When your team goes remote or when you are creating a new remote or distributed team, you need to reconsider the most basic ground rules. Most are a given when co-located. One of these ground rules to reconsider is people’s availability.
At the office, you expect people to be available more or less at similar times. Even if your organization promotes flexi-time or core hours, such expectation is mostly there. But when you go remote or even in the case of companies moving towards flexi-days (many will after COVID-19) availability is something that needs to be carefully considered and agreed within the context of the team or department.
This article will focus on one of those ground rules, availability, including a simple but powerful way of starting the conversation with your team members about it, which has a major impact in scheduling.
I have written before about the need to redefine those ground rules when going remote in several articles. I list them at the end of this article, in the References section. I mentioned in one of those articles that my former colleague back during my Linaro days, Serge Broslavsky, showed me a visualization to start the conversation about availability that I found so useful that I use it ever since. I have mastered it over time, have used it frequently and even assigned it a name: availability heat map. But before describing what it is, let me start by justifying why you should focus energy in reconsidering availability.
In remote environments, be explicit about availability
When remote, each team member works in a different environment, even if they live in the same geo area, time zone or if they share the same life style. I always assume as starting point that their environments might be very different from each other and from mine, so their availability might be too. It needs to be agreed, which requires a sensitive and careful conversation.
Some people live with others at home (friends, partner, etc), they might have different responsibilities towards them or in some cases, those around them affect the environment in a way that it is not possible to predict. far less to assume that their availability will not be affected. In some cases, people work in cafes, coworkings, etc. which involve other constrains.
Another typical case where availability becomes a topic is when having team members from different cultures. Different cultures have different approaches to lunch, for instance. Northern Europeans tend to have lunch very early, Central Europeans usually take lunch in no more than one hour (British even less in general). There are plenty of cultures out there that loves to promote self-destruction by eating fast and poorly at lunch :-). There are others though that take lunch seriously so they invest more time. It is a social activity that, in some cases, is very important for families as well as at work. Latinos tend to fall in that category. At the office, the environment influence these habits making them more homogeneous but that is not necessarily the case when working remotely, at least not on daily basis.
I have managed teams where the availability in summer changes compared to winter, for people that lives up north, in very cold or that lives in tropical areas, in extremely warm areas. They might want to take advantage of the daylight during noon in winter or prefer to work during the mid-day because it is too warm outside.
An interesting consequence of revisiting availability that I pay attention to is the expectations around out-of-the-office hours related with communication channels. I have worked with people used to call others over the phone as default communication channel, even when their colleagues are not at the office. When remote, this might be a productivity killer. The Availability Heat Map helps in all these context but also helps to open a conversation about the consequences of not being available and what to expect in those cases. It helps staff members to understand which channel should be used to reach out to you and when, as well as the other way around.
A third interesting case is people that multitask or work in more than one project, as well as teams with dependencies on other teams, which might have a different understanding of availability. This case is very frequent in remote environments. Discussions and agreements about availability become a ground rule that should be taken seriously since day one.
What is the advantage of working from home if you cannot make your personal and work life compatible to some extend? A better life balance is a big win for both, the employee and the employer. Having a serious thought about availability is essential for achieving such balance. As a manager, I have had cases in which the remote workers where in coworkings or in somebody’s office instead of at home because the company did not provide to them the tools to create such balance at home. That should be avoided when possible.
My point is that going remote requires a conversation about availability that you most likely do not need to have at the office, so inexperienced managers or remote teams often take it from granted. Once they realize the problem, it might be hard to redefine availability, or even impossible. In extreme cases, you might only find out when burning out is getting closer. Funny enough, I have found more of these cases among managers and freelancers than employed developers throughout my career.
The Availability Heat Map
In order to start such conversation, ask each member of your team or department to fill out the availability heat map as first step, ideally right after they join your organization or right when the team is formed. After analysing it, you will have a better idea of the impact that living in different environments, as well as other factors like time zones or personal preferences, will have over people’s availability. You will be in a much better position to discuss the team or department schedule, which will be reflected in the calendar (if possible), making it compatible with company policies and business needs. Once your team have reached an agreement, go as far as placing the Availability Heat Map in the teams profile if they are ok with it. And remember, this is a “living tool”. Availability needs to adapt due to business and also to personal reasons. At the end of the day, it is about being productive as a professional, as a team, as a department…
In summary, make the availability explicit, compared to co-located environments, where availability is implicit in general. The Availability Heat Map is a simple initial step to do so.
Who is it for
I have used the Availability Heat Map with the following groups (and combinations of them). I assume this extremely simple activity can work for additional groups:
- Teams with members in different time zones.
- Multicultural teams.
- Large remote teams.
- Teams with members who belong or support more than one team.
- Teams with strong dependencies with people from other teams.
- Teams with members with small kids or in charge of elderly/dependant relatives.
- As IC (individual contributor) like being a consultant.
Colour scheme
I use four colours in the Availability Heat Map. Each colour has a specific meaning. The goal is to assign a colour to each hour of the day, as shown in the example. I came to this scheme over time. You can adapt it to your experience or environment :
- Green: you are in front of the computer and available for the rest of the team on regular basis.
- Yellow: you might be available although it cannot be assumed by default. It might depend on the day, time of the year, workload…
- Amber: you are usually unreachable at these hours unless it is planned in advance. It is an undesired time slot for you by default.
- Red: you are available if an emergency or under very unusual circumstances only. By default, do not ping me.
The usual ratio of hours I have worked with in the past are: 4-6 green hours, 2-6 yellow hours, 2-4 amber and 8-12 red ones. Do not try to add many green hours at first. This exercise is not designed to demonstrate you work 8 or more a day, which it is a common mistake among (in remote work) newcomers when they join a new organization or team. The price of making such mistake will be high and eventually unsustainable over time. Manage your expectations correctly. Play conservative at first, until you are fully settled.
Explain the exercise
My recommendation is that you explain face to face (video chat) to the involved people the exercise, with your availability already introduced, before asking others to fill out theirs. People from different cultures and background respond differently to this activity based on cultural factors or prior experience with managers and remote work. In my experience, some people take at first this exercise as a control one, specially if you are the manager or PO instead of the Scrum Master or facilitator.
The goal is to find out the ideal time slots for scheduling activities but at the same time, as manager, you can take this opportunity to learn about people constrains and desires when it comes to working hours. I use this action as starting point for some 1:1 conversations. I mentioned before that when remote, each employee works in a different environment and such environment affects their performance. As a remote manager, you have to learn about it and provide guidance on how to establish a good balance so they maximize work efficiency in a sustainable way. It is not about interfering into their personal lives. The line is thin.
The example
In this example, we have five team members, where the last two live in different time zones, UTC-5 and UTC+2. After each member fills out their desired/expected availability, the conversation about scheduling becomes easier. Each team member, as well as managers and other supporting roles, will have a simple way to understand what kind of sacrifices each staff might have to do in order to be available for their colleagues, thus making their availability compatible with the business needs as well as their closer colleague needs. The scheduling of the team and department ceremonies and other company activities hopefully become easier then. Understanding when the real time communication is effective and when the work should become asynchronous also becomes simpler.
In this case, thanks to the fact that Kentavious is an early bird and that Kyle is used to working with people in Europe, from the US East Coast/Brazil, they have already adapted their availability to work with those on around UTC time zones. As you can see, the approach to lunch is different for each team member. In addition, Anthony has to finish work early to rehearse with his band and Marc prefers to work before going to bed, which is a common pattern among parents with small kids.
According to the map, there are two overlapping hours for all of them. If I would be the manager or part of this team, I would talk to them in group to expose that slightly increasing the number of overlapping times might bring benefits to the overall performance of the team. I would talk individually then with each member to find out a way to have one or two additional overlapping hours. In general, I would consider three or four hours of overlapping availability enough as starting point in this case, depending on the experience of each team member in async work. I always favour a homogeneous expectation of availability throughout the week that having “special” days where your schedule changes. But sometimes that is not possible. At Linaro I had my “Tuesdays for Asia” and my “Thursdays for US” and believe me, it was hard to sustain.
After a conversation and decision process, it would be good to update the availability heat map. I suggest to make the map available to others. If your organization or project is formed by many teams, you might want to add the availability heat map to your team’s landing page or profile, as mentioned earlier. In my experience, this transparency really helps when people that are not close enough to the team day-to-day activity needs to schedule an activity or try to manage a dependency or alert. Teams like HR or individual contributors (IC) are good examples.
If you have a tool where you can create and maintain a team calendar, try to add the common available hours there and make them visible to others. If your team is a service or support/enabler team to other teams, you might want a more powerful tool to communicate your availability but the Availability Heat Map might do the job at high level.
There are tools out there to accomplish the same goal than the Availability Heat Map, but I like simplicity and I never needed anything more complex, assuming you have a powerful corporate calendaring tool.
Finally, please keep in mind that the Availability Heat Map should be a dynamic visualization. Revisit this ground rule on regular basis, at least on summer and winter. Small but significant changes might apply.
Summary
In a variety of use cases, especially related with remote work, there are basic ground rules that need to be reconsidered also on regular basis. Availability is one of them.
The Availability Heat Map is an extremely simple “tool” that can provide a first overview of the overlapping times to trigger a conversation about adapting schedules as previous step to define when the team ceremonies might or should take place, how the communication should happen, when, through which channels, etc.. It is also an interesting action to trigger 1:1 conversations with your managees or colleagues. It s simple and easy to adapt to many use cases.
If you have a different way to reach the same goal, please let me know. If you like this idea and will adopt it, please let me know how it goes and which adaptations you did. I am always interested in improving the Availability Heat Map.
Thanks Serge.
References
Previous articles I wrote related with remote work:
toscalix 
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