Dave Rosen

Team members working remote need leadership support to maintain balance. It’s easy when working from home to let the lines between work and home blur. Setting clear expectations for responses time, working hours, and escalation paths when someone is offline helps people prevent falling into an “always on” mentality that can lead to burnout. These boundaries are only possible with clear and consistent support from leadership.

To support a team in moving past task overload leaders must drive clear prioritization. As a leader, you are the one who needs to step in and guide tradeoffs to ensure time is spent on critical tasks first and non-critical work gets deferred. If everything feels critical that represents a failure of leaders to honestly assess capacity and priorities. Once the priority is set then the job becomes enforcing that prioritization. Multiple stakeholders, including team members themselves, may push to add tasks back in and it's on the leadership group to hold the line. Only once the workload has been succesfully rest as a manageable level can the next round of assessment on what to add in begin.

Having a plan to optimize content for performance is critical for a successful VR project. Start with identifing what are the key content and performance needs for the user experience. Be mindful not to let scope creep add load to the project that does not deliver against that core need. Once the baseline experience is in, then you need to do a cost-benefit analysis on anything additional that includes assessing potential performance impacts. Lastly, plan time in your schedule for content optimization with each deliverable. As VR platforms and code bases evolve there will be a constant need for optimization and failing to include that time in your plan can completely derail a schedule.

Critical insight here for anyone with a global mindset.

As an entrepreneur, you can’t assume every communication has the same audience. You may be speaking to investors, employees, or your consumers. You have to make the communication right for that group. - Define what matters to that audience. - Identify where that audience will be most likely to see your message. - Establish how to measure success. Slowing down to walk through these steps every time will maximize the impact with those you most want to reach and avoid wasting resources on those you don’t.

Get crystal clear on which decisions will and won’t be within your team scope of control then communicate that to the team. This will set expectations around decisions they can participate in and focus them on the areas where their voices are impactful. If the team are led to believe their feedback will impact decisions it won’t that can lead to spirals of frustration. Better to make it clear what goes beyond their level (and yours). You can then empower the team on decisions within their control and when changes out of your control do come through you can share as openly as possible what you know of the reasoning. Frustrations will happen and that’s when you do your best to listen openly and guide people forward.