Don't Let Distance Distance Your Team

For workplace culture, think about the behaviors and interactions, not just the processes and methods. I've been seeing article after article talking about what's been missed with Zoom, Teams, Asana, etc. I've had conversations with people in leadership positions where I keep hearing excuses of lack of teamwork and camaraderie due to remote work.

No! Reject that each and every time you hear it. The problem is that as leaders, we didn't do what leaders needed to do...adapt...adjust.... There is absolutely NO software I should rely on to build my team. I can USE the software to help ME do the work of building my team. But Zoom, Teams, Asana, whatever you use/used, wasn't designed for that any more than the PowerPoint slides we overuse were never meant to BE the plan. It's a tool to help visualize and communicate the plan.

As your organization makes arrangements to return to the office, brainstorm how you can do/be different. You don't HAVE to go back to the way it was done. And if leaders are honest with themselves, a large part of the reason cohesion was lost is because we were face-to-face with our inefficiencies. We didn't have the awkward small-talk in the hallway while waiting on the microwave or banter waiting for the meeting to start that masquerades as getting to know each other. But we had the phone calls we could have used to ask deep questions we may not have asked between cubicle walls that could help us get to know each other with a reasonable level of privacy.

As a leader, if this time didn't bring you closer to your teams, something may be wrong. Or, maybe it was already wrong. If you weren't engaging with your team members and actively virtually encouraging them to engage with each other as best they could ESPECIALLY from March-Sep 2020, reflect on why that is. Not to beat yourself up, but to use it as a learning point. While the initial threat of COVID may be reduced, we're going to be more virtual and more remote going forward. More importantly, we need to CONNECT more than ever.

In March/April 2020, I spent time scouring Google, Pinterest, etc for ways to do virtual team-building. It was obvious this wasn't something that would blow over and we could just go back to what we were doing. It was also clear that with the levels of disruption affecting my team, there's no way I could ask for more from them without giving them more. Everything we knew had changed, so even expecting the basics required extra effort. And that was just from the team members who'd been there before. New hires and new arrivals was another challenge altogether, forcing me daily to rethink norms and practices I took for granted and trying to do things that didn't exist without being there in-person.

Leaders, refresh, reflect, and recharge, to be the leader your team needs. It's going to be tough, because you've already experienced that not everyone else who should be leading will. You may have peers who choose not to model the organization's stated values. You may even have leaders above you whose example you will have to discard and double-down on for the people you lead. That's the leadership challenge. The blame-line burden. That's also how we can engage our teams through remote work, through geographic separation. It CAN be done. Whether you CHOOSE to or not is something different.