Christoph Ott of dizmo and Planisy On How To Communicate With Your Team Effectively Even If You Are Rarely In The Same Physical Space

Don’t hold back or cut down. Let’s say you have a standing weekly meeting. However, because everybody’s busy, you move to a bi-weekly meeting. People might start to feel excluded, or maybe they have something on their mind that they want to share, even though you, as the team leader, may not think it’s too important. Also, from a team leader’s perspective, you usually know about most of the critical things going on in a team, but your team does not. Communicate as often as you can.

We are living in a new world in which offices are becoming obsolete. How can teams effectively communicate if they are never together? Zoom and Slack are excellent tools, but they don’t replicate all the advantages of being together. What strategies, tools and techniques work to be a highly effective communicator, even if you are not in the same space?

In this interview series, we are interviewing business leaders who share the strategies, tools and techniques they use to effectively and efficiently communicate with their team who may be spread out across the world. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Christoph Ott.

Christoph Ott is the Chief Financial Officer at dizmo and project sponsor of Planisy. Christoph has an extensive background in finance and operation management. Previously, he was the Head of Finance and Managing Director at Ingeus Switzerland, CFO at Benninger Guss AG, and Director of Finance and Management Services at Norgren AG. Prior to that, he was the Director of Operations at INS Engineering & Consulting AG. Christoph began his career in 1990 as a part of NCR Corporation, and has since held positions at Georg Fischer Corporation, Buchi Corporation, and Rhenus Contract Logistics AG.

Planisy, the latest innovation from dizmo, allows teams to combine and manage their existing digital assets within one interface. This will be game-changing for distributed teams, alleviating silos and giving all personnel visibility and accessibility -whatever their skill level and speciality. Planisy signals the next wave in multi-resource planning technology -a drastic reinvention of how resources are planned, assigned, and scheduled, with usage tracking and optimising capability. As businesses face the challenges of digital transformation, the skills gap, and financial uncertainty, Christoph believes that a holistic approach to team communication and resource management through intuitive workspace technology is the key to remote working efficiency.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I have been in management for over 30 years. I have had the opportunity to work in very different environments, from the CFO of a foundry to the social field of work integration and everything in between! I have also worked internationally, in Switzerland and the US, and for British, Australian, and American companies in Switzerland. I’ve always had a finance perspective, but I felt very close to the real action through my experience in operational functions and services.

So how did it all start? From childhood, I was interested in pretty much everything in life! I was interested in how large and diverse organisations and the people working within them actually work together. As a small boy, I remember visiting the manufacturing company where my father was a director of operations and wondered how these people actually knew what to do. And what to do next and what to do the whole day. I wondered who coordinates all this knowledge and how an anthill’s decision-making differs from an organisation’s or if it is the same. And how does this all happen? So this was my starting point.

I got a master’s in business administration from the best German-speaking business school and was always interested in what makes companies successful. I was very much of the opinion that knowledge and know-how are the keys to success. Although I focused on finance, I always try to be in touch with many other disciplines close to management, such as IT technology, sociology, languages, law, and even sports. I started my work in a Swiss subsidiary of an American company, NCR, with 2000 people -which is a lot for the small country of Switzerland. I collaborated early in my career with many different countries and encountered a CFO who did not speak German, and I realised that management success is not just lining up facts in the right way. It has a lot more to do with making people collaborate or assuring that they actually understand each other, sometimes in a very basic way, when it comes to different languages. It’s about making sure people share values, a common motto or a common motivation, or sometimes incentives. So there was a shift to collaboration and a more people-oriented attitude. Ever since that shift, I think my biggest contribution in my professional life has been bringing experts together and making sure they understand each other.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

It was my journey with Buchi Corporation in the US. I was living in Switzerland but was interested in another assignment abroad. I saw an advertisement for a Swiss company looking for a Swiss guy to go to the US and become the CFO -responsible for internal sales and warehousing -kind of a weird combination, which I have! The location of that company was half an hour away from my in-laws, so I took on that assignment. Due to a reseller agreement that ran out, we had to quadruple an existing organisation in all aspects. And we only had a couple of months to do so. We had to hire four times as many people, have a warehouse four times as large, four times as many salespeople, and four times the infrastructure in six months. Not to speak about processes and IT systems. It was an enormous task. And I loved it. But I also absolutely underestimated it.

The guys in the US thought, “here comes that Swiss guy and I can ask him anything that I ever needed to know about the headquarters in Switzerland” (which I didn’t know because I was only hired to go over to the US). And here were my people at the headquarters in Switzerland, who expected me to shape this US subsidiary 100% the Swiss way. This is how I learned a thing or two about expectation management!

What I became part of was a great management team. The three of us achieved what was almost impossible in very little time. Although we had many stories happening, which I could practically fill a book with, we managed to do a rapid startup as planned. A year later, the company was four times larger and profitable for the first time. It was an endeavour that involved not just me in my professional life but also me in my private life, having moved with the family and kids and purchased a house far away from home. We all worked hard individually and as a team to finally achieve something big. I will always treasure this adventure of bringing Swiss and Americans together for success.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I had to think about that question, but it occurred to me that it’s not too far-fetched when I say the words “trust the system”. I believe I’ve often been in a situation where I trusted the situation, the system, my superiors, the company I signed up for, and the employees I had. This has become an excellent guideline for me to always start with trust. It doesn’t mean this trust will stay forever because it also means that if there was a moment when I stopped trusting the system, I knew it was maybe time to change. But as a beginning point, starting with trust in everybody has very rarely failed me. I think I got a lot out of trusting everybody first, and that’s 360 degrees, that’s managers, that’s employees, that’s clients, that’s suppliers, auditors, and whoever is in my life. I just trust that they want the best, and it’s an excellent first step in any collaboration and any relationship.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

His name is Hans-Ulrich Lieberherr, and he was very relevant in my early career. My second job was with a Swiss manufacturing company. We built up shared service organisations for Georg Fischer. We established worldwide telephone contracts and started to build up worldwide data networks for a conglomerate of two large manufacturing corporations with about 80 or 100 sites worldwide (this was before the time of IP as a standard). So we did larger projects that affected a lot of people. To me, he was just ‘Mr. Project management’. However complicated the situation was, he could always calm me down and turn my attention back to basic project management. He recommended often: “hey, ask the simple questions,” such as, what is the project charter? What are we paid to do? Particularly when things became challenging dealing with people -as it happens in projects like that, he made me and others take a clean white sheet and look at it from a distance. He ran me through stakeholder analysis, saying, “who are the people involved and affected by what you do? What are their interests? What are their requirements and expectations”. This exercise taught me about working out people’s hidden concerns, which was a constant help.

One story that stands out was when, as a project team, we decided to leave the by far largest Swiss telecom provider. The exec committee of that company wanted to stop us because there was a board member of our corporation who was also a board member of this telecommunication company. We were ready to step down from our function over this conflict. But Hans-Ueli calmed us down, and made us conduct a stakeholder analysis, then made us ask the CEO for a meeting and prepare it thoroughly. Twenty minutes into that meeting, the CEO turned to us and said, “look, you know what you’re doing. Go ahead”. Just through a calm, relaxed analysis and helping us bring the facts together, he helped us eventually succeed without putting himself in the foreground. I will never forget his ability to analyse situations and use simple project management tools to succeed.

Ok wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. The pandemic has changed so many things about the way we behave. One of them of course, is how we work and how we communicate in our work. Many teams have started working remotely. Working remotely can be very different than working with a team that is in front of you. This provides great opportunity but it can also create unique challenges. To begin, can you articulate for our readers a few of the main benefits of having a team physically together?

Having a team physically together is, of course, much easier for any communication. Any communication specialist will also tell you that we communicate relatively little through language. We also communicate with our body, we communicate with the tone of our voice, and in multiple other ways; sometimes, technology hides those things. So there is an immediate advantage to physically seeing a person during communication. Also, working together in the same location, people are always available. If you’re in the same office, very close, you can contact the person for the little things you might not do if people are remote. You might consider these minor things as unimportant or be concerned about interrupting the person. In an office, you can physically see if you’re interrupting. When in doubt, the decision to contact or not to contact is likely different remotely from when the person is in the same building. In person, you can better understand what’s going on in general with that person, whether they had a super day with a lot of success or what your communications partner’s general emotional situation and private life is. With a person who is close, it’s a more complete communication situation.

On the flip side, can you articulate for our readers a few of the main challenges that arise when a team is not in the same space?

I learned early about a very human phenomenon. We have a much better attitude towards people we see more often than when we don’t see them. We assume that this person cares more for the business, and when we don’t see the person somewhere in our brain, we think the opposite -unconsciously or not. It’s essential to remember that we generally feel more positively about people we see more often. We need a higher effort to think positively about somebody outside the same space. To form an opinion of anybody, we should get a complete picture of a person. Still, if you only communicate by telephone, email, voice, or video conference, it’s a very partial experience.

Fantastic. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience, what can one do to address or redress each of those challenges? What are your “5 Things You Need To Know To Communicate With Your Team Effectively Even If You Are Rarely In The Same Physical Space ? (Please share a story or example for each.)

1. Don’t hold back or cut down. Let’s say you have a standing weekly meeting. However, because everybody’s busy, you move to a bi-weekly meeting. People might start to feel excluded, or maybe they have something on their mind that they want to share, even though you, as the team leader, may not think it’s too important. Also, from a team leader’s perspective, you usually know about most of the critical things going on in a team, but your team does not. Communicate as often as you can.
2. Communicate in a prepared way. We should be cognizant if we’re in a phase where we’re exchanging information or at the point where we’re deciding. We should know all the topics we want to cover during this meeting. How much time do we allocate for the meeting? Who else would like to speak? Who manages the time? And who manages the meeting? Those things need to be defined, especially when you’re remote. It’s vital to use collaborative tools. It’s important that we can illustrate what we’re saying in parallel. Just because we’re not in the same room, we can still look at the same visualisation.
3. Be unstructured. You have to allow moments when you are unstructured, private, and joyful. There needs to be room for this. We just have to be conscious of everybody’s time and expectations. But there needs to be room for a joke or finding out if somebody got stuck in traffic, or whatever would be discussed when the meeting is in the same room.
4. Change the parameters of your meetings often. Don’t go into boring routines where everything feels the same every time. Change the meeting times. Change the sequence of topics. Change the roles -the timekeeper, chairperson, scribe, whatever you have in a meeting, rotate them. The camera on/camera off. It’s unnatural to look into each other’s eyes for 40 minutes or longer; it’s very tiring for the brain. So in long meetings, why not switch the camera off? We’re just not used to that. So breaking the routines is an essential thing in communication.
5. Balance the quiet and the loud people. Often enough in my career, I’ve been in meetings where a person didn’t say much, whereas, when asked what she/he had in mind, could give a very precise analysis of the situation and very good advice on how to move forward. Immediately, the whole team would acknowledge this would be a good idea. If the chairperson had not realised that there was a quiet person in the room and made space for this person to give their opinion, the idea would never have come to the table. So equally, it’s sometimes good to stop a couple of talkative people from being repetitive and too long in their explanations.

Has your company experienced communication challenges with your workforce working from home during the pandemic? For example, does your company allow employees to use their own cell phones or do they use the company’s phone lines for work? Can you share any other issues that came up?

Spectacularly, by some coincidence, the week before we all went to work from home, we upgraded from very old workstations with no communication capabilities to the latest and greatest Microsoft Windows Team environment. And with some intuition, I called everybody into the meeting room the day before the lockdown, and we played with the video conferencing and transferring phone calls. Although we were all in the same room, just to know how to do it comfortably. Then boom, two days later, we were actually at home using all this technology, which was key. And we managed it. There were still situations where people found they had a weak wireless connection that was unreliable, their phone connection was inferior, or they shared a room with their children who needed to do their homework. Things like that showed us a different set of limitations.

After five or six months of home office work, the team almost fell apart because people didn’t see each other anymore, so they complained more about their colleagues’ productivity. Whereas in the typical office world, people are more aware of what their colleagues are working on and are more patient and understanding. So we decided to declare compulsory office days whenever it was possible again. In our case, it was not healthy for our overall collaboration to move to too much home office time. I was also aware of the communication needs of people who lived alone and didn’t get out much versus those who had many social contacts. Working from home is a personal and technical challenge for each individual.

Let’s zoom in a bit. Many tools have been developed to help teams coordinate and communicate with each other. In your personal experiences which tools have been most effective in helping to replicate the benefits of being together in the same space?

Reliable video conferencing with screen sharing on any device was the most crucial prerequisite for this new communication. Voice alone doesn’t do it. You need the picture with it. And the next thing is collaborative workspaces. This can be as simple as working in parallel on the same document and then synchronising, such as working on the same PowerPoint presentation -somebody does the intro pages, and somebody is on the conclusion page, and then you bring things together.

In the world of scheduling, the tool we have just launched to the public, Planisy, allows a team to come together and resolve conflict in planning quickly, simultaneously and in parallel, but with different views. It’s the combination of the visualisation, the voice, the video and the underlying tool you can use collaboratively. To make Planisy work for collaboration, we made usability a huge priority.

If you could design the perfect communication feature or system to help your business, what would it be?

In any communication, we would like to have all the information we need to support this communication at our fingertips. Today, too often, we have silos of information that can only be accessed from here but not from anywhere else.

Sometimes the world of what we intended to do, our plan, and how we’re actually doing it are far apart. Now I’m talking more like the finance guy who says what I put in my budget and what I actually did is not easily accessible at the same time. Very often, information is several complicated steps away from having it available in a conversation. So instead of pulling up some information during an exchange, we defer it to later. A good communication tool should enable us to bring information right into the conversation when needed without going through login procedures or a specialist, which also means a delay because the specialist might not be available now, which slows productivity. I think that’s the ideal world -everything is combined.

As a communication specialist, I know that communication is mainly a human affair. The communication itself can only sometimes be improved. However, our business tools can free up the time of individuals, so we have more time to communicate. The core of compelling communication comes from the people who communicate. Technology might support it more or less, but if you’re not a good communicator, no tool in the world can help you become a good communicator.

The technology is rapidly evolving and new tools like VR, AR, and Mixed Reality are being developed to help bring remote teams together in a shared virtual space. Is there any technology coming down the pipeline that excites you?

One thing I’d like to see developing that has huge potential is voice-activated technology. Today we’re interfacing with our computer systems with a mouse, keyboard, or touchpad. It’s relatively cumbersome. We work through long menus and need expert know-how to get the right answers out of our systems. What if I could ask a simple human question to my ERP system? Such as how much money did we spend in the last four months on travel? That’s an easy question. On the other hand, how many people within a company get this information from an ERP system? Only accountants, financial controllers, and a few others, but how many people would be interested in that information? And how good would it be to have that information readily available in a conference or video conference? So I think voice-activated inquiry, together with learning systems that start to learn the expressions, and the right vocabulary, in each company, can help us tremendously. I’d like to see more coming down that way. Also, when voice-activated machines remember the question I asked before and understand my next question in the context of my last question, which today, they can’t do. Then we will see a big boost.

Is there a part of this future vision that concerns you? Can you explain?

I am concerned that we think the latest tools will lead to better communication. Mindful communication tools are good, but it’s not the tools that will lead to good interactions. Conscious interaction is mainly a mindset. So many of the tools help us to interact practically. None of them replaces human skills -the human interest in other people and the motivation to do something together and achieve something together, which is essential for human communication. So, whatever we do, we need to be aware that all the tools in the world can help us, but they’re never the centrepiece of good quality communication.

So far we have discussed communication within a team. How has the pandemic changed the way you interact and engage your customers? How much of your interactions have moved to digital such as chatbots, messaging apps, phone, or video calls?

We replaced physical meetings with video conferencing. They run today in a very similar format. Just as we communicated on-site, we now do it by video conferencing. Still, we are missing the human connection and possibilities: the informal walk from the receptionist to the meeting room, and we don’t have a break together. We miss the awareness of the workplace of the other person we get when they’re physically there. But everything else is the same. We don’t need to commute. That’s nice. But as collaborative tools develop, as they become more intuitive, self-evident and integrated, we will improve how we run our meetings beyond the physical experience of the past.

In my experience, one of the trickiest parts of working with a remote team is giving honest feedback, in a way that doesn’t come across as too harsh. If someone is in front of you much of the nuance can be picked up in facial expressions and body language. But not when someone is remote. Can you give a few suggestions about how to best give constructive criticism to a remote team member?

It is a critical point. And indeed, the subtleties are hidden in a video, or it’s like a filter. My general suggestion is criticism needs to be embedded in positive feedback. If I work for months with somebody, and I’ve never given positive feedback and suddenly come with negative feedback, my gosh, what a terrible situation! It might feel awkward, but if I keep giving positive feedback to any person, it’s much easier than coming up with something that didn’t work one day.

I must ensure the technical environment works fine when I have a difficult conversation. Don’t even try to have such a conversation on a weak connection. If there’s background noise if the person is in a bad mood or if I’m in a bad mood, that’s also not good. So make sure these circumstances are good, and pick a good time. Give the person time to digest the information, maybe have a follow-up conversation the next day to make sure there are no misunderstandings, and at the same time, give the person a moment to reflect on what they just heard. Offer suggestions. If you need to relay criticism, use clear language. Also, put what went wrong into the perspective of all the other things that went right. So people are not all of a sudden negatively focused. I often use a sentence when I give negative feedback: “I’m telling you mainly because I think that you can do better and because I think you can overcome this situation.”

Can you give any specific ideas about how to create a sense of camaraderie and team cohesion when you are not physically together?

We can always add a moment of casually being together -even remotely. Why not have a coffee break? I remember in the pandemic, early on, we had after-work drinks. There were no restaurants open, but everybody could bring their own drink. And it was good. We continue this with a creative lunch over a video conference. Start off sparingly so you can assess whether these activities are appreciated, liked, and seen as something positive by the team. Also, let the team have ideas. It needs to work for everybody. And it definitely can. I know of teams who sent the same package of food to everybody. Then everybody had it in front of them and unpacked it. It was like a virtual Christmas. It doesn’t replace physically being together, but it works.

Ok wonderful. We are nearly done. Here is our last “meaty” question. You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Mindful communication is my movement, especially in business. You need to take time for each other without wasting it. We don’t become more effective by cutting down communication time. Digitalisation will help us achieve our daily work more efficiently and free up more time for communication. But not the other way around. Qualitative communication comes from each person, so let’s take the time to actually do it. Whatever the situation is, and whatever the circumstances are, use the tools that we have. But the genuine interest and the general idea about mindful communication are key.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can connect with me via Linkedin or check out Planisy.com to see what we do and for some great insights via our blog.

Thank you so much for the time you spent doing this interview. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success.