With little warning, the current pandemic has thrust many of us into the world of virtual work with almost no time to adjust. The outcome is that we’ve taken the processes we used in our face-to-face lives and directly mapped them to our dens and bedrooms.
I’ve been on the phone and in the messenger box with leaders I work with around the world, and what I’m hearing is the same: this is starting to take a toll. Many of them are experiencing fatigue and fade as they go into another week of virtual work.
At first, it feels like a bit of a holiday – not needing to commute, able to open the laptop and instantly be at work. You are learning the latest quirks of Zoom, checking your bandwidth and jitter and being business casual from the waist up.
Updates are crisp, and it appears everyone is working hard. Then you begin to see it – tiny bits at first, then more. Creativity is off, and for some reason, the client deliverables just aren’t as impactful. Your team members are prickly as well, with some feeling “overwatched,” and others complaining they don’t know what’s going on.
You try to address items directly, but somehow you feel like you are playing whack-a-mole – and the moles are popping up faster than you can get to them.
I’ve been serving virtually for several years, and have seen this play out in client firms and my own work. The good news, is that there is a map you can use to get to work on these issues that isn’t endless. The challenging news, is that you are going to need to work on deeper issues to get the performance you are looking for.
Regaining the Momentum
The root of the issues that you and your team come up against are at the basic human emotional level. There are a number of subtle things that happen in the physical world that don’t map well when we simply try to run them through Zoom:
When we are in an office, all five senses are fully alive. We can hear several conversations at once, see the full scope of activity across the firm as we travel around the site, pick up on the smell of fresh coffee and nearly taste the bagel in the office next door. We can also touch the physical space around us – the desk, copier and conference room door.
But when we fire up Zoom, what we have is hearing and seeing (ok, and some tactile feedback from the keyboard) – and this hearing and seeing is done in a small slice of a very specific place and time. Lost is our ability to integrate over the full physics of what is occurring outside the conference room or in the cafeteria. Our brain does a marvelous job of filling in the details, but also runs continuously in the background trying to build a more complete understanding of what is really going on.
Now put both endpoints into our adhoc offices at home. When we need to have a difficult conversation, for instance, we are hobbled by the limited capability to send and receive emotional signals.
The key to unlocking this is to look deeper at the human level of emotional needs, and map out as a group how we can compensate for the limited sensory interface.
A useful tool to get started here is Maslow’s Pyramid (if you are not familiar, see the link here). This work dates back to the 1940s, and basically says that we all build our engagement through a pyramid of needs that must be met to get to a level of success, performance, and motivation. The five layers are physiological, safety, loving/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. The theory is that we all need to “build a pyramid” by having our basic human needs such as health, food and water met, followed by confidence in our ability to be secure physically and financially, and so forth.
There is a huge body of subsequent work to parse these out and make them actionable. For today’s application, I’m going to use a list developed by HGI, but there are many others that could serve us, as well.
The list of basic emotional needs includes 10 items – I’ve included them below in the first column.
|
Element |
Defined | Physical Office |
Virtual Teaming |
| Security | Safe territory | “My space” | Shared home space |
| Attention | Giving and receiving focused listening | I can read the subtle cues before I approach someone | I place a request in the chat channel |
| Sense of autonomy and control | Able to make choices and have control over the quality of my work | ||
| Being emotionally connected | Having empathy and care of others | ||
| Feeling part of a wider community | Being engaged in an enterprise that is bigger than our current circumstances | ||
| Friendship & Intimacy | Being accepted for who you are by another human | ||
| Privacy | Having space to reflect and consolidate your experience | ||
| Status | Knowing how I fit and what my “lane” is | ||
| Competence & Achievement | Having some measure of what is “good work” and having it recognized | ||
| Having meaning and purpose | Feeling like I am challenged & making a contribution |
How to Use This Table
First, print out the PDF of the table, grab a beverage of your choice and make some notes.
Start with your native environment (i.e., your world in February). On a scale of one to five, how would you rate each of these? Which ones are most important to you?
Next pencil in the third column: how are those needs met when you are in your native world? Are there specific subordinates, peers or leaders that are better at meeting those needs?
Now for the diagnostic work – how are each of these elements being met in your new virtual world? Some of them, like attention and autonomy, are likely pretty similar. It’s the “softer” elements, like emotional connection, feeling part of the wider community and meaning and purpose that take a hit when we go virtual.
Action Step: Once you’ve done this work for yourself, I encourage you to take some time with your team and talk this matrix through with them. Take on a task or two to meet the areas where there are gaps between the physical space you enjoyed and your new virtual world.
Some Tips
Here are some things I’ve done and seen practiced by those who excel at this:
- Cut meeting times to allow for short, daily 1:1 check ins and check outs. You’d be amazed at how 10 minutes can energize and focus your teammates’ day.
- Set aside time for a 40-minute extended group coffee session at least once every couple of weeks. Only light discussion allowed. Consider assigning a show-and-tell piece, and have someone keep a timer.
- Make sure each “business meeting” has only one agenda item and schedule it for less than an hour. If the same team needs to meet on a new topic, close out the session, take a break and then reconvene the session to allow everyone a chance to “clear the mechanism” and get into the new mindset.
- Have Slack quiet hours so those who need to do deep thinking can shut down their messenger without fear of “missing out.”
- Manage results whenever possible. Turn up the clarity on deliverables, and when you create a new workstream, set a 24-hour check-in to be sure that it’s on target and not a victim of “that’s not what I was looking for.”
There is So Much More
Each of us is a unique human being with innate skills, abilities and blind spots with overlay directly on the above. I am a specialist in helping firms develop the right project, discern and engage the right team and the right plan for the unique situation they find themselves.
If you’d like to connect with me, feel free to contact me on my direct line (847-651-1014) or use this link to put a call with me directly in the calendar (no salesy pitch, we’ll roll up our sleeves and get right to work).
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