Covid-19, How we pulled teams up in this time

Let it be a very short story. Covid-19 was there and we at Frendy had to start “Work From Home”, I knew, it is not going to be easy task. No body had experience for such conditions.

Doing Vs Managing

If you are a genuine person, you can do your task in hand from Home very well, you know what to do, it’s your work and you can do it from anywhere.

Problem comes when you have to manage from remote. It’s tough.

The Problem

I knew that work performance will go down for sure in start and moreover, what I never wanted to let every developer be a victim of situation. I wanted them to act as Player.

I knew, problems will be there but every team member should see it from positive angle. They must not feel that “due to covid, we are not able to coordinate well and our performance is going down” or, I even not wanted a blame game to get started.

How I can make them motivated and still fight positive and get more out of the situation?

The Solution

What I did in this situation was an experiment that really went well.

Instead, taking more safer approach, I approached it offensively, From the very first day of Work From Home, online meeting, I raise everyone’s profile, I put part of responsibility of their senior onto them.

Instead of taking scrum meeting by me or our product manager Parth Amin, we started giving scrum master role to every team member in rotation. We gave more power to tech leads. Passed some research work to developers that helps us taking decisions. We got diversified angles and team got that feeling, that drive them well.

A clear indication that “I am betting on you, can you prove yourself?”

Now, instead of thinking that I am not able to do due to this situation, team started thinking positively, they just focused on performing better. They took every problem positive and started finding solutions.

A few person even came to me, asking how to manage something that they were not managing before. I talk with them and suggested how to do things.

Being seen upper/senior level problems, I felt team now responding their seniors well, they understand how they have to manage.

And with in a month, instead victims, I got so many leaders, motivated members and more strong team.