Teams to MS Teams and back...

It’s been almost 180 days that I have been at the helm of Solv, attempting to?solve for growth challenges of MSMEs in India. It has been a once-in-a-lifetime experience taking reigns of a 170 people team, remotely. Within two days of starting this journey in early April this year, I got hit with?Covid19, so did?several Solvers and their extended families - what followed?nationwide was?probably once in a lifetime black swan for each one of us.?The team’s?strong?belief in?the core purpose of?improving the livelihoods of MSMEs?& doing our bit in nation-building,?helped us?deliver on our customer promise every single day, despite the severest adversity.

Fast forward 6 months - thanks to the speed of vaccination;?this past week was the first time that I traveled to Bangalore?to meet my team in person.?And boy, what an experience it was!

As?a team, in person, we?were able to get tough things done, more of them done?&?faster!

On my flight back to Delhi, I wondered why…

At 30,000 ft in the air, devoid of any distractions I was able to pin-point on 3 things:

1. Collaborative Focus:?Start-ups are in the business of solving hard problems, which usually aren’t a one-person job. It takes intense focussed attention of multiple functions/people to crack open a problem. Case in point, we had been struggling to solve our supply chain design in NCR for the last 3-4 months. In-person discussions between sales, category, supply chain, and finance helped get a framework in place this past week.?In-person,?the team was able to focus together for longer- thanks to the camaraderie, oodles of humor (hard to come by in remote meetings, no?), and some friendly banter.

2. Interaction:?The first half an hour on Day 1 was a bit of awkwardness – whether to say hi, kick heels or shake hands. It seemed as if we had forgotten the art of human interaction. The awkwardness quickly gave way to familiarity, by the end of Day 1 we were almost back to being humans! Thanks to the entire week of in-person interactions, we have now been able to add a personality to the person and look beyond the KPIs that each one of us drives. On-screen one-ones gave way to walk and talk, all of a sudden things were a lot friendlier and a lot less formal. On-screen emojis gave way to real infectious smiles, claps gave way to more connected high-fives.

3. Serendipity:?Impromptu coffee catch-ups, sharing a lunch meal, and celebrating the journey over a drink in the evening made way for unstructured conversations, hard to carry in a remote work environment. We realized that not every interaction or decision needs to be a slave to a meeting invite, it’s ok to pull people aside in the spur, take calls and move on…and that a lot of solutions to tough problems can be serendipitous.

?So what’s the future of a high-performance workplace?

?A lot more in-person teams and a bit less of MS teams…thoughts?

?*Btw we at Solv love MS teams as a collaboration tool. If you think human in-person interactions are imperative for overall mental well-being and individual & organizational growth- you’re not alone, my 1-week experiment has convinced me to strive to make these connections stronger.?

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