Provide training and guidance for asynchronous team practices

[choldgraf]

A hallmark of 2i2c is that it is distributed and largely asynchronous in its work. We are all awake at different times, and it is often very difficult to get everybody on the same page at the same time.

However, working asynchronously does not come naturally to many people. Being able to effectively communicate, plan, coordinate, and provide feedback in an asynchronous fashion is a skill like any other. Given how crucial asynchronous practices are to 2i2c, we should have resources and support for people that wish to improve their skills in this area.

This should probably focus on the tools that we use most heavily, like GitHub, Slack, Zoom, Sphinx, etc.

This is a tracking issue to keep track of resources for this, and eventually we can turn it into a little guide or addition to our documentation.

Trainings

• Danielle @ CS&S recommended The Hum asynchronous trainings. Jess took it and apparently she was a fan.

Resources

• The GitLab all-remote playbook

Advice from colleagues

I asked in the CS&S and Chad Sensing (who spent many years at Mozilla) provided thoughts:

From my experience, these principles/practices have been most helpful

• A cadence of regular, recurring meetings at the org and team levels for crucial conversations and a shared commitment to preparing for those meetings and keeping those meetings tight, facilitation and time-wise.
• An ongoing calibration of what can be shared by email and what's better shared, for whatever reason, while meeting together.
• Documentation, documentation, documentation and empowering people to document.
• Empowering people to call their own smaller, crossfunctional, 1:1, or small team meetings as needed or to establish their own smaller meeting cadences/rituals as needed to get their work done.
• Demonstrating sensitivity to work/life balance and timezones by sticking to a "best" time or rotating through "good enough" times for team members - and repeating key meetings or conversations for people who cannot make it if only one conversation is planned.

[chadsansing]

While there's no quick fix in my experience, sometime templates can help, as can creating agendas wherein the facilitator really only needs to open and close the meeting, with people invested in the work of each agenda item wrangling discussion of that particular item.

Having a rotating calendar of facilitation responsibilities is also sometimes helpful. We used to rotate facilitation of team meetings from month to month (and asked that no one repeated until everyone had facilitated) with someone responsible for gathering agenda items, creating and sharing the agenda at least 24 hours ahead of time, and facilitating the call each week. I think if an org sets up a rotation like this with a solid template and enthusiastic facilitators in the first few spots of the rotation, it can model good enough facilitation practices for others and create some shared expectations and accountability around running meetings. We did this at the team level, though there was also a lot of effort to rotate the emcee role for monthly all-hands calls, as well.