Starting on a new team? Write your user manual!
Summary
Personal user manuals are a way for distributed workers to broadcast information about themselves to their colleagues. While they aren’t without their pitfalls, they can be an effective way to achieve some personal and team objectives.
Learning what you’d like to tell coworkers about yourself
Creating triggers for coworkers to connect with you
Broadcasting your work preferences to your team
Helping people find something common with you
Finding ways to be a productive coworker
Reflecting on your work preferences
We often learn the most when the shoe is on the other foot. In many of my recent gigs, I’ve been a person responsible for onboarding others. While I’ve attempted to be as empathetic to my new colleagues as I could have been when in those earlier roles, I didn’t experience exactly what those new joiners were experiencing. I recently joined a new team. As I integrate myself into that team’s ways of working, I can experience what it feels like to be a newcomer in an existing setup.
In some weeks I’ll reflect on my onboarding experience and I might have a lot to write about it, but right now, it’s still early days. Early as it may be though, I’ve reinforced one of my firm beliefs. I work best with people who I know beyond their work personas. You know, like a multi-dimensional human being! No, they needn’t be my BFFs or even friends. But if I know a bit about them, their work styles, the work environment they enjoy, their life situation and their work constraints, I realise I can be a better colleague to them.
Without a conscious attempt to make this happen, remote work can dehumanise our coworkers as being mere “resources”. After all, the informal conversations that’d happen between work tasks in the office, don’t happen by themselves when we’re remote. Each of us must take some initiative to create these opportunities to know each other.
So I’m doing a couple of things to build a connection between my remote colleagues and myself. The first one is simple. I’m setting up one-on-one meetings with the people I expect to work with. I’ve done it even when I was on the other side of the onboarding process, so it comes naturally to me. But I’m also trying something I haven’t done before - a personal user manual. For those who don’t know about such artefacts, here’s how I define them.
A personal user manual is a document about a team member that explains how someone prefers to work and communicate, helping others understand how to interact with them effectively. The formats for such documents vary, depending on the information individuals wish to share with their colleagues.
Why have I been a holdout so far?
I’ll be honest. I wasn’t always sure about writing a personal user manual. Some of my reticence was down to how I am as a person. I hate introducing myself. I’m never certain about how much detail is necessary or if the people listening, even care! So when I’m speaking publicly, I ask the organisers of the event to introduce me as they please. When I must introduce myself, I go with the simplest introduction possible. For example, “Hi, I’m Sumeet. I’m a product manager at Thoughtworks.”
My reticence aside, I wondered if putting out manuals about oneself may preempt other valuable interactions, such as talking to each other and learning about one another through real-time conversations. Would such a manual oversimplify the person writing it? We are, after all, complex individuals and a document may only portray slices of our personalities.
I also had concerns about how others would take to such artefacts. Some people enjoy writing, but even those people rarely enjoy writing about themselves. And there are others for whom writing is a chore. Is it a good idea to put them off a valuable activity, such as written communication, by asking them to write personal user manuals?
I imagine it’s also hard to prescribe a consistent format for personal user manuals in a team. People’s concern for privacy varies, and that affects the information they’re willing to share in writing. And what about the effort to create and maintain these documents? What if people’s preferences change? How would we keep such documents current?
As you can see, I had enough reasons to dissuade myself from writing my user manual.
Why am I writing one now?
Sections from my user manual
Fast forward to this last week, and I find myself in a globally distributed program with different squads, where everyone’s working asynchronously, as they should. While I received a warm welcome on the program’s IM channel, I’m sure everyone went back to work seconds after they responded to that message. Until I speak to them, they may not know much about me. Depending on how closely I work with them, or not, we may not even have time to talk, anytime soon.
So, I decided to write my user manual, not as a team exercise, but as a personal exercise. The idea is to make it easy for my colleagues to know a bit about me. This document doesn’t pre-empt a conversation. In fact, I hope it encourages people to see me as a human being who has something in common with them, and whom they’d like to talk to.
It was a challenge to get over my reticence to write about myself. Having been through the exercise though, I can tell you that writing a few things afresh was a valuable experience. I’m more self-aware about how I want to broadcast my values, personal information, and work preferences. Writing the document has helped me accept the compromises and concessions I’m willing to make, so I’m easy to work with. And like any act of writing, it’s been a learning experience to put myself in the shoes of my readers and imagine what information they may be interested in, and how I can make it easy for them to find it.
I’ll keep this document current - no extra work for anyone else. As for privacy, the document doesn’t have any information I haven’t already shared on some public platform. It only brings all this information together in one artefact. And that’s why, I’m happy to share my user manual with you. Check it out here.
If my post made you curious about personal user manuals, you may be keen to make one of your own. If you liked the format of my Google Docs manual, you can make a copy for yourself. Of course, there are plenty of other examples too.
If copying formats isn’t your thing, I recommend Matthew Knight’s brilliant online tool, Manual of Me. Mathew has a repository of questions from thousands of manuals people have created on his site, and you can add custom questions too. That way, your manual can be as unique as you’d like it to be.
Mathew’s team also offers workshops for teams to build and share their user manuals and I’ve heard great things about them. Either way, creating your manual is free, so if the idea has caught your attention, why not give it a crack?