Best Practices for Driving Collaborative Innovation, Remotely: Part 2
In an attempt to do our part in the fight against COVID-19 and flatten the curve, most of us have transitioned to working remotely.
In my Part 1: Structures & Technology Best Practices, I shared the importance of knowing if you’re collaborating in a teaming environment or as a functioning team, Computer Supported Cooperative Work risks (to include isolation), and best practices around structures & technologies.
While the myriad of technological advancements have resulted in improved distributed work, the key is all in understanding your people. In a recent essay, my colleague at SCAD, Scott Boylston reminded me of economists Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to human development. Over the course of the next several weeks many will feel deprived of education, healthcare, and economic opportunity. I believe understanding situational effects across the spectrum of agency, freedom, achievement, and wellbeing can prove vital to managing performance, remotely.
Fears orbiting uncertainty in these times require genuine leadership and calculated management.
How connected individuals feel to the organization will determine the level at which they choose to pay attention to take responsibility, to learn, to share those learnings, and in the end to innovate.
In Part 2, I want to share my best practices for performance management.
Best Practices: Performance Management
Even with short, time-boxed sprints, voice an explicit vision and roadmap. A good method for collaboration managers to work through a new roadmap is leveraging objectives and key results (OKRs). For leaders, I highly recommend you consider:
- Establish values and priorities
- Recognize and maintain that the situation has changed
- Leverage creativity to generate options (allow enough time)
In learning and development environments, the 70/20/10 model is essential. The most important takeaway in this model is to acknowledge 70% of our learning is from experience, the challenges we take on, and the mistakes/victories we make. There is a correlation to this reality and decision making. The worst time to make big decisions is before you’ve done anything.
It’s critical to expose vulnerability, embrace both the wins and mistakes made, and leverage engaged, “role model” mentors. Leaders from afar have all realized the need to establish a sense of urgency. Kotter’s Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail may be most impactful for leaders during this time of crisis. Here are some basics to get you started with managing a distributed, different time zone collaborative team.
understand your team members
- Do they have shared experiences? Explicitly have teammates recognize this crisis as a shared experience.
- Are they brand and/or university alum?
keep everyone on the same page
- Check-in frequently.
- Offer communication training (see note below).
let them shine
- Trust (we’ll discuss in Part 3).
- Respect their time, their place.
- Promote/reward initiative and creativity.
- Give plenty of ownership.
- Identify/activate great leaders (enablers that remove barriers for others).
- Have secondary tasks to work on when in different timezones. Consider what requires synchronous collaboration and what can be done asynchronous.
- Ideas don’t travel in a straight line. Have a space in Mural for individuals and groups to brainstorm outside of synchronous engagement
over emphasize work-life balance
- Set a schedule
- Get dressed
- Plan your days
- Take breaks
- Take a day for yourself (joy, play, etc.)
- Make everyone aware of this day and turn off notifications
- acknowledge the need to disconnect
Note: As it relates to collaborative performance, communication across remote teams is next level business. Students and more junior employees, in particular, should make it a habit to read more from professional sources and challenge themselves to write daily and share internally with the team or even externally for feedback.
Know your teammates’ habits and pick tools that work well with them. For instance, if your teammates prefer short, casual chats, pick Slack. If they prefer video calls, prioritize Zoom. When scheduling meetings take into consideration time zone differences and performance behaviors — lead with the principle of being reasonable. Some may not be able to (due to internet connections) or don’t feel as comfortable in video chat as they do dialing in. In these cases, make sure you’re explicit with asking your teammates what they are thinking and how they are feeling.
A lack of eye contact/gaze awareness and limited deictic gestures, due to distance, makes joint focus more challenging — a significant risk to maintaining collaboration.
Understanding your teammates is crucial from the start. Work situations and environments will differ drastically across teammates, time zones, place and position. Have a solid work plan. My dear friend and partner at humble ventures, Harry Alford offers an excellent COVID-19 Work from Home Plan for Parents.
“Struggle is the mother of innovation.” — Ash Maurya
My friend, Ash reminds us many innovative companies were born during economically-daunting periods of history — see here. No doubt economic downturn is a struggle, however, don’t take lightly the additional constraints that exist when individuals and their family’s health, security, and safety are at risk. Be sure to acknowledge:
Those factors common to all people
- Existence
- Psychological
- Sustenance
- Health
- Security
- Self
- Family
- Relatedness
- Belongingness
- Self-Esteem
- Growth
- Self-Actualization
Individual traits
- Achievement orientation
- Power needs
- Motivation
- Stress Tolerance
- Interior functions
- Risk needs
- Activity preference
- Fear of consequences
- Time horizon
Your collaboration desired outcomes will be dependent on the speed at which you can create sustainable, shared application-oriented knowledge.
