The tent in the office

A few weeks ago, I was in Richmond, VA chatting with my Uber driver on the drive back to the airport. She asked where I was from, and upon hearing SF she brought up the latest news from our city that had apparently made it across the country—the ban on plastic straws. 

Every ban has two sides, and the interesting thing about this ban is who is speaking up against it most compellingly. Here it's not a big company that makes plastic straws, it's people with disabilities who need straws in order to consume liquids. This use case was not in my awareness before I saw it in the news, and it likely wasn't for most people who supported the ban. My surprise reminded me of how people react when I talk about my appreciation for the tent in the office.


If you walk into the Instabase office, one of the first things you'll notice is the tent pitched in a walled-off corner. When one of my friends came to interview, he had already heard about it from a VC. The tent blends into the fabric of the office when you see it every day. I have lost my beginner’s eyes, so I observe the reactions of visitors. Some are repulsed; others see it as a sign of a committed team. Yes, it's occasionally used for crashing, and that is the most obvious meaning and utility of the tent. That’s not why I use it or love that we have it. 


On a Wednesday morning a few months ago, I was scheduled to give an onsite interview. I realized shortly after I woke up I was probably not going to make it. My period had started, which meant in a few hours I was likely to have bad cramps. I pinged the two other people who were available to cover, and luckily one of them was awake and free.

Based on talking to friends, I'm guessing my pain is on the higher end of the spectrum. Painkillers tend to reduce but not get the pain down to a level where I can be productive, and based on experience my cramps continue until I either take a nap or fake it by lying down extremely still for one to two hours. The good thing is there’s a straightforward solution. I just need a spot to lie down. In the age of open offices, though, this can be surprisingly tough.

At the start of my career, I spent four years at big companies where my periods led me to discover how much of a privacy desert an open office is. At my first job (at a company I overwhelmingly feel grateful to), there were nap rooms, not to mention nursing mothers’ rooms, but they were perpetually occupied—demand exceeded supply. When I lived close by in Menlo Park, I would cab or Uber home. Later I moved to SF, and that ride became a more painful and expensive proposition, so I stuck to the office. I would walk a few buildings over from where I worked so people wouldn’t recognize me, and lie on a couch in a small living area between two clusters of desks. It was exposed, next to a busy walkway. I was a bit embarrassed, but it was the best option I found.

I became curious how other women were dealing and posted in an internal women's group to ask. I saw a range of responses, from sympathy from people who experience less discomfort, to stories from other women who sought spaces to rest. One woman said she had trouble finding places to lie down during her pregnancy, so she would go to the parking lot and lie down in the trunk of her SUV.

As much as it's judged and possibly ridiculed, the tent at the office is the most available space I've encountered in my working life when I need to lie down. It's private, yet not entirely secluded, so I can hear what's going on in the rest of the room and even respond. From an engineering/product standpoint—how well it solves the problem, cost, mobility, ease of deployment—a tent is a great solution for our tiny but fast-growing startup.

The tent solves one of the two uncomfortable parts of my experience with period pain—the space to rest. The other part is talking about it when it throws randomness into my schedule. It has always been a weird topic to bring up to my managers, especially as only one of the ten I’ve had has been a woman. But I recognize it’s primarily weird because it’s not usual; I bet there was a time when being a nursing mother was weird to talk about, but nowadays mothers' rooms seem a normal fixture of offices. 


The main reason I wanted to write this post is, well, the plastic straw business reminded me about it. The tent is my plastic straw. In the bigger picture, this is one issue that highlights to me what it means to have and support diversity in the workplace. I have nothing to add to the broad strokes in the dialogue about diversity, but I can help fill in the details of what that concretely means in the office. It's in the mundane details and crevasses of everyday working life that we all can shed more light. 

[Daily] Saturday 2018.05.26 - Brain dump: a few things I learned this week, mostly about people

I learned a few things this week from two events and a new acquaintance. This is a brain dump of things that stuck.


== Work -> Coworkers -> Health ==
On Tuesday night I went to an event where Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Stanford Business professor, talked about his new book on the cost of modern management practices. His opening line: “According to the Mayo Clinic, the person you report to at work has a bigger impact on your health than your family doctor.” It's obvious when you think about how often we see doctors, but it's an unusual way to frame the people we work with: are they helping extend your life? That's a question to turn inwards to ask myself: am I helping extend the lives of my coworkers (or killing them faster)? It's also a responsibility I had never explicitly thought about.

One objection to measuring "well-being" at a company is that it's hard to measure. However, Jeffrey said a single self-reported 1-5 of “do I feel healthy” has been found to correlate to mortality. I.e. people roughly know whether they are healthy or not.

== You get what you screen for == 

Wednesday night, I attended a panel about mentorship that featured a mentor/mentee chain: Ken Coleman, Ben Horowitz, and Michel Feaster. The second half of the panel focused on diversity and inclusion (often shortened to d&i). People management lessons are best conveyed in stories, and Ben told two stories that stuck.

The first story was about a person named Chris they'd hired for a role that required being really good at making people like you. They had interviewed and passed on a number of people who were investment bankers (Ben joked that was probably not the ideal profession to be looking in) before considering alternative profiles. Chris used to work as a waiter at the Cheesecake Factory, where they rank waiters by their tip percentages. Chris had ranked #1 chain-wide in percentage tips, so he was a champion in a field where to be good, you have to be liked. Ben's points: 1) when hiring, are you defining what skills you actually need for the job? (notably Ben didn't stress the title of the job, rather the skills needed), and 2) are you then seeking out people with those skills in all possible places, including non-obvious ones?

Ben prefaced the second story with, "People at the firm don't like it when I tell this story, but I'll tell it anyway." He once asked a team that was all women, "What is it about your interview process that you can't hire any men?" The team responded that they screen for helpfulness. Ben could have taken this response in a number of ways—are no men helpful? this team must be crazy—but his observation was, hey, it's unusual to screen for helpfulness, and that is clearly making a material difference.

I remember this one statement by Ken: if you are discussing a candidate and can't identify their weaknesses, stop. You are probably missing something because everyone has weaknesses, and if you know about them upfront, you can manage around them.


== Words and connotations; Culture from office furniture ==

Yesterday, I met up with Jules W, whom I ran into at the a16z event. He's a product manager at Slack working on growth. During our conversation, he told two stories that gave me, "oh shit, I'd never thought of that" moments.

The first story is about words. At Slack, they did a few months of user research and found the most effective phrase to describe Slack to most new users was "collaboration hub." For the longest time, Stewart, the CEO, had opposed using the word "collaboration" because it's a fluffy, overused-to-the-point-of-meaningless word in Silicon Valley. But the Valley is not the rest of the country, where "collaboration" can be viewed quite positively, and the Valley already knows and uses Slack. Their research also found that people were confused by the word "tool," because people outside of tech don't really use "tool" to describe software and tend to think of physical objects. A "hub" captured the feeling of "tool" while illustrating the purpose. For me, that's something to chew on regarding the words we use to describe Instabase. Mind you, we have many other critical things to think about, but I had at least personally been operating with the mindset that an "operating system" sounds cool!

The second story was actually a statement. "Slack will never have a ping pong table." Why? He said, a ping pong table is fun for people who have looser schedules—which tend to be younger folks who don't have families. They can afford to take longer breaks, play matches, and make up for it by working late. People with more commitments outside of work can be conflicted, possibly feeling left out because they can't afford the breaks in the middle of the day. In general, Slack wants to foster a culture of "come to work, work hard and stay focused, then go home," because that culture tends to work for a wider range of people. And building that culture requires thinking about even the office furniture. I have thought about open offices and noise and distraction, but not about this particular second-order effect of fun things.