WLP294 What’s Going On: Wellbeing and Emojis
This episode is a hybrid of What’s Going On and Thinking Remote. Maya and Pilar revisit the chapter from Thinking Remote: Sick and Tired, Working and Not-Working on a Remote Team. They also discuss asynchronous communication and how it’s being adopted in the workspace, they talk about the role of emojis and finally, they share a couple of social media discussions.
4.05 mins
In the past (before the pandemic), taking time off work meant you had one of two choices – both were difficult processes.
The first option was to go into work, even though you were ill - unless you were very ill, it was almost expected you would go into work, plus, we did not want to let our teammates down.
The second option was to stay at home, but even then you were not fully away from work, as you could still do some work online and lessen the workload for your colleagues to feel less guilty. In both cases there is a sense of fear of work piling up that is still prominent even in current times.
This has continued even in the pandemic. It takes a lot of self-discipline to step away and focus on resting and recovering.
When visible teamwork is implemented, it should make taking time off to recover an easier process. As we are able to communicate our progress and give access to our work. This can help people rest and recover.
Another part that is changing is our approach to mental health, as it is becoming acknowledged and more accepted to take a mental health leave in the workplace.
You can read the chapter we refer to here: Sick and Tired, Working and Not-Working on a Remote Team or listen to the audio version below. (Skip the embed to continue reading.)
20.12 mins
Pilar and Maya talk about the new space created by Salesforce called Trailblazer Ranch. It is a holistic and nature driven space with the purpose of getting people to connect with their team. They also discuss the article Diving Deeper Five workforce trends to watch in 2021, which states that wellbeing is a part of how we are doing work, it is not a separate aspect of it. (Yes, it’s a year old but it all still feels relevant.)
We can give people autonomy to make meaningful decisions about their contributions to the organisation to help prevent disconnection. This means we don’t need expensive programmes to look after our employees’ wellbeing.
25.47 mins
The Royal Society for Arts (RSA) has recently released Social security: The risks from automation and economic insecurity for England’s social renters covering the state of the UK’s social housing, used by those who cannot afford market rates. Part of this article states:
“When employed, people in social housing are less likely to benefit from good work practices that support their economic and personal security: only 38 percent of social renters are in work which offers them an annual incremental pay increase, and three quarters (74 percent) never worked from home, even in the height of the pandemic.”
When we are considering why we are doing hybrid or remote work, the main aim is to achieve autonomy and flexibility , but we still need to prevent a two-tiered workforce being created. You therefore need to find ways to provide flexibility for those who cannot do their work remotely.
31.49 mins
Maya and Pilar shift to the topic of asynchronous communication, in the context of emojis. They discuss an article titled Do emojis represent the whole gamut of human emotion? The short answer is, yes they do.
For this experiment they took 74 different facial emojis and observed how much valence and arousal they had communicated amongst a demographic of 1000 Japanese participants aged 20 to 39. To quote the article:
“They see our emotional experiences as falling along continuous scales of both valence - how positive or negative an emotion is - and arousal. So, for instance, “sadness” has a negative valence but is fairly low in arousal; “anger” is also negatively-valenced but high in arousal; and “excitement” is positively-valenced but is still high in arousal.”
They have given us a cool graph with all of the emojis plotted of these different levels to show how different emojis have different effects. For instance, emojis that have accessories, such as the starry eyed or blue icicle, have higher arousal ratings.
When communicating with people from different countries and cultures we need to take these aspects into consideration. The article, Caution! These emojis mean different things in different countries, discusses this. For instance it mentions that the prayer emoji can have different meanings depending on the culture.
If you have any other questions about asynchronous communication or have any thoughts or ideas you want to discuss you can tweet at Virtual not Distant or at Maya or Pilar directly.
50.52 mins
News from the social media community and our connections:
Follow the conversation on Twitter about helping people adopt asynchronous communication. https://twitter.com/marjolijndg/status/1491476316453052420?s=21
Pilar will be speaking at Social Now in Lisbon, in May. Check out the programme, centred around a case study. (And look out for organiser Ana Neves talking about it on this podcast.)
Penny Pullan has released the second edition of her book Virtual Leadership. You can get a 20% discount with the code FBM20 from the publisher’s website.
Lucid Meetings have released a new course “Free Your Team From Unproductive Meetings”, If you would like to sign up to their March/April programme, this link will take you there. (Please note it’s an affiliate link, so if you sign up, you’ll also be supporting this podcast.)
Have you got any news you’d like to share with our audience? Let us know through our contact form or Twitter.
We also have a page on LinkedIn you can follow.
Looking for the transcript? You can find it further down…
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WLP294: What’s Going On: Wellbeing and Emojis
Pilar Orti 0:01
Hello and welcome to episode 294 of the 21st century work life podcast where we talk about leading remote teams online collaboration and working in distributed organisations. And this podcast is brought to you by Virtual not Distant and you can check out everything we do helping managers of remote teams over at: virtual not distant dot com. Hello, listeners, I am delighted to be with you. My name is Pilar Orti. I'm the director of Virtual not Distant and for another… well it's a… kind of what's going on..? “Rethinking Thinking Remote” episodes but the important thing is that at the other end of the line with me is Maya Middlemiss. Hello, Maya.
Maya Middlemiss 0:39
Hello Pilar. Hello, everybody. Good to be with you again.
Pilar Orti 0:43
How are you feeling today, Maya?
Maya Middlemiss 0:46
Much better. Thank you. Yeah, I think, hopefully the dreaded COVID has left the building.
Pilar Orti 0:53
Yes, we are still in COVID times, we are recording on… What is it? The 15th of February 2022. And very fittingly, so… this episode is following some of the recent episodes that we do together on “rethinking thinking remote”. Thinking Remote is a collection of blog posts that we published as a book also with some reflection questions and that was about four or five years ago. So we've decided to come back to that material and see what we think of it and in the current… in the new context. But also recently, there's been quite a few pieces of news and articles that are very interesting. So we thought today we'd have Rethinking Remote plus What's going on, all in one. Yeah, and we've also got some bits of stuff that's happened around people online or the little communities, so it'd be lovely to share that as well. But before we start, don't let me forget that this will be the second episode where we are offering transcripts for the show. And the reason for offering transcripts was to give listeners a very specific thing to go back to if you want to refer back to something you've been listening to, also to give people, who are not listening but want to read more, just more material to read, and also to help anyone who is having trouble understanding or hearing the podcasts to then use the transcript as support. So listeners, I would love to hear from you whether you are using these transcripts, how they are helping you, if you're not using them, I would love to hear that as well. Because we need to be making decisions as we go along. We can't do everything. So we've gone from having very rich blog posts that acted as show notes to less rich blog posts, but also the transcript. So it'd be great to hear from you, please use the contact form over at virtualnotdistant.com So with all of that, we'll kick off with revisiting an article from thinking remote. And, then, we will have a look at a couple of other articles around… Well, social equality and the role of remote and working from home within that. Emojis. There's a couple of interesting articles around. And also, of course, asynchronous communication. So we'll start Maya with one of your blog posts, which was then turned into a chapter of thinking remote and I love, I have to say Maya, I love the title of this “Sick and tired working and not working on our remote team” written on the 27th of November 2017. And I've just seen, we need to change these, that it says I'm the author. So we need to go back to the website and change that Maya.
Maya Middlemiss 3:44
All these years, I am sure I had to login even
Pilar Orti 3:48
That’s probably why. Oh my. So that.. Oh, well. I have to say I am very chuffed about having been taking the credit for it, because this is one of my favourite pieces. Do you want to… Because this was written as a blog post, not as a chapter to go in a book. So do you remember what the trigger was for this article?
Maya Middlemiss 4:05
I think… I mean, this is going back a very long way. This is what? More than four years ago, we need to remember what a long time that was in the Remote space. But at the time, I was reflecting on how taking time off sick, and how we talked about that, how we how we actually did it, what it meant in terms of the workflow within a team had shifted. Particularly in terms of how it had shifted in moving from the office to the remote space, and also how it had shifted in terms of how work itself had become digitalised. And the fact that even if you didn't work remotely, increasingly you potentially could, or you could at least, put the fires out and do some emergency maintenance if you weren't able to come in and how that had changed. You know, really, the start of the article reflected on how it was when you went off sick 20 years ago and it was a case of right I'm not coming in somebody else has to deal with everything. Because work is at work and I'm at home, and I can't tackle, I can't put any fires out. So I think you know, whatever knowledge work, you do know, wherever you're used to doing it, or whatever you consider the normal place to do it, there's probably some expectation that you'll fix some things, unless you're in a coma or something, your manager will probably expect you to stick your out of office on or divert a couple of calls or cancel some meetings or something. So I think it has changed and the direction of change has only continued since this article was written in 2017. Great,
Pilar Orti 5:38
Great, I'm sorry, I thought you were going to continue. Yes. And, and I think that the very real you, you talked about in the article, how… for me, I see it in two ways. One is the individual who is ill, and you're ill. And if you are… if your job is very busy, and you feel very connected to the team, you might even feel guilty that you're ill and can't help. And also, of course, there's different degrees of ill. So if maybe in the past, we might have a little hint of maybe not even a fever, but actually we're just feeling quite rough. And maybe we're coughing a lot, whatever. And yes, we wouldn't think of going and taking the journey into work. But now because we're home, or maybe we can then… this can be two pieces we can do.
Maya Middlemiss 6:27
If we just… if we don't do them, we'll lie there feeling ill and worrying about it piling up for when we get back and actually go we will feel better if we just knock that email out or just deal with that thing. But then you could probably find that you've been working from home all morning, feeling rubbish anyway.
Pilar Orti 6:44
That's the thing. And the discipline that takes I mean… this is something that I feel very strongly about, it takes a lot of discipline to go “my body, whether because of something that's come in or because of how I'm feeling is telling me to stop”. So I need to stop and stopping, it's not “I’ll do a little bit”, stopping is trying to disconnect the brain and going into bed and sleeping for extra time during the day because the body might be needing that. And it takes so much discipline because of all the emotional stuff that goes around it.
Maya Middlemiss 7:18
Yeah, and because of the way that we live now our work is probably on our phone, which is right next to our bed. And you know, those alerts will keep coming. And unless you know, you have such a bad headache, you can't look at your phone, then it's going to be there in your face. It might be where you're listening to an audiobook while you're lying in bed or something. And then there's a beep from your work email. It's quite difficult to untangle those things.
Pilar Orti 7:42
So I think it's quite important that we start to set up ourselves so that this doesn't happen, or this happens as little as possible. So maybe it's time to not let the phone ping. When work is coming in.
Maya Middlemiss 7:55
You get ahead of your notifications before you get ill.
Pilar Orti 7:59
Yes. And actually, I'm going to go on a rant and go a little bit off face from this article. Because, I think a lot of the time when we're talking about the problems of online collaboration and online communication and remote work, the problem a lot of the time are our phones. They've been… The phone has been a problem for a very long time. And I think it's time now… that we… Now that we are much more accessible in lots of different ways, we can switch the phone off because actually our computer is at home, switch that phone off and do the work only when you're at your computer. And I mean, there's not one way of doing this. But this is really something that I think more people could experiment with and would benefit from.
Maya Middlemiss 8:43
Yes, definitely. And in the latest iOS release, there's lots of things you can do with setting up sort of groups and profiles. If these are the alerts I want when I'm in work mode. These are the things I only want in the evening or whatever. So you can do that. Don't do that when you're ill, do that when you're well then you'll be ready. I mean it's interesting, what has changed and what hasn't changed since this article was written. I suppose for me, there are two standout things. The first is that… it was probably pretty much expected you would go into the office with a cold and I apologise I'm still croaking slightly but you know, it was normal not because of any kind of martyr culture but because of cold was a cold, now if you go in get on a crowded train and go into a work building coughing or sneezing on people, that's a very, very different context these days and it should be handled very differently. I think the second thing that I didn't really address in this article and I think is now better addressed in the workplace is mental health alongside physical health and I I do believe that although there is still a quite a long hours culture and there can be problems in different teams and organisations that it is now easier to say “I need to take a mental health day” rather than having to cloak that in physical excuse, which we know is what has happened in the past in plenty of occasions.
Pilar Orti 10:06
Yeah. And you'll refer near the end of the article to the need for psychological safety, so that we can really look at these things and look at them and explore them. It's a terrible word for this, but address them in a way that is really helpful.
Maya Middlemiss 10:20
And open about it. And I think that that is, hopefully, something that where we are now is more safe to say, look, “I'm actually too stressed to work today”. Rather than having to say, “Oh, I've got a headache or something”, or come up with some physical reason why you can't log in. And I know, that's probably not the case in every team, but it is an aspect of psychological safety. Definitely, how acceptable that would be to your manager or within your team. So maybe that's something that's a bit better. I hope so.
Pilar Orti 10:50
I think… I hope… yeah, I hope so. I was gonna say, I think so. But I hope so. The point you make about different degrees of illness is really important as well. And actually what is, at the moment, different, what's acceptable to bring into the office, also, you have to go there. And I think that, as we know that, if we are quite contagious, I have a cold, I'm not even going to talk about COVID. But you know, for the future flu, whatever, some horrible Noravirus. We can now stay at home and not pass it on to anyone and continue working. So I think that these are really important conversations to be having all throughout the year, not just in the winter time about… what does taking time off look like in this team? And is this what we want time off to look like in this team? Or even if you want to look at the organisational level? That'd be great. But I think these kinds of things tend to be more at the team level.
Maya Middlemiss 11:48
Yes, definitely. And it splits into that whole thing of planned versus unplanned leave, and what you can be ready for as an individual, or as a team, because there's something qualitatively very different of knowing you're going away for a fortnight and clearing the decks and having everything parked and everyone knows you're not going to be there, versus what happens if you have a sudden emergency of any kind, it might be health, it might be some other reason, but I think it's probably something all teams and all managers would find it valuable to look at, what are our contingencies? How ready are we? How easily could somebody cover or not? Or is there some way of letting external people know and so on? Whatever the reason, somebody might abruptly have to take time off.
Pilar Orti 12:33
So we should be able to say now that all of that should be easier, because of course, the listeners will be bored of hearing the term visible teamwork, which is the other side of having our work communicated asynchronously knowing, communicating our progress on the work, having documents that are available in the cloud, to the whole team, and all of those who need to look at it rather than on our computer. I think that also that could reduce the anxiety we're talking about about “Ah, if I take a day off today, and Maya is working on that document, how is she going to access it? Or how is she going to know what I worked on yesterday, when I haven't talked to her?” Well, that's fine, because you go to your online document and Maya can see what's been worked on.
Maya Middlemiss 13:15
Because there it all is, yes.
Pilar Orti 13:19
And I think maybe this is another point of advocacy for asynchronous communication. I'm just gonna jump ahead into further in the podcast, but there was a whole conversation around asynchronous communication and Twitter and how we… well how we help people adopt it. And this is a big question anyway, in remote advocacy world, and this is one of those areas. This is… if for… not even big things that happen to everyone on the team and the fact that we can then go and work from anywhere. But on an individual level, if somebody has to take time off work, we are making that person's life easier, because there's no guilt, everything is there. And if people are ill, it's easier to take a day off.
Maya Middlemiss 14:03
Definitely. And it's easy for the whole team, but they can see exactly how things were left, they can slot in, they can see what needs to be picked up, what can be deferred until that key person is back and so on. So it is yes, if you work in a team with excellent asynchronous collaboration practices, all of this is going to be so much easier.
Pilar Orti 14:24
And then I'm going to mention the big elephant in the online… Well, a big elephant in the current workplace actually. And it's something I'm hearing more and more and I'm sometimes… sometimes I am either running a workshop or talking to people about stuff and I feel really guilty saying anything around visible teamwork and stuff because what people really need is not to be overworked. The workload at the moment just keeps piling up and piling up and because organisations during the transition to forced remote work got into that mode. It hasn't really stopped in a lot of places.
Maya Middlemiss 15:05
It is part of the boundaries question as well. And that's making people ill.
Pilar Orti 15:10
Yes, yeah. And until we address that we can't make remote work sustainable because we don't have the time to put the practices in place. We can't make sure that people take time off when they need it, et cetera, et cetera. So that's really important. And I think that really pausing and looking at our work and seeing whether we're doing things that we shouldn't be doing at leadership level. Do we really need to work at this pace? Can't we cut down at a role modelling level? Are people seeing me work too hard? Too long. So all of that.
Maya Middlemiss 15:43
yeah, it's really important, especially as we're, it’s horrific to think of it, but we're entering the third year of this post pandemic situation, but you can't say, we’re still responding to an emergency, you have to sort this stuff out, because people can't operate at that pitch. For years, a few weeks, maybe yes. And everybody kept the plane in the air, which is great. But there is a big responsibility now at the enterprise level, at the management level to put in place things that make people safe and well, in order to carry on working in the way that you're working now.
Pilar Orti 16:24
So I think you were spot on with this article, it's such an important thing to bring up. Because it's… we need to be thinking about it in advance, we really need to. I think someone contacted me yesterday, they were putting an article together with stuff that should go into remote work policies. And this is something that needs to be made explicit. And that needs a little bit more thought and explicit guidance than in the old days.
Maya Middlemiss 16:49
Yes, definitely. And even the just the thing of being able to check in with people, by looking across the room, you can see if somebody's got a cold brewing, you can see if somebody is so stressed that they're about to throw their laptop across the room, you don't pick those things up remotely unless you look for them. Unless as a manager, you're consciously checking in with your people, having a one-to-one connection, asking questions, making it easy for people to talk about things that might not be directly related to the work that they think maybe they've got to deal with on their own. And then you're going to end up with the surprises when they suddenly get signed off sick for a month because they're depressed or something, if you haven't built that relationship and seen that coming, it's going to create more problems for you, as a manager way beyond the problems that it's creating for that poor individual who hasn't been receiving the support that there could have been from you directly.
Pilar Orti 17:44
And I'm also thinking in the hybrid workspaces, where we have the office and probably the home. I think there's a danger that we have… we get into some kind of routine of how we're using the spaces, and then suddenly, when we are ill, or whatever, then we resort to working from home. And that's enough. That's enough taking care of ourselves that we're working from home, not the office today.
Maya Middlemiss 18:09
I referred in the article, and I don't know whether this is current, because this was from four and a half years ago that in the UK that the idea of the fit note and working from home is offered is suggested by the NHS as a reasonable adjustment as a way for people to keep working if they're not well enough to come into the office. So there's the sense that working from home is some kind of a soft option, or we'll help you get better, which I think I would strongly question that you might not have an arduous physical commute on top of everything else. But it's certainly not a way of correcting a health problem.
Pilar Orti 18:46
We could talk about this for ages. But the other thing you're making me think of is, if I'm not feeling well, for whatever reason, and I take time off, or as you say, I decide that actually working from home is a good adjustment, and I'll be a little bit ill but I’ll carry on. But also, especially when we talk about mental health, that might be the time actually people need more support. So I think even having the conversation, as we agree that someone is going to be working more from home than they usually are okay, can we… is this time off sick? Is this an adjustment for you? Are you going to spend more time at home than normal in the office? And how do you want us to be in touch with you?
Maya Middlemiss 19:29
Yes, because we need to make this work for you.
Pilar Orti 19:33
Because we can't expect, I think, someone if we've got if we have a team, for example, when there's lots of meetings and stuff like that, if a person is going to work from home to slow down, because that's probably what we want, then what activities can they do and can they not do should or shouldn't do? I think it really needs a good conversation.
Maya Middlemiss 19:51
Yes, and it's all too easy for those conversations to be avoided by “Okay, they're gonna work from home this week. We don't even have to see their miserable faces in the office”. So we're not going to have those conversations at all. And like every conversation in the remote space, you have to be intentional about it. It's not going to happen organically in the same easy way.
Pilar Orti 20:12
Yeah. So something that caught my eye around not this specifically. But actually the whole focus on well being now, that more people are remote and stuff like that. Salesforce has created a whole new space for their people to come together physically. And I have to say that at first, I was quite excited because I saw it was like an online space that anyone could access. But now they've gotten the other way, and created this amazingly, very nature driven… holistically… the typical spaces you would associate with creativity very well, I would say very offline but when I watched the video, there were lots of people on their laptops. And I was thinking “why are you on your laptops?”. The hope is hope, he says that “they're trying to get people away from their computers”. But anyway, it's very difficult to work without a laptop when you're a knowledge worker, but I thought it said, we're gonna give you this space for this specific purpose. And I really like that I like the way that they've acknowledged that people coming together and asking people to come to a physical space has to have some sort of purpose and benefit. And I think they did that quite well.
Maya Middlemiss 21:24
I think it's lovely. I mean, I think it's part of this conversation of what is that colocated space for now? What do we use it for? How do we potentially repurpose it like Dropbox moving from offices to sort of collaboration studios, and this is like another step beyond so we're gonna put you all on a ranch in the middle of wherever it is? It's funny, because there are some sort of echoes of when you used to send people on management training courses, sort of in the 90s to go and build a raft or something like that will get lost up a mountainside with a compass, things like that. So there's some interesting echoes there. But there is something about being in a completely non office environment, that you can focus on the relationships in a different way. And I think it's a fascinating evolution.
Pilar Orti 22:12
Yeah, it does. It has the feel of our retreat space. And, but that's great that that's now like you say, we're very specifically asking you to come into this and for a specific time, probably. Within that, I think was a really interesting article that I came across yesterday about the five workforce trends to watch in 2021. Oh, this is 2021. Huh. This is interesting. I thought it was 2022.
Maya Middlemiss 22:45
Well, we argue about anything. Has anything changed? Is the question. This is the thing because it does feel there's this sense that we're still stuck in our new normal. Have we got there yet? Have we fixed this yet? No.
Pilar Orti 23:00
Oh, no. Anyway, for anyone who wants to have a quick look, we'll put the link in the show notes. But the article is called “Diving Deeper: five workforce trends to watch in 2021”. And it is by Deloitte, there is this whole piece at the beginning around well being. And it's interesting, like you say that, this is why I thought it was now because I don't know whether anything has changed. But it's really interesting to have a look at.
Maya Middlemiss 23:21
I have to see if they update it. Because this was published in December 2020. So yeah, good to see if they revisited this at all.
Pilar Orti 23:32
It's really interesting. The reason why I was pulling it out was that there's a bit about how well being should not be seen, this goes back to what we're talking about today, which is why I got so excited when I read is the well being is not something we do aside from work and we don't do well being initiatives actually well being is part of how we're doing it, how we're doing work. And I'll just quote because I said so well. What was the most exciting to us in the reaction was the examples of organisations designing well being into work itself. We heard from organisations that were complementing well being programs adjacent to work with efforts to embed well being into the work, some organisations were focusing on building digital wellness and productivity, while others were managing capacity at both the individual and team levels and still others were encouraging job crafting. Giving individuals autonomy to make meaningful decisions about what and how they contribute to the organisation. We don't need to have a huge well being program, we can give individuals autonomy to make meaningful decisions about what and how they contribute to the organisation. That's quite, that's not very costly. Is it? In money terms?
Maya Middlemiss 24:47
It's the kind of thing we've been talking about for years with remote teams of giving people that fuel for their intrinsic motivation and they're alright actually. It's interesting, the big consulting firms are finally getting round to that.
Pilar Orti 25:01
Yeah. So that's well worth checking. And this is a different topic. So yes, let's round this up a little bit around well being, I think I'll stick to the chapter, in the book chapter right at the end of this episode is going to make a huge file. But we'll all release it. But you will be able to listen to the audio version of this wonderful blog post that was written in 2017 by Maya Middlemiss, not Pilar Orti, “Sick and tired working and not working on a remote team”. Anything else you want to add before we move on to the next item? Well, on the what's going on list?
Maya Middlemiss 25:41
No, that's great. I think it's important to revisit these topics and see how much has changed and how much really has not.
Pilar Orti 25:47
Excellent. So let's go into a piece of news which I, again, only came across yesterday on Twitter. But it really speaks to this whole sense that when… while we're advocating for more location, independence of work for knowledge workers, we cannot forget that even within organisations and definitely within society, there are a lot of people who cannot choose where they work from, for different reasons. Sometimes, they can't do their job wherever they want to, because they can't. And the RSA, the Royal Society for the Arts, which is big, I don't know how to describe it. I call it a think tank. They're really, it's all about innovation. It's mainly a place where people think and share their ideas. It's in the UK, it's an organisation, it's really ancient. Anyway, what they do, they do look at stuff in great depth. And they came up with a report only yesterday around it’s mainly called Social Security, the risks from automation and economic insecurity for England social renters. Now in the UK, like in other countries, there's social housing. So it's subsidised housing for people who probably could, who don't have huge salaries and who can't afford to pay market rates. And so this is a study all about people who live in social housing, and it touches loads of stuff. But there's one thing that I wanted to bring to the attention of listeners, whether you are remote advocates, or not, or advocating for more remote work, when employed, I'm quoting people in social housing are less likely to benefit from good work practices that support their economic and personal security. Only 38% of social renters are in work, which offers them an annual incremental pay increase, and three quarters never worked from home, even in the height of the pandemic. And the reason why I wanted to bring this in is that when we are looking at why we're doing hybrid, why we're doing remote, what we're doing… What we really want to aim for is flexibility and a sense of autonomy. And so many times when I'm talking to organisations, and they're saying “we've got these other people who can't work from home” then you need to see where you can give them the autonomy or flexibility. So you don't end up with a two tiered workforce, even in an organisation.
Maya Middlemiss 28:19
Yes, and it's very easy as knowledge workers to think “remote work gives us a choice of where to live, we can just up sticks and go somewhere else. We can choose our environment”, we talk a lot about having a separate place to work. If you're in social housing, you're more likely to get penalised and lose your home. If you have a bedroom, that's not a bedroom, or people literally getting moved on from home, say as an empty nester where their children have left you can't say that's my office. Whereas if you don't own your home, if you are vulnerable to social housing policy changes, and if that's your workplace, as well, there's so much more tied up with it. And everything about renting makes it less secure. And we shouldn't neglect the impact of that. I even spent a long time privately renting in Spain and in the UK. And often it was really difficult to explain that you were going to work from home and that sometimes there were clauses in leases and things saying that you couldn't notice your home that you're paying the rent for. But you might have to get a contract change that said you couldn't carry out a business activity on those premises without breaching your lease and therefore making you vulnerable to getting kicked out of the place that you lived and work. I think it's a really important reminder that a lot of the people who couldn't work from home not only were their key workers that we all depended on during the pandemic, but that things haven't changed for them long term.
Pilar Orti 29:42
I'm going to touch on this just there. There is… you mentioned leases, mortgages as well. I think it's really worth everyone who started working from home going back to anything, any paperwork that affects their home…
Maya Middlemiss 29:56
Also your home insurance does it cover that nice laptop. There are so many things that have not updated in line with the times. They hadn't beforehand anyway, I think I remember speaking to landlords about what you're going to work from home, are you going to be having lots of people coming here? Are you going to be making noise? Are you going to have strange chemicals? I don't know what they thought, but it's just on my laptop. You wouldn't even know if I hadn't disclosed it at this point. But the idea of working from home I think there's a lot tied up with sort of pre industrial ideas of piecework and manufacturing. And so things need to move on. The lorries always last.
Pilar Orti 30:35
Yes, that's true. So that is a reminder. And then there's the other reminder, that however much we want to advocate for people to be able to work from home, or even work from anywhere, there are people who will always need a space to go to, to do their work. And whether this is the knowledge worker that doesn't have the space at home, maybe you want them to explore coworking spaces, if you're reducing your office space, for example, remember that, what are the other options?
Maya Middlemiss 31:03
Yes, and at the end of the day, somebody will always have to clean and be the receptionist in their coworking space, and they will need somewhere affordable to live. That's accessible to it.
Pilar Orti 31:12
Yeah. So I only came across it yesterday, I haven't had a look. But that is just really… it is just something we must not forget as we are… I was gonna say fighting but I won’t as we are advocating for making remote work more sustainable, as we're advocating for not to lose a lot of what was discovered during the pandemic that can be useful in the future. There is also this other sector of society that we cannot forget about and even within our own organisations.
Pilar Orti 31:49
So let's shift a little bit too well, to our favourite topic, asynchronous communication. But with a little bit of a different twist. I came across this article in the British Psychological Society Research digest, which I recommend that you subscribe to the weekly newsletter, there's always some very interesting work related research that is useful and fun. And this one was published on the fourth of February 2022. And it's called “Do emojis represent the whole gamut of human emotion?”, such a word “gamut”? And basically, I think the answer is more or less “yes”, isn't it? But it was an interesting piece, let me just recap a little bit for listeners. So what they looked at was 74 different emojis. And the emojis they looked at were the round ones with a face on them, so they didn't really look at any of the other ones. So the faces basically. And they looked at 74 of them. And they looked at how much valence and arousal they communicated, I'll explain what that means. So we can see our emotional experiences and quoting, “as falling along continuous scales of both valence so how positive or negative an emotion is, and arousal.” So how do we get on those different scales? So for example, sadness has a negative valence, but it's fairly low in arousal. Anger is also negatively valence, but is high in arousal and excitement is positive and high in arousal. So that's what they were looking at and they were looking at when we come across these emojis, how much do they affect us in these two dimensions? And I find it fascinating. What did you think, Maya?
Maya Middlemiss 33:42
I love this graph where they've actually plotted them on those two factors. I love the fact that somebody's got research funding for this. What a fun thing to look at. It really is important because this is how we communicate now and not just at work it’s also in our personal lives with our families. It's how we communicate across cultures and generations. I really love this graph. All the emojis plotted on a chart.
Pilar Orti 34:11
Yeah, it's really interesting. And what they found was that they are pretty much doing those two things and different emojis have different effects. What they really found interesting was that the high arousal ratings seem to be associated with the presence of accessories. So the things that were getting to gasp or be annoyed, or be more emotional as it were…
Maya Middlemiss 34:41
…Were the more colourful ones, not just the yellow face, there is this cluster at the bottom of the graph, it's the ones you put hearts or styles or something on it. I guess it's more intentional and you can't do it with the keyboard as well. It's one where you have to go to the emoji menu. Because I often try to just do the smiley face or just do a thumbs up or something. And that's sort of lazy and quick, but maybe there's something more deliberate about having to go and find the starry eyed one or the crying with laughter.
Pilar Orti 35:11
That's really interesting, because that is something that I would do. I always look for, well not always, but sometimes I don't use emojis very much, maybe more for reactions and stuff. And I don't like emojis very much, especially when I sometimes see social media posts, which are full of stuff, and they just shout at me. So it's like, my arousal level increases, and it's a negative valence for me.
Maya Middlemiss 35:37
That proves it's not universal, which is very interesting. I mean, from a psychology point of view, I think the idea of recognizing human emotion has definitely been proven to be cross-cultural, that we can recognize basic emotions of the sort of mad, sad, glad spectrum, there are things that definitely cross cultures. But I don't know if you've got another article on this. There are definitely things which are more ambiguous and more subject to cultural interpretation. They focused on the facial emojis for this one. And it's funny, even just looking at this chart, you think, “Well I never use the cowboy hat one. What does that even mean?” That wouldn't convey anything to me if somebody had responded, but apparently, it's a fairly positive and fairly lower rise as well, but it wouldn't tell me anything. Whereas they've got the cool glasses one next to it. So that's what I would use for a “Cool. Okay. Yeah, I'm with that”, but I can't be bothered to say anything more about it. I'm trying to use that one. Because apparently, if I use the thumbs up, according to my kids that's really sort of boomer-ish and old fashioned, so you shouldn't do that.
Pilar Orti 36:49
Right, interesting. So it's not the use of emojis, but the emojis we are using, it's like, capillaries isn’t it?
Maya Middlemiss 36:55
It is a minefield when you've got Gen Z kids. There are all sorts of… I mean… the face ones are probably fairly safe. But once you move off into anything else, there's all sorts of weird sexual connotations and things that you can just so easily go wrong with.
Pilar Orti 37:09
So listeners do have a look at the article. It's short, it's fun, and it's called “Do emojis represent the whole gamut of human emotion”, it's in the BPS will stick the link in the show notes. Now, something to remember, and I'm sure hopefully, all of you evidence based people are asking “Who took part in this study? We want to know.” So there were 1000 Japanese participants aged 20 to 39. I was actually really glad that for once I was coming across a piece of study in English, so I could read it, which was not about the UK or the US. And it was very interesting. And I think that the 20 to 39 in this case seems like it might be more important than location. But we can't be making assumptions. So I think… So at the end of that article, it says the caveat is, of course, that we need to look at demographics, culture. There's all that stuff that we need to look at before we make assumptions. And then Tim Burgess, friend of this show, shared another article called “Caution, these emoji mean different things in different countries”. fascinating
Maya Middlemiss 38:22
Fascinating to look at the two side by side because that's… Who would have thought that the poo emoji in Japan is a symbol of good luck.
Pilar Orti 38:33
Which is great. So this is in restofworld.org from 2021. What were your favourite ones? And I'm sorry, and listeners, it just goes through examples of where depending on what country or what culture you come from different emojis mean different things. So one that you were saying is the one about the poo emoji, which I love. I just love that emoji. It is a symbol of good luck in Japan. And which one else did you like?
Maya Middlemiss 39:02
I thought it was fascinating, the discussion of the prayer hands because I would love there to be a good universal Thank you emoji that has no religious or cultural connotations, and I still haven't found one. Maybe that's why I resort to my little yellow thumbs up a lot. Yes, there isn't one that… I mean some people say that means thanks in a kind of namaste way. But then it also looks like prayer. So it's asking for something and you might not want to use that if you're not religious. Yeah, it proves these things are complicated and there are so many overtones. For example, if your keyboard suggests an emoji in exchange for a word that can be very culturally specific as well, like congratulations, it might offer you a champagne bottle, which is appropriate to cultures where alcohol is a manifestation of how you celebrate things, but that's not universal. So there I think it's a very rich form of communication. But just as this article highlights, there are so many different ones and also that it's dynamic. Things change over time. Things take on different connections, say with political movements, or subcultures. And so if you don't know what you're doing, you could end up being, not just confusing, but actively offensive. Yeah, so I was just gonna add one more thing. Looking at this article in this text, it made me think of what you said earlier about social media posts that are full of emojis. And it's the other thing that's important to remember is they are not good for accessibility and screen readers. It tends to interrupt the flow. I use emojis a lot when I'm texting with my kids, because they're Gen Z. And that's their first language. But if I'm out listening to a podcast, and my phone reads me that text as a screen reader, for example, it's a “heart emoji hand emoji” , it really breaks the flow. And so that's what it must be like for anybody visually impaired, looking at LinkedIn these days, or reading this article. This article, of course, is fair enough in this article, but in general communication, it's not very accessible.
Pilar Orti 41:01
This article they have to put them in
Maya Middlemiss 41:07
I mean fair enough in this article they have to put them in, but in general communication it’s not very accessible
Pilar Orti 41:13
But that's a really good point that we could think about how best to use emojis, and that could be… well I tend to use them at the office… This is making me think a lot though, I tend to use them at the end of a sentence to punctuate something, or to show how I feel about something. So that is maybe something we need to be to be developing, is this this new way of incorporating them so that they're not… They don't get in the way actually
Maya Middlemiss 41:36
Yes. If they're not in the middle of a sentence, I'm sure it's better. And if they're not a substitute for the word. You know? There's an enhancement to it.
Pilar Orti 41:48
That's the thing. That's the thing, that's where I think that's where sometimes I get a bit... Yeah, or sometimes it's too much coming as well, because it's enhancing a lot. But I think you're right, that it's enhancing. One other thing that this article makes is the assumptions we make. So for example, the first example they give is the well, the second example, is that what you were saying is the prayer hands, so it's the two hands that are touching each other. They say that that is commonly interpreted as high five in many Western countries. But in India, it's seen for what it's actually meant to be prayer hands. And in Indonesia, it's a sign of gratitude. I'd never seen those. I never associated those with the high five, I always associated them as praise and isn’t that funny.
Maya Middlemiss 42:33
No, I've never come across the high five thing at all. I've only ever seen that used as gratitude, which says it's just in Indonesia. But I think that's more pervasive. Now.
Pilar Orti 42:42
That's very interesting. Great. So that is, if we are starting to adopt asynchronous communication for many people, emojis are really important, because they see it as a way of humanising the conversation of not losing the emotion of just being more human. So I think there's all these things that we need to look into. So asynchronous communication is really important. And I just posted on Twitter, because the other day, I was working with Simon Wilson on our Google Doc. And I went in, and I saw him there in the Google Doc. Followed by what often happens to me is that I send a chat message in the Google Doc. And no one replies, I don't know if this has happened to you Maya but…
Maya Middlemiss 43:33
I don’t really chat in Google Docs, but if I see one then I reply to it, though.
Pilar Orti 43:37
Yes, I think many people don't see it. Because I've never been the recipient, the first recipient of one I don't know where it is, but it's always so horrible, because I always go “Oh Hello” and nothing and then the other person has left.
Maya Middlemiss 43:50
Oh, well, yeah, that's asynchronicity. Yeah, I don't tend to think of docs as a place to chat. But you can often see conversations unfolding in the comment thread. Yeah, but it's replied to this, and this, and this. And for me, it's
Pilar Orti 44:05
For me, it's the… I like the chat because it means it's there. And I just say hello. And that said, I don't need to record it. It's not… It is really real time. For me, the chat and other stuff is async which is when you want it recorded, you can take more time around it. But no one ever replies. But I tweeted about this. Just to say, any examples of async and sync concerning listeners, and funnily enough, it just developed into some interesting stuff. So somebody asked about how to help people adopt asynchronous communication, mainly in the field of facilitation. So asynchronous facilitation as in, someone who is helping a group or a team through a process to go towards something. And this came from Marjolijn de Gaaf. And on Twitter See, she's at Marjolijn the good. And she says: “Hi, I wonder what your perspective is on asynchronous facilitation. My challenge is to engage multiple stakeholders in crafting solutions for their common problem. How do you activate them to keep interacting and collaborating on the mirror board?” Which is really… because for me, the first thing I thought is, well, people just are gonna say they don't have time. And they're gonna wait till the meeting to do the work.
Maya Middlemiss 45:27
Yeah, it depends how you work with the asynchronous culture you have in the first place to an extent that how much you value that asynchronous collaboration, do people come to the meetings and then interact? Or is there a culture where people do the prep and show up, ready, having actually put the time in asynchronously and it's shifting at that level, probably to get the collaboration on the board. And once people are collaborating asynchronously on the board, then that will encourage more of it, it will become a bit self-sustaining, because they'll see changes since they were last there. And they respond to this and respond to that, but getting the party started as the challenge.
Pilar Orti 46:07
And also, where is the party happening? It's happening in a room where you've never been to and which is at the other end of the building? It's gonna take a lot more friction, than if you are already in a kind of document that you are used to using every day that you're going to go into there at some point during the day anyway, I think these are all things that specially for those of us who have been in the medium for long, we forget that the barriers don't need to be well… we don't see the barriers. But actually, just to give this very specific example, if the team if the people making up that team are not used to working on a mirror board, this is a huge step for them to know.
Maya Middlemiss 46:49
So you might need some very specific induction and orientation and showing it off. This is what's fun about it, this is what you could do, look, have a go, everybody have… that needs to be synchronous, probably you need a bit of a screenshare kind of an activity to lead people into it.
Pilar Orti 47:06
And to be honest, I would stay away from those boards, to be honest with people who've never used them. Because for me, they're a nightmare. They're huge. You can do all sorts of things, you just need to click in the wrong place, and it goes all over the place. Gary Austen, also, in reply to this was suggesting, for example, Google jam board, which is just a board with post-its. That's it.
Maya Middlemiss 47:30
Yes, it's the right tool for the job. And Mirror is so powerful. I've seen some incredible stuff that was working with a client recently, who was using it to plan a whole product launch, including a website and whitepapers. And the bits I was working on was one tiny, specific bit of it. But this canvas was just everywhere, and that the potential for bringing a freelancer into look at one style guide that I could have ruined it. The potential to do damage or mess things up at the difficulty of finding things unless you're very visual. And you've got that overview of it. So yeah, Mirror is a very powerful tool, there might be a simpler solution.
Pilar Orti 48:10
Yeah. And also, there's also other stuff that went… there's other asynchronous tools that we can start with and simpler conversations that are whole idea generation and, and stuff. So I think that we tend to think of using asynchronous communication when we've got these big things we need to do. But actually, we might want to start in the day-to-day. If people are not used to updating each other about the work regularly using async, it's very difficult to transfer them to do a huge process that they only ever do once in a blue moon. So we need to be thinking about all these things. When we're introducing it.
Maya Middlemiss 48:49
Yeah, find a way to make it part of the practice and show people that it will actually make it easier for them. And yeah, starting small, something low stakes, maybe gamify, something that's got a fairly immediate payoff as well, rather than a grand project.
Pilar Orti 49:05
And if we want people to adopt this new way of working, we've got to give them time. If we're going back to the workload thing, if people have a huge workload, it's like saying: “Hey, we're going to introduce this whole new process of communication”. Well, I don't… How am I going to do it?
Maya Middlemiss 48:49
If you're used to working in a very synchronous way, and if your diaries full of meetings, then you might not think about that next meeting till you get to the time that you've allocated for that whereas once people get used to having more unstructured asynchronous time, then they can plan when they're going to go and do the work on the big thing ahead of that connection and conversation.
Pilar Orti 49:41
Hey, you made me think, So how about when you're doing a process and you want to introduce this this is being very sneaky, do a plan which has like five meetings in it and then at some point, go okay, we're gonna not have that meeting that day so that you have time to look at…
Maya Middlemiss 49:57
Just use the time to review the board. Yeah, it's like if a teacher suddenly calls a study period or something, it's like, yeah, you can use this time to prepare for your exam. Oh, they're all outside.
Pilar Orti 50:12
So listeners, we would love to hear how you have introduced some kind of asynchronous communication practice in your organisation. And I would particularly like to hear from internal people who've convinced their teams or who have experimented with their teams around something async. And we'd love to hear things that have worked and things that haven't worked, because we can learn from all of those. So you can use the contact form on virtualnotdistant.com Or we are also on Twitter @virtualteamw0rk with a zero instead of an o. And also on LinkedIn, we'd love to hear from you because this is ever growing. And we can all learn from what's going on.
Pilar Orti 51:00
I wanted to let listeners know that I'm going to be speaking at a conference in Lisbon, in Portugal, on the 19th and 20th of May 2022, I'll only be speaking for a very short slot on one day, not for both days. And it's called Social now. And the website is socialnow.org. And we do have an episode coming with Ana Neves, who is a listener of the show, and also who runs the conference because it's a really interesting format. And I think anyone who likes to go to things that have a different feel will enjoy it. And it's about high performing teams. So relevant to everyone. But we'll have more on that. And then also, Penny Pullan who was on the show some time ago, has released the second edition of virtual leadership, which she has adapted for remote and hybrid. And you can have a 20% discount if you order the paperback through the Kogan page, which is from the publishers and the code is FB M 20. To know what it stands for, but FB M 20. And yes, we'll have a little bit of her talking about that in a while. And also, sorry, Maya, I've got at Elise Keith from Lucid Meetings has a new life training program for Team leaders through meeting school. So if you're bored of async and want to have some good meetings, this is what you want. And it's designed to help them quickly outline a plan for overhauling their meetings. So we'll put our own affiliate link in the show notes. So if you want to check that out, if you go through us, we will get a little bit of a cut from your cost. And then finally, I just want to say I'm starting… So I've made time to do some more drawings. And I am enjoying drawing a lot. And we've actually got a little shop for virtual not distant but we need to have some new designs and new products. So I asked on LinkedIn what people would like to see illustrated as a way of having something they can give to other remote workers, whether in their team or clients. And, and Judy said that she'd like “something that's a business like hug”, she would like to send that. And then Matt said, “When I used to deliver in person sessions, we would regularly have some type of informal ceremony afterwards with the team, like a drink or a meal, maybe a walk together to the train. I don't have that anymore. I wonder what illustration could signify a sense of “Job well done” and ``time to relax””. Which is getting us back to the beginning of the show today. Almost. Yeah.
Maya Middlemiss 53:57
And it's interesting that they immediately went to emotions… that we need to kind of, it's maybe not to the emojis, but we need them manifested in real life. But your drawings are much nicer than emojis.
Pilar Orti 51:00
So listeners, if there is something that you're thinking, “actually, I would love to have something that represents this” or “you know, what I would really like to send my people this” just let me know we'll make it possible, kind of. So virtualnotdistant.com Maya anything you want to say to listeners before we wrap up another month.
Maya Middlemiss 54:31
I won't take any more time. Just thanks for bearing with me being still slightly croaky normal service will be resumed soon.
Pilar Orti 54:40
You are fine because you're not really ill. You are just getting away from illness.
Maya Middlemiss 54:47
[Inaudible] can't catch it from a podcast, no, no I am perfectly well enough for that
Pilar Orti 54:40
She should have been resting. Well, listeners if you're listening to this on the web, remember that you can find this show. It's called “21st Century Work Life”. You can find it on any podcaster app and if you can't let us know, you can sign up to our monthly newsletter which has reading and listening recommendations plus a digest of our own content. And you can do that over at virtualnotdistant.com. You can follow us on LinkedIn, we have a page there as Virtual not Distant. Our Twitter account is virtualteamw0rk with a zero instead of an o and my email address if you like, oh, good old fashioned email. Thank you for listening. And big thank you for listening to the 21st Century Work Life Podcast produced by Virtual not Distant. If you have something to add to the conversation, let us know through the contact form over at virtualnotdistant.com I have been your host Pilar Orti and I'm signing off now. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, enjoy