Transcript

LISETTE SUTHERLAND:

The key things that I would advise organisations to consider as we go more hybrid is, one, we have to recognise that we have to change the way we're communicating with each other. I'll go into that in just a second. The second thing is we have to define what is normal behaviour for our team through team agreements. And then the third is we need to explore new ways of being present with each other. So, what does that even what does it mean to go into the modern-day workforce, where some people are virtual, and some people are in person? So, there are new forms of presence that we can create with each other. And I can talk about that as well.

To start with, though, when we talk about how modifying how we communicate with each other, one of the things that we know is that, over time, email and instant messaging have become more and more prevalent. And in fact, most of us can absolutely relate to information overload. And now that we've got all these tools and that we've got this multimodal way of working, it's like our email inboxes are almost a form of presence that we have with each other on the team, where we can say like, hey, good morning, how's it going? Oh, it's going fine. I want to meet a little bit later. Yeah, let's go. Wednesday at two o’clock, let's have lunch. And you suddenly playing ping pong with your colleagues about a variety of different subjects.

But now, with the plethora of tools that we have, it's like we're playing ping pong on 10 different tables. And the problem with it is that most of us are knowledge workers. And we need time for focus and deep thinking and concentration to really dive into our work. And this constant game of ping pong of going back and forth is not allowing for the type of deep work that most of us need.

On top of that, it's exhausting us. This context switching of going back and forth between work and message and work and message is really Cal Newport in his book, A World Without Email he calls it a cognitive catastrophe. And that's what it is. Like, most of us are reaching the end of the day. And we're just toasted. And it's because of this context switching that's going back and forth.

So, the first thing that we have to do in order to tame this, what Cal calls, the hyperactive hive mind behaviour is we have to change our workflows so that we minimise the number of unscheduled, unstructured messages going back and forth. And then we can talk about meetings after this, too, because it's not just emails that is contributing to communication overload, it's also meetings. Everybody's just meeting-ed out. Zoom fatigue is now a thing since the pandemic.

So, in order to tame our hyperactive hive minds and to change the way we work, there's an example that I can give that maybe will help make it a little less abstract. And that example was a team that they had four or five it's a small team with four or five people, but they were working on 20 to 25 different projects. It was a design team, so they have 25 different design projects going on at any given time. And they were constantly emailing and Slack as their tool of choice they were Slacking each other back and forth.

And when they realised that this was not a sustainable working behaviour and you're just bombarded by Slack and email messages all day long, they decided that they were going to develop a dashboard.

So, their tool they used Trello but you could use any tool. And they built a dashboard with all of their design projects on Trello. And any time now somebody has a question, they don't have to email each other. They can simply visit the dashboard. And they can see the status. Because it's kept updated in real time.

So, in fact, they said that they went from having two meetings a week to one meeting a month once they implemented the dashboard and got it all up and running. So that's one way that you might tame that back-and-forth email. So that's the one thing I would advise organisations is, if you're going to go in this hybrid way, you will experience communication overload. Because email is so easy. And everybody knows how to use it. But it's not a sustainable way of working.

So, one of the things as leaders you want to make sure that you're thinking about how your work is flowing and then use a proper tool like a dashboard or some other project management tool to visualise the work, so you don't have to constantly be messaging each other back and forth. It's just an impossible scenario. There's no way to keep up.

We know that the inbox zero movement was really popular for a long time. We've set up filters. We've got flags. We've got snooze. We've got all kinds of things to manage the communication overload. But we know that it's not working. And it's never worked. We really have to change the way we're working.

And I think the key is more transparency and more visualisation into what's happening with our work. So, a good workflow shows who's working on what and where the status of that task is. So, in the past when we were working together in a physical office, we knew what was going on by proximity. Nothing was too far away. You could always correct it by just walking over to a desk.

When we go remote, we have to create. We have to visualise that environment in a different way or when we go hybrid. So, our work needs to go online, but so does our task planning and how or where, we have to visualise that somehow. Every company has a different system. So, there is no one right system. But we definitely know that visualising the work and making it more transparent one, it helps with everybody knowing what's going on. And it helps build trust in the environment.

Because we have to go from being time-oriented to being results-oriented, which sounds super easy to say until you really start to dive into just think about how do on any given week for yourself if you've been productive or not? How do you measure that for yourself? I've got my own way of measuring it. But it took me years to come up with a system that really worked for me, that actually measured my productivity.

Now, extrapolate that to a team. How do you know your team is being productive, especially on tasks that don't necessarily have a numerical goal that you can measure? Sales is easy. Are you making enough sales? But what if you're doing HR or something where it's like do you what is the metric there? Are people happy? Are people staying, retention?

So, everybody's got a different metric that we have to measure. And that's what makes it so hard to go from time-based to results-based. So, for leaders, I think transitioning to this hybrid environment, that's the one place to start. And it's really, how do you make it transparent? And then how do you measure it?

Because you're going to have to measure something if we're going to pay people for value. Because you have to figure out what is that value? Because it's no longer 9:00 to 5:00. That is not the reality anymore.

So, you can say you're going to pay people 40 hours a week. But what does that mean in reality?

In the past, leaders could lead through their charisma and their personalities. Come on, team. Follow me. I know what I'm doing. And then everybody follows. We know what they're doing. Online, that charisma falls a little bit flat. And what we've seen from the research is what workers want from their leaders is more insight into how the work flows

So, what is my role? And what are my responsibilities? How does that fit into the bigger picture? We want our leaders to set expectations and to really define what does success look like so that we know how to make that happen.

And in the Management 3.0 community, they always teach with leadership that leaders should be the ones who set the goals and define the broad general parameters. But then they need to get out of the way and focus on removing the roadblocks so that our team can take us there.

So, we've hired professionals to help meet our goals. Leaders can't micromanage in this hybrid-ed environment. We've got to get more into the creating a good work environment for people to work in so that they can take us where we need to go. But that means setting expectations, roles, and responsibilities.

I've got my list of leadership traits here – making more time for personal connection, more transparency in the system, and regular feedback loops. That's what people really want from their leaders.

One of the things that I actually teach in the workshop is we do an exercise where I ask people to draw the answer to the question. When you're working at your best, you're like what? And so, I have them actually visualise it and draw it out. And for example, one of mine is I'm like a lighthouse. When I'm working at my best, I am strong and standing firm against all the challenges. I'm shining out for others to warn people or to show them the way.

And one of the interesting things that we find is that with remote teams, we communicate a lot via text and via words. And that is not always enough. In the office, one of the powers, one of the things people loved about working together in one place is the ability to go to a whiteboard and draw out your idea very quickly. On virtual teams, we have to really remember that's one of the tools that I think is most important to learn is the virtual whiteboard so that we can draw out our ideas.

Now, the other thing that I've noticed, though, from doing this exercise is we know 20% of the population doesn't think in images. So, it's also important to recognise that actually when you say to somebody, visualise this, there's 20% of the population that are not able to visualise that. They think in a different way. So, they think in words instead.

So, there's never one right way. But in general, visualising together is a very powerful tool that on remote teams, we don't do enough. And one of the hardest things because I think one of the hardest things about this remote environment is, in the past, we had physical barriers or the time barriers. We would go to the office. And we would work there and be focused there. And then at 5:00, we would go home.

And there was this once you're home, you're home. there was no access to work. Back in the olden days, you couldn't even get the files. You couldn't do anything, really, unless you were at the office.

Now we can do everything everywhere. And we have to be disciplined about our own boundaries. And I think that we need to acknowledge that it's a lot harder than we think it is.