The new ‘face to face’

As someone who often coaches in agile methodologies, the power of being face to face is a big part of it and eliminating unnecessary asynchronous communication. It is so much easier to have a chat and solve a problem in 2 mins rather than a day of emails going back and forth. This is often interpreted as each party coming together in a room, at their desk or similar for a face to face conversation. With working from home becoming the new normal, what does this now mean?

The tl;dr answer is, the same thing it always did.

I had a really interesting conversation with someone on Zoom this morning about how lovely our conversation was. I was sat in my garden and he was sat in his garden office at the same eye level and the fact that it was online actually made no difference. What it did do, was give us our best environments to be in whilst connecting with each other. It made me think about how much an environment can influence us in connecting with others and how the lockdown has seen a dramatic improvement in having effective and equal communications.

Keeping it equal

Often different environments can intentionally or unintentionally work to your advantage. As leaders, we will often take the environment into consideration for all our different comms to how best it will benefit our message. For example; if we want to have a difficult conversation with someone and feel anxiety, we will want to be in our setting and bring others into it as a sense of security. If we want people to feel more at ease or feel that there may be some fear on their part, we will go to them. This is by no means a bad exercise, it can be used, however, as a tool against the greater good. It can be used as an intimidation technique which is definitely not a good practise in leadership.

The lockdown has forced us to remain in our own environments which has taken out that consideration as we no longer have control over that aspect of our dealings with people. What I have liked about this, is that there is no upper hand to be had, each participant is in an equal state of environmental security. It means we can all be where we feel at our best.