4 bad collaboration habits we need to unlearn
Remote work isn't about layering the office model with digital tools. It's about unlearning old behaviours and finding better alternatives. Here are four bad collaboration habits that we all should unlearn.
- Indiscriminate shoulder tapping for answers, problem solving or just opinions can hurt people's momentum at work.
- Ad-hoc meetings create a false sense of urgency and are usually ineffective because of a lack of preparation.
- Meetings to share static information are pointless in a remote setting because people are usually distracted and because there are modern alternatives to do these updates more efficiently.
- Communication blasts are insensitive and they not only create noise in the system, but they also reduce the efficacy of our systems.
The knowledge work industry grew in offices. Even in this era where offices are losing their relevance and are no longer the only place where work happens, this legacy is clear. A lot of remote work is about layering new tools on an old mindset - that of an office centric, synchronous model. The power of remote work isn’t just in being able to work from anywhere. It’s in being able to work at any time.
This flexibility is not at odds with doing high quality work. When people can choose their most productive hours to work, employers benefit from their employees’ enhanced focus and the fact that they are relatively stress free. While it may initially seem odd that people are designing their work around their personal lives, isn’t this how it should be?
So, if we are to move away from the office mindset, then we’ll need to unlearn a few unhealthy habits we’ve picked up over the years. In today’s post, I want to share four of these habits. Benign as they may seem, they are pernicious obstacles in your path to being an async-first team or organisation. Let’s explore each of them and the problems they create. As we do so, I’ll outline a few alternatives to these behaviours.
Shoulder-taps
Ah, the proverbial “shoulder tap”! Advocates of the office-centric model think of this as a feature, but it was a bug even when we were all sitting around the same table. When you interrupt someone who’s deeply engrossed in their work, it may feel like a harmless two-minute conversation to you. To the person you interrupted, however, it takes an average of 23 minutes to recover.
When you take this same behaviour to a remote team, you amplify the impact. Suddenly, it’s much easier to interrupt someone. Think about it. Instead of walking halfway down the office to tap someone on the shoulder, you can just ping them and ask for a quick sync - either on chat or on video. Imagine just 10 such interruptions in a day - that’s close to four hours lost just to context switching. By the way, if you think I’m exaggerating, chew on this. The average knowledge worker checks on email and IM every six minutes! How much work are we doing then?
Here are a few ideas that you could implement as alternatives.
Abolish the culture of immediacy. Sure, you have a question, but the answer can wait for some time, right? How about you send off your question to someone and they don’t feel the pressure to respond at once? You can achieve this by agreeing to a communication protocol, where people respond to emails and instant messages when they are free.
Institute office hours. If there are people on the team who get most of the shoulder taps, how about you set up a specific time where they can expect questions? That way, they know how to plan their days and you know you’re not interrupting them if you contact them during their “office hours”.
Write things up properly. This goes with #1 and #2 above. Not only does this allow people to respond to you asynchronously with all information available, the act of writing can also magically reveal the solution to you. You may not need the shoulder tap after all!
Default to action. Often, the shoulder tap is just for confirmation or reassurance. You feel like you need that other point of view before you do something. This isn’t always necessary. Act instead. Write things up so everyone understands what you did and why you did it. If you must backtrack, you can always do it later. Not only does this bias for action help the team get faster, but it also encourages ownership and entrepreneurialism amongst people.
Ad-hoc meetings
Shoulder taps often escalate to becoming ad-hoc meetings. Someone believes a topic is urgent enough for everyone to meet up “right now”. Lo and behold! You have yourself an ad-hoc meeting.
The cost of the interruption aside, the problem with such meetings is that very few people are prepared for it. Meetings are effective when everyone has adequate information about the problem you’re trying to solve or the decision you’re trying to make. Ad-hoc meetings inevitably lose efficiency because you spend too much time informing the least informed people in the discussion.
Moreover, these ad-hoc meetings often create a false sense of urgency. There are very few topics that deserve this otherwise trigger-happy collaboration pattern.
So, what can you do instead?
Make meetings the last resort. Write things up properly and get people’s input asynchronously. Slowing things down through asynchronous discussion can not only elevate the quality of decisions, but it can also make most meetings unnecessary.
Schedule the conversation. This allows people to prepare for the meeting and plan their day around it. Follow meeting best practice while you’re at it.
Meetings to present static information
Back in the day, there were very few tools at our disposal to easily share information. So, it was natural to do static presentations and status updates in meetings. But in the last decade or so, we’ve got access to all sorts of tools that reduce the need for meetings. People can read a report or watch a video in their own time.
When you invite people to a one-way presentation where they’ll be a passive audience, most of them are sleeping with their eyes open. Some of them are checking email on the side. This is an inevitability. These meetings are some of the biggest time wasters out there.
Thankfully, there are alternatives.
Send the information in writing. Your colleagues are literate. Don’t read to them, what they can read themselves. Write up your reports in a succinct fashion, put them up on the team wiki and mention everyone who needs to pay attention. If someone needs to act on the information, tag them separately with a due-by date.
Record your presentation. These days most video conferencing tools allow you to record yourself. You can even use specialised asynchronous video tools like Loom or ThreadIt to record your presentation. There are a few advantages to asynchronous video.
You can edit your video to make the message short and sharp. Any more than 10 minutes, and you’re probably packing in too much.
Your audience can speed you up or slow you down or pause and rewatch the video, so they understand your point. This is a feature that live presentations don’t have.
People can still ask you questions in line with the video, which you can answer asynchronously.
Garr Reynolds, the man who wrote the book about presentations, believes that the majority of presentations should be pre-recorded. That helps us reserve live presentations for high stakes, engaging conversations and workshops.
Communication blasts
This last bad habit isn’t related to the office. It has its roots in the fear of missing out; a.k.a. FOMO feeling that exists because you don’t see everyone in front of you. Many of us want the widest audience to see our messages - something that’s in common with our behaviour on social media. What if someone important, who we don’t know of yet, is to find something important about that message we’re about to send, but they won’t find it because they won’t receive the message? Oh boy! Isn’t that a reason to send the message to the largest group of people we can justify sending it to?
I know that thought process sounds ridiculous when I phrase it that way, but trust me, I’ve lived in that communication set up for several years of my consulting life. Your inbox and your instant messaging system become a total mess because you have all sorts of communication in it - whether it's directly useful to you or not. From birthday wishes, to event information, to congratulating people on making that big sale and more - everything’s in your inbox. And everyone else’s inbox. We need better etiquette when using communication tools such as email or IM.
“The etiquette about how we used these tools, what we used them for when we used them is very poorly understood compared to the fact that if you were in an office, imagine you’re in the middle of the workday there’s 200 people in this open office. You pull out your chair, you just stand on your chair, and you start clapping your hands, ‘Hey, everyone. What’s your opinion about this?’ People would look at you as though you were just bananas!”
David goes on to explain that a single line message that you send to 200 people isn’t a single line message anymore. It’s a 200-line message. To borrow one more of his phrases, we need to “shrink the blast radius”.
And of course, there are things you can do instead.
Target your message. Everyone doesn’t need to get every single message. It’s ok. The world will continue to exist if some people miss out. Direct your communication to the people who need to act on it. If you can’t name the right people, then you haven’t thought your message through properly.
Use opt-in channels. Many channels such as company mailing lists and team, or department IM groups have a captive audience. People can’t opt-out of these. Spamming such channels with a blast message is insensitive. If you really need to reach a large audience, choose an opt-in group, such as a community of interest. That way you know that people who’re members have chosen to receive broadly directed communication.
Communicate with kindness. Recognise that all communication is an interruption. People need to step away from what they’re doing to address a message or an IM. Be thoughtful about how and when you communicate. For example, do you really need to hit “Reply-all” on that email? If all you want to say is one word, such as “Congratulations!”, can you just use an emoji reaction instead and not generate notifications for everyone? Do you have to mention @all or @channel or @board or should you reserve these mentions only for emergencies? When everyone acts thoughtfully in their individual situations, the whole team or organisation benefits from a better communication system.
“How many of the quick asks for someone else’s time and attention that you dash off over email during a normal day would you still make if you had to instead walk down the hallway and interrupt someone’s work? If slightly increasing friction drastically reduces the requests made on your time and attention, then most of these requests are not vital to your organisation’s operation in the first place; they are instead a side effect of the artificially low resistance created by digital communication tools.” - Cal Newport
Calm, thoughtful communication is at the heart of an async way of working. For many of us this may be different from the way we’ve seen the world of work for many years. I admit many of us will take time to adjust to this way of working. However, if we want to embrace a culture of flexibility, empathy and deep work, we need to get our hyperactive hive mind (Cal Newport’s term, not mine) in control. Unlearning our bad collaboration habits is a small step in that direction.