More than 4h of video calls each day? Work doesn’t have to be this way.
It’s 7pm. Sarah says goodbye to her colleagues, exits the video call, quickly checks her e-mail and closes her laptop.
Her teenage son is playing video games in his room and her husband is still in a video call that should end at 7:30pm. She has some moments of reflection before preparing the dinner — it’s not even Friday yet and she is exhausted. “It’s just one more day until the weekend… You can do it, Sarah.”
She remembers how the video calls have felt when they started a month ago, soon after the whole team started working remotely. They were all so enthusiastic that they could see each other often and feel connected almost like when they were working together in the office.
Now each week feels like a long marathon of video calls on Zoom. Even though she learned to cope better with juggling with the different roles — like cooking for the whole day the night before, involving her family in all the tasks around the house and other new habits — there’s a question that she keeps returning to in her few spare moments: “Is there a better way?”
During a recent webinar on Virtual Leadership, half of the participants answered that they see “video calls fatigue” in their organizations. We’ve started seeing this as well in the teams that we work with. So many people jumping from one video call to another, like binge watching on Netflix… next episode in 3, 2, 1... You don’t have time to react, the next episode starts hastily and captures your attention.
What’s causing this fatiguing dynamic at work? Is it having any long-term consequences? Are there better ways of working remotely, get results and still feel connected to your team?
We found part of the answers in a survey done by a research team at INSEAD and in the accompanying webinar hosted by the Organizational Design Community. The key takeaway is a framework for coordinating work when remote, summarized by the snapshot below.
Being remote creates more difficulty when coordinating work, so the main two options are:
- reducing the need for coordination
- or managing the need for coordination
Most companies that have recently transitioned to working remotely are now using the ongoing communication aka “see the face”, which is a solution for managing the need for coordination. Basically teams trying to keep the same synchronicity that they had when they were working together in the office.
It felt like the right thing to do, it’s the intuitive switch most managers have encouraged. It has the advantages that you constantly feel connected to your team, especially in this new, unknown, uncertain setup.
There are at least two factors that you need to take into account to see how this is not a long term solution for your organization:
- The value of individual deep work — when someone gathers their thoughts, immerses in the challenge at hand, builds a mental context and uses their talent to create something valuable— see Paul Graham’s essay about “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule”.
- All the home-related aspects that need to be managed by team members when working from home, especially for people that take care of other people (children, elders…)
Fortunately, there are 3 other working modes that can support the coordination of work when remote:
- Sync(hronous) tacit communication aka “see the hands”
- Async(hronous) tacit communication aka “see the work”
- Modularization aka “blind”
Unfortunately, mastering these modes (and intentionally switching between them) might feel for most organizations like learning new (exotic) languages when most of your life you did just fine in most situations by being fluent in your native language.
Before exploring what these 3 modes mean, have to share with you an interesting insight from the INSEAD research team: all-remote organizations use a mix of all these modes, with organizations spanning multiple timezones putting more focus on async tacit communication.
Take GitLab, for example — it’s an all-remote organization with 1200 members in more than 65 countries. We found more of the answers that we looked for in the learnings that they have publicly shared about phases of remote adaptation. Here’s the summary — we invite you to go through the whole page as it might inspire you and your organization in your transition to performing in a remote setup.
As teams grapple with transitioning from a colocated environment to a remote one, it’s common to see differing levels of adaptability. (…) The amount of disruption is generally tied to two maturity factors: culture and tools.
Phases of remote adaptation:
Phase 1: Skeuomorph
In Phase 1, a remote organization will look to imitate the design, structure, norms, ebbs and flows of an office environment.The primary goal is to merely continue to operate the business, but remotely.
Phase 2: Functional
Entering Phase 2 is simple. It begins with leadership asking a fundamental question: “What if we didn’t do things the way we’ve always done them?”Remote enables you to function differently than a conventional colocated company. It challenges preconceived notions and it provides new opportunities to increase efficiency of work and agency of people.
Phase 3: Asynchronous
Phase 3 is marked by a company’s comfortability in completing work without mandated synchronicity.Maximally efficient remote environments will do as little work as possible synchronously, instead focusing the valuable moments where two or more people are online at the same time on informal communication and bonding.
Phase 4: Intentionality
Phase 4 is marked by an extraordinary amount of intentionality, particularly in areas that are typically assumed to need minimal guardrails: measuring output (results) rather than input (hours); hiring outside of a company’s home geography without relocating; structure social interactions and non-work activities etc.
Ok, now that we have seen GitLab’s phases of remote adaptation, let’s go back to sync tacit comms, async tacit comms and modularization.
In the sync tacit communication mode, coordination tends to be on the product, so you see what the others are doing and you continuously adapt to what the others are doing. Not by talking, but by seeing the hands, the gestures, like couples after many years when they don’t have to speak to understand what the other is going to do and to act accordingly. In a team context, this happens especially when team members get to know each other really well, so this mode is harder to be put into practice by temporary teams.
The geek term for this is stigmergic coordination because it’s similar to the way that ants tend to coordinate together — the principle is that the trace left in the environment by an individual action stimulates the performance of a succeeding action (possibly by the same agent, but in many scenarios by a different agent).
There are some emerging practices that enable the async tacit communication mode, where team members just need to see the work done by the others, without necessarily being present when that work is being done.
One interesting practice is the minimum viable change: as soon as you complete something, or are in the process of completing something, you share it with others in the team. In this way, coordination appears because the other team members can immediately see what you’re doing, minimizing double work or rework. Other practices include having extensive documentation. A special case of documentation is having an extensive handbook that richly describes the common practices in the organization, as a single source of truth.
Thinking more carefully about how to clearly divide the tasks between team members in a way that reduces to the minimum the need to coordinate between people is the modularization mode, also known as the blind solution: people might not need to see what others are doing, because they can keep doing their job.
Our hope is that this article gave you some insights for the path forward on the journey towards high performance in the new remote setup and that it inspires you and the leaders that you work with to ask yourselves: “What if we didn’t do things the way we’ve always done them?”
