For many years in tech, companies have encouraged employees to bring their home life to work. In the face of COVID-19 and an emerging new remote workforce, companies and leaders are being challenged to do the opposite — bring work and team culture, home.

As we enter this new era, it’s critical to build teams that encourage inclusion, community, and empathy.

Some leaders are struggling to answer these questions: how do you foster a team environment when you’re miles apart? When conversations at the water cooler and in-person brainstorm sessions can evolve into big company objectives, how do you find opportunities to collaborate and encourage out-of-the box ideas? And as a manager, how do you discover new ways to hire diverse and scalable teams?

Go the extra mile

I joined Ripple at a pivotal time in our society. As the team was adjusting to remote working, I recognized that it was critical that I take the necessary steps to ensure my team was set up for success in this new normal.

One of the biggest lessons I learned in previous roles is that remote teams need a different kind of support than in-person teams. However, this doesn’t mean that remote working has to be a negative experience.

In fact, 85% of businesses have seen productivity increase because of flexible remote work options. It’s the responsibility of managers to find ways to work together and reduce friction within a team. When we can’t jump into a meeting room to talk through a project, we need to encourage teammates to collaborate in different ways.

When you do have team meetings, save some time to encourage banter and team familiarity. Having that time at hand to increase team bonding and cohesion goes a long way in building relationships, which eventually result in everyone performing at their best.

As engineers, we have so many tools and resources at our fingertips. The engineering team at Ripple has started collaborating on strategy and system design for future projects with code and documentation. These are two tools engineers use daily to get work done, so why not also use them to talk to each other? It allows our teams to think and contribute offline at a time and pace that works for them, while accommodating critical quiet thinking time.

Our customer facing teams are also spread across different time zones — instead of trying to squeeze in another meeting that accommodates all time zones, teams can communicate within the documentation itself.

Adapting to new challenges

Some folks might be perfectly fine adjusting to a remote lifestyle, while it may be a challenge for others. Have conversations with your teams early on, and check in regularly to understand the nuances of each person’s situation.

You might be able to enact small adjustments that will benefit the whole team — like a global ‘no meeting’ day. Some team members might have a specific situation they are dealing with that you can help them to work through. Not everyone on the team may have the space, time, or privacy to work from home.

With teams fully remote, we’re all experiencing video call fatigue. Paying attention to time zones helps to prioritize business-critical meetings while catering to every team member’s schedule. While 9am may be the perfect time to meet for a San Francisco-based team member, the teammate in New York is in the middle of a lunch break. And shelter in place has drastically changed what the traditional workday looks like for most of us.

Keep in mind that your colleagues may need to accommodate things like child care or elder care in the middle of the day. Encourage your team to block off the times that are a no go for them even if it’s during the work day.

Build a diverse and inclusive team

When companies recruit for engineering jobs, the skillset for that role has already been established internally, and that’s never going to change. What we can do is control where we look for these candidates and to whom we give the interview opportunity. Talent can be found anywhere and companies shouldn’t limit themselves to only recruiting from prestigious schools or their own network.

When I was coming up in the industry, no one above me looked like me. I’ve learned over the years that being a woman or an immigrant doesn’t make me who I am. It’s a part of who I am and my experience, leadership, and technical understanding are what make me valuable.

After a few years in leadership roles, I realized that I am now that person that someone else might be looking for, just as I did years ago. The key then is to pay it forward, reach out and help mentor team members who show potential and eagerness to learn.

When building a diverse team, it’s about consciously deciding to give underrepresented people an opportunity to show up. There are a variety of things that make someone great at their job and pedigree is just one of them. Understanding your team and what makes them successful is key to build an inclusive team.

People work differently and have a variety of means to demonstrate their work. Creating an environment that embraces these differences and encourages collaboration with that understanding is what makes a truly inclusive team. Having an inclusive team is crucial to hiring and retaining a diverse team.

Work for the greater good of the team

Part of building an inclusive, diverse team is to build a community where everyone is invested in not only the team’s work, but the overall company goals as well. It’s easier to feel like one, cohesive team when you’re a team of one leader and three or four engineers. But, when the team starts growing, it’s critical that the team continues to feel like they work with each other and not for a leader.

Every team needs to feel like one unit, regardless of leadership level, which propels them to build innovative products. With my team consisting of leaders of teams, my goal is to continue growing that cohesion and a feeling of “One Team.”

There isn’t a single person that owns a 100% of one problem. As your company grows, and you build out your team, it’s important to keep this in mind. Leaders should encourage teams to focus on individual projects while understanding that the team may have to switch gears to solve a priority problem because it’s what is best for the company at that time. We are all in it to solve these problems together.

If the last few months of being remote have taught us anything, it’s that we’re all capable of being more flexible and empathetic. Inclusive teams that are invested in the work they’re doing will create the strongest organizations that have the most longevity.

So you’re interested in creating a successful team? Then join our online event, TNW2020 , to hear how successful companies are adapting to a new way of working.

Startups, pitch to journalists like you would to a VC

Unicorns, rainbows, seed, pre-seed, angel… my head was spinning as I changed fields a couple of years back. After a decade in PR, comms, and journalism — having worked mostly for the ‘big guys’ with their big partners like Sony, P&G, HP, Cisco, Netflix, etc. — I entered the crazy world of startup PR. I was a total novice here, honestly thinking VC meant ‘video chat’.

But the switch meant more than learning a few new acronyms. When you say to a journalist “Hi, I’m from Google,”  well, they probably know that without you needing to introduce yourself. When you say “Hi, I’m from [insert startup name, anyone from pre-seed to series A],” it’s a hard sell.

I swim in the startup waters pretty comfortably now, but it’s been a learning curve. I’ve got to understand the differences between doing PR for big global names, any old SME, and doing it for startups of all sizes. The biggest lesson? Pitch to journalists as you pitch to VCs.

So here’s how I came to that conclusion, along with my observations, humorous learnings, and frank thoughts, which are perfect for:

Early startup founders who are not sure what to expect from PR

All startup founders who expect to be on the cover of Financial Times

Let’s dig in!

1. PR really can make an impact

If you land a great piece of coverage for Sony (hello, my old employer), you fill a row in a coverage tracker, and… that’s about it. Job done.

Don’t get me wrong, absolutely, there is a place for PR as a tool for large companies that have been established for years now, but the impact it makes is usually nowhere near to what you can do for a startup at any stage.

After landing a full-blown piece on BBC for a startup, my client told me they had a pipeline of 30 bluechip companies on the back of the coverage.

This has been one of my favorite, most rewarding, startup moments so far — I actually made an impact for the company, for the individual founder who is trying to change the world through the power of technology. I thought that was amazing. So yes, PR can really make it for startups.

Note: this is by no means a sales pitch. I, or any other PR, can’t promise anyone to get them on BBC. Also, if your value proposition isn’t strong or the timing isn’t right, no coverage will make a miracle for you. But that’s for a different article.

2. It’s hard (to stand out)

Figures provided by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and analyzed by Tech Nation showed almost 20,000 tech startups were born in the UK in 2020. That means every 30 mins, there was a new entity fighting not only for attention from VCs and customers but also for the journalists you want to write about you. Not to mention your global competition.

The likes of TNW, Sifted, Techcrunch, and UKTN get hundreds if not thousands of PR pitches a day.

“I receive around 70-80 individual interview pitches in a day, and as far as pressers and op-eds are concerned, the mailbox goes beyond 500 sometimes. It’s just crazy on this end,” Akansha Srivastava, the editor at UKTN, told me.

In other words, this space is crowded like Borough Market on a sunny Saturday. You need more than just your innovative (journalists don’t like that word) idea or solution (or this one, really) to stand out. And please never try to buy them — just in case you were thinking about it.

Also, remember that nationals often don’t have dedicated startup writers, and technology journalists need to follow editorial rules — often outlining criteria you should meet to come across credible enough to the reader.

Similarly to the investor mentality, if a journalist does decide to write about an early-stage startup, they would choose one they believe will fly, so in five years time, they can say, “I was the first to write about them when they were a 20-people team and now they are going IPO.”

So you need to work hard to persuade them that there is a place for you on the market.

3. It’s useful and fun

From bone conduction technology and voice recognition to Bitcoin and IoT, I love watching innovation happen from the front row. And it’s not just about tech. I’ve been lucky to meet some inspirational founders, marketers, writers, and salespeople, mostly full of passion and drive. And some of them are bloody good at telling stories.

As mentioned, you often need much more than just a good product to stand out among 100s of competitors’ pitches. On the journey to what we, PR people, call ‘storytelling,’ startups often also learn a lot about themselves.

They discover new aspects of their product, gaps in brand positioning, and founders meet some great journalists and pick up a few things personally. So PR is a useful exercise that can help shape your pitch to investors and prospects too.

4. The startup community is cliquey

Good news, it’s not too big — yet . You can quickly find a way to recognize the best startup journalists, sherpas, VCs, and mentors.

Bad news, everyone knows everyone, and it can feel a bit… cliquey to an outsider — more than other groups of journalists I’ve worked with.

So it’s really worth the effort to put some time and energy into building personal relationships with journalists. In regards to my previous point, remember, a top-tier journalist speaks to both your competitors and VCs, so these guys know a lot and there’s a lot of intel you can get from them as well.

5. The bulls and the bears — timing matters

The risks and adrenaline involved in raising a startup are not too dissimilar from trading, and in my experience, most founders either fall in the bull or the bear category.

I’ve met startups founders who wanted to go all in… all the time. It was usually the types who wanted to be interviewed by Forbes after their pre-seed funding of $200K. I’ll let that sink for you.

Some — not many — actually don’t want to be on the cover of national newspapers. They want to stay low-key, especially at the beginning, carefully paving their path before giving too much away to the competition.

While consideration of timing when it comes to releasing news is important for a company of any size, in the world where groundbreaking innovations and the fight for investor attention play roles in the same field, it’s paramount.

6. Expectations are often as realistic as the likelihood of meeting a unicorn in real life

Your startup is your baby and you want only the best for it (read coverage in FT or ‘at least’ Techcrunch). And what do you base this expectation on?

You’ve just launched and you want to change the world

You’ve got £10m funding in series A

Or £90m in series D

You are growing 50% year on year

While that’s all great news for your company — every journalist (and a solid PR person) will ask — in the nicest possible way, ‘and what?’ There are thousands of others, what’s the impact you’re making?

From getting turned down 186 times to living the startup dream

I recently read an insightful and honest article from Pavlo Maherovsky and Sam Gluck, the founders of Honest Health, called “From getting turned down by 186 investors, to being acquired by the market leader: Honest Health’s tale of resilience.”

In the article , the Founders Factory alumni entrepreneurs talk about the lessons they learned about fundraising. Here is my take on how the bumps on their journey relate to selling stories to journalists:

That said, you will probably get turned down a few times before getting a buy-in from a journalist, and that’s fine, it’s part of the journey.

But if you spent months fine-tuning your pitch deck and then just sent a few generic emails to the best startup journalists expecting they will know you and love you and write about you… you will probably end up disappointed.

My advice to founders is to think about journalists as key figures in the startup ecosystem. Don’t expect overnight miracles from your PR team.

I like to believe that (almost) everything is possible, including FT coverage. After all, who would have thought unicorns would become a real thing 20 years ago, right? But always be aware that great coverage takes time, effort, and creativity.

How Slack co-designed its biggest update yet with customers

Did you know Tamar Yehoshua, Slack‘s Chief Product Officer, is speaking at TNW2020 this year? Check out their session on ‘Human-centricity: building products with customers’ here .

Back in March, Slack launched a significant update to Slack’s design . It wasn’t just one change, but a constellation of them—some shiny new things (channel sections!), some old things in new places, and a general spring cleaning of information architecture.

These changes addressed a basic challenge that had grown naturally with Slack: with size comes complexity. As different product teams added new capabilities piecemeal, Slack started to feel not intuitive for people trying it out for the first time.

Our header alone had over a dozen places to click, and included two search bars:

And our menus were a bit sprawling:

Even people who had used Slack for years often didn’t know about powerful features because they were buried away in odd places. And this growing tangle made it harder for us to build new things; we couldn’t find places to put them.

This type of problem is hard to quantify and measure. We weren’t going to solve it through A/B testing tiny changes or intellectualizing over it in a room with a bunch of sticky notes. Instead, we took it to people in the real world.

We tried a new way of working with our users, bringing them into every stage of the design process. Together we were able to prototype, build and refine our designs to create a simpler and more organized Slack.

Assembling the team

We put together a small team of designers, engineers, researchers and product managers to create rough, “throw-away” prototypes. In the beginning, we put aside our previous ideas about what was essential in Slack. Because Slack’s mission is to make work easier for people, our guiding principle was to limit the choices someone using Slack might have to make. This meant stripping away as much of the interface as possible, and reorganizing it piece by piece.

The process was quick and dirty: We did our best not to hem and haw over details and minute decisions. This reductive approach led us to some very intriguing but untested prototypes.

While these seemed tidier, we wanted to make sure they were actually better: more obvious and useful for people trying to get things done in Slack. So we turned to customers for a gut check.

Co-designing with customers

In the early days of Slack, we were very similar to many of our users—tech-y people working at mid-sized companies. But these days people use Slack at all kinds of organizations and roles, from dairy farms and dentists to large retailers and banks. To make Slack simpler for everyone, we needed to hear from a broader group.

In order to collect feedback, we worked with customers the best way we knew how: through a shared channel . It was eventually shared with around 100 users from our champion network , representing dozens of organizations around the world.

The pilot channel provided a way for us to hear unfiltered input quickly. Their collective experience let us see where our first ideas weren’t quite right, and refine our design to improve the experience.

Among the many things we learned:

Member count is critical

As we attempted to strip down the UI, we thought that channel member count could be safely tucked behind a click. We figured it was extra noise that you didn’t need all the time.

In practice, member count provides a crucial sense of “reading the room,” which gives an important clue about how to behave.

After reducing our designs to almost nothing, we gradually rebuilt them to find a balance we felt was just right:

People will find the things they really want

When we introduced the ability to organize channels, we were concerned that people wouldn’t easily find out about it. At first, we added a big, top-level button.

However, we underestimated how much people actually wanted the capability. With just a bit of education, we saw members of the pilot learn to create custom sections despite the fact that it was tucked away.

History and navigation was best understood at the top of the app

This was the biggest departure from our previous interface, and it didn’t go without debate.

We found that people who work at large companies with lots of active conversations often rely on search or ⌘K to get around the app—much like a browser. Our horizontal hierarchy often left us struggling with the right placement for search. For the past year or so, we’ve had two different search inputs that do essentially the same thing. It wasn’t our favorite.

Our first prototype was controversial, and there was strong feedback from both sides.

While this is a big change for Slack’s platform, it traded screen real estate for better matching the expectations of new and existing users alike. In the end, we gained a strong perspective: go for obvious over clever, and don’t reinvent the wheel.

Dialogue was crucial

Having everyone in a shared channel meant that, unlike a conventional pilot, we could have a free-form dialogue with people as they used it over weeks and months.

We learned from them, and they were able to build off each other.

In some cases, we were able to hear feedback and ship a new version within a day, to see if it felt any better. Collaborating in real time gave us a chance to co-design Slack with people who use it, and it made our work a lot better.

Learning from beginners

Even as things improved for established users, we needed to make sure Slack was genuinely easier for people just starting out.

We worked with our research team to run a “benchmarking” study that pitted the old Slack experience against the new one. For each version, we asked people who had never used Slack to complete a few important tasks, like sending a message, searching, and finding and joining channels.

In our first test, the results were mixed. While the new design beat the old one in a few categories, new insights popped up. To name a few:

Floating buttons definitively aren’t a thing on desktop

We tried to cleverly nestle our new compose button at the bottom of the sidebar. We thought it would stand out to new users, and provide a chance to match the design with mobile. But our participants completely ignored it. So we zapped it to the top of the sidebar, where people intuitively found and understood it.

Right-clicking on the desktop isn’t just for power users

In reality, it’s often the first or second thing people do to take an action. After seeing people trying to right click in testing (and getting feedback from our pilot), we created a more comprehensive design for right-clicking throughout the app.

Collapsible views should start open

In the new design, we brought important features like our people directory and saved messages into the top of the sidebar. To keep things minimal, we started with the view collapsed. But we quickly found that folks unfamiliar with the product were missing a big opportunity to learn about these capabilities. So we decided to start with them open for everyone.

After we worked through dozens of hiccups, our second test beat or tied the existing design. With that (along with similar studies with “average” Slack users) we felt more confident that what we were releasing was more useful, and easier to understand.

Getting the details just right

As the design came together, we left some time to polish some little bits and bops:

Our new save-a-message button does a fancy little boing when saving and unsaving. Cute!

We refined our new top bar to feel a little more at home on Windows and Mac desktops.

Our various jump-to buttons now match one another.

We updated and expanded our set of built-in themes to take advantage of the new top bar for both the minimalist and the maximalist.

At Slack, we take design changes seriously. Because people are highly engaged on our platform, spending an average of nine hours every workday connected and around 90 minutes actively using it, we recognize that we need to be extra careful when making even the slightest change to their working environment. People choose to use Slack and we don’t take that for granted. Even the most well-intentioned changes to an app you use every day can leave you with the uncanny feeling that someone’s reorganized your room. Worse even, the adjustments can feel useless: change for change’s sake.

At the end of the day, we think this update takes us meaningfully toward a simpler, more organized Slack that will set the stage for more exciting improvements to come.

This article was originally published on Slack’s blog by the Slack team. You can read it here .