We are all grown-ups, aren’t we?

I was talking to some associate consultant colleagues this week about planning to return to the office post COVID-19. We were discussing the benefits we have all found in working remotely in terms of productivity, the ability to focus and get the most out of the working day.

We also recognised that the biggest loss to working remotely were those ad hoc ‘coffee machine’ or ‘water cooler’ conversations that take place in an office environment. You know, those times where you are in the break out area and overhear a conversation and drop in to contribute or share experience; or where you see someone you haven’t seen for a while and stop to find out what they are working on only to discover that it is something that directly impacts or complements what you are doing; or when you hear the voice of someone you have been trying to seek out for days…

What we then realised was that we have all worked on teams and with clients were there are people who are those ones we have to track down for days. Ones that seem to consume their day with meetings, or in hiding. There are others who don’t seem to have any specific outputs other than these coffee conversations. And that got us talking about those hidden individuals that nobody can ever really get hold of, no one is really sure what they’re doing, and they never seem to produce anything…

Clearly this is waste, like any other lack of productivity in an organisation. So how do you address it?  It comes down to management, allowing self-organising teams and individuals taking ownership and accountability of delivering work, and in having an adult, respectful, ‘grown up’ relationship within the team and with the manager of that team.

The team members need strong SMART objectives. They need a way to see what work is needing to be done, and to volunteer to take tasks on. And they need a forum to regularly review and update the rest of the team on their work and feel their contribution (or lack of…).

And the line manager, or project manager, role is then in coaching, feedback and peer review, and not in needing to micromanage individuals. Instead, a self-organising team is built and the expectations of that manager role change. Team members get to ‘grow up’, trust develops and remote working becomes an advantage to this sort of team dynamic.

The manager needs to organise and assign the work – or, even better, allow the team to ‘take’ the work and assign it to themselves. The manager makes sure expectations are clear with the team in how they need to organise themselves, what their SMART objectives are, how they need to take work on and be accountable for the delivery.

The manager needs to ensure that the team is set up with ways to encourage team updates to each other, for the manager to facilitate those conversations and allow the team to hold each other to account for example in a daily stand up / huddle / briefing.

The work needs to be visible to all on a Kanban Board or plan for the team to provide progress updates on items in hand or completed. Focus in the daily stand up then becomes on issues and risks rather than updates by asking questions such as ‘What did you say you would do, but have not done?’ or ‘What do you need from me or from others?’. But always remember to celebrate success. Whether it is the completion of a tough deliverable, the resolution of a tricky issue, or support provided to another team member through collaboration.

Circling back to how we re-enact these ‘water cooler’ moments when we are all remote, we can encourage conversations on Teams or Slack or Chatter or whatever collaboration tool your teams use. So that the team can access both the hierarchical and the hidden organisation structures, and people both in their network and those they have not met, you need to make colleagues visible to each other.

Get the organisation structure, job titles, working teams and location, and contact details on a searchable database. But also allow a profile photo and an individual’s experience, skills, expertise and qualifications or certifications to be loaded and searched as well.