Know Your Limits - Get Off The Never-ending Meeting Carousel

In our new extreme-VUCA, crisis-led sudden-remote working paradigm, it’s worth spending time thinking about how you structure your online interactions and your work. More than ever, to stay sane, we must recognise that we have to be compassionate not only towards others but ourselves and that we don’t all work the same way and we all have limits. Limits we should know and understand and then take the time to communicate them to each other.

Of course, not everyone has the luxury to pick and choose what they engage with and for some of us, it can seem like a never-ending carousel of meetings we have to be a part of and the more of those that are above and beyond our natural limits, the more exacerbated our feelings of despondency and anxiety become and the more negative our outlook. What we can do and should strive to do, even in the most strict of environments and irrespective of the level we are at, is communicate when we have hit the “too much” limit and what we believe to be the natural rhythm and scope of ability in interaction that we can comfortably cope with, to our team leaders. They may be able to accommodate it, or they may not, but they have at least been offered honest feedback and that’s invaluable for both parts. 

Added to that, most of us in teams are fearful for our employment at this time and feel it’s not the right moment to speak up, be it because we don’t want to rock the boat, or because we genuinely understand the strain the business is under, so we think our “interaction limits” are inconsequential at a time like this. Realistically though, we ought to reframe that thought towards realising that not speaking up about our limits is unsustainable and is depriving the enterprise of the very resource we are trying to provide by staying quiet. In other words, not speaking up about our limits is not a mature and thoughtful way of going about this and it helps no one long term. 

If you’re a team leader, ask. Provoke these conversations and initiate these individual internal lines of thought. Underline it’s important that people comprehend what their natural tendencies are, and that the business finds their help in understanding and communicating this, in order to be productive, to be very valuable and necessary.

Encourage your people to spend time realising where their overload threshold is. We all have a certain amount of online (in particular video) interaction we can comfortably and productively engage with, and anything above this amount will be nothing more than presentism at and a box-ticking exercise. Understanding what is “too much” is the key to building healthy work habits in this heavily digital environment. 

A tip from some of the teams we’ve been working with these last two weeks is to ask your teammates to help you create a distinction between “active” meetings and “passive” or “listening” meetings.

Obviously, most of the meetings that are 1-on-1 will fall into the first category, but then simply encourage teammates to only schedule as many of those as they think they can handle, feel free not to pick up a call or accept every meeting invite, let them know it’s ok to use any of the channels and answer something by text or email in lieu of a call if it better works for them etc.

For group and team-level meetings, allow people to engage as much or as little as needed, and let them listen in to some things without demanding constant participation except for the initial round-the-table human moments. 

Crucially, consider dropping the “video-always-on” requirement for a while. It’s tempting to press as it feels that nearly everyone is on board with it now and we just need to carry on until we’ve all created the right habit, but the reality is that it’s an overbearing demand to some of us and the resentment of having to do it can negatively impede on the meeting to where it defeats the very point of supposedly creating more closeness. If teams work on understanding individual limits and communicating them first and find ways to accommodate those in the way they interact then video should come in naturally on its own as a result of the sense of closeness and comfort created.

Teams that are already psychologically safe feel comfortable exploring and stating these limits, teams that lack it will struggle and will have to conquer a fair amount of uncomfortability to bring themselves to either think under flexible terms with regards to interaction online but it will undoubtedly be worth it and only bring them closer together to achieve it. 

Stay safe, stay sane and stay Psychologically Safe. 

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Don't send your teams home with a laptop, a Jira and Slack account and a prayer!

As a tech company passionately working on ways to create psychologically safe teams whatever their location, we at PeopleNotTech have been considering the role we can play in supporting teams in light of COVID-19. We all have to keep thinking of the work-family aka the team and the ways to redefine work in the digital playing field with an emphasis on EQ and we rapidly have to find ways to turn that into a comfortable and efficient reality for all of us.

If you’re preparing a team for remote working and want to kit them with the right tools to manage this, we are offering:

1. An extended trial of the Psychological Safety software i.e. we have opened up accounts to your teams for a period for free so your people can express how they are feeling (in particular in these anxious times) and so that team leaders can quickly assess their team on topics such as Morale, Resilience, Courage, Flexibility, Learning, Openness, Empathy and more;

2. A “Stay Connected” questions pack designed specifically for teams who are transitioning to remote working; 

3. A free 1-on-1 online EQ crash course for your team leaders to help them support their now remote team confidently.

It is painless to get anyone up on the software - there is no implementation, set-up, extensive training or data needed, teams can be using the work tool within hours. Reach out to us at [email protected] and tell us more about your working-from-home efforts and readiness in light of COVID-19 and we’ll do our best to help.

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