Here’s How To Deal With The 6 Hidden Dysfunctions That Covid-19 Exposing In Our Teams
As Peter allegedly wrote, a little charity can cover a multitude of sins. So it goes in business, too, it seems.
When people are showing up and sales are coming in, we can be forgiven for not having perfect habits at work. We’ll often excuse some inefficiencies — and even bad behavior — as part of the price of growth.
Bumps and bad habits are just business — so long as share prices are going up.
It’s when things get tough that we realize that some of those “bumps” are actually quite serious.
Unfortunately, the Covid crisis has exposed some of the business world’s ultra-prevalent bad habits. Many companies just didn’t see them until they had to adapt to remote work and a roller-coaster economy.
As a researcher and author who studies team dynamics and has been training companies in how to manage remote work, I’ve noticed 6 dysfunctions in particular that are suddenly threatening a lot of businesses today. These dysfunctions may feel painful now, but chances are they’ve been doing damage for a while.
The good news is: the changing situation gives us an excuse to reassess the way we do things. If any of the following sound familiar, now’s a good time to start some new habits:
The Hidden Dysfunction of Poor Work/Life Boundaries
Setting boundaries between your work life and your home life when you work from home can be especially difficult. If you work where you eat (and sleep, and hang out with your family), it can be extremely difficult to switch “off” psychologically.
Research shows that people who work from home are actually more likely to suffer from overwork than under-work. And this is a function of poor boundaries.
But it turns out that a huge percentage of those who work on computers all day actually have the same problem.
Most white collar workers do eat in the same place they work — at their desks — and bring their work home with them. They think about and talk about work (and answer emails about work) while they hang out with their families, and from bed before and after they sleep.
The impact of this is huge. Burnout is at an all-time high among white-collar workers.
The solution? Setting boundaries. It’s not always easy, but if you can carve out space and time for only work, and separate that from only not-work, you’re halfway there.
Picking a spot where you only work, and picking a start and end time when you’ll turn off your email and notifications is a big part of the battle. Not caving on those boundaries is basically the rest. It’s easiest when you tell the people you work with (and live with) what those boundaries are, and enlist them to help you stick to them.
This handy Work Style Quiz can help you think through a bunch of the little things that can help you set up your work/life boundaries and share them with others.
But often, poor work/life boundaries are a function of a bigger boundary problem…
Hidden Dysfunction: Poor Boundaries With Your Coworkers (And/Or Boss!)
Working from home makes a lot of people hyper-conscious of how much work they’re actually accomplishing. Spending all day on Youtube at home feels different than spending all day on Youtube in the office.
For those who don’t fancy themselves slackers, the boundary problem isn’t about goofing around on the Internet when you should be working. It’s responding to communication all day when you could be getting more done.
In 2019, office workers reported that they spend nearly 6 hours per day fielding emails, messages, and requests. This means that as much as 80 percent of our time in a typical workweek is actually being dictated by other people!
It’s safe to say that other people are the wrong people to be setting your priorities for you. You know much better than anyone else what your needs are in order to accomplish the work you need to do.
For many people, working remote makes this more clear. Sitting at your kitchen table answering emails all day can feel a lot less like “real work” than it does in the office. And there’s a truth there:
Responding to other people on their terms is not a good way to work.
This is simply an extension of the broader boundaries problem that a lot of us have at work — especially when power dynamics are at play. We do work at others’ behest, at the expense of our work — and often that means at the expense of those very others’ success.
The solution? Set some boundaries — but do your homework first. You’ll want to understand what your collaborators are up against, so that you can communicate your needs in terms of the broader team’s success. This post here will walk you through how to do that.
Hidden Dysfunction: Using Meetings to Postpone Thinking
You can throw a rock in any direction, from any point on planet Earth, and hit a blog post complaining about how much meetings suck.
That’s one of the reasons it’s nice that it’s a little bit harder to call an impromptu meeting when working remotely. You can’t just pluck people from their desks and huddle in a conference room. And you can’t assume that everyone’s good to meet at any given time — because you can’t see who’s at work, who’s busy, who’s in a bad place, etc.
But the other reason it’s nice that remote meetings are harder to coordinate — and more awkward to pull off — is it forces us to think a little harder about whether we need a meeting, and what a given meeting is meant to accomplish.
Far too often in office settings, meetings are used as mechanisms to force us to carve out time to think about something that’s important. We either set a meeting so that we can have time to think, or we set a meeting to force our colleagues to spend time thinking about something.
Unfortunately, a group gathering is a terrible time to start thinking about something. Meetings are most effective when people have done the hard thinking ahead of time.
This LinkedIn article will walk you through the whole thing. And this Remote Meeting Wizard can help you figure out what you ought to do to optimize your next remote meeting.
Hidden Dysfunction: Inconsistent Information Gathering & Sharing Habits
If you need to make good decisions, the worst thing that can happen to you is to not have all the information you need. Or to not know where to find information that’s… somewhere.
Teams that work closely in an office setting often have norms around information sharing that are more like… oral traditions than stone tablets.
Where’s the most up-to-date logo file? Oh, Wendy can tell you.
When’s the project kickoff? James says it’s Friday morning.
What happened in Tuesday’s meeting? Oh yeah, let me catch you up on that.
What was the link to the hiring process template? I think it’s in this folder… ehh, I’ll just walk over to HR and ask.
If you use Microsoft Teams or some other team chat app, you can still do the digital version of the Ask Around Method of information gathering. But you can’t interrupt people and get information on the spot remotely in the same way you can in the office. So finding stuff will take longer.
And this exposes a common flaw in our teams:
We often don’t stick to a system for when and where we put the most up-to-date information.
We have meetings and don’t document what happened in them.
We make decisions and don’t record them and the process behind them for people who weren’t involved.
We make changes to things and just tell people. But what about when we need to find the specifics later?
Working remotely can give you an excuse to establish a shared set of rules for when and where to put updated information, including meeting notes, decisions, policies, and files. A shared drive with an easy file structure and some gentle, but frequent, reminders can do. Or you can get fancier with software.
But be warned: just because you have tools doesn’t mean you’ll automatically have productive info-sharing habits to match. If working remotely is proving a little more difficult than you’d hoped, I’d wager this is one of your key issues.
Hidden Dysfunction: Not Trusting Team Members’ Intentions (But Saying You Do)
If you’re like me, you work hard and try not to slack off. But even on a day when I worked 12 hours straight with no breaks, I would be MORTIFIED if my boss could just log in and see what’s on my screen at any moment.
There’s something supremely icky about that idea.
And yet, out of fear, many managers whose team members work from home feel the need to check up on people. Or even, in extreme cases, to install apps that randomly screenshot their workers’ desktops to make sure they’re not up to anything funny.
Nothing screams “I DON’T TRUST YOU” like surveillance.
If you are worried about your boss checking up on you like this — or if you’re worried about your employees requiring check-ups — you very likely have a trust problem you didn’t even know about.
In his classic framework, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, management icon Patrick Lencioni shows that “absence of trust” is the first domino that all other team dysfunctions flow from. If you don’t trust someone, how are you possibly going to work well with them?
In particular, the trust that’s often missing from teams of talented people is not trust in people’s skill. Top people are hired for a reason. The more common problem is a lack of trust in one another’s intentions.
Sure, you know that Bob is capable, but is he actually putting the team first in this scenario? Sasha’s talented, yeah, but is she trying to get a leg up at my expense? And so it goes.
The hard truth about trust is you have to show it to get it. Many of us expect other people to earn our trust, but we’re less likely to get trust if we don’t show trust first.
With remote work, we’re in many ways forced to let go and show a little more trust. So resist the urge to add surveillance — or to add rules and policies meant to prevent people from abusing the company. Treat people like adults and see what happens. (If they don’t act like adults, you may have a person problem.)
(BTW, this online course on supercharging remote teamwork has a great lesson on building trust when remote.)
Hidden Dysfunction: Succumbing to Distraction, Instead of Creating Traction
Psychology researcher and author Nir Eyal, who studies human behavior around technology, says that “the most important skill of the future is being ‘indistractable.’”
Indeed, one of workers’ biggest worries about going remote is the panoply of distractions that awaits you at home. The kids, the laundry, the TV, the fridge, and so on.
But Eyal’s book, Indistractable, makes the case that distraction is the #1 productivity killer in the office — not just at home. All the pings and dings of notifications across all our devices are designed to steal our attention from whatever we’re doing. When you’re in the office, you’re faced with constant distractions from your technology, and from your coworkers as well. At least people can’t swing by your desk to ask you questions when you’re working from home!
A big key to managing remote work is to recognize that the adversary to getting your work done is distraction, no matter where you are working from. Working from home means different distractions — but they’re still just that.
Among other things, Eyal’s research shows how the opposite of distraction is not focus; it’s traction.
Being focused on something that doesn’t move us toward our goals is not productive. And yet how many of us have the sneaky habit of being able to buckle down at work… on the wrong things?
I’m hoping that one of the silver linings to this strange and tragic time we’re living through right now can be the fact that shifting to remote work gives so many of us an opportunity to reassess our habits. Let’s use this transition as an excuse to root out some of the hidden flaws that are holding out work back.
Here’s to setting some good boundaries and habits while the iron’s hot — and before we get comfortable again.
Shane Snow is author of Dream Teams and creator of Snow Academy.
