WLP280: Mindful Teamwork and Collaboration
In today’s episode we welcome back a returning guest, to help us explore being mindful and deliberate about how we use the office - just another tool in our location-independent work-style - to work together as a team, in a changing world.
We also discuss changing jobs during a pandemic, reopening anxiety, and other significant issues in the way we work today.
Justin Morris, Senior Customer Success Manager - Modern Communications, Microsoft
Justin last joined us back in 2019 - a very different era in remote and hybrid working (you can find this unnumbered bonus episode here or by searching for 7th June 2019 in your preferred podcast player).
Moving from consulting, Justin started working full time for Microsoft in January this year - in the height of lockdown, so the onboarding experience was rather different to that at previous organisations. His role is a new one too, helping customers get the most out of the communication tools and possibilities available wherever they are working from - how and when to use each mode, in a deliberate and mindful way. But he found the remote onboarding handled and structured very well, carefully designed to be deliberately immersive and engaging.
Justin Morris
Six months later they are opening offices back up, and presently at a mid-level of normal office occupancy - while encouraging an inclusive hybrid future, which recognises different needs.
Reopening anxiety is real, and people have different degrees of risk. So, Microsoft have developed a 6-step model, where level 1 = lockdown, full work from home, to 6 which would be pre-pandemic levels of office occupancy. This enables flexibility and clear signposting, as well as the acknowledgement that different locations can move both ways on this dial. (Australian offices having recently reset from level 3 or 4 to level 2, to deal with the Delta outbreak.)
Such flexibility lets people reshape their personal and teams goals, but it requires trust and open-mindedness from leadership. What people want vs what they need can vary, and even conflict in practice, and there’s a mixture of nostalgia, personal factors, health needs, and collaboration styles in the mix. To deal with this, leaders need to be communicative and inclusive, as well as highly flexible.
Microsoft look at everything through a 3 pillar framework, reflecting a blend of people, place and process needs. The right policies, underpinned by the right cloud-based technology, can make this work for everyone - but it requires an agile and experimental approach, acknowledging that this is new, for Microsoft as for everyone else.
Inclusivity also is acknowledged as a work in progress, and while a lot of focus is on meetings, asynchronous work has issues too. Working out loud, clearly structuring communications, tagging appropriately, and deliberately asking for specific input, all helps. They also pay attention to the flow of words and documentation - how an idea can be generated in one application or conversation but then may need to become its own document or project or something else - all of which requires managing intentionally.
Using technology to make all this fluid is naturally a key strength at Microsoft, so we can all learn from this vision and the way they are innovating. Getting people out of meetings and into an asynchronous but closely collaborative flow, is the most successful outcome. But paradoxically, to enable this very fluidity, a significant amount of structure and planning is necessary. We need to think about how we generate and build ideas and creativity, and ensure those spaces are built, and the right content communicated effectively, so nothing is lost that should be surfaced and spread.
Mindful teamwork is the way Justin describes it, and being able to nurture ideas from the spark to production means involving the right people at the right time. Microsoft has a culture of building on each other's ideas, so manifesting this digitally using their in-house tools - the right tool at the right time - is essential.
Taking people with you as you develop your own initiatives gets buy-in along the way, as well as diverse input and enhanced creativity - giving thoughts time to evolve and develop. On a distributed team, this means giving time for people to respond when they are personally active and available - requiring expectations, deadlines, and response times to be expressed with clarity and directness.
Equally, individuals need autonomy, and the space to iterate and learn as they go. Mindfulness about what does and doesn't work in different settings, and the courage to experiment and accept a degree of uncertainty, can be challenging. But the hybrid work movement is new, and we need to take our time to feel our way through it safely - especially now the immediate emergency is fading, and we have a chance to create something genuinely new.
You can connect with Justin over at LinkedIn, to keep up with his thoughts on this evolving practice.
33.05 Pilar’s reflections on mindfulness and Visible Teamwork
The opportunity to use offices again, as part of our matrix of working tools and environments, gives us a chance to explore what works and what we really want from our digital workspace. Our in-house Visible Teamwork framework structures this concept around a set of principles and practices which work effectively in long-term distributed teams, so here’s a quick reminder:
Deliberate Communication - passing on the right information in the right way, from availability to ideas to soliciting input and sharing news. How and where do we share each kind of information, at the right time, and with the right people?
Work Visibility - from project management tools and dashboards to collaborative documents, we need ways (appropriate to what we do), to share what we’re working on and the progress it’s making - providing updates, seeking feedback, managing resources, and sharing ideas.
Planned Spontaneity - finally, we need ways to recreate the unscheduled, serendipitous communications and connections and possibilities, by creating environments and practices which support this. And yes, the shared office can be one tool we can use for this - but it is far from the only one.
For more on the Visible Teamwork framework, please check out the following articles and episodes:
Good bye "Working Out Loud"; Hello "Visible Teamwork"
WLP241 Visible Teamwork and Trust in Remote Teams
Applications of Visible Teamwork in Remote Teams — Virtual not Distant
WLP239 Match Your Visible Teamwork to Your Team Task Workflow
You can also download our free PDF guide by signing up for the newsletter in the box below, and learn how to put the ideas into practice in your own team via an in-house workshop.
Tell us what you think: contact us, or you can tweet Virtual Not Distant, or Pilar and Maya directly, with your thoughts and ideas, and do let us know how mindful teamwork resonates with your future plans.
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