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When Tamara Wyszynski’s team at GE transitioned from a Germany-focus to a broader European focus, she wanted to find a way for the expanded team to get to know each other and each other's skills. But travel bans kept the distributed team from getting together, so Wyszynski turned to her external network for advice on how to solve the problem.
Someone recommended Working Out Loud (WOL), a method of making one’s work more visible in the world in service to connecting with others, learning new things and advancing in a career.
Wyszynski became curious about the method and decided to start a WOL group with any colleagues who were interested. She put out an inquiry on GE’s internal message board looking for four more people to join and ended with about 80 responses from colleagues all over the world.
To keep to an acceptable number of participants per group, Wyszynski organized her small group and helped colleagues form others. And while her team didn’t use WOL to resolve the remote-work cohesion problem, she grew convinced that the approach had great potential to transform how people work, relate and solve problems.
“By the third week, I realized this is really a big thing,” she said. “There was so much potential for the whole company on many different levels.”
That’s why she went on to create a WOL grassroots initiative at GE, which grew to more than 700 participants globally within two-and-a-half years. When she left the company in 2021, two employees from her voluntary WOL team took over the cross-business WOL activities.
So, what is WOL and how can it help your business?
Building Communities of Trust
Bryce Williams, now senior director of workforce collaboration at Eli Lilly & Company, originated the term “working out loud” in 2010 when he was an IT consultant for the company. He was inspired by a conference session in which Brian Tullis and Joe Crumpler of Alcoa Fastening Systems discussed ideas of making work observable and narrating one’s work. Williams joined the two ideas and defined WOL as “observable work + narrating your work.”
John Stepper, then managing director of Deutsche Bank, took Williams’ idea and created a framework for the process. He published a book and workbook for a 12-week, group-based method of formally Working Out Loud, which is what Wyszynski used at GE. He also started an organization, Working Out Loud, to help companies adopt the practice within their workplaces.
Stepper calls working out loud a “peer support method that rehumanizes work,” which he said is increasingly necessary in a digitized world in which “it’s harder and harder to build trust and belonging.”
His conception of WOL includes five elements:
- Purposeful discovery
- Relationships
- Generosity
- Visible work
- A growth mindset
His method of practicing this approach involves working in small groups of four or five people, called circles. Participants each set an individual goal, which can be as simple as aiming to learn more about a given thing, and then follow steps and do activities that lead them to develop relationships, learn to be more open about and generous with their work, and cultivate a growth mindset.
Growth mindset, in particular, is a key underpinning to the kind of sharing that working out loud proponents say is so helpful for employees’ personal development and professional advancement.
“It may appear that people are very comfortable sharing what they're doing, but in almost every workplace that's not the case,” said Stepper. “People are worried about what others will think: What if I make a mistake? What if my boss doesn't like it? What if I say something stupid or wrong? And so, the lack of knowledge-sharing inside companies is extraordinary, given how valuable it is.”
Taking a mindset that allows for exploration, development and making mistakes is necessary for this valuable sharing, learning and collective progress.
Related Article: Moving Forward With Grit and Growth Mindset
Making the Hidden Visible
One key benefit of using the WOL approach in the workplace — and even more so in today’s dispersed workplaces — is the ability to build relationships and share knowledge among people who practice similar tasks but aren’t on the same teams.
Jane Bozarth, author of “Show Your Work: The Payoffs and How-To's of Working Out Loud” and director of research for the Learning Guild, is an advocate of working out loud, albeit in a more casual way than Stepper’s method. At one point, “tired of bad presentations,” she organized a group of people within her organization who all did presentations as part of their jobs. She put out an invitation to anyone who wanted to participate, and the group shared their presentations and consulted with each other about the process of creating them.
“It was very helpful,” she said. It also helped her get to know colleagues she'd never interacted with before. “We didn’t all work together otherwise.”
For her, the key function of working out loud is making apparent the hidden aspects of work — the unreported daily processes that produce an employee’s or team’s visible results.
“We are very good at documenting explicit information: do this, do that, fill out the form, do this on Tuesdays, do this on Wednesdays,” said Bozarth. “We are not as good at capturing and sharing tacit information, and honestly, that’s often how work really gets done. We're good at talking about what we do but not necessarily how we get things done.”
Related Article: Want Your Organization to Collaborate More? Social Psychology Can Help
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Connection, Empathy, Curiosity
A common method of WOL is blogging or vlogging or otherwise sharing one’s work online. For example, Wyszynski wrote two LinkedIn posts (My first year with Working Out Loud, WOL at GE 2020) about her experience of creating GE’s WOL program.
Critics may contend that the practice encourages contribution to the amount of digital “noise,” but proponents see a qualitative difference in the type of online engagement working out loud engenders — and the changes such communication prompts.
“There may be plenty of content, but there’s not a lot of meaningful connection or empathy,” said Stepper. “What I try to do is give people the experience of ‘I’m not just putting myself out there; the goal is to connect with other people.’”
Wyszynski found that the process promotes a sense of curiosity and ongoing personal change, benefits that are far more profound than the tangible outputs of the process would suggest.
“One thing I observed with many colleagues who have gone through the whole program is it enables the curiosity of a longer process of learning,” she said. “It is something that’s really changing the way you think, changing the way you act, changing the way you behave. It’s unfolding the curiosity for learning and for trying new things.”
Any workplace would be lucky to have employees in such a mindset. And it turns out, all it takes is doing some of your work out loud.
