Editorial
Back in the days when everyone was working at the office, our daily cadence was defined by the familiar beats of commuting, lunch breaks, coffee rituals, meetings and for some, swiping our badges when entering or exiting the building. The office environment and its rituals orchestrated our every move, like a well-coordinated square dance.
Our steps were instinctive. A glance at the office clock or our colleagues signaled the next move. If people were getting up and leaving their desks, that was our cue to get ready to go home too.
Remote and hybrid work scrambled our once harmonious dance routines. The division between in-office and WFA (work from anywhere) workers is making us think about our steps more ever since these new ways of working ripped out the traditional office along with its implicit dance instructions.
With a majority of CEOs pushing for a Return To Office (RTO), there’s clearly a concern about losing the collective rhythm of work without a shared physical space, but there’s no need to panic. For collaboration to thrive, leaders need to redesign how their teams will collaborate. The goal is not to micromanage others but to grasp the intricacies of modern flexible workstyles and adapt accordingly. There’s a simple method to do just that.
Arranging Your Team’s Dance Moves
As a team leader in a changing workplace, you must be explicit about your team’s new rhythm. How can your team learn a new beat and understand which steps to follow? This is where you establish a Rhythm of Collaboration (RoC).
A Rhythm of Collaboration highlights the most important activities that a team will engage with together or individually.
Most teams fixate on the tangible outcomes (the WHAT) while neglecting processes and methodologies (the HOW). This oversight can lead to individuals working in silos, confusing communication and a lack of clarity around task ownership.
By defining a RoC, you’ll clarify your team’s recurring activities. Whether it's daily stand-ups, weekly brainstorming sessions, monthly progress reviews, quarterly strategy meetings or annual team-building events, each interaction needs its designated place in the choreography. The RoC serves as a visual guide of your team’s collaborative ethos, not just for existing team members but also for onboarding new additions. It’s also helpful to gauge whether your team is over-collaborating together without enough time to do individual work.
A key aspect of successful collaboration is adaptability. Teams evolve, projects shift and external factors introduce new dynamics. Your RoC should be dynamic too, capable of accommodating changes on the go, and responsive and attuned to the evolving needs of the team.
Note: A RoC is not a shared calendar of events; it's a map of regular touchpoints that and HOW each one will be conducted. It includes details about the purpose of these activities, adding a layer of intentionality onto the team’s collaborative flow.
Steps to Harmonious Collaboration
A Rhythm of Collaboration involves four parts: Identify, Organize, Reassess, and Prioritize. Below is a step-by-step guide to building your team’s RoC:
1. Identify
Start by listing the various activities you anticipate doing as a team. Use an online whiteboard to write each activity on a separate sticky note, then line them up in a row.
You can add as many activities as you see fit, including rituals, celebrations, team offsites and more. Depending on your team’s size and scope, you’ll likely end up with 5-12 activities. If the list extends beyond that, consider removing some activities to make the team’s interactions more focused and counteract collaboration overload.
After identifying your activities and weeding out the ones you don’t really need, it’s time to add more details (when, where, why and who) for each one in the rows below.
By following the actions above, your team's RoC will start taking shape into a more structured framework:
2. Organize
Now that your team’s RoC is mapped out, determine whether the activities should be done together as a team (synchronously) or independently at different times and different locations (asynchronously).
Color code each row to visually distinguish between sync and async tasks, and group similar colors together. The breakdown below shows a team that is almost evenly split between asynchronous (turquoise) and synchronous (pink) collaboration.
3. Reassess
When office presence was mandatory, a team’s RoC would have been predominantly pink because most people worked synchronously. Today, as asynchronous collaboration becomes more common, your goal as a team leader is to introduce more turquoise into the mix.
If your team creates a RoC and notices that the majority of its activities are categorized as “sync,” discuss this. Having many synchronous activities is a red flag that your team might be leaving insufficient time for deep work in solitude.
Balance is ideal. Introducing more asynchronous activities empowers your team members to self manage their schedules around their most productive times of the day and personal needs and responsibilities. This shift not only enhances flexibility but also contributes to a healthier, more sustainable collaborative rhythm.
4. Prioritize
As a final step, visually indicate the frequency of each activity. In the second row, use different shapes to show how often each activity is repeated.
Activities with higher frequency, such as daily or weekly engagements, evolve into habits that demand less planning. These can be spontaneous (check-ins) or regular (weekly meetings). Conversely, activities with lower frequency, occurring monthly, quarterly, or yearly, require more strategic planning (All Hands meeting or offsite). By using distinct shapes, we can easily see how many activities need longer-term planning and start preparing for those well in advance.
Let’s Dance!
Creating a RoC can take less than two hours if your team is already familiar with its preferred tools. It may take longer if your team is not or if there are disagreements on certain aspects of the activities. No matter where your team finds itself, this exercise serves as a valuable group activity to align on how you want to collaborate as a team.
To put it into action, prepare the first version of your team’s RoC and share it with your team during a meeting. Look at each activity individually and outline the specifics in the vertical column beneath the top sticky note. Discuss as a team and iterate based on feedback.
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You might want to start with something simple like a recurring check-in. Once your team agrees on the tool, format and purpose of this daily ritual, add it in your RoC. Depending on the complexity of the activity, some may take longer than others to set up. Just remember to notify your team each time an iteration is made so that everyone can embrace the new rhythm.
Sustaining the Melody
To have a bigger overview of your team’s collaborative flow over longer periods of time, you can also plot the activities on a timeline of one month or even a quarter.
Visualizing a RoC over an entire month can be read like a music score. At the top, daily activities rap like a steady snare drum; further down, weekly and monthly activities are scattered like the beats of a bass, with the occasional yearly cymbal crash. Each collaborative moment adds a unique flair and variation to your collaborative groove.
Your team’s RoC may look similar or completely different. You’ll probably start with one version and gradually adapt it as you become attuned to your unique dance style — transitioning seamlessly from disco to hip hop, or perhaps from salsa to tango. The essence lies not in the specific dance but in understanding and mastering the steps.
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