THE LAYERS OF ISOLATED WORKGROUPS

COVID-19 has forced companies the world over to enact — or create — remote working protocols. The likes of Box, Amazon, Airbnb, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have all told their employees some variation of “work from home”. But so too are more traditional organisations across fields such as real estate, accounting and local government. Zoom team-selfies, are slowly polluting Twitter and LinkedIn feeds.

But like most things worth doing, there are different levels of proficiency and sophistication to scale. Many newly-remote workers seem to conflate simply downloading Zoom, Slack, and having access to email with having this remote working thing sorted out.

But having a ball and a bat does not make you a Cricketer.

A Case – Automattic Company.

When it comes to swimming in the deep end of the remote working pool, few companies are doing it better than Automattic — the company behind WordPress, which powers 35% of all websites on the internet. Automattic has about 1,200 employees scattered across more than 75 countries, speaking 93 languages. It boasts a company valuation of US$3 billion and has made several significant acquisitions such as that of WooCommerce and blogging platform, Tumblr. The company does not have an office, with its employees collaborating almost exclusively online.

Automattic’s founder, Matt Mullenweg (hence the “double t” in the company’s name) recently appeared on a popular podcast to talk on what he calls the five levels of distributed teams (he prefers ‘distributed’ to ‘remote’ because the latter implies that there is still a central place of work). Encouragingly Mullenweg’s sentiments echo the fact that the tools are only as good as how you use them. In fact, abuse of tools can actually make us less productive.

The Five Levels of Distributed Teams

Level 1: Non-Deliberate Action

Nothing deliberate has been done by the company to support remote work, but employees can still keep the ball rolling somewhat if they are at home for a day. They have access to their smartphone, and email. Perhaps they dial in to a few meetings. But they will put off most things until they’re back in the office and will be a shadow of their office-bound selves.

Level 1 is where the overwhelming majority of organisations were prior to the COVID19 outbreak.

Level 2: Recreating the Office Online

This is where most organisations now reside — especially traditional ones. It is where your employees have access to videoconferencing software (eg. Zoom), instant messaging software (eg. Slack) and email, but instead of redesigning work to take advantage of the new medium, teams ultimately end up recreating online, how they work in the office.

This extends to many of the bad habits that permeate the modern office and suppress the ability of knowledge workers to actually think, with..:-

1. . . . . 10-person video-calls when two people would suffice.
2. . . . . 60+ interruptions a day — now via Slack and phone calls.
3. . . . . the sporadic checking of and responding to email more than 70 times a day throughout the day.
4. . . . . hyper-responsiveness that is expected of all employees, leaving them wired to desktop.

Mullenweg equates lack of redesigning work around the medium. A similar example was with the radio drama of the 1930s, which was essentially the acting out of plays over the airwaves. Adapting the content to the radio medium was not fully considered or appreciated at the time. At Level 2, people are still expected to be online from 9 to 5, and in some cases to be subject to what essentially amounts to spyware, with employers installing screen-logging software on their employee machines to ensure compliance.

Level 3: Adapting to the medium

At level 3, organizations start to adapt to and take advantage of the medium. Mullenweg points to shared documents (such as a Google Doc), that is visible to all and updated in real-time during a discussion, so that there is a shared understanding of what is discussed and decided, eliminating the risk of lost in translation errors and time wasted thereafter.

It’s at this stage that companies start to invest in better equipment for their employees as well, such as lighting for video-calls and background noise-canceling microphones. Effective written communication becomes critical the more companies embrace remote work. With an aversion to ‘jumping on calls’ at a whim, and a preference for asynchronous communication (more on that later), most of Automattic’s communications is text-based, and so accurate and timely articulation becomes key. In fact, Mullenweg says that most of the company’s hiring is performed via text as opposed to candidate phone or vide calls.

When it comes to meetings:

1. Only hold a meeting if it is absolutely necessary and the same outcomes cannot be reached via a quick ad-hoc conversation, phone call, email, text or instant message.
2. Set the meeting to 15 minutes by default, and only make it longer if absolutely necessary (the shorter the meeting, the more succinct you will have to be, and the less time there will be for pointless small talk and rambling).
3. Set a specific agenda and desired outcome going into the meeting.
4. Invite only ‘must have’ people (unless this is a big Type-1 decision, two people should usually do it with three on the rare occasion).
5. Agree on next steps, allocate responsible person(s) and set due dates (this is especially important to avoid boomerang meetings).
6. Never, ever, use a meeting simply to communicate information — that’s what email or IM is for. Many are indeed learning that all those meetings could have in fact been emails.

Level 4: Asynchronous Communication

‘I’ll get to it when it suits me.’ This is the nature of asynchronous communication. The reality is that most things do not require an immediate response. For most things, a one-way email or instant message should do the job, with the recipient responding when it suits them. If something really is urgent, then the mode of communication should reflect that. Pick up the phone, or tap that person on the shoulder, but only if it is truly urgent.

Aside from the obvious and massive benefit of giving knowledge workers time to think, create and get into the flow state (a psychological state whereby we are up to five times more productive according to McKinsey), but asynchronous communication predisposes people to making better decisions. If you want to cut emotion out of the equation, increase your response time. Giving people time to think between question and response, rather than fall victim to blurting out the first thing that comes to mind in a meeting or when tapped on the shoulders, delivers a compound benefit to the organization over time.

In order to avoid tennis games and duplication of effort, ensure that asynchronous messages:

1. provide sufficient background detail, where necessary provide clear action item(s) and outcome(s) required.
2. provide a due date
3. provide a path of recourse if the recipient is unable to meet your requirements.

For example:

“Hey Sunil. Attached is the incorporation document for our new spin-off company. Please sign the document where requested and send it back to me by 4 pm this Friday. If you have any concerns, give me a call on 555 1983.”

Globally distributed teams, who work asynchronously, and master ‘passing the baton’, can get three times more done than a local team relying on everybody to be in an office between 9am and 5pm.

Awaken the Night Owls

Science suggests that our preferred sleeping patterns — our chronotypes — are programmed at birth. People are either night owls or early birds. Several studies have found that about 30 to 40 per cent of the population are night owls, which means that the modern 9-to-5 workday is sabotaging the creative and intellectual efforts of almost half the workforce. Studies show that while early risers are more alert in the morning, night owls show stronger focus and longer attention spans 10 hours after waking than their early-bird compatriots.

Level 5: ‘Nirvana’

This is where your distributed team works better than any in-person team ever could. Mullenweg equates this level with having more emphasis on ‘environment design’, insofar as the organization’s culture, and the physical environment people work in is concerned.

The disadvantages:

Three big disadvantages or concerns that face newly remote teams, and how to counter them, can be found below:

1. Team bonding and building
   1. Instead of telling their employees to be at the office 11 months a year, and have 4 weeks off, the script gets flipped. Employees have 11 months of remote work a year and have to make time to travel for up to 4 weeks a year for team bonding and building events.
      1. To counter this, organizations can make use of custom-built apps which keep track of who has met who, and then assign seats, say at a dinner party, so that people sit with people they’ve not yet met before.
2. Osmotic and office communication
   1. With everybody working online, you miss out on watering hole conversations, overhearing other people say something that you can help with, or just having a general awareness of your team’s activities by virtue of being within earshot of discussions.
      1. To counter this, some organizations use an internal blog, and a place where an incredible amount of conversation and activity is chronicled and captured.
3. Security
   1. Mullenweg points to endpoint security —computer networks that are remotely bridged to client devices — and used for BYOD such as laptops and smartphones.
   1. The alternative — being inside the office wall, as Mullenweg says —essentially becomes a single point of failure, and compromises depth in defense.
   1. What we should be doing instead is rather than over-emphasizing just access control, we need to be protecting against malicious behaviors. With over 70% of IT hacks using social engineering to get inside, he has a point.

***Concept Courtesy – http://www.automattic.com

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa.

MANAGING REMOTE WORKFORCES: BEHAVIOURAL CHALLENGES

In response to the uncertainties presented by Covid-19, many companies and universities have asked their employees to work remotely. The new policies leave many employees — and their managers — separated from each other for the first time.

Common Behavioural Challenges of Remote Workforces

Managers first ought to understand factors that can make remote work especially demanding. Both managers and their employees often express concerns about the lack of face-to-face interaction. Supervisors worry that employees will not work as hard or as efficiently (though research indicates otherwise, at least for some types of jobs).  Many employees, on the other hand, struggle with reduced access to managerial support and communication. Challenges inherent in remote work include:

1. Lack of access to information: 

Newly remote workers are often surprised by the added time and effort needed to locate information from colleagues. Even getting answers to what seem like simple questions can feel like a large obstacle to a worker based at home. This phenomenon extends beyond task-related work to interpersonal challenges that can emerge among remote colleagues. 

Research has found that a lack of “mutual knowledge” among remote workers translates to a lower willingness to give colleagues the benefit of the doubt in difficult situations. For example, if you know that your officemate is having a rough day, you will view a brusque email from them as a natural product of their stress. However, if you receive this email from a remote colleague, with no understanding of their current circumstances, you are more likely to take offense, or at a minimum to think poorly of your colleague’s professionalism.

• Social Isolation and Loneliness: 

Loneliness is one of the most common complaints about remote work, with employees missing the informal social interaction of an office setting. It is thought that extraverts may suffer from isolation more in the short run, particularly if they do not have opportunities to connect with others in their remote-work environment. However, over a longer period of time, isolation can cause any employee to feel less “belonging” to their organization, and can even result in increased intention to leave the company.

Not surprisingly then, it’s a huge health factor that impacts not only our psychology but even our physical health. Isolation and loneliness in humans are just as detrimental. Prolonged isolation can in extreme cases result in things like anxiety and depression.

When working remotely, we miss out on so many opportunities to connect with our colleagues and managers. More than just that, though, we also feel like our teammates don’t hear us the same. We often feel like leadership doesn’t take notice of us the way they do those working in office. A survey of remote employees found that 37% of those surveyed believe that working remotely can lead to reduced visibility and less access to company leadership.

• Distractions in the Environment: 

Typically, we encourage employers to ensure that their remote workers have both dedicated workspace and adequate childcare before allowing them to work remotely. Yet, in the case of a sudden transition to virtual work, there is a much greater chance that employees will be contending with suboptimal workspaces and (due to school and daycare closures) unexpected parenting responsibilities. Even in normal circumstances family and home demands can impinge on remote work; managers should expect these distractions to be greater during this unplanned work-from-home transition.

• Communication issues due to a lack of non-verbal cues:

We lose some of those hallway conversations, and quick in-office chats, but it goes deeper than that. It can become difficult to sense intent in messages between you and your team. The philosophical concept Hanlon’s razor, coined by author Robert J. Hanlon, says that we should “assume ignorance before malice,” when communicating with others. It is based on thousands upon thousands of years of primal programming that causes us to assume something is a threat by default for the sake of survival.

The problem is, that natural defence mechanism doesn’t help us much in a modern workplace. When you’re messaging an employee, they’re liable to assume negative intent when you say something they could take as a “threat” (such as when you offer a critique, feedback, ask a question, etc.), and the same goes for you. Without any of the non-verbal cues to discern intent from what we see and hear, communication issues can easily arise, since almost 90% of all communication is non-verbal. Imagine trying to make an important decision with only 10% of the information.

How Managers Can Support Remote Employees

There are specific, research-based, steps that managers can take without great effort to improve the engagement and productivity of remote employees, even when there is little time to prepare. As much as remote work can be fraught with challenges, there are relatively quick and inexpensive things that managers can do to ease the transition:

1. Establish structured daily check-ins: 

Many successful remote managers establish a daily call with their remote employees.  The important feature is that the calls are regular and predictable, and that they are a forum in which employees know that they can consult with you, and that their concerns and questions will be heard.

• Provide several different communication technology options: 

Remote workers benefit from having a “richer” technology, such as video conferencing, that gives participants many of the visual cues that they would have if they were face-to-face. Video conferencing has many advantages:

1. It allows for increased “mutual knowledge” about colleagues
2. It helps reduce the sense of isolation among teams
3. Useful for complex or sensitive conversations as it feels more personal than written or audio-only communication.
4. Aids in discerning the non-verbal cues of communication that we are so accustomed to.

• Provide opportunities for remote social interaction: 

The easiest way to establish some basic social interaction is to leave some time at the beginning of team calls just for non-work items (e.g., “We’re going to spend the first few minutes just catching up with each other. How was your weekend?”). Other options include virtual pizza parties (in which pizza is delivered to all team members at the time of a videoconference), or virtual office parties (in which party “care packages” can be sent in advance to be opened and enjoyed simultaneously). While these types of events may sound artificial or forced, experienced managers of remote workers (and the workers themselves) report that virtual events help reduce feelings of isolation, promoting a sense of belonging.

• Offer encouragement and emotional support: 

Especially in the context of an abrupt shift to remote work, it is important for managers to acknowledge stress, listen to employees’ anxieties and concerns, and empathize with their struggles. Research on emotional intelligence and emotional contagion tells us that employees look to their managers for cues about how to react to sudden changes or crisis situations. If a manager communicates stress and helplessness, this will have a “trickle-down” effect on employees.

Effective leaders take a two-pronged approach, both acknowledging the stress and anxiety that employees may be feeling in difficult circumstances, but also providing affirmation of their confidence in their teams. With this support, employees are more likely to take up the challenge with a sense of purpose and focus.

Remote Management Tips:

1. Establish Well-defined Expectations:

Everyone has a different idea of what doing something “quickly” or “well” means. Whether showing examples of what you expect to be done, calendar sharing, etc., make sure you have clear expectations from those you work with online.

• Engage Consistently:

Engage your remote workers on a daily basis through some kind of communication. Use multiple channels to communicate. Then, plan a regularly scheduled face-to-face meeting. This can be weekly, monthly, or annually, and could be combined with a training or coaching program. This constant interaction and engagement will help remote workers feel included, which is an important aspect of the organization.  

• Trust the Team:

Sometimes, companies are not willing to embrace a remote workforce because there’s an uncertainty about whether or not the work will get completed at the same level as if they were in the office. To combat this belief, set up work-from-home guidelines, such as emails must be responded to within 24 hours, use text for urgent matters, etc.

• Clarify For Mission, Values, Outcomes And Role:

Remote workers are often frozen out of regular-office human interaction, so on-target overcommunication is critical. Help them get aligned with mission, the values that truly matter to them, as well as the outcomes they love delivering to others and their natural role in any situation. This will keep them truly motivated and working with you longer and more productively.

• Organise Reliable Tools:

If remote employees can’t download files, struggle hearing on a conference call, and consistently receive meeting invitations for times when they are still asleep, you have failed to address the basics. First, invest in reliable tools to make collaboration possible. Then develop clear processes to use such tools. For circumstances when quick collaboration is more important than visual detail, provide mobile-enabled individual messaging functionality (Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc.) which can be used for simpler, less formal conversations, as well as time-sensitive communication.

• Focus On Goals, Not Activity:

It is important to manage expectations and stay focused on goals when embracing a remote workforce. Don’t worry as much about what is being done. Instead, concentrate on what is being accomplished. If we are meeting our goals, then great. If not, we need to look into the situation further. It is all about accomplishment, not activity.  

Connect Their Goals With Yours. The world is shifting quickly to a workforce interested in learning and skills advancement rather than stability. Take a moment to connect their interests to the goals of my company.

• Create A Communication Strategy

Managing a productive team remotely begins with a strategy for communication. First, arrange for the appropriate number of weekly formal “report-ins.” Second, set guidelines about daily needs. Some people work better with a shopping list of questions and thoughts while others like a trickle. An understanding of what is urgent will further mitigate inefficiency, allowing ultimate productivity.  

Make each team meeting count with intentional purpose and opportunities to engage and contribute in a variety of ways. Intentionality is an essential practice, particularly when we cannot readily “see” our people. 

• The Importance of One-On-Ones:

Since you don’t have all those moments in the office to build rapport and talk about issues ad hoc, make up for it by setting aside more time for your one on ones with your remote employees. One of the fastest ways to build resentment on your team is regularly cancelling one on ones. Employees miss out on the kinds of information that would naturally spread across an office related to other parts of the company and brief announcements. One on ones provide an opportunity to make up for that as well as handle all the little things that build up over the course of a week.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa