In a recent post, I proposed a framework for incorporating relationship design into efforts designed to create outcomes through structured experiences that empower people.?
My claim is that we tend to jump from outcomes to structure without giving sufficient consideration to the kind of relationships that will enable success on an enduring basis.?At the time, I was thinking primarily about customer relationships.?But now that we are reopening all our offices, and doing so with the added variable of working remotely from home, we need to give our full attention to relationship design if we are to get our workforce off on the right foot.
Again, the temptation will be to go straight from outcomes—enabling people to do productive work—to structure—how to redesign our office spaces to support a hybrid work model—without thinking through what kind of relationships we want to foster.?Now, implicitly we will gravitate to structures that “feel right” to us, and that will signal they induce relationships that we like, but what happens when you want an open bull pen but I want a closed office door??We need a vocabulary to talk through design decisions that will have decisive effects on our future way of working.?We can’t just say “Better conference rooms!?Collaboration studios!?Bigger Zoom screens!?More Slack!”?We need to have a theory of the case to guide us.?Of course, our theory will be wrong, at least at first.?No one is going to get this right on the first go.?But without a theory, you cannot see what you are getting wrong and course-correct accordingly.?Instead, you just argue or gripe or eventually capitulate.?We can do better than that.?
This is a situation that calls for one of my true talents.?I like to call it, being the first fool.?Put something out there that is plausible—indeed, the very best you can do—and expose it to critique.?People are much better at editing than they are at drafting.?Give them something to edit, and then work with them to critique it fairly and accurately.?
With that in mind, what are the relationships we want our new hybrid work model to incorporate??Here is a first cut at some of them:
- Jettison reflex commuting.?It may be hard to remember, but going to the office every day no matter what was the old normal.?The pandemic has taught us that this is far from the most productive way to conduct our business.?The hybrid model is specifically intended to achieve a better balance—hence its almost universal endorsement, at least for the present.
- Support team dynamics.?We know from our remote work experience that working alone is more efficient for getting known tasks done whereas working in teams is more effective for creating and developing new opportunities.?This is behind the almost universal commitment to allocate more office space to conference rooms and socialization areas.
- Give individuals a place.?This one has been missing in action in most of what I have been reading.?People need a place of their own.?Where do I go when I get to the office??And where do I find Harry, Mary, or Sherry??What do I do with my stuff??And, I liked having a place where I could “be me” by displaying my own artifacts.?There is a relationship here between the enterprise and the individual that respects the latter’s individuality.?We don’t want to lose that.
- Facilitate peer-to-peer connections.?To the degree that space is more fluid at the office, we are going to need easy ways to find people, both digitally and physically.?There are all kinds of things we could do with smart phones, smart badges, key fobs, and the like, but we have to watch out for creepy surveillance vibes.?In the old normal, we solved this through a directory of places, with each person having an assigned spot.?I doubt that is going to work in the new normal, but we are going to need something analogous to fill the void.
- Avoid mixed-mode meetings.?Meetings where some of the participants are in the room and others join by video conference manage to combine the worst of both mediums.?They can be done, but you are swimming upstream the whole time.?The challenge is that they are so convenient.?Well, convenience turned out to matter a lot during the pandemic, but going forward, we need to substitute intelligent design.?Better to meet less often and properly than to leaving hanging chads across our web of relationships.
- Onboard new colleagues productively.?This, I predict, is where we are going to miss our old-office normal the most.?As humans we are mammals first, and we do our best bonding where we are present with others in the same room.?Getting someone settled, for example, implies finding them a place of their own.?Starting the web of relationships begins with the person sitting next to you.?Getting to know “your floor”—both the people and the amenities—is an important milestone.?Neglect all these, and risk a new colleague who feels disconnected and vaguely alone.
- Enable self-organization.?Since we know we are going to get this wrong the first time out, we need to allow people to self-organize the spaces we so thoughtfully planned out for them.?It is a little bit like all those paths you see through public lawns where the pavement did not coincide with the direction people actually wanted to take.?The solution—postpone the paving until you see the tracks people have made.?Same idea can apply to organizing our workspaces.?
- Substitute accountability for supervision.?This is actually probably a whole other topic, as it aligns with a cultural move away from hierarchical, attendance-based management modeled after a parent-child relationship to a collegial, OKR-based management model based on an adult-adult relationship.?But space does have a role to play here because we still want to facilitate conversations of accountability, both individually and at a team level as well.?It just argues for having rooms with closed doors.?Privacy helps maintain community by protecting face.?
Love to hear what people are actually doing, to learn what is working and what’s not.?Please feel free to chime in.
That’s what I think.?What do you think?
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CEO at TechSmith, Digital Transformation Leader, Corporate and NFP Board Member
3 年First - I'm a big fan - thanks for the article. Our biggest concerns with hybrid are mixed-mode meetings, or more broadly, incongruent communication styles. We have always valued flexibility and empowerment at our ~300 person tech company. We are still remote and are trying to reconcile how our hybrid design should reflect those values of flexibility. In a hybrid situation, it feels impossible for every team member to be empowered to work from anywhere because it impacts other team members. --If only one person wants to work from home then everyone else on their team is impacted - employees who crave F2F don't get what they feel they need to be successful because now they are on Zoom all day even if they are in the office. --Or worse, as you point out, mixed-mode meetings happen and those result in unequal stature which ultimately is not fair for the remote employees. --Also, not everyone is equally adept in the areas of emotional intelligence and neuroscience to understand the long-term risks of lack of F2F contact. No one knows what the long-term impacts might be to creativity, retention, and working relationships - so without more information what framework should we use to guide decision making? --Finally, an office facility has a network effect - it is more valuable to everyone if more are using it. For us that suggests prescribing days to go into the office to maximize the value to everyone - but what if those days don't align to work that is best done in the office. I have not seen a lot discussed on this kind of issue - how much of the hybrid design can be left up to the individual vs. how much has to be coordinated to gain the best benefits from the in-office time? Remote technology is amazing and we are so thankful to have business continuity during COVID because of it. But it's not the same as F2F, not yet. What we ultimately want is for work to get done in the best place for that particular work. That is easy if you are talking about individual contributors or 2-pizza-rule size teams - simply let the employees decide where to work. But how do you design for more complex objectives than individual tasks?
Ex-IBM. Ex-Fidelity Investments. Product-Led Growth executive aligning Marketing, Sales, and Product to accelerate ARR and customer retention. Experienced AI & ML portfolio leader, facilitator, and agilist.
3 年I appreciate the point of view and the eagerness to 'be the first fool' to be knowingly wrong with the desire to learn to be roughly right. For the article itself, I generally have a similar point of view, but have a counter-point to one of your ideas to further the conversation. I wonder if 'avoid mixed-mode meetings' could benefit from a rethink of the current binary view of either in-office or a 2D video call. We've been exploring options for how VR (Virtual Reality) and/or AR (Augmented Reality) could bridge the gap between the limitations of video calls with the benefits of physical proximity. While the technologies we've tried are interesting and at times surprisingly good, the technology is not yet to a place where it truly feels like we're 'all together' at the same time. One of the more interesting learnings came from Spatial, a VR tool for meeting in a 3D virtual space with avatars and real-world constructs like screen sharing or document collaboration, where we found that the 'physical' boundaries placed in the virtual environment coupled with 360-degree audio (headset) meant that when someone to your left and behind you spoke up, you'd naturally turn your head to look at them, even in a virtual space. This mimicked an aspect of real-world spaces where spatial audio is simply the norm and isn't even considered as an important part of interaction, but turns out to be far more important that we would have ever realized had we not explored the VR and AR options available today. My point is that while you're describing an either/or of video call or on-site team proximity, there's going to be a technology solution eventually that bridges that gap and makes the delineation less important. I am curious to hear your (and others) thoughts.
Top Voice in AI | Helping SMBs Scale with AI & Automation | CIO at TetraNoodle | AI Speaker & Author | 4x AI Patents | Travel Lover??
3 年To be effective, working as a team means to have the right relationships and cooperation with each other. Without them, the teamwork would not exist at all. To have good relationships with colleagues, you can learn from how you relate to your close friend or relative. It is because human relations are similar to teamwork relationships so you can easily apply the things what you learnt from your closest friends in friendship, family member in relatives and schoolmate in classmates relationship. Interesting Geoffrey Moore