Maren Deepwell

Category: jointposts

  • Virtual Teams: Things that donā€™t look broken still need fixing

    Things that donā€™t look broken still need fixing

    Hello and welcome to this monthā€™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.

    March

    Maren: this month Iā€™m keen to pick up on a couple of things we started talking about in the last podcast, talk about all things open as we get ready for OER19 and also discuss a book you recommended, Invisible Women. Itā€™s an awesome read full of interesting facts and laugh out loud moments (car manufacturersā€™ advice to lower my voice to help AIs understand my ā€˜atypicalā€™ high female voice made me giggle it seemed so ludicrous) and there are many things that really chimed with me in the context of this series on open practice, starting with how important it is for women & men to each contribute their perspective to policy, research and practice equally. The joint keynote we wrote for International Womenā€™s Day at UHI is a good example of this – neither one of us could have written the talk on their own.

    Itā€™s the open collaboration, the dialogue, that produces deeper insights. Gender data gaps discussed in the book provide countless examples of where that kind of dialogue is lacking from workplace practices (biases in recruitment software) to disaster relief (male only committees designing shelters without cooking spaces). Another point the book prompted me to reflect on is how important transparency and openness are for promoting equality. There are countless examples of complex technologies, especially AIs, that are proprietary and donā€™t permit us to investigate potentially biases much less address them. The two overarching thoughts I took from the book are that firstly, in one way or another, women, and by extension anyone who doesnā€™t fit the ā€˜templateā€™ is made to adjust in order to fit – even if changing the underlying policies/design/structures would have bigger benefits for all. And secondly, how we always prioritise something else, focus on the next crisis, instead of focusing on gender equality ā€˜because we see the rights of 50% of the population as a minority interestā€™.

    Martin: ā€˜Fitā€™ is an interesting topic. As part of our talk at UHI I thought Iā€™d look at the findings of the ALT Annual Survey to see if there are any notable differences for survey responses based on gender. This was a very quick analysis so I canā€™t say if the results are statistically significant but it was interesting to see differences in areas such as enablers/drivers for the use of Learning Technology by male and female respondents. Fit, and in particular culture fit, features as a chapter in ā€˜The Open Organization Leaders Manualā€™, which you recently shared. In this Jen Kelchner’s writes about “Stop hiring for culture fit“. As part of this Kelchner argues that instead of cultural fit organisations should recruit for ā€˜alignmentā€™:

    “Fit” implies that your organization seeks to indoctrinate new members into its specific way of lifeā€”to clone its vision of the ideal member in everyone who joins it. When we talk about “fit” we create the potential for exclusion. It prompts us to seek someone who already embodies the values and principles we think are best (then seek to “fit” them into a pre-existing spot in our organizations), and ignore others.

    Achieving “alignment,” however, is different. Alignment involves embracing diversity of thought and building inclusive, innovative, community-driven teams that are all oriented toward shared goals, even if they look and think differently from one another.

    ā€˜The Open Organization Leaders Manualā€™ uses five principles as part of itā€™s Open Organization Definition: transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration and community. In terms of transparency itā€™s highlighted that:

    In open organizations, transparency reigns. As much as possible (and advisable) under applicable laws, open organizations work to make their data and other materials easily accessible to both internal and external participants; they are open for any member to review them when necessary (see also inclusivity). Decisions are transparent to the extent that everyone affected by them understands the processes and arguments that led to them; they are open to assessment (see also collaboration). Work is transparent to the extent that anyone can monitor and assess a project’s progress throughout its development; it is open to observation and potential revision if necessary (see also adaptability).

    I feel to our members and the general public that our operations are very transparent (our joint posts being a case in point). In terms of our distributed team it feels like more effort is required to be transparent, as in ā€œto the extent that anyone can monitor and assess a project’s progress throughout its developmentā€, than if we were all physically in the same office. Weā€™ve previously talked about the challenges of virtual operations and the removal of some of the affordances of being physically co-located. Even though we are over 12 months into our move to operating as a distributed team this feels like one of the areas where we have the most continued evolution in our systems and procedures. This is also an interesting time as our staff team will have a number of new faces and Iā€™m interested to see how candidates align to ALTā€™s values.

    Maren: I like the concept of ā€˜alignmentā€™ instead of ā€˜fitā€™ and it is a useful way of thinking during recruitment in particular. But whilst I found the open org manual really useful, its perspective comes from open source/software companies. In our context, in a small charity with a wide breadth of projects itā€™s harder to make the kind of internal ā€˜joined-up-nessā€™ work for everyone than when you are all focused on making a product shipping deadline. Thereā€™s a balance to be struck between enabling individuals to get on with their work and effective team communication. And it can be hard to determine how much information is actually useful and why. For instance, Iā€™m finding it rewarding to develop and improve our internal processes for reporting, budgets and project overviews. Itā€™s part of the ongoing effort you refer to helping us as a team work together even better. Like you, I have a lot of enthusiasm for an iterative approach to designing processes. That said, Iā€™m also acutely aware that any change requires time and effort that would not be needed if we just kept doing things the same way. Itā€™s a big ask (and one that requires a strong common understanding of the reasons behind it) to spend time and energy changing things when thereā€™s so much to be getting with. Especially when things donā€™t look ā€˜brokenā€™ but still need ā€˜fixingā€™ to avoid disaster in the long run it can be a hard argument to make. As well as requiring time and effort, changing internal processes can also temporarily rob us of the comfort and confidence that comes with familiarity. Which leads me to reflect on what alternative sources of comfort I turn to when uncertainty and change are a constant. One example of what I do is to look beyond a period or process of change, and thinking ahead to what things might look like 3 months into the future or a year ahead. And it can be useful to do that as a team as well to create a greater measure of the kind of transparency you speak about. Hereā€™s one such approach, similar to a SWOT analysis, that I found interesting and maybe we can try something like this at our next team day in April.

    Martin: Your comment on things that ā€œdonā€™t look ā€˜brokenā€™ but still need ā€˜fixingā€™ā€ made me smile. I’ve some wooden decking at home that falls into that category thanks to some rot, but I get we are talking about something very different here. Having recently gone through my annual appraisal thinking ahead is still fresh in my mind. It’s interesting to reflect on personal goals and I can also see the benefit of exploring and articulating team goals. As often with these collaborative posts they are an opportunity for me to start googling for answers to questions that pop into my mind. Something I started wondering was the impact of churn as staff move on and new faces join virtual teams. I didnā€™t find anything in particular that talks about this and I suppose the stronger influencer in this instance is less on whether or not you are dealing with a virtual team but the size of the team you are dealing with. As part of my search Google Books did throw up ā€˜Leading Effective Virtual Teams: Overcoming Time and Distance to Achieve Exceptional Resultsā€™ by Nancy Settle-Murphy. As part of the uniques challenges of virtual teams Settle-Murphy highlights that ā€œitā€™s harder for team members to tell whether theyā€™re out of alignment about important issues ā€¦ and once out of alignment, it takes virtual teams much longer to pull back togetherā€. Settle-Murphy goes on to highlight one of the challenges for virtual team leaders is ā€œensuring that all share the same understanding of team goalsā€. The modified SWOT approach you mentioned looks like it should help with identifying goals, the issue I see is the timing as weā€™ve potentially got two new starters joining us after April. In a team of six, two new starters make a big impact and with a high percentage of the team changing itā€™s going to be interesting times but the timing is good as whilst not a lull it does mean we are not throwing our new starts straight into our Annual Conference.

    Maren: ever since I took on a leadership role Iā€™ve waited for the right timing for all those things, for the mythical steady state, that blank slate from which to start planning and doing afresh, ideally with all aims clearly defined and understood by everyone. But leading organisations or teams, working with technology and with people is always messy. Thereā€™s always history, legacy, mess you inherit, missing pieces of the puzzle and my favourite – the unknown unknowns. Our work is always work in progress. Thatā€™s why when you have a moment when things work out, when you achieve something or can enjoy something, itā€™s worth pausing and revelling in the moment. Send a hug, share a smile, take a breath. And then take that next step towards the inevitable chaos that will no doubt put an end to that peaceful moment.

    More to read and listen to

  • Virtual Teams: special #femedtech podcast edition

    Hello and welcome to this monthā€™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 & feedback and welcome questions or suggestions for future posts.

    February

    Maren: In the past year weā€™ve each volunteered as a guest curator for @femedtech (hereā€™s a link to my post on that). Promoting greater equality in Learning Technology and in our distributed organisation in particular has become an important part of our professional practice. In 2017 I gave this talk at EdTech17 and since then Iā€™ve included something about equality in most of my talks, following the example of others to use my voice to raise awareness.

    As my turn to volunteer as a guest curator is coming up just after International Womenā€™s Day on 8 March and we are contributing a joint keynote on promoting equality in a distributed organisation to a related event at the University of the Highlands and Islands, Iā€™ve started to reflect on what Iā€™ve learnt over the past year and come up with some ideas to discuss in this post and podcast: first, Iā€™ve discovered lots of my own blind spots – issues and inequalities that I wasnā€™t aware of previously. The #femedtech network and also working in the Open Education community has helped with that (although there is a lot more to learn). Also, our work on policies for remote working has prompted me to question what I can do, what I can change, to help address any structural inequality within our organisation, by for example reviewing policies for flexible working and family leave. Another thought is that reading the narratives of others, recounting personal journeys, precarious work and family situations, career challenges, work life balance problems and so forth, made me reflect on how far outside of any comfort zone I usually work. And that is a sobering thought, particularly as I am in a position of relative privilege.

    Martin: Itā€™s interesting to consider equality and diversity as part of a distributed team. A number of the discussions Iā€™ve seen around gender equality highlight the benefits of employers providing better opportunities for flexible working. Another factor to consider is the physical workplace can be very gender bias. The allocation/distribution of toilets is often mentioned, but I think there are lots of other environmental factors which are often overlooked. I donā€™t know whether virtual workplaces can be gender bias, perhaps you have thoughts on this, but itā€™s interesting that in a 2017 survey on Jobsite they reported that 76% of female tech professionals thought businesses offering remote working were more likely to retain top talent. Blind spots is one of the biggest challenges, not just within the workplace, but society as a whole. Before attitudes and approaches can be changed the issue first has to be acknowledged. In the case of gender I think a lot of guys donā€™t see a problem, or even if they do see it as a problem it is something that they shouldnā€™t be concerned about. As part of my curation period for @femedtech I came across the ā€œICTsā€™ for Feminist Movement Building – Activist Toolkit

    A part of this Frances Bell highlighted the ā€˜Principles of Feminist Communicationā€™ which is part of the toolkit. A principle that caught my eye was ā€œwe produce content in a democratic manner. Women take the lead. The process serves to build positive powerā€. In the case of @femedtech it is absolutely important that women lead this community, but for it to be successful it has to reach those who have their own blind spots. As such I was grateful for the opportunity to curate this community for a short period. As I explained to a friend the best equality and diversity training I had ever been on.

    Maren: I agree. Itā€™s an enormously valuable experience. Physical workspace is an interesting area when it comes to promoting equality and Iā€™d include conference/meeting spaces in that. There are many aspects to this, even the seats you sit on: for example, I was on an all women panel once conducted on a high stage on bar stools. Not great when panelists are wearing skirts and the camera is located five feet below. Or dress codes for work, including it still being legal to stipulate women wear heels. And donā€™t get me started on the topic of pockets

    . Working closely with the tech sector a different kind of stereotype dominates, the genius young start up CEO or coder, mostly males who work all hours of the day. Having other responsibilities outside of work or not being able or willing to give up 100% of your time all of the time can easily be looked down on. If you open up your perspective to challenging discrimination based on age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership, and pregnancy and maternity then the challenges just keep getting bigger (ALTā€™s policy on equality & diversity underlines this). Which is why I feel so strongly that itā€™s also a matter of personal responsibility to help promote greater equality: everyone can make a difference within their personal practice, their immediate sphere of influence or even their own mindset. We can each educate ourselves, try and become more aware and raise othersā€™ awareness. I am always inspired by projects such as the Feminist Internet, Women in Red, Uncommon Women and many others that do amazing things. On a related note, I saw a tweet the other day where Kelsey Merkley shared a childhood memory:

    It made me smile because my dream jobs growing up were bin man (because of riding at the back of the truck), hot dog vendor (love of ketchup), astronaut (amazing science teacher), judge (inspired by Captain Picard) and my fancy dress costume of choice was Poseidon (trident) and circus director (top hat). It never occurred to me that these werenā€™t ā€˜girlyā€™ choices. Nowadays I buy books like Garth Nixā€™s Frogkisser for the younger readers in my life, so they can develop imaginations in which the White Wizard can be a teenage girl. And I indulge in books like those written by Ursula LeGuin, which have diverse lead characters and cultural contexts so that my own imagination grows in richness and diversity.

    Martin: Iā€™m hoping over the generations there is more equality. One issue we have is people just live to darn long so even if this is the case we still have a long time to wait. Just before our last Trustee meeting and knowing I had the prospect of a 4am start I decided to stay up and watch The Great British Sewing Bee. My interest in sewing is largely as a spectator, but Iā€™m quite happy to put buttons back on, I also sewed on all of my daughterā€™s Brownie badges. People who know me well will recognise me as a maker and DIYer so perhaps not a surprise that Iā€™m interested in this type of programme. When I was a kid I remember one year asking Santa for a sewing machine, I donā€™t recall it being a particularly positive reaction to that request and think I ended up with a bike instead. As someone with their own child I feel Iā€™m more conscious of not imposing stereotypes. Some of my friends/family are teachers and when we have spoken about this in the past they say they feel there is greater openness and acceptance in areas like sexual orientation in that generation. Thinking about this post and how it relates to equality in the workplace one question I have is there a danger that remote working will be used to allow organisations to have a diverse workforce but also prevent people having full freedom of expression? An example I have in mind is a number of organisations, notably the education sector, now provide employees with the option of branded rainbow-coloured lanyards. This is a very visible support of the LGBT+ community, an act that would have far less public impact for a remote workforce. Do remote workers have the same degree of expression as office based staff?

    Maren: That feels like a good jumping off point for the podcast we are recording for this post. Thereā€™s so much to unpack. Like many of the issues we discuss in this series this is a topic that touches on very personal, human questions and reaches all the way to formal HR policies, working with diverse stakeholders and keynote speakers and even our organisationā€™s strategy. Iā€™ve also explored this in my Senior CMALT portfolio to show that this is a key element of my professional practice.

    Thereā€™s a person on the image below who has green hair, and thatā€™s intentional. Sure, itā€™s a small thing, but itā€™s important because of the thought process that went into it. Itā€™s putting values, policies even, into practice in a playful and powerful way.

    https://soundcloud.com/mhawksey/openly-sharing-our-approach-to-leading-a-virtual-team-podcast-3

    More to read and listen to:

  • Virtual Teams: When things get personal

    Hello and welcome to this monthā€™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 & feedback and welcome questions or suggestions for future posts.

    January

    Maren: Hi. I wanted to start this post by talking about a small professional development experiment we did this month. I came across some online courses run by Google and as we use Google Apps for Education this seemed like a nice way for all of us to do some free CPD, use a familiar platform for a new purpose and have a bit of fun as a team. Everyone was free to choose their own topic, and the plan was to report back at a team meeting and share three things: something you learnt, something you found challenging and something you would like to find out more about. I chose to spend my hour learning more about digital wellbeing (maybe not a new topic, but definitely time well spent) and one of the ideas that I took away from the course is to have ā€˜device-freeā€™ meetings to encourage individuals to be more present and engage with each other. On the one hand not being distracted by notifications etc makes complete sense to me. Giving others your full attention is important. I wonder what else makes for good online meeting etiquette other than not checking notifications? On the other hand I am not sure that staring at each otherā€™s video feed is always the best way to get people thinking or talking. That reminded me of this visual thought ā€˜Meeting around a documentā€™ and how sometimes having a walk, an actual one or a virtual wander through a spreadsheet, might be a better way to connect, work, talk together. Thoughts?

    Martin: I also did the digital wellbeing course, mainly because knowing you had already done it weā€™d have something to discuss. Bryanā€™s visual thinkery is very apt particularly for distributed teams where we rely on real-time collaborative documents. The thought of working on a MS Word or Excel document and emailing it around as an attachment now seems completely foreign to me. There have been some projects where this has been required because of the limitations Google Docs has when embedding complicated graphs. When I have to go back to this technique now it just seems like such an unproductive way of doing things and I see lots of benefits from ā€˜meeting around a documentā€™, particularly when combined with video conferencing. It does come with some challenges, for example, making sure everyone is on the same page or spreadsheet tab. As a result I think it requires a little more awareness than if you were working on a document face-to-face. There are also small things that can easily be forgotten. For example we have two colleagues with the same name and there was a moment recently when we all had to be reminded that when meeting virtually, unlike a physical meeting, you canā€™t easily make eye contact and direct your comment to someone as a result we need to remember to let people know which person you are talking to. You could ask if there is any point in enabling cameras during virtual meetings as often when you are collaborating on a document you might be viewing it in the same window as the meeting but it gets lost underneath. Personally I find even in these situations having video is important, particularly when there are more than two of you. It gives me reassurance that the other person is ā€˜thereā€™ and not been dropped from the call. Do you have any tips on maintaining focus while in video calls?

    Maren: I have a mental checklist for meetings that I use for meetings regardless of how they happen. Iā€™ve added a few examples of techniques specifically relevant for online meetings.

    When I lose focus in a call, most of the time thatā€™s because my priorities are wrong: instead of whatā€™s important, Iā€™ll focus on whatā€™s urgent or worse, I get distracted by whatā€™s loudest. That could be emails pinging into my inbox or notifications coming into my phone. Or it could be something more personal like having a bad hair day or feeling self conscious about my new glasses (no one actually noticed). Outside of meetings there is a bigger issue around focus Iā€™d like to think about: in roles like ours, as senior staff, we should ideally focus on whatā€™s important, manage whatā€™s urgent and oversee whatā€™s loud or noisy (noisy, but part of the day to day churn of running the organisation). In practice as the pressure we are under goes up, the higher the workload for whatever reason, the less good I become at delegating and the more prone to get stuck in and simply ā€˜doā€™. Working in a distributed team some of the physical prompts to prioritise are absent: for example, in a traditional setting you may have team meetings in one room but meet the Board or plan strategy in another. In our virtual working environment all meeting rooms are equal – itā€™s up to us to create a different atmosphere, a different focus. Similarly, when my former boss was in the office and working on something he would close the door to indicate that he was not to be disturbed unless it was urgent. Now, itā€™s up to me to shut down my inbox, tell everyone I am busy via chat or update my calendar and make that space to focus and have no distractions. Itā€™s a bit like training for a race, preparation & practice are key. And a sense of fun/a bit of humour goes a long way to get you through rough patches.

    Martin: Great checklists! I was recently invited to a meeting. The person co-ordinating the meetings was conducting interviews and used Google Calendar appointment slots to allow me select a time that suited me best. As part of the sign-up the calendar slots included some tips on meetings like the prompt ā€œwhat is the desirable outcome of this meeting?ā€ and a link to Wikihow: Prepare for a meeting. I didnā€™t think that the Wikihow guidance is that great but liked the idea of using appointment slots and those slots being prefilled with some guidance text with the option for the person taking the slot to edit the text. In terms of ā€˜noiseā€™ Iā€™ve followed Alan Livineā€™s advice and will now often put the radio on in the morning. Generally meetings later in the day mean I end up turning it off and forgetting to put it back on. To also reduce the noise of notifications I generally always have Windows 10 Focus Assist on which reduces the number of pings and alerts you get. As part of our year end we are also conducting a ā€œhome working setup – annual check-inā€ where we are encouraging our team to share a photo of their setup and include a couple of tips/lessons learned. As I look after ALT infrastructure and oversee our social media I never like to be too far away from being contactable – if our website goes down I want to know about it. As a result my home setup has a lot of screen real estate to help, the downside is there are a lot of potential distractions:

    Something else that features in this pic are post-it notes. Iā€™ve got various online note tools, mainly Google Keep, but still find particularly when our workload increases that the processes of prioritising what I need to achieve by writing it down very useful ā€¦ itā€™s also always nice to cross something off when complete. One downside of physical notes relates to your comment about closing office doors when you are busy. There is no easy way for the rest of the team to see what is on my notes. What I really need is a view access only option on Google Keep…

    Maren: I hadnā€™t tried out the calendar slot scheduling, so thatā€™s a new tip for me. And I definitely agree we should support a feature request for view only Keep notes! With such frequent iteration on the platform, I donā€™t always spot new things or indeed explore the potential of innovations as they appear. A recent week of A/B testing left me rather puzzled as my interfaces suddenly looked different to everyone else’s. I suppose itā€™s the flipside of being ā€œagileā€… and as the in house family tech support that many of us who work in Learning Technology are, I frequently try and explain to elderly users, i.e. my mom, why indeed she has to adapt to the way things are done afresh every few months. It plays havoc with our family tech manuals (my mom was an accountant, we have manualsā€¦) and is REALLY unhelpful for people who have trouble with technology to begin with. I am not going to mention here the problems even blogging brings with it just now thanks to the recent WordPress innovationsā€¦ thereā€™s plenty of that discussion already going on. My closing thought for this monthā€™s conversation is really about how personal all of this is, how much of a personal issue managing our relationship with technology and our wellbeing (online and physical) is. Sure, itā€™s an obvious point to make, but I wonder how me having appointment slots in my calendar may feel to someone who is used to having a chat about when to meet? I often underestimate how small actions like this may come across at a human level. I feel a whole new blog post coming on, so I better pause hereā€¦ any final thoughts from you?

    Martin: I completely agree that our individual relationship with technology varies as does the level of confidence we individually have when faced with change. Someone you chat with to arrange a meeting might prefer picking a calendar slot. This really underlines your point that this is all very personal, one thing that works for one person might not for the next ā€¦ let’s just be grateful we are a team of 6, not 60, 600 or even more than that.  

    More to read and listen to:

    Getting Virtual Teams Right (Harvard Business Review)

  • Virtual teams: a special podcast edition

    Cover image: Special Podcast Edition: Reflecting on the first year leading a virtual team

    This post continues the series on openly sharing our approach to leading a virtual team – a joint project with Martin Hawksey (cross-posted here) for which we write a monthly blog post and this time recorded a podcast for you, too.

    What a year…

    With the transition to becoming a distributed organisation and one year of leading our virtual team under our belt, we reflect on the highs and lows, the good and the bad and most importantly on whatā€™s ahead as we continue to develop this project in open practice.

    Maren: Thereā€™s so much Iā€™d like to talk about that itā€™s hard to know where to start. First, Iā€™m excited about how a transition plan on a spreadsheet has turned into reality, how the organisation we lead has changed over the past 18 months. Second, thereā€™re 101 things Iā€™ve learnt along the way, from how to set up a PO Box when you are a distributed organisation (harder than you think) to how to manage a virtual team and all that that entails. And then there are all the things Iā€™ve discovered about being a home workerā€¦ during summer holidays, family emergencies and when things go wrong. Itā€™s never been boring, thatā€™s for sure!

    How about how? Whatā€™s been most surprising and rewarding this past year? What are you most keen to develop next? This time next yearā€¦ will we be millionaires?

    Martin: Time has really flown by, it only seemed like yesterday that we started putting in place some of the operational changes for moving to a distributed organisation. Itā€™s only the fact that Iā€™ve started to receive renewal notifications for annual licences for things we didnā€™t require before in a host institution that Iā€™m reminded of the realities of the changes we had to put in place. In some ways I have to say that the most rewarding thing in the past year has been the shared monthly posts we are doing. When we started I thought it would be useful to share with others the journey we as an organisation were on. Iā€™ll let others decided whether it has been useful or not, but regardless Iā€™ve personally greatly benefited from the opportunity to reflect on progress and consider where we go next. Reflecting on December something that stood out for me was in Septemberā€™s post on the ā€˜serious upsides of working in pyjamasā€™, we discussed remote worker wellbeing. In December as the cold has set in itā€™s been noticeable how weā€™ve swapped pyjamas for thick jumpers and blankets. As a remote worker youā€™ve the benefit of having more control over your working environment. The downside I find, particularly if you are a skinflint like me, is you are reluctant to put the heating on if you are the only one in the property. As an employer our organisation is limited in what we can do. We all get a home working allowance but that is limited and it is up to us individually to decide how it is used. Seasonal variations in remote teams wasnā€™t something I had anticipated. Do you have any standout unanticipated moments?    

    Maren: It often feels to me like this whole year has been one long unanticipated moment. Thereā€™s definitely a lot we could talk about in that whole area of remote working and wellbeing. Writing these posts has helped us both become more aware of the complex issues involved and itā€™s interesting just how much there is to unpack here, both from the perspective of a small employer and ourselves as individuals.
    Another question you touch upon is whom this kind of open leadership practice is for. Our readers include our own team, the Board of Trustees whom we report to, Members of ALT and our professional networks. On Twitter, LinkedIn and our own blogs as well as at events weā€™ve been getting comments, questions & feedback – and many of them are about open practice rather than the virtual org transition. Senior staff donā€™t often adopt the approach we are taking, to discuss the inner workings of their organisation as they happen. Bringing our Learning Technology open practice into how we lead the team and managed the transition feels like an important step forward. Itā€™s prompted me to think differently about innovating, about improving things even if they are new/in progress. No one gets to start new things on a blank slate or with everything in steady state very often. Thereā€™s usually legacy issues, deadlines, risks etc from the outset. By making time to focus on how we run the organisation weā€™ve been able to innovate much more in that area and thatā€™s been exciting.

    Martin: You touched upon space in terms of time and locations such as various social networks. Something I’ve been thinking about more is mental space. This is an area we’ve talked about a couple of times, but a recent experience reminded me how important I find it to compartmentalize my workspace and personal space as part of being a remote worker and also how difficult it can be sometimes for others to understand this. Recently my parents were staying with us for the holidays. At home my ‘officeā€™ is also the spare bedroom. Having a dedicated space for me to work is very important, not least it means I can just go to work each morning and not have to set up anything, I just switch on and go. This year my parents wanted to stay a little longer which meant they’d still need the spare room while I went back to work. As part of this they said they would make sure they would be out of the spare room/my office by 9am each day. Initially I didn’t say anything but in the end had to say to them it wasn’t going to work for me. The issue I had in my own mind is going to the office as a remote worker is more than just being at your desk at 9am. With suitcases and clothes lying around I was worried it was going to feel less like an office. Knowing my parents were in the house I was worried it was going to feel less like being at work. I appreciate for many these things sound trivial, but for me they are very important. If I worked in a traditional office in my own mind I knew it was going to feel like having my parents sitting in reception all day. I think this aspect of remote working can be hard for others to appreciate. Have you had any similar experiences?

    Maren: Iā€™ve not worked from home for as long as you have and regular travel is a big part of my role, so I come to this from a different angle: I have created a mental work space that I can function in properly on a train, hotel room or at an event. I feel comfortable in that space. And itā€™s probably why I have a strong attachment to my chromebook, stickers and all. That said, creating that space in my head at my home has been tricky! Trickier than I had anticipated especially given how rarely I was desk based before working from home. And like you I prefer having physical space thatā€™s ā€˜mineā€™ for that – but limited space, my cat, family etc really challenge that at times. I hated strongly disliked working in an office and I feel working from home is a hard won privilege. I love working from home and it suits me really well. Still, I have had to rearrange my set up at least 5 times in the first year, moving furniture, changing equipment, adjusting to how the sun comes in through the window and so forth. I have ended up with a yoga bolster as a footrest and using the windowsill as a temporary standing desk. Iā€™m also a carer for my parents so my work/family lines are already blurry, but working from home has made that moreā€¦ prominent in my mind. I may have also come to the conclusion that I would ideally need a bigger house! My work space is adjacent to the family bathroom and the main space to dry laundry as well as the notional spare room. Like you, I have to try and articulate my workspace not only in my own mind but to family, friends, guests & my cat. It reminds me of a Seinfeld episode in which George is talking to Jerry about his new girlfriend making friends with his other friends, how those two parts of his life are starting to mesh and he feels panic because he fears losing space to be ā€˜Independent Georgeā€™ and end up being ā€˜Relationship Georgeā€™ all of the time he shouts: ā€˜worlds are colliding, Jerry!ā€™ I feel similarly about working from home – sometimes it seems like worlds are colliding.

  • Virtual Teams: Checklists, kindness and Secret Santa – nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more

    This post continues the series on openly sharing our approach to leading a virtual team – a joint project with Martin Hawksey (cross-posted here) for which we write a monthly blog post.

    November

    This month we discuss checklists, how each of our staff invented their own scale to rate their week and treating others with kindness.

    Maren: Iā€™ve been thinking about how to make time for both urgent and important things, and at the same time to reserve enough space for impromptu collaboration. This article on using G Suite to improve team performance via intermittent interaction for example argues that agile communication and collaboration is more effective than regularly scheduled interactions – but itā€™s much harder to do well in my experience. Following on from last monthā€™s post in which we discussed trello and jamboard one of the things we have since implemented are some new checklists, for areas like payroll, GDPR and tech maintenance that cover regular, important tasks for the team, but arenā€™t related to urgent deadlines. Iā€™m a big fan of checklists (and their history in aviation and healthcare in particular) and find them very effective in a team like ours and in particular for things that we donā€™t work on every day. We complete the checklist individually but we have a prompt at team meetings and then review the results together, which gives us space to raise questions. For me, another upside is that I spent less time on something thatā€™s routine, if important, freeing me up for other things. As a recent development in our approach to leading the team, what are your thoughts on this?

    Martin: An aspect of checklists, particularly if they are shared, I hadnā€™t really considered until recently was how they can be used to ā€˜nudgeā€™ team members. Nudge theory was something I first heard about many years ago talking to a contractor who worked with the UK Government, in part supporting the British Cabinet Office Behavioural Insights Team, also known as the ā€œNudge Unitā€. It was only recently at the Scottish ELESIG that I first heard it being referenced in a learning and teaching context. This also got me thinking about nudges in distributed teams. Iā€™ve no experience in behavioural science and I should also say I can see the dangers of going down a ā€˜nudge managementā€™ route, but I can also see the value in exploring some aspects of ā€˜nudgesā€™. An interesting paper I came across was Nudge management: applying behavioural science to increase knowledge worker productivity (Ebert and Freibichler, 2017). This paper highlights a number of nudge tactics and itā€™s interesting to see that things like quarterly reporting of goals/milestones is something we already do. I can also see parallels with some of the examples reported and the G Suite article and models of collaboration you mentioned earlier. It is unlikely we will get a Google style micro kitchen and I always wonder if there is more we can do to create opportunities for the informal exploration of ideas. Back to checklists I see one advantage of using these is it becomes easier for us to see who has and hasnā€™t completed activities ā€¦ nudge, nudge, wink, wink say no more.

    Maren: I donā€™t like the term nudge management much, but itā€™s a very useful idea and so is the article once I got past the terminology. One benefit of using approaches like this in a small team rather than in a huge corporation like Google is being able to take an agile, informal approach to reiterating checklists: for example when a colleague added something new to their own checklist this week, we identified this as a gap and added it to the template for everyone. Two minutes work resulted in an immediate improvement. Similarly, being able to see an overview of everyone completing a monthly GDPR checklist makes the process more transparent and shows that everyone is participating. It improves communication in a very time effective way. Being a small team we can sometimes take a more playful approach as this weekā€™s team meeting demonstrated. We often incorporate a check-in into team meetings, where we quickly and informally share how we are doing and how busy we are. That started as rating your week out of 10 (10 = the busiest) and has gradually turned into everyone rating their week on their own scale, be that a colour or phrase or similar metaphor. With a small team, that works because it still fulfills the purpose of the exercise: taking a step back and checking in with yourself, sharing that with everyone without being competitive and giving us a better sense of how everyone is doing. How individuals choose to rate their week, what scale they apply, also tells you a lot: it reflects their personality or mood, how they integrate with the team, how much of a sense they have of how theyā€™re doingā€¦ it helps to fill the gaps formal reporting or catch ups canā€™t. We have established such a strong foundation in the team meetings process that we can now have more freedom to ā€˜personaliseā€™ parts of it, like the check-ins. The way I see it, the better the structures we as a team have are and the more we trust them, the more freedom we have. Iā€™m really interested in the relationship between those structures and the agility they can bring. Does that make sense to you?

    Martin: Being able to express ourselves is a good thing, Iā€™ve never considered if it was more or less important for distributed teams. I think it certainly helps when there is work pressure on and the degree of informality perhaps provides a foundation in creating a culture for the ā€˜informal exploration of ideasā€™. I can also see the benefit of moving to a more abstract and personal scale. I think one issue with a 1 to 10 scale is it can potentially become a little divisive, particularly within a virtual team context. For example, Bob says heā€™s a 9, Margaret thinks ā€˜how is Bob a 9!?ā€™, in part because in a distributed setting itā€™s hard to see how hard Bob is working. Equally John might feel like a 6, but at the same time feels guilty that Bob is a 9. With everyone using their personal scale it becomes less quantifiable and more of a personal reflection which is less open to judgement. Using scales hopefully also creates opportunities for the ā€˜humble bragā€™. I know this month youā€™ve shared a post on the Ā ā€˜Virtual no Distantā€™ blog on sharing success. In this post it highlights, perhaps on questionable research, the increased importance of sharing when things go well. As someone who usually has to be reminded to share my achievements I can see the benefits of this approach. In particular, where I see this fitting in is you might be ā€˜code redā€™, but that because the thing you were working on has been a huge success, the downside being itā€™s created more work. How do you feel about the ā€˜humble bragā€™? Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā 

    Maren: Hmmmm. Iā€™ve written posts like How to share credit and praise yourselfā€¦ reflecting on the value of (deserved) recognition and Donā€™t think you are brilliant? Think againā€¦ – so I have given this quite a lot of thought. Alongside terms like ā€˜imposterā€™ or ā€˜lurkingā€™ I have ambivalent feelings about ā€˜humble braggingā€™ (i.e. to make an ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement with the actual intention of drawing attention to something of which one is proud). On the one hand, modesty and humility are good qualities to have. On the other hand, itā€™s essential to learn how to assess oneā€™s professional achievements and articulate them. Too often, particularly in our cultural context, professionals are unable to do that effectively (and incidentally this is something I come up against frequently as a CMALT assessor). I find that sometimes ā€˜humble braggingā€™ is less a reflection of personal modesty and more to do with not really reflecting on progress, or not being able to understand oneā€™s role within a team, oneā€™s contribution and why it is important. Not being able to say ā€˜I did thisā€¦ā€™ or ā€˜Itā€™s my responsibility toā€¦ā€™ can make it much harder for others to understand what the other personā€™s role is and to respond accordingly. Thatā€™s why a few years ago we introduced 360 degree feedback for everyone as part of our annual appraisal process. Itā€™s a regular opportunity to practice giving and receiving feedback, both good and bad. That said, any form of sharing the highs (and lows) of our work is important and welcome, ā€˜humble bragā€™ included! Iā€™m generally very communicative at work and Iā€™m confident enough to share both success and failure. I try to be honest about things that go wrong because I want to show that it does happen and how to deal with it. But I appreciate that this is much harder for some and at times maybe a ā€˜humble bragā€™ is the best strategy, maybe the only way to communicate. Our job, leading a team, is to listen and acknowledge that achievement no matter how loudly or quietly it may be voiced. For me, itā€™s also about treating others with kindness (which is also why I am mentioning our postal Secret Santa, sending a little kindness to each other each December).

    Martin: As tempting as it is to put ā€˜Secret Santaā€™ under the lens of ā€˜nudge managementā€™ perhaps we should end here and show dear reader some of our own kindness and wish you all a wonderful holiday season and we look forward to sharing more of ALTā€™s journey in becoming a virtual team in 2019.

    Other things weā€™ve been reading:

  • Virtual Teams: Remote crisis

    This post continues the series on openly sharing our approach to leading a virtual team – a joint project with Martin Hawksey (cross-posted here) for which we write a monthly blog post.

    October

    This month we discuss ways in which we could develop our approach to virtual team leadership including dealing with critical incidents when you have a distributed workforce. Rather than sharing what we found works, we open up some of the questions we have and consider how we might find solutions that support sustainable development for a small virtual team.

    Maren: We received some really thoughtful comments in response to our last post which touched both on the discipline it takes to work from home (your own and everyone who lives with you) and also the challenges of leading a virtual team. Iā€™ve been thinking about how we might develop our approach to that kind of leadership and there are a couple of ideas Iā€™d like to explore: first, Iā€™m wondering if we should open up leading team meetings. As I meet with everyone one to one my way of leading online meetings dominates in our team and more diversity might be a good thing. Also, Iā€™m curious about tools like Jamboard we recently looked at, a virtual notice board, to mix up how we work synchronously. Different tools may also open up new ways of interacting with each other as a group.

    Last, inspired in part by this tweet Iā€™m curious about how our team would respond to trying out new things, now that we have nearly a year of virtual working under our belt.

    Martin: Having had the experience of leading team meetings in the past the proposition of having to do this on a regular basis isn’t one that personally appeals to me. In part I think it is because there are some subtle differences with leading virtual team meetings compared to when you are face-to-face. For example, as often everyone is staring at a monitor the temptation to check on the various popup notifications increases, plus with virtual meetings I think there is a tendency, because you are not physically co-present, to feel that when you are not speaking no one is watching you. I find I often have to remind myself to pay attention and not get distracted, something I don’t think happens as much when meeting the team face-to-face. Consequently, I feel you need a strong individual to lead virtual meetings, someone who is skillful in keeping everyone’s focus and energy high, something you have in abundance. This is something perhaps Paul Hollins was alluding to in his comment on our last post when he mentioned that team directorship is a challenging area. Ā Would you agree different qualities are required to lead virtual team meetings compared to face-to-face?

    Maren: There are definitely differences between face to face, blended and fully online meetings or webinars, and additional skills that need to be developed incl. technical capabilities. I, for example, learnt a lot from seeing many different people lead meetings and facilitate webinars – but I also gained experience in different contexts that helped me build skills and confidence. Itā€™s important to see different peopleā€™s approaches in order to find one that works, but there are some commonalities: listening, giving everyone the chance to participate/speak, keeping to time, preparing an agenda, being clear about the purpose of the meeting and its outcome. You describe traps that we can all fall into, a temptation to be passive or distracted, to rely on othersā€™ momentum. Having seen plenty of people doodle, eat, doze or lurk their way through meetings whilst sitting around a table I think that particular aspect of communicating or working together is always challenging. But coming back to Paulā€™s comment, Iā€™ve reflected on the challenge of managing crisis recently, something that came up in a series of posts Iā€™ve written with my mentor, Margaret. Margaret commented on how using different ways of working together affected the quality of our interaction. For example, we would plan strategy face to face, work on procedures in shared docs or speak on the phone in an emergency. One of the biggest challenges in managing a distributed team lies in building confidence in managing a crisis and to continue to communicate in an emergency whether thatā€™s staff illness, systems failures or external issues. It takes time and, unfortunately, experience to build trust in ways of managing a crisis when meeting in person isnā€™t an option. Initially, I found it really difficult that my Line Manager or mentor were a remote presence only. Sometimes I still do. On the other hand, that perspective helped me identify and develop the skills I need to provide support or manage an emergency. You and I have a lot of experience in managing different types of emergencies, but scaling that up to a bigger scale, to work for everyone in the organisation is a continuous learning process.

    Martin: It’s interesting to reflect on critical incidents and whether being a virtual team hindered our response. An incident that immediately comes to mind was last year’s ALT Online Winter Conference when the European servers for the webinar platform we use went down. My experience was the combination of chat and video Hangouts worked well and don’t think hindered our response in any way. Fortunately we also had a great support from our webinar provider which resulted in minimal impact. In some ways I think where it gets harder are moments where you are tackling a slow burn rather than an immediate crisis, like a server failure. Ā In these situations the danger is they are not perceived by everyone as critical but can quickly escalate to be critical if not addressed. This is where continued communication becomes essential and like you I think it can be easily forgotten particularly in a distributed environment. This is perhaps where online tools can help. At the beginning of this post you mentioned we’d been looking at Google’s collaborative meeting tool Jamboard. This basically gives you a virtual whiteboard you can collaboratively contribute to. As someone who likes using post-it notes a virtual place for sticking these is immediately attractive. I can see Jamboard and tools that have similar functionality as a way to avoid slow burn incidents, providing a way for everyone in the team to get an overview of useful information. Creating workflows or using tools everyone is happy with is always a challenge, not just for distributed teams, and creating a culture of continuous learning is very important.

    Maren: I agree with that. On the one hand itā€™s important to manage change by providing some continuity, like some of the strategic and operational planning tools we use and in a year full of change keeping some things the same has been a necessity. On the other hand, weā€™ve learnt a huge amount in the transition to operating as a virtual organisation and it makes sense that we learn from that and try out new ways of doing things. Weā€™re already learning a lot from an interim virtual audit, and improving our new financial and payroll procedures and checklists. You point to some advantages collaboration tools could give us when it comes to managing a crisis, and there could be other upsides such as simplifying communication, creating an easy to access overview of progress and giving greater support for our team outside of meetings. I feel the additional support structure a new tool or maybe a new way of using an existing tool could provide would help give us confidence in the long run and support more learning and agile working. Iā€™d really like to find a way to incorporate a stronger sense of progression into our weekly team meeting notes and Iā€™d like to see whether our operations plan could become more practical day to day. Iā€™d like a better overview of areas I donā€™t have active involvement in. Whatā€™s on your wish list of things to try?

    Martin: I came across an interesting series of posts by Zapier in which theyā€™ve documented the tools they recommend for remote teams as they have grown from 6 to 20 to over 110 employees. The first two posts arenā€™t date stamped but Iā€™m guessing they hit 6 employees in 2013 and 20 in 2015, and the over 110 was posted in 2017. Some tools that were mentioned in 2013 that caught my eye were iDoneThis and Sqwiggle. With iDoneThis ā€œeverybody on the team checks in daily; either in their browser or via emailā€, which is turned into a daily digest or analysed in a report. I can see the benefit of such a system but fear, depending on how it was implemented, it might be perceived as too draconian. Another service that was mentioned that got my attention for different reasons was Sqwiggle: ā€œSqwiggle is a persistent video chat room, but instead of having a live video feed on all the time like you might do with Skype or Google Hangouts, Sqwiggle takes a picture of you every 8 secondsā€. Weā€™ve previously talked about the importance of trust within remote teams and whilst I can see why people might like Sqwiggle to me it appears like surveillance technology and a shortcut to eroding trust. Sqwiggle was closed in 2016 but both Sqwiggle and iDoneThis didnā€™t appear in Zapierā€™s posts in 2015 and 2017. One tool that appears in all of Zapierā€™s posts is the project management service Trello. Trello is a tool I often hear about in the developer community and there are lots of posts and resources that promote it as a tool to support remote teams, including Trelloā€™s own Trello for Remote Teams. Having had a quick look a Trello an immediate thought is can we replicate it with any of the existing tools we use like Google Keep. Ultimately I think it comes back to one of our core principles, the appropriate use of technology. Unpacking what it is we want to achieve will go a long way in helping us decide how we continue to develop remote teamwork at ALT. Ā Ā Ā Ā 

    Other things weā€™ve been reading:

     

    Missed a month? Hereā€™re previous posts:

    • September –Ā The serious upsides of working in pyjamas
    • August – Pizza and virtual team dynamics
    • July – Special podcast edition: Reflecting on the first six months leading a virtual team
    • June ā€“ Virtual team, face to face team day: putting our blended approach to the test
    • May ā€“ Opportunity knocks: Using GDPR to strengthen virtual teams
    • April ā€“ 3 months inā€¦ hitting our first milestones as a virtual team
    • March ā€“ Developing collaboration as a virtual team
    • February ā€“ An open perspective on organisational transformation?