WLP211 Planned Spontaneity
Today’s episode is all about planned spontaneity - while Pilar gets spontaneously excited about her new tablet, she and Maya discuss this important aspect of remote collaboration. But firstly our regular news round-up:
01.30 What’s going on?
Owl Labs has released their ‘State of Remote Work 2019’ report. It highlights a huge variety in the meaning and scope of remote work, a reminder that we should not assume it means the same thing to different people
On the other hand, research from Airtasker published by Yahoo tells us that remote workers work more and have poorer work-life balance, and paints a very different picture to the report above. But that just goes to show how hard it is to compare like with like in this fragmented space. What do you think? Here’s the link to the original research.
Co-working - apparently the best low-cost option in San Francisco is a parking space - and why not! It might not work quite so well in London… Lots of interest here, including the idea of co-working becoming unaffordable in city hotspots, and the human connection of this ties in nicely with today’s theme of spontaneity.
New co-working options like And Co (UK), and CoCo (US/International) are seeking to reclaim work space on a more flexible and fractional way, so maybe this will be the future? More grassroots and user-centric than the WeWork corporate top-down stuff, maybe that’s what we need to get back to…
Slack released a load of updates this week, including a tool to invite up to 1000 users to a channel. Do we want to be in Slack channels with thousands of users? Well, these tools continue to evolve in response to users, and they’re replacing intranets in large organisations. Let’s hope everyone knows how to manage their notifications!
Looking ahead to an upcoming episode on social change, and the general idea that ‘remote work is the future’, we do need to make sure we’re not excluding whole industries or categories of work. Remote may be the future for knowledge workers, but let’s be careful not to generalise and create divisions. The future is blended and flexible, rather than specifically ‘remote’.
Don’t forget to share with us ‘what’s going on’ for you, and there’s more news, of course, in our newsletter.
26.44 Planned Spontaneity
We want to introduce this term to listeners, to explore the concern many people have about leaving our individuality and humanity behind in the office, when we move to online collaboration. We have much more on this theme in our upcoming course Leading through Visible Teamwork - but today we have a chance to look at this aspect in detail in conversation.
Spontaneity after all matters to humans, we have a primal need to seek out novel stimuli and respond to it - little touches of surprise and unexpectedness. We can’t plan every aspect of the working day, and if our work itself is very structured and routine, then those spontaneous touches can come from our interaction with others.
Spontaneity also creates informality, it breaks down barriers between individuals, and promotes creativity and trust. Anything which helps you access that bit of the brain where what we call intuition happens, has to be a good thing. And spontaneity facilitates the psychologically-safe space to be experimental, to make mistakes and learn from them, in an environment where there’s room for innovation and experimentation.
But in the online space, things happen when you plan them, and you have to open up room for things to happen spontaneously - however contradictory it might sound at first. It’s part of the leadership role, to help people stay engaged and happy, and it does require specific time and intention to get it right, and increasingly organisations are recognising the importance of this.
Shared online spaces certainly help with this, cloud-based tools where you can interact around the work itself, and ‘bump into each other’, and it’s nice to see someone else commenting and working in real-time on a shared document But people will find ways to push the boundaries and edge their touches of humanity even into tools like email - and leaders need to role-model how to do this, what’s acceptable and expected within the team. Being aware of this can bridge the gaps which can exist culturally in hybrid teams, enabling the remote people to be just as spontaneous as the folks in the office.
Some examples of planned spontaneity in the online workspace include:
Open video calls, as they do at Github, for ‘virtual coffee’
Apps and bots (like Donut) to pair people up at random to chat with a stranger in their organisation
Business social networks - ways to build connection around the work, according to new research (remembering we got a lot of these tools, such as comments and reactions, from social networking in the first place)
Recognising people/accomplishments in public social places, like LinkedIn
And within our teams we can use tools to signal our availability for a quick spontaneous interaction, such as showing our door is open with a status alert or regular ‘office hours’. We can also use tools which allow collaboration in the work itself to encourage more ephemeral comments and observations - you might not phone or email to tell someone that you loved a specific paragraph they wrote, but it’s so easy in a shared document (when your chat is working properly anyway - are you listening, Google docs?). Each team will probably evolve their own ways of doing things and sharing kudos, reactions and fleeting remarks - but make sure you all know what’s in play and how to recognise and use the tools you have available.
We hope you enjoyed this discussion about planned spontaneity, and we’d love to know about any examples from your own online teams and organisations. And do look out for lots more about this in our upcoming online course ‘Leading through Visible Teamwork’.
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