For many parents, hybrid working has resulted in less late pick up fees from the nursery, but it also means parents are working at all hours of the day. These parents also spend most remote meetings on mute with one eye on the door to prevent their video call from being screen-bombed by their little tykes. Observing the juggle has given child-free colleagues serious food for thought.

The superhero parent

In the before times, this person was a consummate presentation giver, but they haven't taken to the virtual world quite well. It could be the unforgiving camera angles, the demoralising exhaustion of back-to-back calls, but the moment the green light on their webcam flickers, they switch it off and fade into the black.

The webcam refusenik

When the lockdowns reached their zenith during 2020-21, this cubicle-championing colleague was missing the workplace. Now, as work has gone hybrid, they’re back in the office five days a week, bounding from desk to desk, bemoaning homeworking as detrimental to “office culture”. They see the office as a second home. Put a futon by their computer, and they’d sleep there if they could.

The office evangelist

After two years of the pandemic, the teleworking technophobe is still struggling with its tech. During virtual meetings, the group chat, technophobes are still unable to locate the chat tab. Their face fills the entire screen and at last year's annual general meeting, they became a meme after getting stuck in a video filter that made them look like a talking pizza.

The teleworking technophobe

The smug stay-at-homer hopes they won't have to return to the office, even if only for two days a week. Not commuting has saved them so much money. No amount of free coffee or away days to the local abseiling centre will ever lure them back.

The smug stay-at-homer

These colleagues think they’ve got hybrid office life hacked. They now work a 3:2 timetable and ensure their mandatory three days in the office span from Tuesdays to Thursdays. No more blue Monday commutes or long Friday afternoons.

Team Tuesdays to Thursdays

They entered the world of work during the lockdown, and it was months before they saw any of their colleagues in person. Now that they're in the office for the first time, it's a shock to the system. Since then, they’ve drifted aimlessly around the workspace, wondering why some people actively choose to sardine themselves into public transport for two hours, only to spend the day making copious hot drinks.

The bewildered first-jobbers

Our new era of flexible working has spawned some distinct new workplace personalities … but which one are you?

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

career

Career

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

teamwork

Teamwork

From office evangelists to superhero parents: seven colleagues all hybrid workers will recognise

<ul><li>Employees don’t want to come back more than occasionally</li><li>Having an increasing number of permanently remote employees is complicating</li><li>Workers who do endure the hassle of commuting into the office will regularly find themselves sitting at their desks with headphones on logging into Zoom meetings with their remote colleagues undermining leaders’ justification for any enforced hybrid or full-time in-office schedules.</li></ul>

The Return to the Office: Core Problems

<ul><li>Research suggests that the hybrid approach has little to no impact on productivity and culture, connection, and innovation improve with in-person time</li><li>With workers who have been hired remotely or have moved out of range of an office, "it's a tricky issue."</li><li>One approach is to give them a certain amount of time to relocate to where they can be part of the hybrid schedule. Another is to grandfather them in and let them remain remote</li><li>This has the downside of the frustration and two-tier system and is likely to decrease their ability to get promoted because of proximity bias.</li></ul>

Most Companies Should Stick To A Hybrid Approach

Companies with a preference that workers be in the office all or most of the time might have to pay more to recruit and retain them.HubSpot's strategy includes three Es: enablement, experimentation, empathy:  enablement involves equipping managers and workers with tools and support for hybrid, such as templates for 1:1 meetings and connectivity suggestions;  experimentation includes virtual events, so that employees from different teams can get to know each other; empathy includes special support for caregivers and employees of color, including training and encouraging managers to talk about t<warningtag>heir own experiences.</warningtag>

The Money Issue

We’ve recently heard from leaders who are finding the coming return to office even messier than they anticipated. Some share a set of core problems:&hellip;

remotework

Remote Work

business

Business

When No One Really Wants to Return to the Office

Pushing a new feature or changing a product is a huge balancing act for the product manager.Having the team trust you to speak on their behalf is rule number one. Always know the current status and context: You should always know where key people in the company stand on what’s important and why. You should also know what’s going on with the competition.

Being A Product Manager

Jump from small details to the big picture: You should be able to articulate the highest level strategy behind a product but also be ready to explain why a particular UI element is placed the way it is. Compliments should always go to the team. Credit should be handed out freely and generously. Success belongs to the team but failures belong to you.

How Product Managers Handle A Meeting

Obviously, you have no authority over the founders or cross-functional stakeholders you’re presenting to — you also probably don’t have authority over the engineers you work with. You have to be a good communicator and make things easy for people. QA a new feature, write the first blog post, make mock-ups your designers might think are amateur but will give them inspiration. Do the boring stuff that makes a difference and moves things forward.

Be An Influencer, Not An Authoritative Master

You may not be the decider at the table, but it’s your responsibility to make sure a decision gets made. Half of this is getting the right information in front of them. The other half is getting the right people behind them.

Getting Decisions Made

Keep the presentations short, 10 to 15 slides max. Most of the time, they can just be sent to the team over email unless there’s something really controversial. You should try to eliminate as many meetings as you can.Distilling a product review down to 10 slides can be a challenge, but it's an excellent forcing function to provide a full but simple snapshot of where your project is at.

The Slide Deck

If derailments crystallize into serious decisions, it is a good idea to pin founders down to brass tacks. Ask them directly: ‘So is that a decision? Then make your next actions clear: We’ll follow up on that point and come back to you.More importantly, only agree to decisions in a meeting that you’ve had a chance to think through and feel confident in your team’s ability to execute.

Concrete Decisions

Use the decisions made by founders to get things done. Use them to motivate your team and the teams you need to support you. Employees are usually at a company because they respect the founder.For all these reasons, positively relaying what happened in product review meetings, and very closely tying future actions to founder asks is a great way to get people aligned.

Aligning The Team

If fielding founder requests and concerns are a major part of a PM’s job, an even bigger part is motivating and coordinating designers and engineers to reach company goals. This comes with its own share of personalities, land mines and mind tricks. To inspire a team, tell a good story. Then break it down into an execution plan.

Motivating Your Team

Work with short milestones, ideally two weeks. It’s impossible for an engineering team to have a detailed six-month roadmap. It will never be accurate. In two weeks, people understand what they can get done this week and next week, and they can keep it all in their heads. It’s also enough time to make substantial, visible progress.

The Milestones Of The Goal

There are two types of meetings — decision-making meetings and status update meetings. Both should be kept short and only include the relevant people. Status meetings should be based around what people have accomplished. Demos are the best. Culturally, you should set a low bar for demos not needing to be super polished so people aren’t afraid to show their stuff early. Applaud each other. Create an environment where engineers can’t wait to show each other what they’ve built, and they leave eager to go back to it.

Short And Focused Meetings

You have to be protective of your time and your team’s time. As a PM, you’re in meetings all the time where executives are very blunt and say that things aren’t working at all and the team needs to do a better job at X, Y or Z. You have to develop a thick skin, and then you need to learn how to translate all of the criticism you hear into something motivating.

Handling Criticism

Engineers usually take it upon themselves to think through all the edge cases to any scenario, but they really appreciate it when PMs and designers beat them to it. Engineers want to be inspired by the vision, see a plan for the tactics, and then see how the latter will add up to the former with all things considered.

The Edge Cases

Big technology companies are now known for deploying new products and features internally before testing them or releasing them to the public. It gives product managers and engineers a chance to work out the bugs and safely gather feedback. It gives them a glimpse of what their friends and family will see, and one of the greatest joys of being a product manager or an engineer is being that guy who helped build something everyone you know uses and loves.

Eating Your Own Dog Food

<ul><li>You need a team task list that transcends a simple bug system. It should be big, ideally on a whiteboard that everyone can see and consult.</li><li>You have to be a ninja-quality expert at email. Being responsive is mission-critical. It’s okay if engineers and designers are bad at email, but PMs absolutely cannot be bad at email. You have to get back to people right away.</li><li>Maintain your own task list and organize it into sub-lists: today, this week, someday and maybe. Never silently drop a task and don’t tolerate silent drops from the people on your team.</li></ul>

Survival Tips For Product Managers

Todd Jackson has experience managing products at Google, Facebook and his own startup. Here's what he learned.

product

Product & Design

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Top Hacks from a PM Behind Two of Tech's Hottest Products

A privacy policy is a legal statement on an app or website clearly outlining what aspects of a user’s data are collected, how it is stored, and what is done with that information. Online activity used to occur like this when sharing information was like the wild west. Thankfully, we’re in a more sophisticated age, though it does require more advanced policies around privacy and data sharing.

Defining A Privacy Policy

As this is a legal document. It’s important all i’s are dotted and t’s crossed. Should a business fail to list that some aspect of data is being stored and users discover this, then the business is open to a fraud lawsuit. The collection and use of data by any third parties connected to your business, app, and website must also be mentioned. Even if you’re not using the data, if a third party in connection to your website or app is, then it has to be listed in your privacy policy as well.

The App's Privacy Policy

A general overview of what you need in a privacy policy:<ul><li>Collection of personal data</li><li>Use of personal data</li><li>Disclosure/sharing of personal data</li><li>Advertising and Analytics Services Provided by Others</li><li>Data Transfers and Retention </li><li>Third-Party Services </li><li>Your preferences</li><li>Privacy rights for California consumers</li></ul>

Things Included In The Privacy Policy

Now that data storing and <a href="https://designli.co/blog/guide-to-monitoring-and-interpreting-your-mobile-app-analytics/">information tracking</a> are common digital practices, it’s important businesses are upfront about how a user’s personal information is managed. Providing clarity around this topic both protects the business from accusations for data mishandling, as well as lets the user make informed decisions about which websites and apps they trust. Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony at a 2018 Senate hearing is an illustrative example of the consequences of privacy policies not accurately reflecting a business’ data practices.

The Need Of A Privacy Policy

In most circumstances, it’s required to have a privacy policy stated on your app, web app, and website. For example, if you want to <a href="https://designli.co/blog/how-to-successfully-submit-your-app-to-the-app-store/">host your app in the Apple app store</a> or Android app stores, then you have to include a clear privacy policy defining how users’ data is used. If you don’t, you can have your app suspended, rejected, or removed from their platforms.

The Two Main Platforms

A few notable privacy laws domestic to the USA are CalOOPA and CCPA. Without getting bogged down in the legal-ese of these laws, the overarching takeaways concern:<ul><li>How and why businesses collect data</li><li>Consumers right to know, consent, and opt-out of data collection</li><li>Penalties for businesses that fail to comply.</li></ul>

The Names Of The Laws

An app's privacy policy states what data from a user is collected and how it is stored. There are specific topics included in the policy.

cybersecurity

Cybersecurity

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

What is an App Privacy Policy and How to Create One - Designli Blog

The job description of a product manager is often either vague or over specific, making it ineffective in helping people become great product managers. Done right, a product leader acts as a force multiplier that can help a cross-functional team do their best work.

The product leader

The product manager's task is to articulate two simple things:<ul><li>What game are we playing?</li><li>How do we keep score?</li></ul> This will empower contributors with talents in engineering, operations, quality, design and marketing to move in the same direction. Defining what game you are playing includes:<ul><li>Your vision for the product.</li><li>The value for the customer.</li><li>Your differentiated advantage over competitors.</li></ul>

Product strategy

When the team knows what game they are playing and how to keep score, prioritization becomes much easier. The product manager should ensure that the initial work on the strategy and metrics is carried through to the phasing of projects/features to work on. Phasing is crucial as most products and companies have many great ideas but struggle to know which ones are critical to executing first.

Prioritization

Product managers do hundreds of different things, but certain parts of execution are vital to the team, and without them, execution becomes inefficient. These are:<ul><li>Product specification - the required details to ensure clarity about what the team is building.</li><li>Edge case decisions</li><li>Project management</li><li>Analytics</li></ul> Ultimately, great product managers ensure they make things happen.

Execution

People who know me professionally know that I'm passionate about Product Management.  I truly believe that, done properly, a strong product leader acts as a force multiplier that can help a cross-functional team of great technologies and designers do their best work. Unfortunately, the job description of a product manager tends to either be overly…

Be a Great Product Leader

Many people worry that creativity and collaboration suffer when teams are working remotely or in hybrid flexible configurations, and sure, there's a challenge of having a lack of in-person vitality but if you're creative enough about the formats that you're using for these interactions, there would be more engagement from the team members.

Creativity and Collaboration for Remote Teams

There are some managers who love having video meetings with a document open but there are many who hate it.  If you are the one leading the meeting, you should have someone else to monitor the chat who'll be able to respond because it's quite dificult to focus on projecting, sharing, and facilitating while also monitoring the chat box. To mitigate this, deputize people with different roles. In hybrid meetings, make sure that there is someone who can run the online experience because they can empathize and identify with attendees.

Having an open document in parallel to a video meeting

With a hybrid team, interactions and relationships across cultures -- even at a significant distance -- is important because it can spur your own creativity, and in order to do so team members must have a meaningful relationship with each other. They can try the exercise of 'wordless conversation'. You pair up with somebody from the team that you don't know very well and for a whole day you take pictures or short videos as you go through your day. The goal is to send photos where they can relate to what you sent them.

Approaches to kick-start creativity for remote & hybrid teams

<ol><li>Start with small pairings -- so that they can have a little bit of psychological safety with the other person</li><li>Give them a small project that they both can work on </li><li>Eventually, try to merge the small pairing with another pair to collaborate on ideas and enhance what they've done so far</li></ol>The way to have heightened trust is to start with having a deep interpersonal connection first.

Building trust and collaboration 

Everyone is tired and trying to find ways to stay inspired is challenging for both the leader and the team members.  However, as leaders we have to make space for deeper emotions to emerge. We cannot pretend that everything is normal therefore it is important to set reflection practices that have to do with understanding, processing, and digesting everything that's happened. Prosocial motivation is what we call the process of developing empathy for somebody and having the urgency to help them meet their needs.

Handling Emotional and Mental Trauma, and Burnout

<ol><li>It is a combination of acknowledging the challenges of the moment while continuing to focus on what you're trying to achieve as a group.</li><li>In order to have a long lasting feeling of inspiration, the team must feel like they're a part of something bigger and to do this, you can try the ff:</li></ol>        - Intentionally create moments where you can tell each other stories or try to collect stories that demonstrate the human impact rather than just the business impact.

What allows remote and hybrid teams to thrive and do their best work

Design and all kinds of creative work is a way to help people develop skills to navigate the kind of uncertainty that we are currently in.  If possible, try to run a short creative project or any project at all that can make people come up with new ideas that focus on the end user which also includes collaborative engagement. These kinds of projects gives folks a chance to practice building resilience and trying multiple different directions.

What leaders should do to help colleagues and organizations thrive

Water cooler magic is best described as the serendipituous interactions between people in hallways between meetings in the office which some say is the key to innovation and creativity and organizational culture. However, even with remote and hybrid teams, there's a little bit of magic if you have a positive and healthy work culture where people are excited to interact and engage with each other.

Water cooler magic

How to jumpstart creativity and innovation in remote and hybrid workplaces

A lack of clarity can lead to issues in hybrid teams; if employees don’t know who is responsible for what or what’s expected of them, both individually and as a team, it can cause conflict.So, if you want to better manage conflict on your team, make sure you’re setting crystal clear expectations from the get-go—particularly if your team is still adjusting to working in a hybrid environment.

Set Clear Expectations

Oten, remote employees feel like they’re not getting an equal experience to employees that work in the office.<ul><li>Take meetings, for example. Face-to-face communication is typically easier and more seamless than virtual conversations. So, when you have employees attending a meeting both in person and remotely, it can be easy for in-person employees to dominate the conversation. </li><li>So, for the meeting example, you might have “employees in the office also call into the meeting remotely to equalize the experience,” says Keswin.</li></ul>

Create An Equal Playing Field For In-Person and Remote Employees

It’s easy to give recognition to employees that share your office space via a “great job on that project!” as you walk by their desk. But those spontaneous opportunities for recognition and acknowledgement don’t exist for remote employees. 
There’s a risk of remote employees being ‘out of sight, out of mind’. This can make remote workers feel undervalued or like they’re not getting the same recognition as in-person employees—which can lead to conflict on the team.

Recognize All Employees’ Contributions

If there’s no trust within your hybrid team—both in leadership and in fellow team members—you can pretty much guarantee there’s going to be conflict. If you want to effectively manage conflict with your team, building trust is a must—and that means investing time in getting to know your team.When you understand your team members and how they function, you can foster better interactions, both with leadership and other team members—which can lead to a higher level of trust within your hybrid team.

Spend Time Building Trust

When you have team members working in different locations, communication can be a challenge. In-person employees might spend the bulk of their day talking to their co-worker in the next cubicle over—while remote workers struggle to form a real connection with their team members.
That’s why, if you want your hybrid team to function harmoniously, you need to create opportunities for frequent communication.

Foster Communication

If you want your team to thrive, it’s important to understand how to effectively manage conflict as a leader, help your team work through challenges, and empower your employees to do their best work.

communication

Communication

Conflict Management Strategies For Hybrid Teams

Trade Deficits happen when the value of a country's imports exceeds the value of its exports. The imports and exports include goods, physical products, and services.  It's not inherently good or bad but trade deficits can actually be a sign of a strong economy and under certain conditions could lead to stronger economic growth for the deficit-running country in the future.

Trade Deficits

There is no clear link between trade deficits and economic growth because even if a country has a strong trade surplus does not equate to strong economic growth, take for example Japan and Germany.

Trade Deficits and Economic Growth

Economists argue on the broad impact of trade deficits on employment. Some argue for the connotation that imports necessarily reduce employment at home while others point to offsetting job growth in other sectors through the same trade ties.

Trade Deficits and Employment 

Is a trade deficit beneficial or detrimental to a country's economy? A negative trade balance offers advantages and disadvantages.

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

Pros and Cons of a Trade Deficit

When you notice information overload (a headache, fatigue, frustration, mood swing), don’t ignore it and don’t panic.Say to yourself, “I’m in a new job and there is plenty to learn here. It’s okay to feel this way.”This self-talk helps normalize the situation and makes the emotions easier to handle

Manage yourself

The goal here is to do what you can to help your brain help you. The more juice you reserve for processing information, the less likely you will be to experience overload.Choose carefully how you expend your energy and avoid doing things that make your brain work harder than it has to. Here are a few ways to you can do this:

Manage your brain

Our brain keeps what it needs more immediately in our short-term memory and blends together information we may need to use in the future to store in our long-term memory. For the information that’s not needed, our brain acts like garbage disposal, sorting, recycling, and deleting it. You can help your brain sort and store information better to avoid overload.

Sort your information

Organizations often have digital knowledge management systems to store and retrieve important information. You can do the same to reduce brain clutter.Create a Word or Google document in which you write down information that your brain doesn’t need to remember or store.

Use technology to store what you don’t need right away

Help your brain sort and store what it needs.

productivity

Productivity

problemsolving

Problem Solving

How to Save Yourself From “Information Overload”

<ul><li>People with a fixed mindset towards anxiety believe that abilities, skills and intelligence are rigid and unchangeable.</li><li>They give up as soon as there are difficulties in front of them. The truth is that anxiety gets the better of them.</li></ul>

Anxiety: The Way You See It

<ul><li>People with a growth mindset towards anxiety, those who believe that the feeling of anxiety can be changed or taken care of, respond better to difficulties and challenges.</li><li>They don’t respond to anxiety with alcohol, drugs or emotional fluctuation, but instead face the uncomfortable feelings head-on, even responding better to therapy.</li></ul>

Intelligence Is Malleable

Many of us face moments of not knowing, when we are doing something completely new, like assembling furniture or learning new software, and there is a certain uneasiness that is felt, as we are complete newbies in the particular activity.We get a strong urge to avoid the seemingly difficult task in front of us, and we rush to our beloved smartphone to distract our mind.

That Feeling Of Being Stuck

We avoid tasks due to the problematic anxiety making us choose the easy path, in line with the principle of least effort.If instead of succumbing to these feelings of anxiety, we persist with what we want to do, tolerating the discomfort, we start to learn new coping skills and move towards curiosity and understanding.We realize that these seemingly large difficulties were just smoke and mirrors, having no real substance, and we simply need to move ahead and focus on the learning.

The Path Of Least Resistance

Everyone feels anxious in moments of not knowing. It’s your beliefs about anxiety that influence what you do next

From office evangelists to superhero parents: seven colleagues all hybrid workers will recognise

When No One Really Wants to Return to the Office

Top Hacks from a PM Behind Two of Tech's Hottest Products

What is an App Privacy Policy and How to Create One - Designli Blog

Be a Great Product Leader

Patricia Hammond