The How and Why of Virtual Cowork
By Ellie Louson and Makena Neal, Learning Experience Designers, MSU Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology
The pandemic, and necessary shifts to remote work, has been challenging for all. For those of us who are more extroverted and social at work, it was hard to shift from a busy, collaborative office where project teams frequently met and worked together to isolation. Comments about missing the “water cooler” conversations, those casual chats that were naturally born out of proximity with colleagues, have become commonplace.
The Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology operates on a model dependent on collaboration. Collaboration is ingrained in our day-to-day work. Colleagues are assigned to educational design project teams, and our work space reflects that collaborative practice through open and flexible areas for coworking. Working from home was a jarring change.
But we have adapted to the isolation of working from home by trying new ways of coworking. In this post, we’ll share our favorite coworking styles that have helped us stay connected and productive, as well as our tips for successful coworking. As two academics who were recently grad students, we’ve employed these strategies and tools for everything from dissertation writing to running meetings for the various educational design projects we lead in the Hub.
Work Parties aka Parallel Coworking
When Ellie was a PhD student in Toronto, she was part of an interdisciplinary cohort working on very different topics and methods. The isolation of thesis writing was demoralizing, however, and she quickly found a group of friends to cowork with. They would get together at each others’ apartments, the library, or in coffee shops for what she called “work parties” where everyone worked on their own writing. This was great for accountability, and they took frequent mini-breaks to socialize.
This kind of coworking translates to virtual work quite well. Having done something similar in her graduate work, Makena founded a coworking channel on the Hub’s Slack and hosts sessions on Zoom for this type of parallel work. We aren’t necessarily working on the same projects, but coworking time gives us scheduled blocks in the calendar to dedicate to making progress on our own tasks, and the feeling of working alongside coworkers for accountability and connection. Should the need for a quick check-in or an extra opinion arise, colleagues are there.
Ellie and Makena also participate in coworking writing groups. For Ellie, a few monthly and weekly coworking writing groups are designed to give dedicated, protected time for her research or other writing projects. Each participant joins on time, then turns off their camera and goes on mute to work independently. In Makena’s writing groups, participants start off the cowork session by sharing their goals for that period of time. Then the working time is concluded just shy of the allotted time, and participants do a quick share out of what they accomplished.
A helpful tool during this type of coworking is the Pomodoro Technique, or structured chunks of focused work (“pomodoros” are named for their inventor’s tomato-shaped kitchen timer) interrupted by regular 5- or 10-minute breaks. You can even do Pomodoros without being in a virtual meeting; you can complete Pomodoros in isolation and coordinate by text message where each person shares the same chunk of focused time and breaks.
A more gamified system that Ellie used for a while is the Forest app, where you schedule blocks of focused work and the app grows virtual trees for as long as you don’t do something else on your phone. Users can even grow trees in the real world, making your focused time slightly beneficial.
Another great tool for parallel coworking that the Community-Engaged Research cowork Ellie belongs to uses is the SMART goal framework. This is a more structured model of goal setting and debriefing than Makena’s writing groups use. At the start, participants fill out our goals for the work session that must be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. At the end of the 3-hour session, we report on our progress towards those goals.
Team Coworking Time
We both run projects in the Hub that meet frequently to connect with colleagues and partners, and some of those meetings involve coworking periods. A benefit here is team cohesion and accountability while each person works on their own tasks, and a chance to present that work and share progress. For example, Ellie uses coworking time with her team when there is a shared document to write or review. Team members spend 20 minutes each working on their own task (filling in sections of a spreadsheet, adding references or commenting) and then share their progress. Similarly, Makena’s project has historically had an advisory group that has provided invaluable user feedback on project mission and functionality.
Coworking within virtual documents and brainstorming using facilitation tools like Mural are integral to this feedback. Additionally, if a project is public-facing, outreach and data strategy are critical to the team’s success. Co-working on strategy documents, marketing plans, and public storytelling pieces are a part of Makena’s team’s regular cadence.
Cowriting
A more collaborative version of team coworking is cowriting, where colleagues make progress together on a writing project. This type of coworking is integrated. A common pattern we use is to be in a Zoom or Teams meeting while working on a shared online document such as a Google Doc. Participants share ideas and collectively add or edit text in real time. We have done this on everything from research papers for academic journals to blog posts. The opportunity for rich, real-time discussion with colleagues as we outline, write, and revise written work is a huge benefit to this type of coworking.
We can also make writing progress asynchronously between these sessions, and using an online document has many positive affordances. Teams don’t have to keep track of one document being emailed back and forth, which can create issues around whether someone is working on the correct version. Plus, being able to make comments on the work that colleagues can see and respond to — including being able to tag and assign a writing task to a specific person — can promote collaboration and help with forward progress.
