Written by: Paul Slater, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
A few weeks back, a friend of mine called with a problem. I should say up front that Richard is not his real name. Richard is something of a high achiever. He’s driven and ambitious and frankly always has to have his life together. Though his ways are the kind that many of us would envy, even the best of us struggle sometimes.
"Paul, everyone I work with is so disorganized!" He exclaimed. "I don't even know why they have a job!" Richard's complaint surprised me. I've known him for ages, and he has never been the sort to worry about the minor details of how people work. He is not a micromanager, and he certainly doesn’t usually concern himself with the day-to-day habits of his colleagues. So, what changed here? After a bit of digging, we discovered the root of the problem. Richard had shifted roles. His new job involved far more collaboration than before. For years, Richard had been optimizing his work solo. Now he was trying to use the same techniques to optimize in a team setting. And as anyone who has been in a rock band will know, those are two very different environments. At BillionMinds, we've worked with many people in this situation. In fact, it's become more of a problem now that more people are working out of the office. Many people (including Richard) have recently joined remote-first teams. They are often expected to collaborate seamlessly with people they've never even met for coffee.
So, if you are in this situation, what can you do to balance your own needs with those of the broader team? Particularly when you are working remotely. Here are four steps we recommend:
Step One: Find the Right Degree of Collaboration
There are very few jobs with zero collaboration. And even fewer where you collaborate 100% of the time.
Solo work brings significant benefits–it's more efficient and gives you much more of an opportunity to focus deeply. Collaboration is often essential to stress-test existing ideas and to spark innovation, but it can be slow, frustrating, and cumbersome. So, when you join a team, look at the type of work that is being done and evaluate where collaboration will be most useful. As you do this, don't forget you will likely have a pre-existing bias towards your prior work methods. In Richard's case, he was such an effective solo worker that collaborative work settings seemed completely ineffective even though they were essential for success in the new role. Let the nature of the work determine the right amount of collaboration. If things need tweaking, talk to the team about it.
Step Two: Make Work Visible
In remote and hybrid teams, one of the biggest challenges to team dynamics is the perception that some people are working more than others. When you are in the office, people may not know exactly what you are working on, but they do sense you are working. Your default state is visible. In remote and hybrid teams, the default state is invisible. We've seen trust erode (or never be established) as team members begin to believe that they are pulling all the weight. Making work visible doesn't equate to time tracking. And it most certainly does not equate to surveillance technology. We are talking about a simple means of ensuring that the team sees progress being made. Typically using a shared online environment where the team members are usually present to see that work is getting done.
Step Three: Create a Personal (not team) Structure
The previous step helps you see everyone is working, but it creates another problem–a clash of work styles. If you make work visible in a shared setting, you will rapidly start to see differences in how other people represent their work. And it most likely won’t reflect how we like to represent our own.
Welcome to neurodiversity! Just as we all have accents, we all have preferred work styles. This is shown in how we organize things–our calendars, our daily routine, our emails, and the files on our desktops. And while being organized is an important trait…the specific organizing structure that works for you will likely be quite different from others. A clash of organizing structure was one of the areas where Richard felt the most pain. He had become an expert at designing an organizing structure that worked for him. So when he saw the shared work environment, all he could see was chaos. As a person who liked to categorize and organize things in a particular way, he wanted to optimize this as well to help his team. But he failed to recognize that imposing this structure would not work for his differently-wired colleagues. Some of whom would prefer a different organizing structure…and some of whom preferred to "live in the chaos." This may seem insignificant, but we've seen teams break down over a "Clash of the Filers," with arguments erupting over the "right" organizing structure. The best solution for most teams is to create a shared environment with as little structure as possible and then for each individual team member to overlay whatever organizing structure works best for them.
Step 4: Gain a Deeper Understanding of Each Other
When do you do your best work? Do you need a strong structure to thrive? We all work differently. But many of us have little understanding of what is needed to do our best work, let alone how others do theirs. The more understanding you have of how your colleagues thrive independently, the easier it is to determine the right compromises in shared work environments. When employees are working out of the office, the opportunity to gain an organic understanding of each other is diminished. This usually leads us to turn inward and optimize what we do ourselves because it is all we truly understand. However, if we gain a greater understanding of each other, we can begin to create the optimal mix between getting the best out of ourselves and getting the best out of each other. Not only that, but it can help us avoid some of the mental health challenges that sometimes occur when we are away from the office, such as work from home loneliness. Structured services such as Groops allow teams to understand each other better and will only become more important.
Final Thoughts
Richard and his team are working on implementing these changes, and he is gaining a deeper understanding of how great work is a balance of what you do yourself (me) and what you do with others (we).
Changing a job can disrupt the extent to which you need each work modality. And it will have an effect on how you feel about your work. Before you choose your next role, think about how much individual or collaborative work will be needed, whether that fits you, and whether you have the skills you need to do it well.
Paul Slater, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Paul Slater is a leader in skills development for the Future of Work. His career began in the 1990s, training managers and employees to adapt to the arrival of the PC. Since then, he has dedicated his life to understanding the challenges posed by each wave of technology and helping people use technology to their benefit. He is the CEO of BillionMinds, a company that uses experiential learning to give employees the skills they need to do amazing work from anywhere.
