Working from home, how do we adopt this as our new normal?

Working from home, how do we adopt this as our new normal?

Since March this year it's been fair to say that our world has changed. We do things that we took for granted so differently now. Everything in our lives has changed from our home lives to our work lives and even the blend between our work life balance. 

We socialise differently, our children attend school differently, and we work differently. We’ve had to adapt in so many areas of our lives to live in this new world. It's taken a long time to adjust and adopt the explosion of new words added to our vocabulary; "zoom etiquette", "social distancing" and"covideo parties" have become standard daily practice alongside expressions of how we feel or act like “zoombombing” (hijacking a Zoom videocall) a “quaranteam” (online teams created during lockdown) on a  "Blursday" (an unspecified day because of lockdown’s disorientating effect on time), but all are helping people deal with changing work circumstances.

What I want to talk about is how this has affected the way that we work. I have been speaking to many companies recently to see if they have similar pain points in terms of how to bring an organisation together when you are apart. I have run teams remotely for many years but have never found it as difficult as I do now! So what has changed? When I ran remote teams before I would connect with them in person every few months. This made it easier to re-set with the team. I would leave knowing that the team had direction and that we could easily pick up where we left off when I returned home. Fast forward to 2020 and we no longer have this ability with many people in the team working from home and meet ups in the office a thing of the past - in fact, there are new people we have hired that I have never actually met in person!

It's been 7 months now since I was in the same office as my team and what are we missing? What is the thing that I can't put my finger on to why I think something is missing? I was chatting with a peer in another engineering organisation who recently summarized it really well as when you meet in person you have "social currency". When you speak to people in the kitchen or at the water cooler, you get to know them outside and around direct work conversations that come naturally when you are all in the same place. When you no longer have access to people in that way, you lose that content and connection. Yes, you have meetings and you speak to people every day, but the meetings are time restricted and have purpose or set agendas, so you tend to be specific on the calls and avoid small talk in order to conduct what the purpose of the call is. That’s when you start to lose that "currency" and the ability to re-stock without that direct personal contact. After time, the ‘social’ bank is empty and it’s harder to connect. Normally this is the time that you would meet up and fill up again. In 2020 this simply isn't possible, but here’s one way I think you can keep a company aligned and all swimming in the same direction when you are all fully remote: a HACKDAY! 

I participated in many Hack Days at @Yammer and am so excited to be leading the first Hackday at @Polystream as we focus on bringing the team close together whilst apart - How Hard Can It Be? I may have never run a fully remote Hackday, so we shall show how that goes in the coming days with ‘Polystream's Fantom Jam’, but the main idea behind it is that it will allow our teams to build something new and exciting to compliment our new in-game spectating (IGS) platform which has already motivated the team to deliver some of their best work these past few months, wherever they are in the world. When I mentioned this to my CEO @Bruce Grove he was very supportive of dedicating time to our teams to work on something new that is not part of their day jobs! I think it's so important to bring teams together and have some fun, and to remember we are human and need that interaction. Not every meeting at work should be about meetings and work; you need to enjoy what you do and where you are working and that is something that we hold dear to us here @ Polystream! My hope for our Hackday is not that we create something because sales or engineering feel it’s the right business thing to do, but is to allow people the freedom to experiment, to have fun, to share, and to connect in a way our normal routine doesn’t always allow. Trust and innovation is important to us as a team, but that can only come from the people involved, and the culture we create around them. 

We shall be writing up a blog over the course of next week on the progress of our Hackday!

I am keen to hear back on peoples thoughts on how they are adapting their organisations to keep their culture strong during this evolvement of the workplace? I would love to have conversations with people over what you are doing so please feel free to reach out