WLP284: What's Going On - Reframing Our Boundaries

When planning today’s episode, both Pilar and Maya found it difficult to locate much really new being said/published about remote and hybrid working. Maybe the world is holding its breath, and waiting for someone else to define the future of work?

But we do have two pieces of research to discuss, which both touch on boundaries in remote work, in a range of ways, (just like Maya’s recent book ‘Finding Your Edge: Establishing And Maintaining Boundaries When You Work From Home’.)

Following our recent episode on communicating, Pilar shared a post on LinkedIn about asynchronous communications, which will evolve into a blog post soon. Visible Teamwork is the key to breaking habits of presenteeism and micro-monitoring, but we also need to break personal habits and needs for real-time connection, which are emotionally driven in many cases. 

Perhaps we’ve never had to consciously examine how we build our relationships at work, because it always ‘just happened’ before…

10.17 Recent Research Papers

A recent publication about psychological safety caught Pilar’s attention about how to create psychological safety in virtual teams. The sample size was small, but the data is pre-pandemic, and offers interesting insight into mature remote-first teams and how their practice has evolved. It offers hope for any team to improve the ways they connect and collaborate, and many of the challenges discussed are far from exclusive to remote.

The paper is very practical, with lots of actionable ideas, behavioural changes which can drive emotional changes, so well worth a look for any team. The key learning is that if you change the behaviour triggers, the emotions and relationships will be improved - so there are lots of things you can experiment with and decide to make part of your habit and practice.

The second research piece we read this month is The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers published in Nature, (and shout-out to Igor, Luis and all the other members of our community who drew our attention to it).

A huge sample size of 61k, but all Microsoft employees in the US, in the early phase of the pandemic - a pretty significant experimental condition which is oddly scarcely referenced in the paper. 

In the absence of a control group not experiencing a global health emergency, a lot of the conclusions seem questionable, especially when driven by certain specific communications statistics within their own platform, while not recognising the diversity of channels people use to connect with each other, especially in a state of flux.  

Overall the conclusions of the article - including that asynchronous communication leads to a lack of information sharing - therefore seem somewhat unsustainable. So if you have this problem in your organisation, you need to look for the real reason, and fix that - remote is not the culprit, and this stuff takes work (see the other article above instead!).

21.09 Asynchronous collaboration and our boundaries

There are so many ways we communicate asynchronously today in our day to day social networks, that it can lead to a lack of boundaries and edges, when it comes to separating our personal and professional communications.

As we start to see discussions about how we collaborate percolating into the mainstream conversation, we need to help people take ownership of their deep work and protected time - and move away, finally, from the micromanaged hyper-available state that many teams have evolved.

Pilar had a recent unscheduled phone call(!) from listener/collaborator Bart, which beautifully demonstrated a match of expectations - he knew it was fine to make a spontaneous call, because he was confident that Pilar would not pick it up unless it was fine for her to do so.  (And it was within office hours.)

In other circumstances, this might not be fine, and the greatest risk always comes from assuming other people’s availability/boundaries/expectations match our own. We do need to have conversations about conversations, and how we want to collaborate and interact. 

The psychological safety paper references behavioural norms, which are often evolved in an unspoken way. We need to realise that our perception of urgent or important or complex may not match that of the other party, and we do need some guide-rails within which to operate. Why will some people always make time for a meeting, but not for asynchronous collaboration, especially when this can be far more respectful of other people’s boundaries and resources…? Why does Maya find it difficult to tell a client she can’t hop on a call because she’s writing, and easier to tell them she’s ‘in a meeting’? Especially when freelancing on irregular projects can be an incredibly asynchronous experience...

Documenting things matters, for all remote teams (of which hybrid is a subset), and having a single source of truth for operational procedures and behavioural norms means that people can go and check things out with confidence whenever they’re unsure of anything. 

Being very formal about procedures promotes spontaneity and frees people to be informal, about connecting and relating. Peoples’ heads are never good places to store information - Visible Teamwork is the key, and all the information about what you do, how you do it, and where you’re at in doing it, is probably digitised anyway - you just need to find a way to make it transparent, so you can stop having meetings to ask about the status of things.

That means that synchronous conversations, in teams or one-to-ones, can be about relationships and connections instead.

45.13 Life in the bubble

The psychological safety article drew attention to the risks of settling into familiar groups and patterns easily in the workplace, and we naturally gravitate to those we feel closest to. This can create unnecessary boundaries, and constrain effective work and information sharing - such as always asking the same people for help, rather than bothering someone we know less well.

In the online space this is harder to notice and counteract, and we have fewer non-work cues about points of connection and ways to expand our “tribe”, so bubbles can quickly form around trivialities. 

There are also limits on the extent to which the organisation is responsible, for interpersonal relationships, and some people are simply more skilled at this than others (like Chris Coladonato, see episode 262 for some excellent tactics on this). But let’s remember that the online space is infinite, and offers us MORE scope to increase our meaningful connections and relationships - provided we make it happen deliberately, and remember that we’re fully rounded people as well as contacts and colleagues. 

It’s not all about cats and kids, it’s about what we love and hate, how we think, what we get inspired by, how we make choices, and what we choose to disclose or not. When it comes to the integrators vs separators spectrum (that we have discussed before and Maya’s book explores in detail), it’s important to realise we can form deep personal connections based on shared values while still maintaining rigid boundaries around our personal lives and what we opt to share - when we work together with people, there are many different aspects of ourselves through which to connect around the work itself. 

Managers, as always, can choose to role model this, as part of their leadership activities - including practising ways to disagree constructively, over small/low stakes issues, so that we all understand each other better when professional conflicts inevitably arise.

Don’t forget to keep in touch; there are many asynchronous options… We have a form for you to contact us, or you can tweet Virtual Not Distant, or Pilar and Maya directly, with your thoughts and ideas about anything we have discussed in this episode or others, as well as links or themes you’d like us to explore in future ‘What’s Going On?’ discussions.

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