Virtualizing Culture - The Human Side of Transition
I set out today to write a piece on virtualizing culture, or what happens to culture when we all become virtual workers. As I organize around this topic, I don’t want to be too shallow in my perspective, or to come off as I am an instant expert on virtual culture. We need to let the change settle before we can fully process what has just happened. As far as experience we’ve had remote workers since the dawn of the internet, and I have been one of them my entire career. I am an expert on working outside of a corporate office as my primary; but even to me, this moment is novel. This current environment is different in scale. I am no longer the “road warrior”, the special type resource who shows up from time to time as he visits the world. I am like everyone else in a shared space of remoteness. “Remote” has become the office, and those in the office are the new loners. My experience is likely different than others. I personally feel like it's Thanksgiving and everyone has shown up at my virtual house. It feels cluttered, and distracting to have everyone in my space, but no matter how you came to this moment, we are all a little disoriented.
BEAM ME UP
New virtual workers are a little wacky, spouting new jargon like “I’m going to Zoom you”, or my favorite line for a t-shirt “Gallery View changed my life”. I will be glad when everyone gets their balance. I am already tired of the rookies. I joke like I have some experiential edge to all the newcomers, but in reality as someone who has been doing virtual for decades, this is new to me too. We are in a magical moment of change.
Let’s discuss just a few things that have drastically changed. One that came to me last week was the amount of digital clutter this creates. If you go to work, you leave your house, get in your car, buy a bagel, go to a meeting, go to lunch, sit at your desk, talk with co-workers, and eventually drive home. During this time there is an almost endless amount of media forms that present information to you. There is a natural context that comes from each step of this. However, in our new world, that is all compressed into a single billboard we call your computer screen. What happens is we lose all that depth of the physical context, and we feel somewhat disenfranchised by the lack of anchoring we perceive in our new virtual world. As an example, no one thinks twice about a road that has 3 restaurants on a given block, but if you digitally see a digital happy hour, a work meeting, a virtual art show, virtual yoga, video conference call with your grandmother, all coming at you with overlapping time slots, we begin to freak out a little, at least that has been my experience. Our mental triggers are at play. We don’t feel an obligation to visit every restaurant we drive by, but virtual options seem more compelling. Maybe it is the fact that in the past, most of us have been able to consume the full offering of virtual that has come our way. It was a natural dosage that fit our schedules. Now, we have an increasing volume that comes from workers, friends, and strangers, without our normal landscape of context; and it is emotionally palpable and a little stressful. First, I think we need to remind ourselves to breathe, then we are going to have to figure out how to build that past contextual depth into our new virtual space, or we’re going to be a little less deep and contextualized as individuals. This effect will likely transfer to companies and their cultures as well.
Another recent observation that I believe everyone will become aware of, over the next few weeks is that words like “Virtual” become meaningless. When we scheduled meetings in the physical world, we didn’t describe them as “At the corporate glass walled meeting room on the 2nd floor” meeting, or “coffee shop table for two” meeting . We instead called them meetings. The physical location was understood. The same is true for virtual meetings. We will need to find more operative descriptions of our organized meetings that extend beyond the fact that they are virtual. I use meetings as an analogy, but this effect is more systemic. We will likely have to reconsider how we process and describe things in this screen-based world. In a way we are emulating the physical past in this new world order, it will require us to re-envision how we conceptualize and perform our work. The fragile piece of this will be the sense of place that workers felt in their old work environments. There are subtle things that our wellbeing has developed around, some of those come from our work experience.They are often unintentional and unrealized, but still significant contributors to our identity. Just like a coach who delivers a pre-game speech from within hallowed halls of a historic locker room, the atmosphere matters. Environmentals are at play in our corporate culture; and those just changed for some period of time. How can we re-establish our physical archetypes within our digital landscape?
OUT OF SIGHT
Another area of challenge for companies is the span of control. We are living in 2020, but many companies have vestiges of the past hanging out in their management culture. Companies are often organized in a manner that supports interaction and control. Many of these physical constructs just vaporized. This is not just manager employee relationships, but also the collaboration between Engineering and Marketing that happens in the lunchroom. Like a lovely garden, many corporate facilities cultivate cross-pollination. The good news is that global companies have had to deal with this to address their distributed companies They have had to consider what operations and personnel belong in their NYC office, versus their San Diego or London offices. How you break up your teams will determine how your culture and company perform.
As for the challenge of controlling output. I think that is the answer, controlling output. I used to have a boss in the past that lived 4-5 states away from me. We would see each other every few weeks somewhere through event travel, but he called often, and always on Friday at 5:30. We were both still working, often sitting in the airport, or on a commute home. I always found it funny, because I am a bit of a boy scout. I am known for over producing, and documenting what I do. There were others who may have actually needed a check in. Ultimately, we had great conversations. I think he enjoyed talking with me to close out his mind each week, but I always chuckled when I saw the phone ringing at 5:30 on Friday. So, yes you can call your team and you should; but as with the case above, the real control is in a process to organize output. I have made a career out of this simple three-phase process to measure results. Start with saying what you will do, by what time. Next, check in on the progress 60% through, and finish by discussing your accomplished results. During the third or last session you also plan the actions for the next iteration. This could be quarterly, monthly, or weekly. This is similar to a portion of the Agile method. It is a process of time boxing, and creating a structured review of activities. This approach becomes an efficient way to manage teams in a virtual world. I also believe it is the optimal way to do work within corporate environments in general. In the sixth article in this series we talked about the rise of individualism in corporate culture. Creative workers demand schedule flexibility to align with their own energies and circumstances. They work better under systems that manage results, than those that manage time spent. This current shift in our way of working can be an influence for your optimizing some old ways of thinking out of the business.
The damage to our sense of place is a more difficult challenge. It has less precedence, and thus harder to quickly determine a broad path that works for all. How do you create a sense of place in a virtual environment, that feels as tangible as your workers are used to? I can not say I have all the answer to this, but I recommend considering these following activities a potential tools:
- Take a Strategic Breath - In this period no one can effectively work on their market evaluation, corporate board members are also surviving through this period, and I think great leadership will be best demonstrated in those companies who take a deep cleansing breath at the executive level. Establish a more relaxed state of being, and communicate that up, down, and out. Share that the company is ok, and doing things to enable itself for long-term success, and the short-term wellbeing of its employees and customers. Everyone needs some stability to build upon.
- Listening & Understanding - Our team at Share More Stories, works with companies to build better understanding of their customers, and employees, to improve their brands and their corporate culture. We use storytelling and machine learning to get to deeper perspectives within the community of people. As mentioned in the third article in this series on the objective of culture, understanding is a critical and under-developed corporate skill. You can call us to discuss a project, or consider organizing designers within your workforce, to do some out reach, to better understand how your company is feeling as a whole. I believe that listening is a verb, and understanding a remedy. Find expanded ways to listen to your customers and workforce during these times.
- Measure Differently - With the reduction in commutes, travel, and hallway conversations, your overall office productivity will likely increase. Consider giving everyone a new KPI to actually reduce their allocated time for task work, and to formally work in time to increase their connections with others. This could be structured, or unstructured in method. However you choose to implement, I do believe most workers, new to virtual working, will need training and guidance to establish limits. Everyone now has to formally inject social time into their schedules. This may be counterintuitive to some, but I am confident this is good advice from my learnings as a remote resource.
- Promote Social Tools and Content Structures for Them - I suspect this will be a period growth for tools like Slack, Zoom, ClickUp, and Workplace. Companies should promote a range of social tools to help deepen the context of virtual communication, but don’t stop with platform promotion. I believe it is worthy for some of your workers to further design the content and experience within these tools; and to then train workers how to apply and build working skill sets using them. You designed your meeting rooms, and your cafeteria, shouldn’t you now play some role in enabling the virtual architecture for collaboration? Years ago when doing system integration work, I wrote a maxim that states the success of an application is based on 5 attributes: Stability, Performance, Adoption, Efficacy, and Cost. Successful tools take an effort to implement. I believe that too often companies spend too little time considering implementation at a content and application level when deploying social tools. Consider measuring the incremental impact of social tool investments as part of orchestrating results.
- Embolden your Clubs - Many larger companies have clubs of chess players, musicians, quilters, and college clubs. These groups usually live in the shadows of relative obscurity within the company, but maybe this is a time to enable them further. Use their activity to further connect others and demonstrate the interesting depth of your culture. May a virtual contest of sorts could become a daily or weekly past time that helps your people relax and feel included in something bigger.
- Be Open to Possibility - The old saying “Necessity is the mother of invention” refers to the fact that change creates challenges, and opportunities. There will be new ways of thinking, new learnings, and uncovered opportunities that some will build upon. How do you inject some of this type thinking into your culture? This mental framing of being open to the possibility not only has a positive tone that will help your workforce seek out silver linings, it may just lead to a great advancement within your company.
- Live Events - Many of the global companies over the last couple decades have been moving their in person annual meetings to be virtual events. In the past I used to fly around to make 3-4 meetings in January and February just participate in the kickoffs of my company and partners. You were in the flow, but it was an exhausting way to start the year. I was ecstatic when many companies worked to reduce the costs of these and moved them to virtual events. Though people weren’t flying around, the companies continued to pour tons of time and resources into the events in order to really develop a sense of place and belonging through extravagant video production, and online tools. There are mature streaming platforms to support such events. This type of event, several weeks out from now, could be an interesting way to put some shared experience in the middle of your virtual culture, and re-energize your team.
- Take Note of the Trash in your Can - There is some good news in this new shared experience. That is some bad habits that will not transfer from your past physical world, to this new virtual one. In this new expression of your company’s culture, there will be new voices, new perspectives, and new ways of thinking. This will be in part to the fact that some old ruts will become irrelevant, while new needs give rise to change. I speculate that this is an overwhelming positive impact on where you can take your culture. Consider this time like boot camp, and old ways of thinking, the loss in fat from the exercise.
- Travel Size - You are going on a trip to virtual, you can’t pack everything, so what do you take. How do you reinvent a travel version of your culture? Hopefully some of the tools discussed above help you virtualize the company in a manner that your workers feel newly empowered. It is a great time to test new ideas. We are all awake and our brains are sponges. It is a good time to absorb new approaches.
THE PRESENT IS A PRESENT
Some of you reading may have been looking for ways to initiate changes in your culture. Maybe you have been looking for the right time, mode or place to start. I suggest to you, that this moment is the most brilliant time to orchestrate change. Change is afoot, and transition affects the brain. Your audience is already warmed up and paying attention. Now the question is what to do with it?
I don’t think the right move is to try to re-facade the new world with the old. This is new, and alternative. I do believe you do need to remind people who they are as part of a shared culture, but lean into the change. This is a rare gift. The awkwardness isn’t all your efforts to change the culture, that’s the virus’ fault. Use this time of natural adaptation and bonding to make some strong authentic and enabling changes to your culture within this transitional virtual world, and then let them become your company’s new go forward.
I wish everyone safety, contentment, and a clear sense of being during our crazy joint experience of COVID19. Good luck to all!
"The Human Side of Transformation" Links: