Editorial
OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman are in the headlines for many reasons. The rise of generative AI and its potential regulation are of course big news, but Altman is also getting attention for his views on remote work, which he described as, “definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes.”
Altman overstated the situation, but the effect that remote work has had on workplace collaboration and community is real, and organizations need to address it.
A recently published report on company culture sampling more than 36,000 workers across 20 countries found one in three employees “do not consider their workplace a community.” More than a quarter actively feel like “outsiders.” It’s not that workers don’t care — a majority wanted “to feel a strong sense of belonging” — but less than half (48%) say it’s “easier to create a sense of community in their new work environment” today.
My conversations with organizations and leaders suggest this is being felt in a number of different ways.
Absence of Community
We’ve all been through widespread, large-scale digitization over the past several years — but it certainly hasn’t impacted all industries and workflows evenly. Many organizations are working through a digital acceleration strategy or program. However, while that work continues, employees are still performing manual processes, or manual elements of partly digitized processes, which often break when key people are working remotely or offsite. In a distributed workplace, you can’t walk a piece of paper to someone to get it signed. You’ve got to find a different way.
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In many cases, people don’t know who to talk to internally anymore. There’s a lack of internal clarity within many organizations on who to reach out to for specific domain expertise or to seek internal permissions or approvals. In distributed workplaces, people may have rarely or never worked together in-person. Internal silos have also had time to become re-established. It can be hard simply to navigate a completely distributed organizational structure without assistance.
It’s clear that the concept of community in the workplace has become stifled to a degree. Rebuilding it as a foundational element to improving collaboration in a distributed workplace is possible, and a goal for many organizations this year and beyond. It’s instructive to examine what separates top-performing teams and organizations in this regard.
Clear Lines of Communication
Top-performing distributed workplaces need to be safe, open places for feedback, with internal communication lines and relationships clearly mapped. These maps must be updated on a rolling basis to keep everyone feeling connected.
You can successfully achieve organizational connectivity by using rule- and role-based tooling and processes that map out who is responsible for a particular task or action. Everyone in the organization should easily be able to reference those tools.
Such tools are particularly useful as a central collaboration and feedback mechanism. Feedback is important to the concept of community because it allows people to be transparent and honest with each other, and to ask questions or seek advice where they need to. Pockets of disdain grow very quickly in organizations where there’s no avenue for collaboration and feedback.
When roles and responsibilities are mapped to the correct internal process owners and experts, it’s clear where feedback about a process should be directed and how to provide that feedback. This visualization of how internal functions work also provides a sense of assumed community because you can see the names and the roles on a page and there are clear lines of communication mapped out between them.
While tooling can’t completely replace community or collaboration culture, it can foster, nurture or augment these concepts if run in a friendly, open and accessible way.
More (and More) Communication
Top-performing distributed workplaces also communicate early and often. Even if you think you’re communicating enough, you won’t be for all people, and you really should do more. There will be pockets of employees who feel completely ostracized, who feel that they haven’t been communicated with and that there’s not enough collaboration. These sentiments are particularly common in distributed workforces.
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The key to successful communication is varying the types of communication methods you use. Whether an FAQ document, or an open forum for discussion and/or access to decision-makers, the most collaborative workplaces are communicating constantly because they understand how important it is to maintaining community.
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Individualizing Change
Change is a constant in most workplaces. In a distributed workplace, where you can’t hear voices or observe body language around the office, it can be hard to know how people are actually dealing with it.
Take a granular view and work out what’s best for individuals, rather than trying to make assumptions that they’ll conform as part of the team. I check in with my team on a quarterly basis to determine their needs. Do they want more regular catch-ups or are they happy to be more autonomous? Do they want catch-ups to be part of a team meeting? Short or long? Do they want the catch-ups documented?
Although a granular, individual focus adds to leaders’ workload, at the end of the day the extra work is far preferable to having people stay silent with objections and quiet, festering unhappiness with the way things are done. Supporting people helps to build that sense of community, encouraging collaboration and ultimately helping everyone to perform at their best.
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