 We have been virtual for almost a year and a half right now and lately I have been reflecting that we are testing the limits of remote work. In my own environment I am now seeing clear trends of what I would call very potent “digital cabals” that is completely unaddressed and misunderstood by HR – remember teams went virtual overnight last year and there has been zero training on fully digital communications at any level. Team members have been left to “figure it out”. I found a really great article on HBR that I am reproducing below that offers a great perspective on where this is going. Across jobs, companies, and industries, people’s success has always depended not just on what they produce or deliver, but also on their ability to navigate the murky waters of office politics. A great deal of scientific research has explored the hidden potent forces underlying the formal and informal power dynamics in any group or organization, unsurprisingly highlighting the pervasive and sometimes toxic nature of office politics. But what happens to office politics when you remove the office? Although virtual work has existed for some time now, the pandemic has dramatically changed the context of work by fully removing the office, eliminating interpersonal contact and physical human interaction — and with it, opportunities to engage in tactics of manipulation or impression management. As one of our clients recently lamented: “Without the office, how can I pretend to work?” Many people have by now recovered a certain degree of normalcy by returning to the office, albeit less often, and without as many colleagues around. In fact, for a large proportion of the industrialized workforce, the big bulk of work continues to be done from home, with most work interactions confined to Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc. What does this all mean for office politics? Do the old norms and rules still apply? Can we expect a reduction in bias and nepotism, and an increase in meritocratic talent management practices? Is technology sanitizing the dark side of human behavior at work, forcing us to focus on our actual job performance, reducing the impact of informal networks and soft power at work? Even without the office, it’s naïve to expect office politics to disappear, much like a company’s culture isn’t erased just because people are working from home. In our view, there are three key opportunities that professionals can seize during this transition to office-less work politics: The opportunity to reset relationships. First, the shift to remote work has profoundly upended the patterns of how we interact at work, and this represents an opportunity to reset your relationships with your boss and colleagues. If you’ve been less than successful in the past at office politics, this is a moment to reflect on how you can turn the situation around. Start by considering whether your boss had reason — justified or not — to question your ability to deliver on assignments as promised. The shift to virtual work is your chance to lay out expectations for both performance and communication channels. If you’re crystal clear about how frequently she would like you to communicate with her, and in what way, it gives you the opportunity to over deliver and ensure that she never has to question whether you’re working on the right things, or whether they’ll be done in a timely fashion. Then, consider the social side of office politics. It’s possible that others invested more time and energy in building personal relationships with colleagues, while you held yourself at a remove. The pandemic provides a natural opportunity to engage more deeply — whether or not you’ve done so in the past. Try suggesting catch-up calls or genuinely inquiring about others’ well-being. The opportunity for substance to prevail. At one time or another, almost all of us have had an irritating coworker who is “all hat and no cattle,” touting their (minimal) accomplishments and charming their way into undeserved promotions. That form of office politics is almost universally reviled — and thankfully, it’s much harder for braggarts and showboats to prevail in a virtual environment. They don’t have easy access to interstitial moments — in the breakroom or walking out to the parking lot after work — to press their agendas. And in a world where every extra minute on a Zoom meeting feels like a lifetime, their bloviating and chest-thumping can be seen for the waste of time that it is. A virtual work environment offers much more of an opportunity to be judged on the output of your work, rather than your messaging around it. In some cases, the shift to virtual may even help limit unconscious biases. Automattic, the company behind WordPress, actually hires job candidates via chat; new employees often have never spoken to someone live before they start the job. “We’re always looking at what we can do to make it as much about the work,” company founder Matt Mullenweg told The New York Times, “and not extraneous stuff, like how you’re dressed, how you showed up, how you sound, how you look, where you live. All those things ultimately don’t matter, particularly for an internet company. So, let’s just remove it from the process entirely.” The opportunity to diversify your networks. These days, many companies — if not most — are international. The discussion around working virtually often focuses on the fact that it’s harder to network with colleagues with whom you used to share an office, for the obvious reason that we tend to build deeper emotional and social connections with people who are physically closer to us. But working from remote locations also gives you an advantage: the opportunity to build relationships with colleagues and clients worldwide that you may have neglected otherwise. In that sense, virtual work is a great leveler, because it reduced our bias for working with those who are close to us, which, by extension, invites us to work with people who are not just physically distant, but also psychologically more diverse (culture and values travel together). So, this is a great opportunity to diversity your networks. You can do this by setting up one-on-one calls, or even engaging in small ways, such as sending an email to check in, or forwarding interesting articles. This becomes an important competitive advantage because so many professionals — because they haven’t consciously focused on it — tend to have remarkably homogeneous networks, filled with people who work at their same company or in their same office. You can make your network much more resilient, and ultimately more useful, by focusing on developing “bridging capital” — building heterogeneous connections with colleagues who are different from you — and connecting with colleagues in other parts of the world. To be sure, an office-less environment isn’t a panacea. Human nature hasn’t changed overnight, and back channel communication and power plays won’t simply evaporate. It’s also possible that, as the world slowly reopens and some professionals come back to the office, we run the risk of developing a “two-tiered” system of office politics, where the people who are able to be together in the office experience preferential treatment compared to those who are still working from home, even in the absence of actual performance differences between both groups. Those are legitimate concerns. But by following the strategies above, you’re far more likely to be “politically” successful during this liminal time as our conceptions of office life continue to shift. Let me know what you think!
DM me @philippemora on IG and Twitter My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Digital Product thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader
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 When the pandemic first sent office employees home last year, knowledge workers and managers didn’t know what types of interactions they needed to succeed. I am reproducing this fascinating article from Kristen Senz at Harvard Business School because it really resonated with me and the experience I have had working with my teams remotely for more than a year. A lot of non verbal cues are not only missed but most importantly many times misunderstood, which in a corporate setting can lead to disaster. The Harvard research points to “bounce time” for example, which doesn’t exist really in a virtual setting. Executives are starting to envision post-COVID collaboration in organizational cultures reshaped by remote work. Research by Leslie Perlow, the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at HBS, and colleagues sheds light on the interactions that were lost during the pandemic’s early weeks, and how teams adapted or faltered. The findings also hold practical implications for managers struggling with low engagement and inefficiency amid a lack of face time and continued pandemic stress. “One of the big insights from our work has been that, just because you went to the meeting doesn’t mean you know what happened,” explains Perlow. “The more senior people assume that the more junior people understood the meeting because they were there.” In reality, while technology makes it possible to invite more and different people to virtual meetings, the lack of spontaneous “huddle time”—quick post-meeting conversations to process what just happened—can leave some attendees in the dark about nuances and next steps. The researchers also found that switching from on-site to remote work reduced “bounce time,” a term they use to describe impromptu brainstorming sessions. The disappearance of bounce time stunted innovation and caused content discussions to intrude on meetings scheduled for other purposes. “Grabbing a marker and sketching ideas together on a whiteboard—that's much more difficult in the virtual environment,” says Ashley Whillans, assistant professor at HBS and co-author of the study Experimenting During the Shift to Virtual Team Work: Learnings from How Teams Adapted Their Activities During the COVID-19 Pandemic, which will appear in the journal Information and Organization. Perlow, Whillans, and HBS doctoral student Aurora Turek interviewed 51 knowledge workers at a professional services firm from April to June 2020 to chart teams’ interactions as they transitioned to remote work. The name of the firm and its industry are confidential, but its teams routinely traveled together to visit clients prior to the pandemic. Drawing on past research about collaboration, the study identifies three categories of interpersonal interactions essential to knowledge workers and looks at how teams tried to facilitate them. They include: At the office, the teams studied would often sit together and discuss content or projects, providing feedback about ideas and early iterations. Like with bounce time interactions, these “content interactions” were usually spontaneous, so the shift to remote work made it difficult to give and receive early input. In response to these challenges, the teams found that using asynchronous communication tools—specifically, Slack or similar messaging apps—helped compensate for the lack of spontaneity. Moreover, the researchers suggest that this change could permanently improve team collaboration, even when teams reunite in person, by giving individual members more time to think through their responses. To compensate for lost bounce interactions, the teams used synchronous communication tools, such as WebEx or Zoom, to simulate in-person work conditions and brainstorming. Even with these tools, it took time for teams to adapt, the study says. The researchers quoted one of their study subjects in the paper as follows: “In the first project, we didn’t have a virtual team room, and didn’t have a rhythm for working together and organizing our work,” the interviewee said. “In the second project, we had a smoother teaming process because we tried to relax the norms around communication, do more virtual brainstorming, and allow for more personal autonomy over the work.” Process interactions: Prioritizing quality over quantity In terms of agenda-setting, Perlow, Whillans, and Turek found that balancing the quantity and quality of process interactions was critical for teams as they adjusted to remote work. In an office, it’s easy to ask a manager or colleague, “When is this due?” or “Who’s working on that?” Without those informal interactions, teams often went too far, scheduling too many meetings to touch base. “They would have check-ins and check-outs, and then that process time would start to get usurped and there would be other kinds of interactions happening within it,” Whillans says. “Process time started to become content conversations because teams were not getting as much feedback during the day.” With so many check-ins, burnout became a real concern. Over time, teams discovered that using Slack or minimally disruptive technologies for process questions helped them achieve balance. Relationship interactions: Connecting through huddles, not yoga The importance of nurturing social relationships has come sharply into focus during the pandemic, as often isolated coworkers communicate exclusively online. Spontaneous socializing in the office helps build bonds, and “huddle time” offers opportunities to learn from one another. When these interactions could no longer happen organically, teams started scheduling them. Virtual drinks, team dinners, and yoga sessions became opportunities to learn more about colleagues than was possible in the office, as videoconferencing offered glimpses into people’s home lives. But as they interviewed employees at the firm they studied, the researchers found that scheduled social time tended to feel forced, and not everyone was interested or able to attend. Still, those who participated found the experiences worthwhile, even if they fell short of past in-person gatherings. Not all social time is the same, however. “Huddle time” helps workers understand the team’s work and context. For teams that valued these “hallway conversations,” especially after meetings, and made an effort to replicate them online, “the results were striking,” the researchers write. “The challenge of replicating ‘hallway’ conversations via digital communication led interviewees to realize that these conversations were more than ‘downtime’—it became apparent that these conversations helped the team qualify their thinking,” they write. Short, scheduled debriefs after client meetings helped team members process what transpired and the work that needed to follow. Moving forward in a virtual world By labeling the types of interactions a team needs and tracking the quality of scheduled time, managers can systematically improve collaboration, the researchers write. “There’s huge inefficiency in so many meetings, and it became even worse in the virtual world,” says Perlow. “So, how can we think about, what are good meetings, and what are less-effective meetings?” Inevitably, various types of team interactions co-occur or overlap. Perlow says she and her fellow researchers are continuing to examine those intersections and ways that different technologies can improve team collaboration long term. “When we go back to the new normal,” says Perlow, “now that we better understand that you need these different types of interactions to work well together as a team, can we figure out how to do them more effectively?” Let me know what you think!
DM me @philippemora on IG and Twitter My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Digital Product thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader |
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