Is Your Firm's Culture Ready for the WFH Future?
You can order people to show up at the office, but that will
waste their time and your money. You need to reshape the way you can share your
corporate culture in this new world.
BY HOWARD
TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH
INVESTORS@TULLMAN
The latest “encouraging” news from the Chicago media is that
maybe 50% of the pre-COVID workforce has returned to their offices in the
central business district for at least a couple of days a week. Allegedly,
Chicago is doing better than a number of its peers in terms of the re-occupancy
rate although I’d take the whole thing - especially in the midst of a fierce
mayoral race -- with a major mouthful of salt.
There’s a lot of self-interest surrounding these stats on the
part of just about everyone involved in reporting and generating them - the
city, the industry, the media, downtown restaurants, theaters, vendors of all
kinds, and the employers anxiously presiding over still largely empty nests.
They’re all praying for a wave of wandering workers to return to the fold.
There’s a pretty fine line between praying and whining, so it’s hard to exactly
tell who’s telling the truth. I like the old line from long-time Chicago
alderman Ed Burke: If “ifs” and “buts” were candy and nuts, then every day
would be Christmas.
So, as you might imagine, my money’s on planning how you’re
going to handle a hybrid workforce that has not only shifted geographically but
also one which has shifted irrevocably in a temporal sense as well. And
probably, when we look back in a few years, much for the better. If 9-to-5
“shifts” or anything like that ever made sense, it was for factories and for
the convenience of foremen, bean counters, attendance takers, and other
supervisors. Which has nothing whatever to do with the effectiveness of
developers, coders, white collar knowledge workers and managers. It was just as
antiquated and counterproductive as sending sleep-deprived students to school
at the crack of dawn when the entire world knows that they’re likely to learn
next to nothing until after lunch time.
Recapturing hours of foregone daily commuting time, successfully
and cost-effectively balancing and managing childcare responsibilities,
spending quality time with your kids during their waking hours and working when
they were otherwise engaged and dodging the countless interruptions and
meaningless meetings have taught us something. Namely, that working anywhere
but the office from 9-to-5 makes a ton of sense and increases our
productivity. That is, at least among serious and self-directed
grown-ups. I can’t speak for the still-employed bros at home sucking down
beers, binging everything on the boob box, and doing more gaming than anything
gainful. I actually think that Elon and Mark will eventually take care of them.
But assuming that you’re interested in retaining and
re-inspiring your remote employees you’re going to need to employ new tools,
techniques and technologies to help get the job done well. And you’re going to
have to overcome some of the concerns and shortcomings that we’ve been living
with due to the stop-gap measures that were adopted in the rush and crush of
COVID-19.
(1) Don’t Blame It on the Time or
Distance.
You can lead from anywhere. Leadership is not a matter of
physical presence or proximity, it’s all about performance and results. But
your management team is going to have change their thinking. This is not
going to be easy for people used to looking over everyone’s shoulder and
tracking trips around the office to understand that today it’s about
productivity and taking care of business rather than busy-ness. Activity is not
a measure of accomplishment. They won’t have the visual cues and the daily
connections and collisions that made up so much of the office’s information
ecosystem in the past. They need to generate that “connectedness” in new ways.
Old line managers are also gonna have to make room for the
best people to do things the way you want without their hands being held.
Tomorrow’s complex and distributed businesses are going to be driven by inbred
company culture and performance expectations rather than by rote rules of behavior.
You can’t write a handbook big enough to handle the challenges that your team
will face in the future. You’re going to have to trust your people to make the
right decisions in real time and to get the job done.
(2) Take Back Control of the Conversation.
As much as increased employee autonomy will be essential, it’s
equally critical that businesses take a step back from some of the behaviors of
the last couple of years, which grew out of the peculiar and unique
circumstances of the pandemic. First was the hierarchical flattening effect of
technologies like Zoom and Slack, where it appeared that everyone on the
channel or on the screen had an equal time, voice, impact, and say in the
ongoing conversations. The idea that every idea had value, that every thought
needed to be expressed, that meetings were more like sharing and therapy
sessions -- free to fritter and drift -- rather than structured opportunities
to share important information and decisions grew up in the absence of
precedent and the novelty of the whole experience. That attitude needs to
change.
Second was the impression-- especially among new young
employees who had never worked at the business before COVID -- that democracy was a virtue in every meeting
and decision. And that critical decisions should and would be the result
of votes or polls taken after extensive conversations leading eventually to a
consensus. The reality is that Amazon warehouse workers will never have the
right to decide which books they pack and ship. The missing message is that,
while a smart leader’s job was always to listen and to ideally and ultimately
make the right decisions, it was never to delegate or abandon the
responsibility of making the final and most difficult calls.
Lastly, much like our society in general, the promise of
constant and continued conversation led in too many cases not to closer
connections, shared culture and a strong community, but to festering, factional
disputes and debates within companies. Instead of connection, we’re stuck with
more and more division. Nothing kills a culture quicker than backroom and
behind-the-back bickering. A true friend always stabs you in the front.
(3) Make the Meetings that You Do Have
Matter.
Whether they’re in person or on Zoom or Teams, you need to
understand that, more than ever before, meetings need to meet the needs of
everyone on the team. They’re not just to serve as cosmetic reminders of the
old days -- reassuring assemblies to make management feel that everyone’s
onboard, or demonstrations of commitment because people killed a few hours
coming into the office or sitting in front of their screens. Meetings need to be CRISP: Concise, Rigorous,
Immediate, Short and Prompt because time is the scarcest resource in our lives
today.
Most importantly, especially when so many participants are
remote, the meeting’s leaders need to insist that the meetings serve as the
finite forum for conversations rather than as jumping-off points for a million
subsequent sidebars. If you aren’t prepared to say something during the
meeting, don’t say it after the meeting to a smaller and more select audience.
Making sure that all the critical views and opinions are shared and surfaced at
all levels of the business is one of the benefits that new technologies and
services like Balloon, which can address some of
the most pressing needs of the hybrid workforce.
In addition, take the time to do one-on-one temperature checks and pray that
your people are telling you the truth.
Finally, you need to make sure that the basic messages and the
critical information and directions are getting through. Data dumps won’t do.
Even the most compelling facts need to be put in the proper context -- tied to
the company’s story -- and delivered with emotion, which is incredibly hard to
do over crappy video while speaking to a bunch of people in little boxes.
Because the water-cooler conclaves, which used to be the be-all and end-all of
company conversations, are gone, it’s easy to accept the comfort and the
illusion that effective communication is going on when you’re really just
talking to yourself about what you wish and hope was happening.