Learn concepts like management skills, working with different people, and working out who our team is and what they do.

Become an Effective Engineering Manager

The technology industry is facing a skills crisis. It’s because we don’t know how to manage people. This module aims at improving our managing skills. In this module, we’ll start with learning concepts like managing ourselves, interacting with humans, having one-on-one meetings with managers, and choosing the right person for the job. Next, we’ll learn how to deal with different people and projects. In the end, we'll touch upon the modern workspace concepts and life cycle of startups.

Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager

As a manager, you owe it to yourself to understand and support remote working because of  either of these reasons:

* It's already happening in your company and team.
* Given the shift taking place in the industry, it's likely you'll be working with distributed staff before you know it, even if it starts small with your team increasingly working from home.


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We're going to touch upon the following topics:

* Organizational inertia, where you find your staff increasingly wanting to not be in the office, which is causing tension with how the company currently operates
* Good communication practices that allow staff to feel included no matter their location
* The importance of trust when managing distributed staff
* Why values and goals have to trump informal interactions
* The importance of face-to-face time and what that means for your travel budget

# Fighting organizational inertia

If your organization doesn't already support remote working, it'll only be a matter of time before your staff begins to ask you about it. You may find yourself caught in the middle between requests from your staff and an organization that believes that the only way to be productive is when everyone is co-located in the same office. However, this is simply not true. Supporting flexible and remote working models is the future of work, and you need to create an environment within which your staff can get used to that way of working.

If your organization is resisting, put your own reputation on the line as a manager. Try to pitch an experiment where each person on your team, should they want to, works one day at home every week. Tell your organization that you are responsible for their output. It's up to your team to decide which day of the week works for them best. For the true distributed working experience, see if everyone can work from home on the same day. If the company is still resisting, be radically candid with them. To be unable to support remote working is a death knell, and the industry is leaving them behind.

If you can proceed with this experiment, you'll see that it isn't so bad after all. It's likely that many of your staff, depending on their setup at home, will find that they can focus more when they're not sitting in a busy office. After a period of time, say a few months, do a retrospective on how the experiment is working out. What do people like about being remote? What do they dislike? What are some of the challenges of not being physically present? How could you overcome them as a team? Has it developed empathy for staff who are permanently remote?

Hopefully, your organization will see that there's nothing to fear about people occasionally working remotely and that they might even be able to solve some of their hiring problems if they look beyond a twenty-mile radius of their office! Who'd have thought it?

Learn how you can make working remotely effective with the help of few good practices.

Priming Yourself for Supporting Remote Working

Reasons for supporting remote working