Covid19, Working from home & UPS

Effective work follows principles which are even more important when working remotely.

Since almost 3 months I’m working from home now. Although it felt strange at the beginning, I really got used to it by now. As additional handicap this new home-office experience came along with being at home while also everyone else was at home too, both colleagues and family.

Everyone who has younger kids (or any other “sometimes loud and demanding” lifeform) surely has experienced similar difficulties and some new needed level of stress resistance 🙂

In my experience we got used to it around 2 weeks into our isolation. And now it’s hard to even imagine going back to a 5-days-in-the-office week.

This home-office thing works much better than I thought. I think we’ve been lucky to have the technological means in place to allow remote work and communication in such a frictionless manner. Working from home turned into a gigantic real-life experiment. And like every experiment, it revealed things we usually overlook during “normal” times.

Imagine this would have happened in the 90’s. Would have been a very different picture in my opinion.

User-behaviour beats technology

But same as with all technological advances, it’s the user behaviour which makes or breaks success. During the first weeks of our home-office odyssey I had the impression that the pure number of virtual meetings exploded. Sadly, most of them were heavily unstructured, badly prepared and by far not efficient enough. The tools were not the issue. They rarely are. It was us trying to behave as if we were still in the same building, just with webcams.

As you know I give classes at different universities where the radical change to remote learning was quite a challenge. Same as with the virtual meetings in the business world, virtual teaching sessions can’t be compared to a normal classroom situation. The input material needed to be prepared very well and can’t at all be compared to a physical class session.

The key difference I experienced is that dialogs and verbal communication are much harder. In the virtual setup the little nuances and timings of human communication get lost.

You surely have experienced multiple situations where the participants in a meeting all of a sudden started talking simultaneously and thus nothing got understood. This is caused by us not being able to “see” some milliseconds upfront that the other person is just about to start talking. These micro-observations reacting to other people’s facial or body expressions processed in our subconsciousness make the difference. In physical situations where you run a meeting or teach a class, you can moderate and steer conversations much more naturally by eye contact and body language (Scott-Philipps, 2014, pp. 54).

As all this is more difficult in a remote setup, you need to focus on creating interaction and dialog in a different way. Pre-prepared tasks, exercises and mini-group actions seem to be a good way to go. But in order to do this well, your preparation upfront needs to be very accurate. Many things I would do spontaneously and verbally in a physical class require a written, precisely prepared description in a virtual class.

So lesson #1 is clearly “Preparation, preparation, preparation!” Preparation is always important for being effective, but I feel it is absolutely inevitable for any effective group work in a remote situation.

The UPS theory

Lesson #2 instead is to try your best to avoid the “useless-participant spotlight”. Seeing and wondering about some person’s behaviour in virtual meetings I came up with this “UPS theory”.

I believe that some people, who are very distant from the real day-to-day operations in their teams, are very vulnerable to the “UPS syndrome”. I have the impression that these people usually spend most of their time networking with peers, participating in meetings in which they assist because of their position in the organisation, and walking around and chatting with their peers, teams and subordinates.

You know the moment when someone unmutes, drops a comment that is only loosely related to the topic just to be visible, and then disappears again into mute-mode? Classic UPS.

The problem with a situation like now with Corona is that this remote situation is undermining their importance. As the day-to-day is anyhow managed by their teams and sub-level managers, they don’t have any stake there. Spontaneous networking with peers is also much more difficult, setting up a video call for pure small talk is much more awkward than spending 30 minutes with a peer who they met occasionally in the cafeteria.

Thus the only place left where they can show their importance to the organisation and from which they derive their self-affirmation are meetings. This unfortunately has a severe negative side-effect on your meeting effectiveness. While in physical meetings the pure physical presence of the person is undisputable and often enough for the person to feel “seen”, the virtual world is very different. In the virtual world, especially in meetings with a high number of participants, the pure attendance of a person might even get missed. Thus for everyone noticing his or her participation it is absolutely key to talk, to have time in the spotlight, to show to the world their contribution.

As you can imagine this usually makes meetings much longer and much harder, especially as persons searching for “UPS” often occur in groups 🙂

Remote work also exposed leadership quality very clearly. Good leaders became even better because they focused on clarity, trust and real outcomes. Weak leaders struggled because their main tools had been proximity and presence. When those tools disappear, what is left is competence and communication. Or in some cases, not much.

Best practice and book recommendation

Best advice I can give is to try to keep meetings small and invite very restrictively only the persons who need to contribute something. A colleague and good friend of mine told me yesterday about Peter Drucker, the founder of modern management (Denning, 2014, Forbes), who wrote in his book The Drucker Essentials that there are only very few situations where a meeting makes sense at all (Drucker, 2008, p. 237). The work needs to get done before and you should apply strict rules before deciding if a meeting is even necessary. Maybe the fact that I could not remember that part earlier is already a hint that I should have applied it more often.

Maybe these thoughts from Drucker are even more important nowadays during Corona times. Remote work forced us to rethink what effective work really means. Less noise, more clarity. Less meeting marathons, more preparation. If we keep a bit of this mindset when things go back to normal, the whole experience has not been wasted.

Despite all the humour, the period itself was serious. It put many things into perspective, about work, but also about what really matters.

Before finishing I really hope that everyone reading this, plus your families and friends, are fine and healthy. While for most of us this is just a strange new experience with a time of less social contact, it has been a nightmare and severe life-threatening situation for others and some may have even lost beloved friends, partners or parents. My thoughts are with those whose families haven’t been as lucky as my own.

I wish you all the best, stay safe, stay healthy!

Next time back with some insights on “goal setting” and maybe some thoughts out of the book I just finished on Amazon, The Everything Store…