Category: jointposts

It’s hot! Even for home-workers. So in this post, which is an ‘outtake’ from my regular series of Virtual Teams posts with Martin Hawksey, I share some of our experiences and tips for home-working during a heatwave…

When I was still office-based hot days were always a challenge. Fans were going on all the desks, commuting was a nightmare (if the trains were running at all) and everyone was trying to schedule as much time away from their desk, taking calls outside, having meetings in the cafe and taking frequent trips to the water cooler to fill up their bottles. Working when the weather is really saying “you should be on a beach… in the park… or in the pub with a cold pint” is always hard.

Dressing for the weather: one of the key advantages of being a home-worker during the heatwave is that you don’t have to leave the house, get on a train or sit in a meeting. You can wear shorts and t-shirts or loose clothing that would not adapt well to commuting or an office environment. For me, sleeveless silk blouses are a friend for formal meetings, but most days shorts and running gear makes work in hot temperatures much more productive!

Cooling your work-space: Airing your work space as much as you can in the early morning or late in the evening is key and I also find drying large sheets/laundry near an open window is a great way to cool air as far as possible. I have a south-facing window in my work space at home, so the blinds come down by about 10am in order to keep the sun at bay during the hottest hours of the day.

Fan yourself: Personally, I don’t like electrical fans, but having recently received a very useful hand fan from a friend I have found that to be an absolute life saver. It’s a great accessory not just during hot weather and will be firmly established in my travel bag.

Care & check-in: Especially during hot weather frequent check ins are important and in our team we use instant chat for that as well as daily video contact. It’s important to check in with each other’s well being and acknowledge the unusual conditions as you would if you were co-located.

Head outside: in my case the proximity of a road and a railway line and a building site makes working outside or in the garden a poor option, but some of my colleagues enjoy taking a laptop and heading outside at least for part of the day.

The fridge is your friend…: One of the things I find much easier at home is keeping hydrated and eating well during the hot weather.

Enjoy the sunshine 🙂

Hello and welcome to this month’s special podcast edition post on leading a virtual team. In this post (cross-posted here) the two of us, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), continue our series of openly sharing our approach to leadership.

If you are new here, you can catch up on earlier posts and podcasts or find out more about ALT, the organisation we work for as senior staff. We really appreciate comments and feedback and welcome questions or suggestions for future posts.

This time we’re talking about how we recruit new staff, what it’s like to carry out a virtual selection process and how that led to interesting reflections on what it means to be professional as a home worker in a virtual team and how we approach professional development.

Our podcast is embedded below or you can listen on SoundCloud.

May

Maren: we’ve been recruiting for two new team members recently and the virtual recruitment process has been a really positive experience. People often ask me how it works to recruit wholly online and in this post I’d like to share some of what we do. From the outset, recruiting for home-based roles gives us a much wider pool of applicants to choose from, and often more experienced candidates, too. We include details of how we work as a virtual, distributed team of home workers in the job description, and this time we included it as part of the practical test in the selection process, too. We conduct the application and initial short-listing process in the same way as you would for traditional roles, we meet online to agree a short-list and then invite candidates to take part in an online test. The practical element is conducted in our G Suite environment to give candidates a practical insight into the role. Likewise, the interview is conducted via Google Hangouts Meet. In one instance all the candidates we interviewed were already home workers and we included questions specifically about home working in the interview. I felt that those questions worked extremely well and led us to learn more about each candidate but also to establish a rapport about some of the challenges you can encounter. Did you find that those questions worked well? Was there anything in the answers that stood out for you?

Martin: I think the process worked well. A surprise to me was how considered the responses were to our question around homeworking. When we asked ‘Have you had any experience working from home previously? Can you expand on the main challenges you’ve encountered and/or perceive?’ a common response was to highlight to issues like isolation and maintaining boundaries between work and personal life. Previously I’ve seen questionable headlines like ‘Half of the UK workforce to work remotely by 2020’ and whilst I don’t expect we’ll even get close to this figure I get the sense there is a higher proportion of the workforce who have worked remotely either full-time or parttime. It’s useful at this point to also make a distinction between working remotely in a solo capacity and working remotely as part of a distributed team. This is where as part of the interview process I feel we got a better insight into whether the candidates would potentially work well in our team as responses revealed the skills they had beyond personal awareness. As part of this we also asked out candidates how they deal with change in the workplace. Given my role in supporting ALT’s infrastructure an aspect that always comes to mind is how our team deal with the continual updates to G Suite and our other web services. Was there anything from the interview processes that has inspired you or identified new opportunities?

Maren: One of the things that has inspired me was gaining insight into how home working is a factor in job selection. It was interesting to hear whether and if so how specifically being home based motivated candidates. The most obvious differentiator is no longer being constrained by location (which in our case was Oxford before we were a virtual org, which really limited our pool of applicants as Oxford is one of the most expensive places to live in the UK). Instead of applying for a job because it’s local, a far greater proportion of applicants selected by what they are passionate about and/or have experience in. Also, many more applicants had considered how the job would fit into their work/life balance and career progression and the questions around home working helped articulate that. As a small independent employer we can offer great opportunities and unique benefits but not the same as a large company could. On a personal level, I learnt a lot from how during the recruitment process we as a team express what we do and why we enjoy it. Questions like ‘what’s a typical day like?’ or ‘what do you find most rewarding?’ prompted us to share a perspective that we don’t often dip in to. I find it shifts my own point of view, allows me to see things in a new way, which after over ten years in the organisation is always a good thing. I am wondering…  if I was applying for my job now, what question would I ask the panel. If you were in that position, what would you want to know?

Martin: There were some great questions and like you I enjoyed talking about what working for ALT is like. I’ve been racking my brain to put myself back in the position of one of our interviewees and what I would ask. After over five years with ALT I’m struggling to remove some of the tacit knowledge of the organisation and how we operate to come up with some questions. One of the themes from our recent selection process was candidates asking about CPD opportunities. As you mentioned we are a small independent charity so there are some constraints on budget. Even with this in mind I’d say there is a strong culture for learning and supporting each other. As a small organisation it feels like we can also engage in CPD activities in a less formulaic fashion. For example, rather than going on an equality and diversity course my own CPD has recently involved looking at and talking about equality in Learning Technology. Given the nature of what we do there are also lots of opportunities to learn from our members. Only last week I was able to attend a workshop hosted by the University of Edinburgh on the emerging use of Jupyter to support learning and teaching. Given the variety of approaches to CPD that we have it can sometimes be hard to articulate. Are there other approaches we have to CPD you think we should highlight?

Maren: … well, as you’ve brought us on to talk about CPD, I’ll add that I’ve been playing with the idea of postal CPD activities for virtual teams recently. The idea came out of an article I read about the value of focusing on positive feedback and I came up with a postal activity called positive feedback by post. I really enjoyed the change of pace doing something by letter brought with it in contrast to the CPD I usually do which is often event based or online. Personally I think we as a team have exceptional CPD opportunities through the resources and support our organisation provides for things like mentoring and training, through working with Trustees and Members, time to travel and also support for internal schemes like CMALT. But for now, I’m busily dreaming up things delivered in the mail. It’s nice to get something tangible delivered to you by letter rather than email or instant chat when you’re part of a virtual team.

Hello and welcome to this month’s post on leading a virtual team. In this post (cross-posted here) the two of us, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), continue our series of openly sharing our approach to leadership.

If you are new here, you can catch up on earlier posts and podcasts or find out more about ALT, the organisation we work for as senior staff. We really appreciate comments and feedback and welcome questions or suggestions for future posts.

This time we’re talking about team culture, upgrading workflows, the ISO9001 Standard, the MIT90s Framework, our dislike of management terminology and the impact of being busy on communication and collaboration as a virtual team.

April

Maren: one of the themes we keep coming back to is how to improve our processes and I have been thinking about that in relation to my personal approach, what we do as a team and how we function as an organisation: first, on a personal basis I have been doing some upgrading to how I manage my own to do lists. This has brought me back to re-reading one of the first books on productivity I ever read, Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done and his “five steps that apply order to chaos” are still a useful reminder for me now. I’ve also been looking at the ISO9001 Standard and the seven quality management principles that inform the standard. Management speak notwithstanding these principles are very much what we do day to day, even if as an organisation we don’t articulate our approach in that manner. It’s useful to review these things from time to time, to remind ourselves of the baseline of how organisations function and how what we do aligns with that, similar to the Open Leadership Handbook we recently looked at. But the part of the puzzle I am most interested in at the moment is how we communicate what we do to our Members and the public in general and I have seen some interesting examples of how other organisations do that, for example the ETUG survey results and Open Education Week sharing its impact summary. One of the challenges we have as a small organisation is to balance getting things done with ensuring what we do is visible and I have the feeling that the busier we are the less communicative we become about what’s been achieved.

Martin: There is a culture aspect of this that is worth unpicking. Last month we highlighted the difference between ‘cultural fit’ and ‘cultural alignment’. Evolving our culture to make they way we communicate to our Members and the public needs us to consider how we adjust our cultural alignment as a team. With a smaller team resource is always a huge factor and change requires time. At the moment given we have two vacancies in our team that we are filling there is perhaps an opportunity to do something as the dynamic in our team changes. In a previous learning technology role culture was a hot topic, in particular, how do you change organisational culture. Something often discussed then was the MIT90s framework in which Scott Morton (1991) purposes that organisations are comprised of “five sets of forces in dynamic equilibrium among themselves even as the organisation is subjected to influences from an external environment”.

In revisiting the MIT90s framework I came across this in the conference paper “Thinking About Virtual Organisations and the Future“

Seeing the organisation in this light has made business managers realise the importance for the organisation to transform to meet the needs of the time. But more importantly, underneath a successful transformation is two conditions that must be met for this transformation. They are: (1) the creation of a vision which must be clearly understood and supported by everyone in the organisation; and (2) the ability to align infrastructures (such as information technology, work structures and processes) with the business goals. No matter what form or structures the organisation takes, these conditions must remain true; even for the virtual organisation.

So in terms of developing a culture where staff are more focused on visibility and communication you could argue that the changing team dynamic is an opportunity for everyone to engage in a new vision and ensure our infrastructures (IT, processes, structure etc.) are aligned. I feel I’ve taken us down a bit of a rabbit hole with this but I’m interested to know if you have an answer to “the busier we are the less communicative we become”?

Maren: My response to that would be that the busier we get the more likely we are to loose perspective. In any busy team, or role, there is always a balance to be struck between getting things done and finding time to think about things – and different factors can make it harder to find that balance: lots of change, things happening outside of work, ill health, heavy workloads etc. Signs of not quite finding that balance in my experience are things like not using project plans or to do lists properly, but instead allowing one’s inbox to dictate what to focus on (we talked about noisy versus important things in a past post), arranging to catch up and not remembering what about, feeling stressed but not that things improve when you tick things off your list etc. Kindness towards one self and others is key here. Giving oneself a break is particularly important when things are busy and can be hard to do. And it always helps to go back to basics, like the to do list strategy I mentioned earlier, and use the processes you have in place to regain some of that perspective, which in turn makes it easier to communicate what you are doing, progress being made and importantly achievements to colleagues and stakeholders. One simple tweak we have made this year is to add to our Operational Plan a column that prompts everyone to consider how they would sum up the output of a task in 280 characters or less and a column which asks us to note what’s new in any given area of operations. We are just about to make use of these new elements for the first time and I am curious to see how useful that will be for us to gain that sense of perspective and balance as a team. I really like our plan and find it really useful to track strategic progress and operational load, and it’s been great to tweak things to try and make it even better. One of the things you talk about is shared vision and that is a really interesting topic when like us you are in the final phase of delivering a really strong, shared vision and strategy before creating a new one. When people get involved in an organisation at this stage in the cycle, how can we best approach that? Any thoughts?

Martin: For me I think it’s important to remember that there is a distinction between our strategy and our processes, recognising that they are still interconnected, but that our processes are likely to have more impact on our culture. It is obviously still useful if our team engages with our strategy but I don’t see that as essential if they are delivering, it being the responsibility of management to make sure they are delivering the right thing. That said, there is probably some overlap between our values and processes, for example, something like openness is hopefully reflected in some of what we do in terms of some of the practicalities of sharing resources (e.g. documents, slides and other outputs are Creative Commons licensed and publically shared), but again you could argue some are more engaged with the processes of finding sharing resources under Creative Commons rather than the underlying value of openness. So ultimately I don’t think the stage we are at in our strategy has that much impact on our culture or vision. Where it has a bigger impact is potentially around processes, for example, if our next strategy has a different focus there might be different performance indicators that our processes have to deliver. So in terms of bring new people in to the team I think by focusing on the processes there is an opportunity to give them a sense of our existing culture and vision. Something I think important to remember is new people may bring new culture and vision which can be greatly beneficial to the organisation.   

Maren:There is a lot to talk about here and I have many different thoughts in response that it could be interesting to explore, but in a nutshell, the key thing for me is for everyone to understand, established staff and new colleagues alike, why we do what we do. You are right that maybe where we are in a strategy cycle isn’t as important as long as everyone is on the same page about what needs to happen, why and how. I conceptualise the why as the strategic perspective, the how as reflecting our values and the what as the practical delivery. Maybe there’s a podcast in the offing for our next episode, so that we can talk about some of these questions in more detail, but one final thought I have on the communication front is a ‘Tell someone about it’ or ‘Who needs to know about this’ checkbox that could be added to everything.. reminding us to keep communicating as we start the busiest period of the year.