A lot is being written about what the new normal will look like now that we are finally exiting the Covid nightmare. We work with hundreds of teams across industries and geographies and while of course, each situation is unique, there are more commonalities than there are differences.
Last week in our weekly Fundamentals series, we wrote about “Psychological Safety in the New Hybrid Environment of Work” and before we did, we looked at all the (anonymous) data that we gathered from the teams using our solution and researched most of what we could find on the topic.
In our opinion the only thing that is clearer than ever is how, for everyone, there will be some working from home, some office work and then some re-humanising of sorts be it weekly/fortnightly socials with the team or events/conferences to learn and interact with others.
If you want to embark on the same fact finding mission (and you should before you work on any policies!) I would advise you try to discard Forbes-level “noise” -however intelligent a slant it may have- and instead look for the meatier studies and guides. When you do, you’ll see most of them come from the DevOps world and the tech companies and that is far from strange, they had prior experience with remote work and they rallied and adapted first during the lockdowns. Microsoft, Google (re:work) and GitHub all have hefty reports out and ITRevolution released a Remote Interactions Workbook from the makers of Team Topologies. In addition to this, as ever, check what Amy Edmondson has been working on lately as she has explored the topic as well. This is, I believe a rather exhaustive list of what is worth examining in detail which doesn’t mean everything else out there is worthless, it simply isn’t as mature of content in my opinion.
We too have a mini guide for doing hybrid right – these are the things we advise teams consider and enterprises facilitate to settle in for Remote/Hybrid:
- No Top-Down/On-paper-only Tone-deaf and Artificial Policies – We feel strongly that any enterprise that attempts to navigate this transition period by having created a set of policies unilaterally at HR or Leadership level and simply communicated them instead of co-created them and offered autonomy and respect in the process, will see a second/third wave of leavers very soon. The companies that did the best so far, have worked hard to make everyone heard for the umbrella policies but also asked teams to feel free to create their own policies and rhythm depending on what their needs were.
- Normalise Doing the People Work – this is what we say with every breath. This new reality will need every team member having the EQ and willingness to probe their reactions, behaviours and emotions and those of others. This work is especially important in the absence of every day phisicality. We further advise that the majority of the people work should focus on Psychological Safety as its elements are so all-encompassing when it comes to the needs of our employees but any habitual work on discussing, thinking, becoming closer is sorely needed from the team and should be enabled by the enterprise.
- Eliminate all trace of Command&Control – managers, leaders, team leads – everyone needs to find urgent ways to reframe and shift their own mindsets towards servant leadership before we can have high performing autonomous teams.
- “One remote – all remote” — which amounts to the fact that even if the majority of the team happens to be physically in each other’s presence in the office in a meeting room, as long as at least one of their team is not able to be there then they should all connect to zoom and treat the meeting as a virtual one;
- Consider No-meetings Days (or portions of the day) — where employees have protected time to think and get on with solo work, etc;
- No video mandatory on internal meetings — is an informal policy any team can adopt if they feel some of their team members still struggle with the video element of their remote meetings;
- Shorter/smarter meetings — an anti-burnout practice starting to take hold in the business world where the meetings are neither as long or placed firmly at the top of the hour as they used to but instead start 5 or 10 minutes past and end 10-15 minutes before to allow people time to cognitively readjust context and take a breath;
- Socials/Re-humanising regular meets — occasions where the team comes together in person and not only online have become very important with the most innovative of companies having found ways to encourage and support set-ups where team members meet for social reasons with regularity;
- Examination of “individual/solo work versus common work” — We ask all teams to include this in their team re-launches. What proportion of their work needs individuals to focus as a solo entity and what can only be accomplished in a group as a team? Knowledge sharing and in-person collaboration need people’s presence so conferences, networking and set-ups that encourage real-life collaboration will become the norm;
- Tools and support for true feedback loops and the people work — now more than ever, managers and teams need the tools to have open communication channels, structured and dedicated time for the human work and a space to discuss and attempt to improve their team health and dynamics. Furthermore, with all of the above being experimental, having data to eternally interrogate how people feel about each of these is essential. As such, feedback work tools have become essential in the absence of the direct-line-of-sight, body language and water-cooler moments that the office presence previously allowed.
But not all of the above have the same answer for each enterprise or even for each team in the same company, so what we are incessantly advising no matter what, is to crack the dialogue open before adopting any one guide or set of apparent best practices.
Moreover, look at how you’ll be able to evaluate how it’s going, think of the next 1-2 years as experimentation mode when it comes to changing the work paradigm and stay so present and so in tune with the feedback that you come closer to building the best future for your team that you can imagine. At the very least start by having a Remote Working Satisfaction score like the one inbuilt in our Dashboard and that people use it as frequently as possible because it is only if you keep a finger firmly on the pulse of the team that you’ll avoid building even more HumanDebt in the midst of this new reality.
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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are: Understand, Measure and Improve
At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- talk to us about a demo at contact@peoplenottech.com
To order the “People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” book go to this Amazon link