Maren Deepwell

Tag: #virtualteams

  • Virtual Teams: It’s good to keep in touch …. most of the time 😉

    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 touch base after both being on international duty for ALT and discuss how our use of social networks often gets blurred between personal and professional. We also think about the role of social media in virtual teams and how social media can be useful for  bridging work and social lives, including the challenges this brings to striking the right balance.  

    June

    Maren: I feel like I need to wave hello to start off this post, as the last month has involved a lot of travel for each of us and working together in different time zones and across continents has made our virtual team feel even more distributed. It’s rare for us to travel internationally as most of our work is in the UK, so this past month has been unusual in that we have both given keynotes in other communities, you spoke at Domains19 and I at the ETUG conference. One of the things my visit to a different conference and a new community made me reflect on is how much of my professional practice is about keeping connected. We have often talked about what we do to combat cabin fever or the loneliness of home working, but we haven’t talked much about all that we do to keep in touch and the networks we connect with or how important that is especially for remote workers like us. 

    Martin: As you mentioned we don’t get much opportunity for international travel and at Domains19 it was a great opportunity to meet a number of people I’ve been connected with for a long time but never met in person. Domains was quite a unique event for me in the fact that it’s probably the first event I’ve been to which overlapped two of my communities, EdTech and Google Apps Script. Events like Domains continue to be a very important way for me to make personal and professional connections, both old and new. There are a lot of benefits of being physically located in the same space but it’s also worth remembering that events like Domains end up being blurred temporally and spatially. In terms of time our communities will no doubt be familiar with how blogging provides opportunities before and after events to make connections and we’ve both blogged about Domains and ETUG. Spatially social media, live streaming and initiatives like VConnecting mean you can get part of a conference experience without physically being there. In the case of Domains there was also some telepresence with Bryan Mathers virtually attending as a Double:  

    https://twitter.com/BryanMMathers/status/1138320436989759489?s=19

    Maren: I met a number of #femedtech activists in Canada whom I have been in contact with only via Twitter before now. I find that particular network is a useful way to expand my horizons and helps me make connections at events, too. Twitter is still my primary social network for work, and I had some interesting conversations with colleagues such as Clint Lalonde about how they manage the overlap between personal and professional lives. I don’t maintain separate profiles for work/non work stuff, but recently I have been more tempted to do so. I try to use different platforms for different aspects of my life but that isn’t really working. Whenever I meet someone new at a conference and they are on first name basis with my cat it’s clear that my work/private divide on social media is blurry at best. Also, being in a different time zone had a big impact on the social media feeds I follow. It gave me a new sense of momentum in a number of conversations I hadn’t followed closely before. I subscribe to some mailing lists and newsletters and there is a certain fellowship in discussing what’s been picked up in a recent edition of OLDaily for example. Blogs are my preferred way of keeping connected, both with what others are thinking about and sharing my own ideas. My blog, my domain, is a constant wherever I am, however distributed the work I do or the people I work with may be. 

    Martin: Similarly Twitter is my main social network but I’ve got a slightly different approach in that I limit personal posts. You’ll see the occasional tweet with a picture of my latest DIY project, runs I’ve completed but unless you know me as a friend or colleague I choose to never do things like mention my 11yo by name, say where I live or wish myself or other people happy birthday. My approach is in part informed by knowing how much data is shared in a tweet and the subsequent profiling that can be done by Twitter but also knowing anyone else with access to the data, aka everyone, can do something similar. Within our team we are the only two who tweet from a personal account about ALT. Something I hadn’t really considered before is in a virtual team setting following your personal account on Twitter is incredibly useful in terms of getting a sense of what is currently interesting you both personally and professionally as well as eavesdropping in on some of the conversations you are having with our community and beyond. There is a fine balance however and I often find I’m censoring myself and I’m always mindful that anything I share in the public domain could be used by someone else. I was recently reminded of this reading the BBC article on The firm with 900 staff and no office which highlights how the company Automatic has an international workforce and no permanent offices. As part of the news item the story features what looks like to me is a personal image taken by one of their staff of a team meet in Thailand. Whilst this is quite a  benign example I’ve had friends who have had Twitter conversations become the basis of tabloid journalism.  

    Maren: I know what you mean. It is tricky to find a balance. I, too, try to stick with that rule never to post anything public that I would not want to see in the press. But the people I care about are so distributed, so many of my relationships, including with family, are mediated by social media in one way or another, that I would miss out on many important moments if I stopped posting anything personal anywhere. When it comes to immediate work colleagues, I ask permission: ‘do you want me to follow you’, ‘do you feel comfortable for me to ‘@‘ you’, ‘are you happy for our official account to mention you by name…’ those kind of questions I ask new colleagues. If I am not completely sure, I won’t post it and sometimes that makes my feeds a bit boring. Where it gets more tricky are social networks I use more for personal things like Instagram. So my Instagram bio for my private account  reads: ‘Pictures of my cat, running, things I like. This is just my personal account – no work here :)’. Overall, and particularly on Twitter, I try to strike a balance to contribute as much as I gain by being part of the network and to share what I can that may be useful to others.. like this post! It’s a curated, carefully considered collaboration, sure, but it is also open leadership in practice and that in itself should speak volumes about what we value and how we work.

  • Virtual Teams: Things that don’t look broken still need fixing

    Things that don’t look broken still need fixing

    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.

    March

    Maren: this month I’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. It’s an awesome read full of interesting facts and laugh out loud moments (car manufacturers’ advice to lower my voice to help AIs understand my ‘atypical’ 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 Women’s Day at UHI is a good example of this – neither one of us could have written the talk on their own.

    It’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 don’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 doesn’t fit the ‘template’ 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 ‘because we see the rights of 50% of the population as a minority interest’.

    Martin: ‘Fit’ is an interesting topic. As part of our talk at UHI I thought I’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 can’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 ‘The Open Organization Leaders Manual’, 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 ‘alignment’:

    “Fit” implies that your organization seeks to indoctrinate new members into its specific way of life—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.

    ‘The Open Organization Leaders Manual’ uses five principles as part of it’s Open Organization Definition: transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration and community. In terms of transparency it’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 “to the extent that anyone can monitor and assess a project’s progress throughout its development”, than if we were all physically in the same office. We’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 I’m interested to see how candidates align to ALT’s values.

    Maren: I like the concept of ‘alignment’ instead of ‘fit’ 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 it’s harder to make the kind of internal ‘joined-up-ness’ work for everyone than when you are all focused on making a product shipping deadline. There’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, I’m finding it rewarding to develop and improve our internal processes for reporting, budgets and project overviews. It’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, I’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. It’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 there’s so much to be getting with. Especially when things don’t look ‘broken’ but still need ‘fixing’ 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. Here’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 “don’t look ‘broken’ but still need ‘fixing’” 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 didn’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 ‘Leading Effective Virtual Teams: Overcoming Time and Distance to Achieve Exceptional Results’ by Nancy Settle-Murphy. As part of the uniques challenges of virtual teams Settle-Murphy highlights that “it’s harder for team members to tell whether they’re out of alignment about important issues … and once out of alignment, it takes virtual teams much longer to pull back together”. Settle-Murphy goes on to highlight one of the challenges for virtual team leaders is “ensuring that all share the same understanding of team goals”. The modified SWOT approach you mentioned looks like it should help with identifying goals, the issue I see is the timing as we’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 it’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 I’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. There’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. That’s why when you have a moment when things work out, when you achieve something or can enjoy something, it’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: 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: I’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 it’s much harder to do well in my experience. Following on from last month’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 aren’t related to urgent deadlines. I’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 don’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 that’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 hadn’t really considered until recently was how they can be used to ‘nudge’ 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 “Nudge Unit”. 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. I’ve no experience in behavioural science and I should also say I can see the dangers of going down a ‘nudge management’ route, but I can also see the value in exploring some aspects of ‘nudges’. 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 it’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 hasn’t completed activities … nudge, nudge, wink, wink say no more.

    Maren: I don’t like the term nudge management much, but it’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 week’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 they’re doing… it helps to fill the gaps formal reporting or catch ups can’t. We have established such a strong foundation in the team meetings process that we can now have more freedom to ‘personalise’ 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. I’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, I’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 ‘informal exploration of ideas’. 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 he’s a 9, Margaret thinks ‘how is Bob a 9!?’, in part because in a distributed setting it’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 ‘humble brag’. I know this month you’ve shared a post on the  ‘Virtual no Distant’ 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 ‘code red’, but that because the thing you were working on has been a huge success, the downside being it’s created more work. How do you feel about the ‘humble brag’?       

    Maren: Hmmmm. I’ve written posts like How to share credit and praise yourself… reflecting on the value of (deserved) recognition and Don’t think you are brilliant? Think again… – so I have given this quite a lot of thought. Alongside terms like ‘imposter’ or ‘lurking’ I have ambivalent feelings about ‘humble bragging’ (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, it’s essential to learn how to assess one’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 ‘humble bragging’ is less a reflection of personal modesty and more to do with not really reflecting on progress, or not being able to understand one’s role within a team, one’s contribution and why it is important. Not being able to say ‘I did this…’ or ‘It’s my responsibility to…’ can make it much harder for others to understand what the other person’s role is and to respond accordingly. That’s why a few years ago we introduced 360 degree feedback for everyone as part of our annual appraisal process. It’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, ‘humble brag’ included! I’m generally very communicative at work and I’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 ‘humble brag’ 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, it’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 ‘Secret Santa’ under the lens of ‘nudge management’ 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 ALT’s journey in becoming a virtual team in 2019.

    Other things we’ve been reading: