Learning to Work in Distributed yet Connected Teams
As we slowly emerge from the pandemic, learning how to innovate together will once again be changing.
One of the most enduring lessons from 2020 was learning to work from home, with all its pros and cons, quirks and concessions. On Google, searches for “working from home” jumped by a factor of almost 15x between February and March last year.
In the comfort of our homes we all carved out a room, or at least a corner of a room, and created our own personal workspaces. We invested in work desks, office chairs, computer monitors, and Bluetooth headphones and got stuck on endless Zoom/Teams/Skype calls.
This was the new way of working and we adapted.
However, perhaps not immediately but at some point in 2021, we expect corporate offices to reopen again. This will mean back to waking up before the crack of dawn, back to the long commute, back to wearing dress pants with our work shirts. So do we really want to return?
At the end of January, Levent Çakıroğlu, the CEO of Koç Holding, one of the largest employers in Turkey, announced intentions for 35,000 of its 100,000 person workforce to continue working from home (WFH), permanently.
“For our 35,000 office employees, working from home is becoming a permanent practice. Remote work, or flexible work, eliminates the time wasted on commutes. The need for office space, and employee transfer services decrease. This has the serious potential to increase employee satisfaction and effectiveness.”
While I agree with the cost efficiency improvements of having office workers continue permanently from home, I believe the potential performance improvements are overstated, and, also taking into account the enduring social and emotional effects, the overall impact on productivity can actually be net negative.
Furthermore, when it comes to the area of innovation, the gains and losses of WFH can be even more exaggerated.
What is the impact of WFH on innovation efforts?
Advantages of WFH on Innovation
Traditionally, employees in the central office, from the technology-related departments find it easier to participate in the innovation process. They are closer to the heart of the action and find it easier to network with key stakeholders. Now, WFH has enabled non-traditional innovators to participate, i.e. teams located in other cities, sales staff on the ground, or even blue-collar workers. Innovation participation is becoming more democratized.
Furthermore, WFH has also allowed innovative thinking to become more flexible. Innovation now extends beyond normal work hours, a flexibility that supports eureka moments whether they happen early in the morning, or late at night, and allows teams to work together when they please. Also, this flexibility extends to location as well… you can be literally anywhere, sitting in a park, a mountain cabin on a retreat, or a yacht on the Mediterranean, and yet still be connected to your team. Employees have learned how to communicate at distance and make distributed working effective.
Disadvantages of WFH on Innovation
Despite the advantages of being able to roll out of bed and start work, wear pajama bottoms all day, and completely skipping out on traffic, we miss real human interactions. We miss the casual chats and the lunches together. We miss being able to see more than the top half of a person in a box in a screen.
Research has shown that our ability to connect meaningfully to others is less satisfying when we’re not physically present and that shared understanding is harder to establish and more likely to suffer from “drift” as we spend time apart. The absence of shared context, from body language to the type of snacks made available in the shared kitchen, dilutes these myriad signals that convey culture.
- Kiesler, S., & Cummings, J. N. (2002). What do we know about proximity and distance in work groups?
This is all the more true for innovation. Creative, innovative work is better done in person. The digital post-its of Miro/Mural aren’t quite the same as the physical ones. The rapid discussion of ideas, the quick sketching and storyboarding, the “aha” moments through collaborative associate thinking just doesn’t spark online like it does offline.
In the first few months following the pandemic, I observed employees were quite happy to engage in ideation sessions online. It was new, exciting, different. However, as the pandemic has dragged on, in the lack of inter-personal connections and interactions has started to drag down interest and energy in such activities.
Furthermore, “home” with an abundance of distractions, especially if you have small kids or rambunctious partners who play loud music at home, is not an ideal place to focus on creative tasks. Without that focused time, ideas become more fleeting, projects more shallow… it is simply easier to give up.
So what can we do?
Hybrid Working: Together & Apart
A Future Forum study of knowledge workers across six major countries found that the vast majority value flexibility — while only 16% want to be fully remote, only 12% want to return to working in the office five days a week. A clear majority of 72% want the option of working within a hybrid remote-office model.
Even within our own small consulting team of 10, practically all of our employees prefer a work option that allows them to work from home with occasional gatherings in-person. I don’t believe I will be able to get anyone to come back into an office setting regularly anymore.
Thus, yet again, a new moment of truth is upon both HR professionals, team managers and innovation leaders alike… what is the best way to facilitate the emergence and development of new ideas? Hybrid working looks perfectly logical on paper, but a new culture, a new discipline must be developed to make it function and deliver on its promises.
Here are a few of my ideas of what hybrid working could look like for innovation teams.
What will innovating together, yet apart, online and offline look like?
- Employees will have the option to work a few days at the central office, a few days at another location each week.
- Once a month, large, cross-functional groups of employees should gather in a central location for short idea generation / jam sessions to discuss emerging opportunities and new ideas, while also providing feedback on existing projects. Project teams will also be formed at these jam sessions.
- Certain days employees will meet up and work with their innovation teams in collaborative spaces, i.e. co-working spaces, that support both online and offline interactions.
- Innovation teams will monitor their “Zoom” time, rather focusing on distributing tasks and documenting progress asynchronously via Slack or similar platforms, in a manner easily shared and disseminated across the team.
- Once a month or two, teams will gather in-person for short 2–5 day sprints to break through with a critical milestone.
Hybrid, or flex working, will give priorities to online tools for collaboration and coordination, but encourage in-person sessions at critical junctures such as ideation, team forming, brainstorming, etc. Hybrid will allot innovation teams focus time together in-person to discuss as well as focus time apart to work remotely, individually to produce results.
Hybrid work is about a careful balance of two worlds, picking the best of each to form something else that will be completely unique on its own.
Who is ready to jump in?
Make Innovation Work
Core Strateji is a strategy consulting firm that specializes in supporting leading companies to transform into ambidextrous organizations. Are you ready to move your innovation activities forward?
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