Teams, Tribes, and Community - 0.2.0
When I posted 0.1.0, I knew of two challenges facing the group. The approaching clock change nonsense and the holidays. These are minor blips when working with co-located teams, but when working with a team spread across 17 time zones and a half dozen different cultures and customs it's a much different story. I could see in each of these the potential to disrupt the group to such a degree that we would at least reduce in size or perhaps disband. This needed a lot of thought and planning.
To prepare for the clock change nonsense, I sent out a poll to the group asking about preferences for meeting times and days. The response rate was high and the comments were good. I was able to establish who I would want to talk to 1:1 to sort out any known issues. We would likely loose one of the outliers that lived where clocks weren't changed twice a year. The new time, since most of the rest of us would change clock, put our meeting time outside reasonable limits for them until such time when the clocks were changed again in the spring.
This all seemed easy enough. The real confusion, however, was a surprise. Not everyone around the globe changes clocks on the same day or even the same week. So for several weeks, some people tried to join the meeting an hour early while others joined an hour later. This even though the meeting times were communicated multiple times via email and in a dedicated chat channel. The solution I hope will help us when we do cross paths with the clock change nonsense again in the spring is to communicate our meeting time in UTC. Regardless of where a team member may be for any particular meeting, it is their responsibility to verify meeting times keyed off of UTC.
The holidays, by comparison, went considerably better. Everyone did a good job of letting us know when they probably wouldn't be attending. Even so, the smallest turnout we had was six members, or about half, just before the new year. This is a time of the year, however, when people tend to evaluate their life and where they are spending time. So the next challenge for our little tribe is to find what we need to continue doing that is working for everyone and what needs to change. What does our meeting need to offer everyone such that the value from participating remains high?
Photo by Kelsey Knight on Unsplash