I have a terrible memory. One of the many ways this rears its ugly head is that I forget birthdays all the time. Shortcuts to the rescue!

Because of my bad memory, I have been putting everyone’s birthday into Contacts (formally known as Address Book) for years. This shortcut will scan your contacts, find everyone who has a birthday recorded in the contact card, and if their birthday hasn’t already passed this year, generate a reminder for three weeks before their birthday to get them a present. For me, I create that reminder as a task in OmniFocus, but you can modify it as you need to use Reminders or any other scriptable task manager. The only thing you have to do is remember to run the script - I have a recurring task in OmniFocus to do that, too.

Next time you have a present for a friend or family member weeks in advance, I will humbly accept your thank you. 🙂

Since December of 2020, the Linode team has been committed to “All-Hands Support” (or “All-Linodian Support”) – an initiative to have all employees, from our developers to operations people to marketing and documentation folks – get their hands dirty helping customers for two half-days every year.

Why All-Hands Support?

We first heard about the concept from 37signals, who in turn heard about it from others who do something similar: Amazon, Zappos, and Kayak. Their hypothesis was that All-Hands Support “…isn’t about putting out fires; it’s about fire safety. It’s about having the kinds of conversations that lead to better products in the first place.” We loved this, but we had a loftier goal: by having the entire company do support, we can reconnect our entire company to the real reason we’re here: our customers.

It’s easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day of our roles. Each of us has different priorities, different KPIs, and different measurements of success – we all can’t talk to customers all day. But what is the point of all the other stuff we do when we aren’t talking to customers? When we lose that connection, we get distanced from the consequences of our actions. All-Hands Support reconnects us with the repercussions of a careless mistake, a misguided decision, or a lack of action when it was needed. On the other hand, it can also connect us to happy, productive customers, solving real problems in the real world, and remind us of why we do what we do every day.

So, we set out to do that: to bring customers front and center to all employees via All-Hands Support.

What it Looks Like

In late 2020, when Linode expanded its Sales team, we saw the perfect opportunity to start our All-Hands Support program. We’d pilot AHS by helping train our new Sales team via working 1:1 with our Support Trainers, learning about our systems and helping customers solve problems. We started with two half days; one to learn the Support Core Values, processes, and an overview of what Support does, and one to listen and talk to real customers via Support tickets.

After their sessions, our Sales team felt more informed and ready to speak with customers, and it went well enough for us to expand to some other teams rather quickly. The feedback we collected from folks who did AHS was generally positive, but we found that people had a hard time connecting support tickets to their job. With this, we made a minor but impactful change: when scheduling an All-Hands Session, the recipient is asked one question: “What are you hoping to get out of this time with Support?” With this tweak, we were able to focus on tilting the entire All-Hands session towards what the employee does and what they want to learn. This seemingly small change has solidified that connection – connected the dots, so to speak – between employee and customer. This update to the initiative has transformed AHS from a training session into what Rob, our Digital Marketing Director, described as an “…incredible opportunity to learn how we solve our customers problems and put them at the forefront of everything we do.”

As word spread, there was another unintentional byproduct of AHS – it’s one of the best training tools we have. All-Hands Support is a yearly initiative, but most employee’s first All-Hands sessions are within the first week or two of starting. It’s now a required training for most departments and supplements the company-wide and department-specific onboardings. Introducing employees to our customers in their first few weeks of employment sets the tone for Linode being a customer-focused company that never loses sight of why we’re here.

Bigger than the Sum of its Parts

So with 115 sessions and 920 hours under our belt, what does All-Hands Support do for us? Actually, more than we thought it would.

It helps keep the customer at the center of everything we do.

We can’t lose touch with who we’re here for – the reason we get to do the work we love and even exist as a company is our customers. This can be easy to forget if we rarely (or never) interact with our customer base. We set out with this as our main purpose, and it still is today.

It helps empower teams.

One benefit we saw was that after All-Hands Support, we saw a reduction in other teams reaching out to our Support team to do things they now could do themselves. This not only relieved a burden on the Support team, but helped others in the company stay connected to customers even outside of their All-Hands Session.

It helps us create better products.

It was only after All-Hands Support that we discovered the concept of exposure hours – that being exposed to the product you work on creates better products. It’s important and obvious – but you need to commit to the time, otherwise it will get swallowed by other things.

It helps us seize opportunities to provide effortless support.

We live and breathe Customer Effort at Linode. Imagine the effortless experience provided by a ticket response that says “I’m fixing that right now” or a network issue worked on and signed by a network engineer. It happens with AHS.

It boosts morale and increases a sense of fulfillment.

Helper’s High is real, and whether it be helping customers or helping the Customer Support team, our feedback from AHS sessions support that just doing these sessions make folks feel good.

Looking to the Future

What’s next for All-Hands Support? Mostly just scaling. Linode has been acquired by Akamai, which means that we are hiring for a ton of new positions. AHS has been facilitated by our Training Team up until this point, but with ~250 employees doing a yearly All-Hands session, plus our new hires, plus all the other Training responsibilities has made that unsustainable. Therefore, we’ve newly minted an All-Hands Support Team – a group of Support team members who are endorsed to run All-Hands training sessions. In addition to the relief that brings our Training Team, expanding this responsibility to more folks actually accelerates this initiative’s mission: to bring customers front and center to all employees.

All-Hands Support has been one of the most impactful things we’ve done to affect the company as a whole, and we’re proud of it. The best news, though, is that you can be a part of it! Whether or not you’re looking, I’d love to hear from you on whether you do AHS or are interested in doing it at your company. I’d love to help.

At some point a few years ago, my AppleTV could no longer connect to the iTunes library running on OS X 10.5 - an event I really couldn’t be annoyed at. Honestly, it kept working for longer than I thought it would. So, I replaced my beloved PowerMac G5 with a shiny new Mac mini. Even though most of my iTunes-ing (now TV-ing) done on that new machine is scripted and self-sufficient, I end up Screen Sharing with my (headless) Mac mini pretty often. I was annoyed enough with constant opening the Screen Sharing app and typing in the hostname of my Mac mini to create a Shortcut to screen share with just a keystroke. You can download it here.

The Shortcut itself runs an AppleScript that opens the Screen Sharing application built-in to macOS (which is hidden in /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications), types in your hostname, and hits enter. If you have this password saved in your Keychain, you won’t even be prompted for a password (although please consider the security implications of doing so - this computer doesn’t do anything but run the TV app and it’s not connected to the internet).

When installing this Shortcut, it will ask you to input the sharing name of the computer you want to Screen Share with (you can find this in System Preferences in “Sharing” if you don’t know what it is). You can edit that yourself after installing (or extend it to provide a dropdown - something I’ve not needed, but was tempted to do anyway). You’ll need to make sure Shortcuts and siriactionsd can control your computer in “Security & Privacy” in System Preferences to allow it to work. You’ll also want to change the name of the Shortcut from using “Mac Mini”, unless you’re connecting to one too. 🙂

As a bonus, you can set this Shortcut to be pinned in the Menu Bar and set a global shortcut in the Shortcuts UI, as I did. I picked ⌃⌥⌘S, which is both unlikely to have a conflict and is also pretty fun to press.

Happy Screen Sharing!

I’m excited to announce that Linode Support has once again been honored by the Stevie Awards, receiving two Bronze awards as well as the coveted People’s Choice Award. Each award is a big achievement for us – in each category, we’re competing with some of the largest organizations in the world, which makes winning especially exciting for us. It’s also pretty special as this was our first Stevie Awards since our recent acquisition by Akamai.

_{^{Our mantle of Stevie Awards in our Philadelphia office, getting quite full.}}

This year, Linode Support took bronze in the “Customer Service Department of the Year,” which recognizes the overall work of our entire Customer Support team. We also took a bronze award in “Best Customer Engagement Initiative” for our efforts to engage with our customers on their feedback. We also were able to again earn the People’s Choice award, which is a big honor. Votes for this award come from our customers, which makes winning extra special for us.

To celebrate this win, two of our Senior Managers, Cassie Bubnis (Customer Support) and Joe Bower (Customer Success), sat down with Swap Bhartiya at TFiR to talk about the awards, what they mean to us, what initiatives drove them, and more — it’s worth a watch.

Congratulations are well-deserved for our team who have once again proven to be the best support team in the industry.

As with the previous two years, I’m incredibly proud to announce that the Linode Support team has been honored in the 15th Annual Stevie Awards, receiving four Silver Awards and one Bronze Award. Each time we enter the Stevie Awards, we compete with some of the world’s biggest companies, which makes winning an especially-big achievement for us.

This year, the Linode Support team took silver in the “Customer Service Department of the Year – Computer Services” category, which recognizes overall Customer Service. We also took home two silver Stevie Awards for “Customer Service Training or Coaching Program of the Year – Technology Industries” for our internal Training and Quality Assurance initiatives, one silver award for “Best Customer Feedback Strategy” for our efforts to better deliver on your voice as a customer, and finally, one bronze award for “Best Return on Customer Service Investment” for our investment in initiatives on our Trust & Safety team. I was also very happy to get into some more detail about this year’s awards, the initiatives that drove them, and the people behind them with Swap Bhartiya at TFiR. You can check out the video below.

Lastly, as with previous years, we’re up for an incredible sixth award, the “People’s Choice Award for Favorite Customer Service.” You can vote for us here. I’d appreciate it if you would take a minute to vote for our team now (and every day through March 5th) - this team deserves it!