What 2020 Taught Me About Remote Work That’s Still Useful in 2021
3 insights that might help you, too.
So, this happened: The first anniversary of working from home (WFH).
I’m a flipchart-loving trainer and former always-traveling consultant. And as such, I would have bet you anything that a work from home anniversary is something I’d never experience.
Yet here we are anyway. So, how did that happen? Since late 2019, I’ve been working as an Agile Coach at idealo. We are a 1100+ people tech company in Berlin that — you guessed it — switched to work from home in March 2020.
That WFH anniversary got me thinking. What did I learn about remote collaboration that is still relevant for the months to come? In this post, I share three of those learnings and how you might apply them. I think they are helpful in most collaborative settings, no matter your role in the organization.
1. What would you learn from medium-term thinking?
A few weeks into the crisis, my tandem partner Jessi posted this check-in question in our chat channel: “If you could travel back in time to March 2020, what advice would you give yourself concerning work in the months ahead?”
One of the answers from my colleagues stuck with me. If memory serves me right, it was Stefan who replied something along the lines of: “Adjust your set-up at home as if it would have to do forever.”
Maybe right now you are thinking what I thought back then: “Indeed, do get yourself an extra monitor and a desk that’s adjustable in height before the back pain starts. And by the way, ring lights are a thing now!”
But what if we thought more broadly? It’s even more useful to rephrase this advice as a question:
What would you do if the current status quo was going to last for another year?
How would you adjust your setting? How would you make use of your energy and resources?
Why that shift of perspective might help
Many people live with a mantra-like this these days: “Pull through, only for a few more weeks. You somehow need to keep going for a while longer, even if it’s exhausting.”
Unfortunately, it has not been “over soon” for more than a year now and it will not be over for some time. What would happen if you told yourself “it’s just four more weeks” every day for a whole year?
Then you might run a whole marathon at the speed you should reserve for the last meters before the finish line. You’d keep your hopes up and keep going, thus depleting your energy.
And once you’re exhausted, it’s all too easy to stick with your current strategy, to do more of the same. You might believe even more that this time, surely, things will have to go back to normal soon. A vicious circle.
You might feel resistance when you read the question. “What would you do if the situation were to stay the same for another year?” That’s quite understandable. It doesn’t feel particularly nice to imagine something unpleasant. Give it a try anyway. See what ideas come up for you or what you realize when looking at things from this different angle.
How to apply it
Well, the obvious thing would be to stop reading right now. Grab pen and paper or your favorite note-taking app and answer the question for a few minutes. Just see what comes up!
(Yes, I’ll wait! We both know what the chances of ever doing this are if you don’t do it right now, don’t we?)
At idealo, we made good experiences with integrating this reflection exercise into workshops. Sharing and discussing the results in group settings provides more than inspiration. It also fosters a sense of not being alone with the challenges.
I like to split the exercise and look at one aspect at a time: my apartment, work processes, social relations, etc. When I asked myself what I’d change about my apartment if I knew I’d be spending nearly 24/7 in it for another year, the answer was clear. I did not want to wait a year for my next bath! Since then I am the proud owner of an inflatable bathtub that fits into my shower.
To cut a long story short: Taking a medium-term perspective can be useful in many areas (e.g. it works as romantic advice, too). In the current circumstances of permanent stress, I’ve found it especially helpful.
2. How comfortable are you chatting up strangers?
All things considered, the switch to work from home went very smoothly at idealo. Sure, that is hardly surprising. As a tech company, our infrastructure was up for the job. The development teams adapted their collaboration processes quickly to the new setting. Hundreds of new idealos were hired and settled into their new teams since then.
What’s missing, though, in remote collaboration are serendipity and chance.
The unplanned encounters and conversations at the coffee machine. Eating cake together while celebrating birthdays, new hires, or farewells. Or because cake is a good enough reason for eating cake together. Bumping into someone in the hallway that turns out to be exactly the person you needed to ask a quick question. When asked what they miss most, idealos would probably answer “TGIF”– celebrating that “Thank God it’s Friday” with beer and pizza after work.
I’m wondering how the decline of socializing will impact our organization in the mid to long term. And I would rather not wait to find out. After all, informal networks in organizations provide more than connection to their members. They can be highly useful for value delivery as well.
If you’re thinking ‘Well, how about you schedule time for socializing and try out new, remote ways to do it?’ then I’m all for it. It just doesn’t happen on its own. Turns out, planning time for socializing isn’t as easy as ‘letting it happen’ like you could in the past.
Now, you must decide to schedule an appointment. That means investing working time to have coffee with someone. And to ask them to do the same. That requires realizing the following: That it’s okay spend some time to “just talk” instead of getting work done. While, at the same time, of course, there is always more work to do than time available in knowledge work.
So, what gives?
- Promote that socializing with people from outside of your team is not nice to have, but necessary and valuable. Thus it belongs in your working hours and not necessarily into your free time. And with promoting I mean walk the talk: start doing it yourself first.
- Then try to make it easier for others. We assumed that people might indeed want to have more conversations with colleagues from other departments. And that they might hesitate to initiate them. So we provided a mindbogglingly simple structure at idealo: If you sign up for “Coffee Roulette”, you’ll receive an invite for a 30-minute conversation with another idealo (who also signed up) every other week. The meeting description provides a few questions the two of you might use to get the conversation starting. Things don’t have to be complicated or new to be valuable!
3. How can you improve every remote meeting?
Okay, but what about actual working from home — people collaborating to create value for others? Coming up now!
For the grand finale, I’d like to share the most helpful insights for remote meetings and workshops I gathered.
Now that shortage of meeting rooms is a thing of the past and we can leverage visual collaboration (we use miro) on a whole new level, surely we figured out awesome ways to facilitate co-creation.
We must have found new ways during 12 months, right?
Well, uhm, unless… we didn’t.
Contrary to popular hopes and expectations, it is still the same simple practices that create the biggest value in meetings or workshops.
(Don’t worry, I’ll get to these practices in a minute. Bear with me for a moment.) The only new thing is this: People tend to not apply these same simple practices online now instead of in meeting rooms.
We oftentimes yearn for new ways to improve collaboration instead of applying what they already know. If that’s the case, ask yourself “What’s keeping me from using what I already know? And what could help me use it?” rather than look for new practices.
Here are a few possible reasons for not applying helpful practices:
- When it comes to something simple, it’s so tempting for the brain to say “Aah, I get how that works! And since I understand it, I don’t need to actually do it to reap the benefits.” Nice try, brain — but no.
- Or it might be the other way around: You understand how this practice might work. But since you haven’t actually seen it work yet, you’re not convinced.
- You have experienced this practice being done poorly or in name only. Rather not live through it again, huh?
- You misjudge a practice because you don’t know its purpose. Some folks assume that a check-in is some touchy-feely Hocus Pocus people do to amuse the Agile Coach. (I’ll leave you with that cliffhanger for a minute.)
- You might hesitate to suggest a helpful practice to a group because you think doing so does not fit your role.
Okay, I’ve kept you waiting long enough.
Here are the items I crown the old and still most-helpful-and-underrated meeting practices that should be implemented before looking any further:
- Make shared responsibility explicit. All participants influence the quality of any meeting’s course as well as its results. Make this explicit and establish roles that take responsibility for different aspects of the time spent together. For example a moderator, a timekeeper, and a note-taker. It’s not just that one person cannot do these three things well at the same time. The other participants, too, will profit from this practice.
- Create an equal number of opportunities to speak up for everybody. Although not everybody enjoys talking, equal airtime (or its premise: an equal number of occasions to say something) is helpful for a group’s process and progress.** It increases the diversity of perspectives, helps identify gridlocks or loss of focus faster, and contributes to shared understanding.
- Visualize. “More of the brain is devoted to vision and visual processing than any other known function, including language.”* Remote visual collaboration tools are a game-changer in terms of ease, practicality, and variety of leveraging those visual capacities of our brains. Shared digital whiteboards enable gathering all relevant information in one space, literally keeping everyone’s eyes on the meeting’s purpose, creating current and editable (I almost wrote edible) documentation of a group’s work on a whole new level.
- Check in and out. Invite all meeting participants to share their answer to a check-in question at the beginning and a check-out question at the end of the meeting. As you already know: Don’t do it because someone says so. Instead, do it for your own and everybody else’s sake. Checking in helps everyone with the context switch of arriving in the meeting. It provides a sense of who is present and how they are present. All those things are prerequisites for collaboration. Checking out provides closure and eases the next context switch.
- Timebox — doubly!
Level 1: Adjust the length of your meeting to the degree of quality and done-ness you want to achieve. I should add I’m not a follower of the cynical definition of meetings as “that’s where work gets distributed”. I aim for “that’s where that kind of work gets done that’s best done together”. Don’t do the 30-minute meeting that you leave with technical debt in form of tasks. Instead schedule 90 minutes, finish the tasks within those 90 minutes. Since you did the tasks together, there’s no need for a future review. And everybody can leave the meetings with a sense of accomplishment and a free mind.
Level 2: Work with timeboxes within your meetings. Make sure everyone understands their purpose. Clarify that they will be adhered to, and, if necessary, enforced in a friendly(!) way. Practice what you preach.
Are you someone that reads the summary first?
2020 taught me three things about remote work that are still helpful for me in 2021 — and might be for you, too:
- Ask yourself every once in a while, what you would do if the current status quo was going to last for another year. While being quite handy in general, I’ve found this question especially helpful for maintaining wellbeing during the pandemic. This change of perspective might spark new insights and help you take good care of your time and energy. And apart from being among the most valuable things you have; they are prerequisites for any collaboration.
- Humans and the organizations they form both thrive on informal communication. Find ways to talk to colleagues you otherwise would not meet. Ask yourself: Does remote work lead to a decline of serendipitous conversations in your organization? What impact might that have? How could you contribute to improving this topic?
- Do apply the helpful meeting practices you already know before seeking new ones. Most dreadful meetings are dreadful even though the participants know better. Find out why. In my experience, the most helpful practices for collaboration in remote meetings are the same ones as in-person meetings. Let’s change that one meeting at a time.
Wanna try our Coffee Roulette, too? Then have a look at our vacancies.
*Quote by Dr. Leo Chalupa, found in Dan Roam’s book “Show and Tell”
**More on equal air time can e.g. be found here or here
