Virtual Work is Already Broken
Earlier in the year I shared my concern that, when the hype of new, shiny online collaboration tools starts to fade, we'll take our eye off the ball and start making the same mistakes in the virtual workspace as we've been making in the co-located space. My fears are coming true.
Virtual teams are an opportunity to improve the traditional workplace, not replicate it.
Last week I read about how a company’s employees’ use of Slack is giving people grief. The discussions on this collaboration tool were being dominated by a group of people who had been using this kind of technology for decades and so were completely comfortable using the platform.
Meanwhile, another group was feeling overwhelmed and stayed away from the discussions all together.
The same article mentioned how, in another company, some employees felt like the virtual watercooler had replaced the dreaded meeting in becoming the number one time waster. But just like with meetings, the problem here is not the collaboration tool, it’s the way in which it’s being used.
“Oh no,” I thought. “It’s happening, we’re just shifting all our bad practices online. Stop, stop!”
Wasting time, feeling out of place… These are not problems that we’re going to solve through technology: we are going to solve them by changing our behaviour.
Add to these the top five collaboration hurdles of
- making information easily accessible to all project members,
- understanding who is available for projects and who is overloaded and
- the fact that it’s hard to collaborate with cross-functional team members,
and you can see that the problems we’re likely to experience when we go virtual are not very different to those we face in the co-located world.
But the solutions are different.
We’re constantly trying to replicate the collocated workplace when we go virtual – what we should be doing is looking for ways of improving how we’re working by going remote.
It’s tricky. For many years we have been paid to sit at our desks. We’ve played solitary at the computer (or checked Facebook) for the last ten minutes of our working day, waiting for the clock to strike 5pm.
When working remotely though, we can set our own schedule while working away from the peripheral vision of our manager. We can stop worrying about whether it looks like we’re working and actually get on with the work – or can we?
Some remote workers being paid by the hour are being asked to log in and out of the system; others have apps installed in their computers that monitor their work by taking regular screenshots.
(I wonder how these companies are tracking thinking time, or is no-one paid to think anymore?)
How should we pay virtual employees and freelancers for regular work: do we value the time they give us or do we value the work they do? It’s tricky, but I’m sure the solution is not to become Big Brother but to find a better way in which to track results. (Have a look at this article, it might have an answer.)
We have lived with this mentality of being paid for being at work rather than doing it for so long, that it’s proving difficult to move away from it. I’ll give you an example. I was recently preparing the materials for the Visibility module of Virtual, not Distant, the course. One of the sections on the unit about online tools had Sqwiggle as an example of a brilliant tool that can help you and your virtual co-workers feel closer together
I showed the slides to my husband.
“Oh, that looks awful. Looks just like CCTV. I’d hate to be monitored like that.”
Ah. In my fluffy, fluffy world of building team spirit and trust between team members, I’d forgotten that we still live in a world where people feel monitored, controlled, watched… and where people feel like the only way of getting things done through others is by continuous monitoring, controlling, watching… Monitoring of time spent at computer, not of getting results.
It’s really difficult to manage people. Shift into a new way of working and it becomes trickier – at least for a while as you get used to it. I’m making it my mission to dissect what we can do to make the world of work a better place, I think about it every day, I have long discussions about it and yet… even I find it hard to practice what I preach.
But it’s worth thinking about. It’s worth taking the time, trying things out. Evaluating what we’re doing and digging deep to find the real issues underlying a problem before scrapping a tool or a process.
It’s too easy to blame technology or distance for the breakdown in communication or trust. Even if they have a part to play, it’s up to us, oh-so-complex humans, to fix this.
Want to fix the world of virtual teams but not quite sure how? Check out Virtual, not Distant the course.