Could Covid-Sequestering Be the Ultimate Escape Room?
Your Culture Has an Opportunity You Should Not Squander
Episode 2: Never Let an Emergency go to Waste | Modus Institute
It’s not the tech, it’s your people.
Most people are working from home right now. A situation thought impossible a few weeks ago.
Yet here we are.
There are several groups I’m working with who are struggling with this and all the internet gives them is the tech. “Use this chat tool!” “Share files here!”
But this isn’t a tech issue. This is all culture all the time.
If you are struggling, your tech might be annoying (for some short-sighted companies the tech might not exist at all), but the tech is the tools your culture uses to get work done. In an emergency, a thoughtful culture can come up with workaround for anything.
Escape rooms are a popular group experience where teams leave the office, have some fun, figure out ways to solve problems, and escape from a cramped space to victory. It would be helpful right now to not focus on the tech, but focus on the problem.
We are all working in an unfamiliar way, yet work must continue. We are all worried, but we can work through these difficult times. This is like a huge, distributed escape room with totally unique rules for each team.
So, what do we need to know about our culture and how it is operating?
Do We Have Clarity?
Do we know what needs to be done, who is able to do it, how doing it will be different today than it was last week, how the other groups our team works with are doing, if client expectations have changed, how billing occurs … this list could go on for pages. The answer to these is often going to be “no” or “it depends” or “in flux”.
So, clarity is unlikely to be “we understand everything that is going on.”
Your clarity needs to be “we are speaking often, know what we are doing next, and sharing information as it becomes available.”
Dictates are not Discussions
Micromanaging and falling back to strong scopes of work are your personal recipe for disaster. Right now, you are not in the office, you are in a huge escape room. Everyone needs to have ideas; ideas need to be acted on.
If you are a manager, you need to create collaborative working arrangements to solve problems (again, think escape room). People in your team need to talk more than ever and you, as a group, need to set the goals for completing work or learning and then act on them.
Circle the Wagons
Here you go, the ultimate team building exercise. You have a common problem in a domain no one is skilled at or owns. Everyone is equally adrift, worried, and clueless.
Your team needs to do a quick charter — where you agree how you work together, who can do what (not who is assigned what), how you will collaborate, how you will run daily huddles, how you will visualize the work you are all doing.
Your team needs a quick communications plan — What is the tech you are employing and how is it to be used. “Talk to me on slack” doesn’t cut it. Where are files stored? How are customers contacted? When can I ask my team members questions? Do I know I’m expected to ask my team members questions?
Use this as an opportunity to smooth over some of the rough edges in your culture that you see every day. (Consider three 15 minute check-ins per day AM, Noon, PM at the start, get people talking and used to working together).
Collaboration Allays Fear
Your team is worried. The stakes are real.
If your people build out silos-of-one in their homes, their fear will continue to grow.
Working together creates higher quality product, immediately spreads learning, and allows people to calm nerves. Simply having someone there and knowing that person is a professional and trusted is all the better. So this is a multi-win, find ways to collaborate.
Map, Visualize, and Limit the Work in Progress
Now, more than ever, your team needs to see work happening. There’s a lot to do and we get reassurance seeing completion. Victory is pleasing, imagine that.
Verbal report outs are, have always been, and always shall be boring.
Visualize your work using an online tool like Asana. People will see in real time how work is getting done and things are a little more stable than they might fear.
This also provides triggers for action. When someone sees completion of a particular piece of work, they know they need to react. If someone sees that something is stuck, they have a different reaction.
These visual cues are crucial in times of uncertainty and when your normal ways of working have been removed.
That’s today’s entry. See the others or check the videos out at Modus Institute.
