Greg says:
I’ve been hearing concerns in multiple organizations from people who work remotely, whether “remote” is a branch office or home office.
The complaints? That remote colleagues are missing out on important conversations that only happen in hallways, company break rooms, or around the foosball table.
Looking through the looking glass, there’s a managerial aspect of the situation, which, perhaps surprisingly, constitutes a breakdown of the old RACI chart (if you aren’t familiar with the framework, it’s an account of who does what on all project tasks – who performs work (Responsible); who decides something (Accountable); who influences (Consulted); and who cares (Informed; except for when the “I” stands for “Ignored”).
Virtualizing the workforce has revealed that RACI is no longer complete, and probably never was. RACI, as it turns out, is limited to a transactional view of employee interrelationships: Many project decisions are made “around the water cooler,” beyond the reach of project task assignments. To manage well we need another “I” – “Informal.”
Bob says:
Maybe this is just a tangent, but one of the great leadership challenges virtualizing the workforce creates is that “What employees want” is only exceeded in its fogginess by “What management wants.”
As you point out, employees miss the watercooler effect and all the related socializing, informal brainstorming and so on that remote work has left behind. At the same time they like the convenience of not having to commute to a centralized office.
Meanwhile, managers want to be able to establish a consistent business culture – a goal already made difficult in a branch office situation even before Remote Work became a thing – while also keeping management/employee interactions relational rather than deteriorating into a purely transactional mode.
And while they want all of this, this they want to keep their workforce happy with their work situation.
So fess up, Greg. You manage people. How do you handle, and encourage them to handle, the growing gap separating the addition of Zoom to the missing RACI entry?
Greg says:
To be honest, there doesn’t seem to be a magic bullet–yet. What seems to be the best solution so far is regular, face to face interactions, where people get these watercooler interactions that they need. When technology has been tried, such as tablet based virtual telepresence robots or collaborative smart boards, they generally end up collecting dust. When Google tried to replicate the sense of being in a room and working together to solve a problem, they ultimately gave up.
I am cautiously optimistic that AI tools will help us sift through the communications and help us find those important nuggets of information that lead to feeling “Consulted” and “Informed”.
Bob says:
I keep wondering if some of the solution is as prosaic as the Surface Pro stylus, coupled with a decently intuitive White Board app, along with sufficient training in its use, plus leader commitment to actually using it. The goal is to replicate the chemistry of a bunch of people in a room together, surrounded by whiteboards and fully charged Dry Erase markers.
Or am I just engaging in optimism bias, with a generous dose of wishful thinking?
A colleague of mine at another organization tried an interesting “open door” policy – he set up a daily zoom meeting that he left on all day as he worked. He did it on a separate computer so he could attend scheduled zoom meetings and do other work on his main computer. He invited anyone to “drop in” any time with questions or to chat. It was surprisingly effective. If you dropped in and he was in another meeting, he could easily pause, turn to you and invite you to come back after he finished his call. Just like you would if you stuck your head in his office while passing by. We’ve tried many team “virtualization” tools, pardon my lack of a better description: they all suck. Waiting for the star trek holodeck.
HI Marc,
That is a creative solution!
Greg, you imply that Google gave up on the concept of collaborative whiteboarding, but that’s not necessarily what happened. Yes, they abandoned their implementation of it, but also recognised that there were other and better alternatives.
On an entirely different note: it’s amusing how the robot checker for this website (when you submit a comment) gives an algebraic challenge with the digits written in words, but only allows answers in digits…
HI Joris, You are correct, that Google offered alternatives. For those who invested in the big Google jamboards (myself included), it feels like a pretty big let down nonetheless.
To begin with, face-to-face interaction are fundamentally different from other (letters, phone call, email, chat, Zoom) interactions.
In my [limited, personal] observation, most companies that push ‘back to the office’ are not intentional about cultivating face-to-face interactions.
A few of my observations:
Open Office, where people have to put on headphones to drown out the noise and focus.
On-site meetings where everyone sits at a desk and uses Zoom/Teams.
Back-to-back meetings that do not allow time for restroom breaks, much less impromptu chats.
No budget for travel. Or activities that foster casual communication.
The lack of intentionality leads me to believe most of the ‘back to office’ is about Managment by AIS (butt in seat), not MBWA.
My last teams were spread all over the US, none anywhere close to me. I believe its reinforcing what we’ve been pushing for years – clear goals, an open office door (which means I take MS Teams calls when someone wants/needs to talk), building trust, regular team meetings to discuss what’s going on, clear measurement of progress on the team and individual level. And stopping depending on chance meetings to drive success and change and making everything deliberate (hummmm, like leadership…).
Spot on. In addition, physical fact-to-face is no guarantee of useful interaction. The key is management that actively seeks out and heeds input from staff (and makes sure staff know their thoughts are wanted). When the attitude is “I hired smart people so I could benefit from their brains.” Then thoughts just naturally flow via all the available communications channels. When management knows they are the source of all wisdom. No process will foster communication.
One point that’s pervasive in this never-ending discussion is the assumption that what works best for one works best for all. That, of course, is not how life works.
Some people work best when they can be isolated the entire workday, with an occasional interaction when they need information (or can provide it). Others need the social interaction to power themselves. In an oversimplified nutshell, this is the difference between introverts and extraverts.
Different duties also require different amounts of interaction. Going back to the bad old days of siloed jobs, a coder would have no reason to interact with anyone all day, whereas a business analyst would be slacking if he or she weren’t talking with others half the time.
Fortunately, I have a two-person office and we both agree that we work better in the office than at home, where there are too many distractions. Of course, we spend half the day distracting each other, too!
Back when I had a watercooler to go to (a couple of decades back) it never lead to insightful conversations. The most that happened was that a DBA and I (SysAdmin) would agree to set up a conference call with each others team. Even then we had datacenters in multiple states.
I have far more effective communications now with Teams or Slack where we gather all of–but only–the people interested and look at the same shared screen. We are also better now about keeping notes about who is responsible for what follow-up action.