Remote Work: Diane Lennard of Lennard & Company On How To Successfully Navigate The Opportunities & Challenges Of Working Remotely Or From Home
Learn new skills or work with your hands.
Learning new skills during time off from work is one way to prevent feelings of inefficacy. Using time away from work to take on a new challenge can give you a sense of personal accomplishment and renewed feelings of efficacy. When you bring your attention back to work, you feel reenergized and ready to engage with the next challenge.
As a part of our series about the things you need to successfully work remotely, I had the pleasure of interviewing Diane Lennard.
Diane Lennard, a Professor of Management Communication at NYU Stern School of Business, teaches courses on team communication, engaging audiences, and strategic communication to graduate business students. Dr. Lennard founded Lennard & Company, a firm that provides communication coaching services to educational institutions, corporations, and individuals who want to expand their communication skills and abilities for functioning in diverse work settings. She is the co-author of Humanizing the Remote Experience through Leadership and Coaching: Strategies for Better Virtual Connections; and the author of Strategic Communication at Work: The Impact Paradigm and Coaching Models: A Cultural Perspective.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. What is your “backstory”?
I have a background in the performing arts, business, and education. My passion is working with people to use the communication skills of actors — words, voice, and body language — to achieve intended results with diverse audiences. I am a full-time management communication professor at New York University Stern School of Business, a premier management education school and research center, where I teach and coach graduate students, faculty, and administrators. I am also the founder of Lennard & Company, an international coaching and consulting firm specializing in programs for individuals and teams that use theatre-based techniques for enhancing communication effectiveness.
My interest in communicating to audiences started at an early age. At the age of six as a member of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet Company, I had the unique experience of earning $1 an hour in opera performances for running across the stage of the grand Metropolitan Opera House in front of an audience of thousands. For many years, I worked as a professional actor/director. Eventually, I focused my career solely on teaching communication and coaching graduate students in business and law, corporate executives, and other professionals. I received my Ph.D. in Education and Performance Studies, my M.S. in Education, and my B.A. in Communication. To my own surprise (since I had never thought of myself as a writer), I have written three books: Humanizing the Remote Experience through Leadership and Coaching; Strategic Communication at Work; and Coaching Models.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
When I first started my coaching and consulting firm, I made a wish list of companies that I wanted to target. Children’s Television Workshop, creators of the educational children’s program Sesame Street, was high on my list. By finding someone who knew someone who knew someone who worked there, I was able to secure an initial meeting and was hired to do a three-month brand marketing assignment. I met and worked with people in every division — marketing, brand management, research, publishing, events, consumer products, and the international group. We had frank conversations about their work and vision for the future of their divisions. The three-month assignment turned into six years of projects for the Sesame Street brand. I believe this long-term client relationship was a result of the connections that I made with people in different divisions of the organization. Building strong, positive working relationships is essential for success. To this day, I have maintained my connections with many of the people I worked with at Children’s Television Workshop, now called Sesame Workshop. (I also have very fond memories of my work related to Elmo, Big Bird, Kermit, Snuffleupagus, and the other characters on Sesame Street.)
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I was so excited to go to Tokyo for the first time. My colleague and I co-facilitated a series of communication workshops for bank executives and did a debrief after each workshop while eating dinner in restaurants. She always carried a little sign in Japanese that read “I cannot eat fish or meat” and showed it to the people in each restaurant. After the first few meals, I realized that the staff at these restaurants assumed the sign applied to me, as well. I then had someone create a sign for me in Japanese that read “I eat everything.” I made sure to show my sign each time we went to a restaurant. The lesson learned from this experience: in all contexts, whether it is primarily a direct or indirect communication culture, make sure to convey your intention in a way that prevents misunderstanding and achieves the results you want.
What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees thrive and avoid burnout?
My advice to business leaders who want to help their employees thrive and avoid burnout is to focus on a human-centered approach to remote work. This involves emphasizing shared purpose and creating a sense of belonging. To foster purpose, I suggest having a conversation about what your organization does and why it matters. Shared purpose can be defined in terms of what the organization does for the world, what the team does for the organization, and what the individual does for the team. It is critically important for business leaders to facilitate positive interactions and make their employees feel, cared for, included, and appreciated. To prevent the workplace phenomenon called burnout — characterized by exhaustion, disengagement, and feelings of inefficacy, requires prioritizing employee wellness, engagement, and social connection.
Ok, let’s jump to the core of our interview. 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 and opportunities of working remotely?
Remote work is enabled by constant connectedness. Not only can we link to people anywhere in the world at any time, we can engage in work activities instantly from any location, including from the comfort of our homes. Remote work can increase productivity and optimize use of time and resources. We have gained efficiency, instant access to people and services from anywhere, and convenience.
Can you articulate for our readers what the five main challenges are regarding working remotely?
We don’t want to sacrifice the benefits of remote work, but we want to also make sure to recognize the human costs. Remote work can create challenges for us socially, emotionally, and cognitively. The five main challenges of working remotely are related to selective attention, understanding others, feeling a sense of belonging, controlling stress, and preventing burnout.
Selective attention: The human brain can attend to a finite number of things in the inner and outer world at any one time. Deciding what to pay attention to is a complex interplay of four selective attention processes — prioritizing what is relevant, ignoring what is not, switching from one focus of attention to another, and sustaining attention on one subject for a specific amount of time. Many people face attention challenges simply by being confined to a digital window.
Understanding others: The human brain is constantly processing incoming sensory information. It is wired to be able to understand other people. As social beings, we rely on verbal and nonverbal signals to convey messages and understand one another. Missed signals (such as eye contact, visible gestures and other body language) and distorted signals (such as poor video quality) in a flat, 2-dimensional remote environment can make it challenging to understand the complexity of our interactions with others.
Feeling a sense of belonging: Humans have an evolutionary need to belong to a community. Building social bonds and trust among group members is essential because it provides a sense of safety and comfort with others. When you are not working with others in the same physical space, it can be harder to build bonds and trusting relationships. An unsettled or discontent feeling can arise from the absence of an established place within a remote group or team.
Controlling stress: When the need for safety and comfort is not met in the remote environment, some people feel constantly on guard. A heightened state of physical alertness makes trying to work or focus highly demanding. When the need for understanding others is not met in virtual interactions, the brain has to do a lot more work to make predictions about people’s behavior. This causes mental fatigue. When the innate human need to belong to a group is not met, there can be a feeling of not being fully seen or heard. Over time, the fatigue and frustration that accumulate from failing to meet these basic human needs can take a heavy toll. Undergoing prolonged and excessive stress can cause some people to feel overwhelmed and unable to cope.
Preventing burnout: The unique demands of remote work can leave a person more vulnerable to a state of chronic stress that leads to the condition of burnout. Everyone experiencing burnout will have some combination of its three symptoms: exhaustion, detachment, and feelings of inefficacy. Burnout can happen in any work context but can be reached more quickly when working remotely.
Based on your experience, what can one do to address or redress each of those challenges? Can you give a story or example for each?
With the stresses and challenges of remote work, implementing strategies to maintain wellness, increase energy for engagement, and build social connections are critically important.
Maintain wellness
Let’s start at the most basic, essential level with a focus on wellness. This refers to the presence of health in multiple aspects of your life. There are six types of health, including: physical health (being free of or in control of illness, symptoms or pain); emotional health (using strengths and emotional responses to increase self-esteem, communicate effectively, and understand others); cognitive health (using your brain for thinking and learning); occupational health (gaining personal satisfaction through your work); social health (having satisfying relationships and contributing to others); and spiritual health (finding meaning in your life and maintaining a healthy outlook). The more you are fueled by these six types of health, the more energy you will have to face the challenges of remote work.
Some suggested strategies to achieve wellness: get 7–8 hours of sleep each night; incorporate some type of physical movement into your day; name your emotions; reframe the way you view situations; read; journal; and practice gratitude.
Increase energy for engagement
The best way to support engagement is to understand the energy it requires, and know how to alternate it with sufficient rest. Energy is required to function and your brain needs a lot of energy to focus during periods of engagement. If you want your brain to be engaged, you must also give it time to be unfocused and at rest. Instead of resting only at points of exhaustion, regularly alternate the high-energy, focused brain state with the unfocused brain state to achieve periods of sustained engagement throughout the day. Staying engaged when working remotely will prevent you from becoming distracted, overwhelmed, cognitively overloaded and fatigued.
Some suggested strategies for energy management: alternate focused and unfocused brain time by planning for 15–20 minutes of rest after every 90 minutes of engaged, high-focus activity; decrease cognitive load by prioritizing tasks and addressing them during your engaged, focused brain time; and at the end of the day, write down at least three areas where you made progress that gives you a sense of accomplishment.
Build social connections
Humans are social creatures. We are hard-wired to fulfill our roles as social creatures. This wiring causes us to crave social connection and to drive us toward others. Our brains allow us to function at our highest levels when our primary need for connecting with others is met. Belonging to a group enables people to feel contented and productive. Brain chemicals surge, making us feel good and reinforcing positive social behavior. Specifically, oxytocin causes feelings of being bonded with the group and decreases the stress response; dopamine creates feelings of pleasure; and endorphins cause feelings of happiness and decreased pain. Social connection can be achieved on a more regular basis by taking a human-centered approach to remote work. Meaningful, fulfilling social interactions are what satisfy the hunger for human connection.
Some suggested strategies to strengthen connections: get to know each other’s interests, preferences, skills and strengths; acknowledge others’ thoughts, feelings, and opinions; create psychological safety; respect people’s time; communicate concisely and precisely; and provide productive feedback to support others.
Do you have any suggestions specifically for people who work at home? What are a few ways to be most productive when you work at home?
Setting and maintaining boundaries is crucial for people who work at home. With constant digital connectedness, it is easy to work at any time. But continuing to work at all hours can be a recipe for burnout, as ultimately the demands will become too high and the opportunities for resting and reenergizing will disappear. Here are three suggested strategies that people working at home can implement that will prevent the symptoms of burnout: exhaustion, detachment, and feelings of inefficacy.
Create an end-of-workday ritual
An effective way to prevent profound exhaustion is to have a deliberate and consistent transition out of work activity at the end of each day. Implementing an end-of-workday ritual, doing the same set of actions, at the same time and place if possible, sends a signal to the brain to mentally disengage from work and begin to reenergize. Over time, the brain will automatically respond to the cues provided by the ritual and more easily switch out of work mode into rest mode.
You can choose any set of actions for the ritual but make sure you perform them at the end of each workday. These actions can be as simple as writing a to-do list, closing all the browser tabs, cleaning out your inbox.
Practice small acts of kindness
Research suggests that small acts of kindness toward others can decrease feelings of disengagement and prevent detachment. There is a tendency to turn inward and focus on yourself when you feel alienated. Instead, by turning outward and focusing on others in small but meaningful ways, people can gain regain a feeling of connectedness.
You can practice small acts of kindness by acknowledging another person and letting them know you appreciate them or complimenting team members on successfully completing a project. Complimenting, praising, or recognizing others increases your feelings of optimism, self-worth, and engagement.
Learn new skills or work with your hands
Learning new skills during time off from work is one way to prevent feelings of inefficacy. Using time away from work to take on a new challenge can give you a sense of personal accomplishment and renewed feelings of efficacy. When you bring your attention back to work, you feel reenergized and ready to engage with the next challenge.
You can also actively work with your hands to produce a tangible result. This can provide a sense of accomplishment from achieving a goal and counteracts feelings of inefficacy at work.
Can you share any suggestions for teams who are used to working together on location but are forced to work remotely due to the pandemic? Are there potential obstacles one should avoid with a team that is just getting used to working remotely?
Even though it can be harder to create psychological safety in remote team environments, it needs to be fostered anyway. Psychological safety is a climate that teams establish to support individual team members to freely express themselves. It can be fostered by a team leader, but ultimately is created by the way members behave toward one another. Group members share the belief that they can have challenging conversations, be vulnerable in front of each other, and be themselves without fear of negative consequences.
Without a climate of psychological safety, teams will have a harder time collaborating and achieving collective results. This difficulty and frustration can drive some individual members to disengage, which will be detrimental to the team in the long run. Alone, the individual loses the benefits of collaborating, supporting each other through challenges, and tapping into all the energy, creativity, and resources of the team. As a result of these losses, there is more strain on the individual and stress builds.
What do you suggest can be done to create an empowering work culture and team culture with a team that is remote and not physically together?
An empowering remote team culture keeps in mind the importance of a human-centered approach to remote work created by prioritizing people, communicating to connect, and cultivating shared purpose.
Showing empathy is an essential component of prioritizing people. Understanding and feeling
the emotional state of others leads to more positive interactions. Increasing levels of empathy is one of the most powerful ways to address the interpersonal challenges of being remote. When members of remote teams connect on a human level, they feel seen, heard, and respected. The more you show you care about others, the more they will feel safe, understood, and included.
Explicit messaging and intentionally communicating to connect also positively impact the remote team culture. Communicating to connect requires the willingness to speak openly and honestly about feelings, goals, motivation, and availability. It involves asking questions and listening to others’ perspectives. Choosing your words carefully is essemtial in virtual interactions, especially since some of the nonverbals communication signals are missing or distorted. Being as specific as possible helps prevent ambiguity and misunderstanding in the remote environment.
Creating and cultivating a sense of purpose and meaning empowers remote teams. Members of remote teams working toward a shared purpose are more motivated and better able to adapt to change. They also have an inherent need for meaningful work and making an impact. Connecting personal values to work and cultivating shared purpose lead to sustained effort and greater satisfaction. To foster purpose, you can have a conversation with team members about what your organization does and why it matters. You can also discuss core values, translate them into concrete actionable behaviors, then demonstrate and model the valued behaviors. These ways of interacting serve our needs as social creatures, even when we are physically apart.
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. :-)
I am a strong believer in the importance of creating and maintaining a feedback-rich work culture. Feedback is a way of communicating helpful information about the impact of an individual’s behavior on you or on a shared goal. I would like to see more people influence the feedback culture in their organizations by asking for feedback about their own performance more frequently. Over time, others likely will start asking for frequent feedback and it can become a new norm in virtual and in-person interactions. Regularly asking for and then receiving effective (balanced, behavioral, specific, and actionable) feedback opens communication and can strengthen human connections.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Practice makes progress” (instead of “practice makes perfect”) is one of my favorite life lesson quotes. It reminds me to maintain a growth mindset and value incremental progress. Having a growth mindset means believing that my abilities can be developed and improved through persistence. I am willing to take on challenges, learn from them, and increase my skills incrementally through practice. Remote experiences present many new challenges but with a growth mindset, I have been able to take them on and learn from them. The rapid pace of technology advances makes it critically important to adopt a growth mindset. In my view, embracing life’s challenges as opportunities and persevering is vital for positively adapting to change.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Information about my coaching work and books, including the recently published Humanizing the Remote Experience through Leadership and Coaching co-authored with Dr. Amy Mednick, can be found on the Lennard and Company website: www.lennardandcompany.com
Thank you for these great insights! We wish you continued success.
