WLP243 Motivation and Visible Teamwork in Remote Teams
Another solo show from Pilar Orti, Director of Virtual not Distant, completing an unofficial miniseries around the concept of visible teamwork.
The principles of Visible Teamwork can be found here, and follow three areas:
Deliberate Communication
Work Visibility
Planned Spontaneity
Visible teamwork is a set of practices which include using technology to make our work and ourselves manifest in our remote teams - staying connected, as well as collaborating. So we need to understand what drives us to do our work in the first place: our motivations, for being part of a team and working toward common goals.
Deci and Ryan’s theory of intrinsic motivation comes from the positive position that we all want to do our best, in work and in life, but the environment gets in the way of that. It follows that we should assume positive intent in others too, so that’s a good place to start.
They define the components of intrinsic motivation as autonomy, competence, and relatedness (see also Daniel Pink’s ‘Drive’ too, though he uses mastery and purpose instead of competence and relatedness).
5.23 Autonomy
Having a choice of where to work from feeds autonomy, so it’s easy to conclude that ‘remote = better’. But right now external circumstances may constrain that, as may the structures of large organisations trying to change the way they move forward in a safe and hybrid way. Choosing how and when to do the work matters too, and even who we do it with - so creating choice wherever we can will help people feel more autonomous.
In Visible Teamwork, Deliberate Communication and Visible Work gives us autonomy by putting us in the driving seat, and helps your correspondent too by giving them information they can use - but encouraging over-reporting or using badly-understood tools, could make things worse.
10:18 Competence
Both doing our job well and learning to improve, are important here - so asynchronous, flexible communication supports this, promoting deep work without disruption.
Being unable to get hold of people or information makes us feel less competent, so we need the structures of Visible Workflow and effective communication tools, to feel confident in what we are doing, when and how. Bear in mind that when introducing any kind of change programme, like a shift to more remote working, can reduce productivity - and this impacts on feelings of competence.
Learning together helps people feel connected and in control, but they need intentional frameworks for doing this through deliberate communication - it won’t just happen, especially in distributed teams.
14.23 Relatedness
We need to relate to people, the work, and its purpose - and this reminds us how much we need to stay connected to the whole organisation and the bigger picture, as well as our immediate team and work.
Open conversations, structured reporting back, and sharing news can help here, using any means of sharing flexibly. And research from MIT by Sandy Pentland and his team has indicated that high-performance teams communicate well outside of their teams as well as internally - again this needs to be planned and scheduled, or it won’t arise, so cross-functional meetings or social events might help here. (See HBR’s The New Science of Building Great Teams.)
Interpersonally, Planned Spontaneity supports relatedness - making sure we bump into each other in and around our work, and finding ways too to deepen the interactions we have with our colleagues, wherever that takes place.
Do you need any support, in starting a conversation about motivation in your remote team?
Remember to get in touch if you need our help, on any aspect working as a remote team, or transitioning to an “office optional” approach. And let us know if you’re interested in our upcoming Podcasting for Connection service.
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