Issue - 2021, week 47
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2021, week 47
Buenos días!
Over the past few weeks I’ve collected a few highlights about a similar topic. I was thinking about a way to share them to you, so I decided to gather all of them in a single issue and to write kind of a ‘’note for thoughts’’ (highly unfinished work!) to get through all of them. I hope you’ll appreciate my ongoing reflection. Have a good read!
Is work working?
For the past few weeks I started to work 100% remotely and some readings I had around this topic raised three main questions in my mind.
Firstly, why do we have to work from the same office in the first place? Secondly, why are we so reluctant to implement remote work in our current societies (even partially)? And thirdly, what can we learn from remote work practices to make better collaboration at work for all?
Of course, not every job is compatible with remote work. Sometimes physical presence and work are indivisible, unless the whole job is questioned or disrupted. But when there are not such challenging barriers, why is it so difficult to make this work a reality?
Working from one desk was a measure put in place to save the company money, not to help you do your best work.
Just to be clear, the question I want to ask is not why do we have to work from an office? But, why do we have to work from the same office (and most of the time, the same desk!)? There are two different questions and I think remote work does not mean working from ‘’home’’ exclusively. We could work from anywhere really, even from shared spaces that feel like an office. The desire for remote work is more about ‘’where you want to live’’ and ‘’who you want to surround yourself with’’ rather than a desire to isolate yourself from anyone at home forever.
It feels to me that there are 3 main reasons why physical presence in the same office is the norm today:
1/ Control
The company is used to assess work by controlling the presence of its employees.
2/ Protection
The company can more easily justify faulty behaviors or propose company advantages when employees work from the office.
3/ Security
The company feels safer when everything runs from within centralized and specific places.
As you may have noticed, all reasons converge to the company’s benefit and don’t consider the people who work for it. Some may argue that Culture is one of the reason why we work from the same place. Sure, Culture is important but it is completely useless if it does not take into account well-being and flexibility (culture can quickly became a strategy to keep employees longer at the office). And who said culture could not be built and maintained without an office?
Companies prioritize talking about work at the expense of doing it and reward presence over productivity.
Most of those reasons are being challenged nowadays. What we’ve been through with the COVID-19 crisis has forced many of us to reconsider how work should work. This period proved to a lot of people that a new paradigm of work was possible. Arbitrarily impose the same old rigid structure to most workers since communication technology has drastically progressed now seems more absurd than ever.
Although many big companies already acted on it, what is holding back so many others to adopt remote work?
1/ Resistance to change
It is difficult to change when there is no real reason to do so. Why a company should change the good old way of working? Well, if you ask employees today, after what they’ve been experiencing with the pandemic, many of them aspire to more well-being and flexibility. For most, work has now to fit in their lives and not the contrary.
2/ Fear of losing control
It’s been years and years since we get to an office to show that we’re ‘’working’’. In reality, your boss or manager doesn’t need to see what you are working on, they just need to know what your objectives are. In the end, what should matter is the result you deliver in time, and not the number of hours spent in front of your computer. But even if this management is goal-oriented, when you work remotely (part-time or full-time), there is still this fear that you’re not working at 100% of your capacity even if you meet the expectations.
3/ Unclear legal framework
Remote work at a large scale is very new and largely disrupts the foundations of the legal work framework we know today. It can be difficult for some companies to offer remote work conditions to their employees without putting them and the company at risk.
The change is ongoing and there are still many things that need to be defined and rethink to make partial or complete remote work mainstream.
But even if it’s difficult to have a real and quick impact on the legal stuffs, there is one thing that should be addressed to allow the shift at a company level: how we approach collaboration.
Regardless of whether your organization is fully remote, hybrid, or 100% in the office, defaulting to an async communication model gives employees the flexibility they crave.
When a team works partially or completely remotely, we can’t rely on the same technics to collaborate. When remote work was not a common thing, asynchronous work was the first presage of a new approach to work. Asynchronous work is necessary when you work with clients or partners abroad but is also becoming a reality between teammates in some companies. Even if asynchronous communication is not what the company wants or needs, I think there are plenty of good things to learn from this way of working that can also improve team collaboration.
Smooth collaboration is based on good communication. But what is good communication?
By default, when we are at the office, we tend to naturally go and talk to whoever we are working with, because it’s what feels more simple. Yet, we often disregard the fact that adopting this behavior by default can lead to communication and collaboration issues. Indeed, more simple does not mean more efficient.
Information loss, waste of time, lack of substance, creativity blocks and frustration are the things I have witnessed, and sometimes, caused, when working with my team.
So the question I couldn’t stop asking myself was : does a culture of oral communication, naturally brought by a strict 100% office presence policy, could be the main source of our problems?
My work and my colleagues' work are intrinsically connected to each other. Although, I mainly work by myself, it’s always the small little interactions in between that will make the work progress in the right direction, or not.
At the very beginning of my career, when I was stuck, overwhelmed by the complexity of a task or not feeling inspired, I always felt the urge to go have a talk with someone or ask for a meeting.
But that’s often when we feel the urge for something that we should stop and think. The ineffectiveness of those types of interaction is, to me, the most flagrant with meetings. I don’t count the number of meetings I was in that ended up with someone saying: « Ok, I think the best way to move forward is that we take a moment to get things straight so we can meet again with more substance. »
The initial urge for this type of unnecessary meetings that I also like to call compulsive work interactions, is an escape to the fear and unwillingness to start the work. And the frustration of this meeting/discussion is the incentive needed to understand that it will only work the moment someone would bring substance to the table.
But do we really need to go through all of this? Can’t we avoid those pitfalls by embracing new practices?
This is where some interesting asynchronous work principles can come into play. As Debbi Johnstone shares it in her article for Fast Company, there are three practices that can help teammates better fill and manage the urge for those compulsive work interactions:
1/ Create presentation document that your colleague will be able to consult beforehand
Written communication is so overlooked although it allows us to better formalise our thoughts and provide our colleagues with a medium to think it through.
2/ Use ‘’Request for Comments’’ (RFCs)
RFCs offers a process for asynchronous discussions where the starting point can be to identify a problem, surface an idea or define a project for example. With RFCs you'll get more thoughtful considerations, more engagement over the long run, and a record of how the decisions were made.
3/ Share things in progress
Sharing at an early stage helps your work going in the expected direction. It’s also a good practice to grow and earn respect.
In a nutshell, asynchronous practices can teach us to:
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Write more, talk less
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Don’t hold, share it sooner
I believe there is much to be gained by adopting those practices as a team and avoid the compulsive work interactions that disturb the receiver and frustrate the emitter.
Of course, not all interactions must fit into these practices (brainstorming, impromptu meetings, casual chats, personal or sensitive discussions, …). That’s why, it is important to accompany these practices with guidelines. A good example is Sourcegraph, an all-remote company with teammates from all around the world. They have a complete and insightful handbook about internal communication at their company.
To conclude this note, whether your team is partially, completely or not at all remote, I think these asynchronous principles can help improve communication at work and therefore team collaboration. And, for the not remote-friendly companies, applying those principles can be a great step towards more telework flexibility because it proves the efficiency of such practices that are heavily compatible with remote working.
Enjoy this issue and see you next week. Take care!