Becoming a Basiser Online
I was doing a bit of thinking over Christmas and I had a realisation. I reckon I’ve just been through the weirdest 5 months of my working life I will ever have.
I started my job at Basis, without meeting a single one of my colleagues in person. And maybe the strangest part is, it didn’t even feel weird. It felt pretty normal — it’s like I barely noticed.
How did this happen? Well, if I’ve learnt one thing about my colleagues since joining it’s this: most of the time, they take their own medicine. Whether it’s using working iteratively, developing prototypes, putting SCRUM into practice, using productive reasoning to have great conversations or sticking to best practices for remote work — the tools and approaches we use on projects we also use internally. We do this because Basisers genuinely believe it’s the best way to approach complex problems.
I have a theory that it’s thanks to two classic Basis big ideas that an experience that, let’s be honest, could have been pretty difficult, actually felt easy. See what you think.
Be open
This is an important one, and it goes both ways.
I’m far from the most extroverted person in the world. So before I started I wondered to myself whether, online, it might take a while to get really relaxed and close working relationships going. I think for most of us who aren’t hyper-social extroverted maniacs this is the kind of thing that usually takes a few weeks of sitting in the same office, getting to know each other.
Doing it online, however, takes something more. Right from the start, chatting to Dennis I could feel a relaxed, trusting culture (think, mates who just happen to run a consultancy together). This gave me the confidence to open up myself. “Ask if you’re not sure”, “have a go”, “don’t worry about making a mistake” — it’s stuff that’s often said, but not always as easy to actually do (particularly so when you’ve never actually met in person).
And of course, inevitably, it happened. I was running a training session, it was all going wrong, Matt had to scramble to come jump in and help me out. However, nobody had a go, nobody blamed me. Instead, I had some great conversations where we worked out exactly what the learning was from the experience and how it could help me grow.
When you’re working in an environment that understands that things like: having a go, making mistakes, and getting some feedback, are how you actually make progress, actually doing these things starts to feel easy. Iterative work like this gets stuff done and builds trust. It works because once you feel able to make mistakes, you begin to share things about your true self. Once people know something about you, they’re far more likely to be empathetic and forgiving, relationships get stronger. And by making mistakes and learning, you usually reach solutions way faster, especially when the problems are complex.
As well building an open culture, it also helps to keep your work open, literally. Matt from Basis is a massive fan of “working out loud” and I can see why. Once you start to do things like giving people a link to your work as you’re still doing it, working collaboratively on documents together with others in real time, crowdsourcing ideas and answers to questions from the wider team, you quickly see the difference it makes. Since getting started I’ve found myself: less precious about my work, more open to other people’s ideas and, most importantly, producing better stuff.
Remote work can be just as good, if not better, than in person.
Another big one. Since 2019, my fellow Basisers have spent a huge amount of time working out how we can do our work virtually. You can read more about that process and how it helped us in one recent project here. But in short, what they learnt was that making genuine connections online is a serious skill. It takes time, effort and practice.
So, for me, this meant investing the time and the effort by attending and eventually teaching our Online Consulting & Facilitation training. The best thing about the training is that not only do you learn the skills, but you model them immediately in the moment. We do exercises that show how the quality of our attention affects not only us, but also the quality of other people’s thought. If you’re half listening, browsing your emails, chances are whoever you’re talking to will end up doing the same.
Then all that was left was the practice. This wasn’t with the tech (although a fair bit of that was needed too), it was practice engaging.
At Basis we meet twice a day for a catch-up and a stand-up. Those relaxed, trusting relationships I talked about earlier, they don’t appear out of nowhere. In our calls each day I had time to practice the online skills I’d learnt and to spend time getting to know Basis and my colleagues. When you’re genuinely engaging, sharing parts of yourself with people who are really listening, everyday, it doesn’t matter if you’re 1 metre or 1000 miles away. It starts to feel easy.
That’s one theory anyway. On the other hand, getting started at Basis entirely remotely might have felt normal because the people I work with are absolute heroes (maybe a bit of both).
And finally, a happy ending between the lockdowns…
We actually met! (featuring some beers, a tiny bit of Zoom and the comment that I am apparently taller than expected…) Although there’s so much you can do online, there’s something a bit special about having a laugh around a table in-person. In the UK things aren’t looking too great right now, but I don’t mind admitting I can’t wait for when we can do it all again!
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
