Adventures in home working

(updated with a link to Michael’s post that works!)

Michael argues that we hide behind the need for culture change on many collaboration projects, his key point is illustrated by this example:

if a team can run a project in email then they can run one in a collaboration tool. They don’t need a change in “culture” to make the transition, they need a change in “work practice”.

Whilst it’s difficult to disagree with the point that to switch from using email to using a collaborative workspace space requires a change in working practice, I don’t agree that it doesn’t sometimes also require a change in culture.  To cite a few examples of my own: 

1. creating a shared knowledge base requires people to share expertise that they might traditionally have thought of as essential to their long term employment and to reduce the visibility of their individual contribution to maximize that of the team.  Changing this attitude requires some culture change away from individual performance and “knowledge is power” and more towards “team results matter”.
2. creating a blog that narrates your work requires significant investment of time and energy and opens up immature ideas to public scrutiny.  This requires a culture change away from “immediate results” towards “investment in the future”, “spin off innovation” and “improved quality through greater participation”.  It requires managers to encourage people to be open and take risks without fearing that this will reflect badly on them.

In my personal experience I have seen a lot of culture related issues that have stalled changes in working practice designed to improve collaboration, for example:

1. People not being comfortable with letting other team members get access to their work in progress files,  preferring instead to only provide access to published/polished information
2. People not being comfortable with producing weekly highlight reports because it exposes the peaks and troughs in the output as if it were peaks and troughs in their input,  ie some weeks they might not have any highlights at all, maybe only low lights but have been working very hard
3. People being very concerned about publishing their ideas and thought processes in discussion areas because they believe that sharing incomplete work potentially damages their reputation and that the reviewers might take control of the conversation
4. People not investing the time and energy required to submit assets to a corporate knowledge base, because the people who benefited were too far removed from the contributor and therefore there was no benefit to her

I think all of these concerns were pretty valid ones,  working through them requires the working practice change to be supported by a culture that recognize and rewards the change in working practice.  Often the cultural change that’s required isn’t immediately obvious and that in itself is a cultural issue.  A willingness to take a risk - knowing that your peers and managers are will be there to support you and not stab you in the back. 

Right now as we move to a new world of work with less job security, and a lot more external competition from free agents and BPO providers it’s not difficult for me to see why some people look for evidence of culture change BEFORE they are comfortable with working practice change.

I blogged a little about the steps I see a person going through on their journey to collaborative behavior here and the factors affecting success here.

(updated to add missing link later on in the post)

Stu has an interesting post on effective collaboration,  I think his arrows pointing in the right direction, but I don’t think its the whole story.  In Stu’s model we need to have a willing person, a willing team, the right culture (less important) and the right tools.    I think these 4 things are key for a short term activity,  in my experience pretty much any team can collaborate well given enough management attention and team enthusiasm, even if they just have a shared file system and a whiteboard.  But the real trick will collaboration is to sustain it over time and to make it work across all of the activities a person’s involved in,  not just the priority project.

For this more sustained and systematic collaboration to take hold I think culture’s more important and I think we need to drill a bit deeper into what motivates people.

In this post I described a way of thinking about the stages a person goes through to be comfortable with collaborating,  I’m no psychologist but it seems to fit my observations so far.  I stretched the idea further with this post trying to apply Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to the same discussion.

But my best post on the topic is probably this one where I took a similar approach to Stu, but looked at the challenges that we face in collaborating and tried to come up with a model to describe them all and their relative importance for different types of collaborative endeavor.  I’ve read whole books that attempt to address the topic of this post so its pretty simplistic, but it’s nice when such a big topic can be reduced to a diagram as simple as this one.

A couple of weeks ago I heard a manager say that employee morale was not a management issue, I hope I heard wrong, but I don’t think I did. 

To be fair though I don’t think the manager concerned really meant what he said and was in fact referring to an employees response to his remuneration was a personal issue.  Morale in contrast is much more than a response to remuneration and is very much a management issue.

I am not a great manager, however in my years I have learnt a couple of lessons about morale and the most significant being that individuals often tend to keep their morale troubles to themselves, sometimes grumbling to friends but not always.  I always found this really worrying because I know for sure that a persons peer group and manager can do a lot improve morale, if they know about it.

Over a couple of years my team leaders and I came up with a pretty good approach, which is worth sharing:

1. Each week everyone in the team (including the team leads and I) posted a highlight report to a shared folder
2. At the end of the highlight report they scored their overall satisfaction in the following areas:  frustration, too much work, too little work, skills, training, overall happiness
3. Our wonderful admin consolidated all the cores into a spreadsheet so that we could spot trends across the 30+ people in the team

I noticed some great benefits:

1. Everyone seemed much happier being honest in providing these happiness scores than they were with explicitly going to their team leaders directly, because they were concerned they might be seen as moaning
2. The team leads and I found that everyone understood us a bit better and the “what does he do all day” question never seemed to arise!
3. We explicitly defined the scores so that a person could indicate that their level of satisfaction required some intervention and how urgent that was
4. All the team leaders and myself scanned every highlight report each week and were very proactive and imaginative in addressing the issues, we were also much more relaxed about management because we had a great way of tracking team “health” overall
5. Very often we didn’t need to do much because when a person indicated an issue their team mates almost always rallied round and helped resolve it before team leaders got a chance
6. Team leaders shared the responsibility for everyone in the team, we often found that the best person to help address a persons motivation issue was not their direct team leader

I’m sure this approach isn’t in any management handbooks but it worked for us so I thought I would pass it on,  one point worth noting is that the issue was almost never money!

Over the last few years I have been much more conscious of stress,  I am able to detect it and don’t tend to miss the symptoms hiding away behind the adrenalin fuelled activity. 

I just came across this article which provides a very shot, but very insightful analysis of some of the main caused of work stress:

I think stress is, by its very nature, always negative. Pressure may create stress, but pressure is not negative in itself. Some pressure is even enjoyable, getting the blood racing and the mind whirring. What turns pressure into stress may be any of these added factors:

• Tiredness. Lack of time or opportunity to relax between bouts of pressure. Almost any stimulus, if continued for too long, become unpleasant or painful. It’s the same with pressure.
• Fear. If the outcome of the situation causes you anxiety or dread, there is no way it can remain a positive experience. A great deal of workplace pressure comes into this category, since there is often an implied threat if you fail to produce whatever is required, on time and to order.
• Haste. Doing things in a rush tends to make you feel anxious. You may fear you have not had time to do a good job, or that you have been forced to cut too many corners for comfort.
• Riskiness. Pleasurable pressure is usually either risk-free, or comes with the kind of risk people enjoy taking (like skiing fast downhill). Stress arises when the risks produce real anxiety and apprehension.
• Feeling out of control. No one can avoid stress when they feel that their lives are being forced down a path over which they have no control. Feeling that you are no longer in control of important parts of your well-being is inherently stressful.
• Excess. We all have a natural tolerance level for pressure. As soon as it increases beyond that level, we start to feel stress. It’s like an aircraft wing. It is designed to withstand a certain range of pressures, plus a safety margin. If the pressures on it increase beyond the design limits, stress results. Too much stress and the wing will break off.

Many people dismiss the idea of slowing down, or taking work/life balance seriously, out of a mixture of bravado and the idea that pressure is natural. It is, and so is stress. We can all withstand some level of stress, especially if it comes in short bursts, with gaps in between for recovery. What leads to burnout and sickness is long-term, unrelenting levels of stress. When that happens, things go badly wrong and may not be recoverable.

I have just discovered the chief happiness officer blog, which focused on happiness at work and I think it’s great.  Just this morning I was talking to Graham on the phone while out walking (I had nothing better to do, Graham was late for a meeting!) and I was saying how I dislike it when a company says it is in business to make a profit.  I much prefer to think of a company seeing its role as:

Providing fulfilling employment to it’s employees and providing great services to it’s customers whilst making a profit.

Framed like this the company can rethink it’s objectives and derive shareholder value as a side effect of having happy employees and satisfied customers, which I think (maybe unrealistically) is a much healthier way to run a company.

Anyway back to the blog,  the author is in the process of writing a book and is blogging ideas along the way, which seems a great process and one that’s increasingly popular.  As a taster here are some of the recent posts, followed by my comments:

Dealing with uncertainty at work, very important and useful advise in today’s climate.  As a team leader I have been in this situation several times and this is good advise.

Ask a co-worker for advice, a few years I did some research into who people like to ask for advise and way out in front was co-workers.  This was in an IT environment and it’s interesting that help desks were way down on the list.  We formalized this by creating a well supported super user role and it worked very well.

Why job descriptions are useless, very perceptive - when was the last time you looked at yours, the post doesn’t just trash job descriptions through, it describes some good alternatives.

Secret salaries vs. open, most people seem to prefer secret salaries, I worked in a department once with voluntary open salaries - almost everyone decided to declare them and we found it worked very well.

For more on my own thoughts on happiness check out this list of posts

Collaboration is a key competency for today’s enterprises and yet despite the fact that the Internet is awash with a myriad of different collaboration solutions many teams still struggle to be effective and most projects continue to fail by at least one metric.  

 Many people assume that collaboration comes naturally - provide people with a tool and off they go, unfortunately it’s rarely that easy. Despite the fact that hundreds of books have been written about how to help teams collaborate and how to successfully manage projects, many team leaders lack a simple framework to help them assess the scale and nature of the collaboration challenges that their teams face. Once the challenge is understood teams need practical guidance on where to focus appropriate process and technology improvements.

One approach is to look inwards at the team and the complexity of the task to assess the level of challenge according to four categories (see fig 1).  The first and probably the most important, is the degree of - common ground - shared by team members, teams with a lot of common ground collaborate more naturally together and common ground becomes increasingly important as complexity increases. 

Where you set the dials for complexity and common ground will dictate the relative importance of technology and process readiness. Understanding nature of complexity and the areas where common ground is lacking (the focus of this article) will help you to home-in on the types of technology and process tools that you need to make your team a success (a future article).

The application of this approach is best illustrated by an example; in this case a typical corporate strategy team which is undertaking a regular yearly review cycle. Their review is not particularly urgent, but is complex (see fig 2) because of the interdependence of different tasks, the need to innovate to stay competitive, the number of decisions still to be taken and the need for different stakeholders to negotiate.

The team lacks common ground (see fig 3) in quite a few areas but the fact that they don’t all know each other, will be working virtually across multiple time zones and will need to work both on and offline will be a particular challenge to them given the complexity of their objective.

Initially the team should focus on building the relationship and trust between team members, probably push for a kick off using a professional video conferencing session and concentrate on well facilitated audio conferences while the team members get to know each other. Common access to information will be very important, so the team need to ensure they use an information sharing/discussion system that is available to everyone, is asynchronous and works well off-line, these characteristics are essential and can be achieved even with disciplined use of email and conference calls.

If the team wants to push the boundaries they should consider a web hosted team room with off-line support and also routinely recording their meetings; this will make it easier to create focus, manage information, engage new team members and involve specialist contributors.

Longer term the team members should consider Instant Messaging and Blogs, as these will allow members of the team to get to know each other much better, help them understand each other’s challenges and perspectives and extend the strategy review process throughout the year. 

A refinement to this simple framework is to consider how the needs of the team will evolve over a projects lifecycle, teams need different processes and tools during the storming and forming phase than during the performing stage for example.

I have long held the belief that successful collaboration is not so much about getting fancy technology and much more about process, culture and careful deployment and use of the technologies you do have.  I was therefore pleased to see the results of a survey on collaboration that S. Ann Earon reported on Collaboration Loop, the questions related to audio conferencing, web conferencing and video conferencing.  What’s interesting is that she reports:

While their responses sound logical and intuitive, when further study was done to determine how well their recommendations were put into practice, it was sad to note that many forget the obvious.

This my experience as well,  unfortunately its all too common for project success criteria to focus mainly on successful deployment of technologies and not on successful adoption of those technologies in the medium to long term, this tends to drive a lot of poor decisions which are definitely not the fault of the project team,  but need to be layed at the door of those who design the projects in the first place.  It’s useful to look at the responses in more detail:

Audioconferencing
•    Make it easy to use
•    Quantify cost savings
•    Better describe internal PBX capabilities
•    Provide training & case study experiences
•    Purchase good quality equipment
•    Trial usage, create awareness
•    Adopt self service reservationless model
•    Promote, promote, promote
Webconferencing
•    Do a business case and promote it
•    Use it and see how it works
•    Remember that not everyone is web friendly
•    Provide training & case study experiences
•    Advertise and don’t restrict use
•    Explore all products & standardize on one
•    Make it easy to use
Videoconferencing
•    Make it easy to use
•    Provide open house demonstrations
•    Quantify cost savings
•    Provide training
•    Provide a user competency test
•    Pick up charges under general overhead to promote usage
•    Get senior management endorsement
•    Make it part of the corporate culture that everyone be trained & required to use the technology
•    Promote, promote, promote
•    Hire a consultant

Larry takes issue with the fact that people always talk about “Blogs and Wikis” at the same time when in fact they are are very different.  To further the point Larry quotes Tim Bray who said in this post  “I don’t think blogs are really a new thing in the world; but wikis are”.   Whilst I don’t have a problem at all with almost all of Larry’s post which is a useful discussion on Wikis I do think it makes sense to talk about them together.

I have already written about my conceptual hierarchy of IT needs,  at layers 1 and 2 people are seeking reliable access to IT, then seeking to maximise their productivity.  The next two layers are where Blogs and Wikis come in,  layer 3 in my model suggests that people seek first to control their personal voice ie the way that their total contribution to the world is viewed.  This is pretty important in a work context as the way their contribution is viewed affects pretty much everything in their work experience including their pay check.  My contention is that Blogs are a great way for an individual to control their personal voice.  Layer 4 in my hierarchy is Team Success and of course this is where Wikis come in as Wikis are one of the best technologies to support collaborative working and that’s a big part of team success. 

In my previous posts on this subject I make the point that it’s important to address the layers in order,  my point being that if you try to implement a system that meets a persons need to contribute to Team Success,  but don’t have a solution for ensuring that their personal voice can be heard then you will be in trouble.  So if I’m right that’s why it’s important to talk about Blogs and Wikis and that’s why it’s important to do it in that order.

I consider myself to be very lucky to work from home.  Because my medical condition makes it difficult for me to travel at least a couple of times a week and I feel too ill to work for at least a few hours most days only a decade ago I would have probably had to give up work. 

However having reached the point in my career where I am now happy to use my skills and experience to support others around the world on their projects home working suits me very well for the following reasons:

• I have a 12 hour window within which to fit in 4 hours of desk work and a couple of hours of research,  this is possible on most days even if I am really tired or in a lot of pain
• I work with teams in the UK, Northern Europe, US and Australia so the extended working day is very valuable
• Not only do I spread out my work over a 12 hour period but in between work sessions I do a lot of gentle exercise which would be difficult to do in an office environment
• I often need to rest, read, nap, meditate etc again this would be difficult in an office environment
• The global nature of my work means there really is no office full of people that I work with anyway
• Although my wife also works from home because two of my daughters need to go to hospital regularly there are often times (every week) when I need to pick kids up from school or take them to after school activities
• Work life balance is much improved
• I have a trampoline at home!

Although home working is very convenient, there are definitely some down-sides:

• I miss the casual social interactions, for example the chats that don’t take place when you only ever talk to people on conference calls
• Most people I want to chat with seem to be busy on conference calls all day,  somehow when you work from home just chilling out for 10 minutes with a couple of team mates is more difficult than it used to be
• I observe much less the way that other people work, and therefore it’s more difficult to pick up new skills and broaden my experience
• There is some social isolation,  even though I get out a lot and meet people a lot,  it’s a smaller circle of people
• My work life and my home life are fully integrated,  it’s more difficult to switch off, but I am nice and relaxed so there is less need to switch off

I mitigate some of this using tools and processes:

• Blogs and blog comments provide access to a diversity of opinion and discussions
• Podcasts provide a way to connect to a broader set of views in a more social way than just reading, and I can listen to them while walking, swimming, ironing, gardening etc
• Presence and IM provide a relatively un-disruptive way to keep in contact with people
• Lunch time meetings provide a good social connection with the few people who live locally
• I am not addicted to always on email
• I keep my Tablet largely free of all work related activities except reading, and a small amount of reviewing

I have an extended version of this post here

We can sometimes get carried away by the idea that the solution to all of our problems is team work, we draw ever more people onto our conference calls, send our emails to bigger circulation lists and try an enlist a diverse group of people on every project to increase innovation.  Stop a minute does this always make sense, sometimes we just need to get the job done!

Taking a lesson from sport, there are “track and field teams” and their are “basketball teams”.  Sometimes we should think more like track and field.  There is a great article on this over on Ezine which is worth checking out, but here are some of the examples that I recall when I needed to step back and ask myself what sort of team I wanted:

• The really complex problem;  to solve this I needed to put two people together in a room, and provide them all the support they needed, but otherwise just keep everyone out of their way.  For this problem focus was key
• Get a fairly simple project delivered to time and budget;  get a team together who had done it before, who new each other well and manage them lightly.  For this problem innovation was not a priority, so it was better to have a small team, who new their stuff and worked easily together.  There was no productive friction to create innovation, but also no friction to slow them down
• Get a very complex project concept clear; to solve this I needed one person to get their head around the concept, and describe it, to help them they needed plenty of opportunity for discussion and review,  but it was their concept in the end and so it had integrity