Transcript
Speaker: Businesses in the world are struggling to operate and maintain performance when suddenly forced to work remotely, work from home, do business without traveling as the coronavirus lockdown rolls out. For many companies, remote working is new and it's a mess, which is why in today's podcast, we'll talk to somebody who's been studying how to do it for more than a generation.
Speaker: Welcome to The Market That Moves America, a podcast from the National Center for the Middle Market, which will educate you about the challenges facing midsize companies and help you take advantage of new opportunities. I'm Tom Stewart. I'm the executive director of the National Center for the Middle Market at the Ohio State University Fisher College of Business.
Speaker: We're the nation's leading research group studying mid -sized companies, which account for a third of private sector employment and GEP, and the lion's share of economic growth. It is the market that moves America. The National Center for the Middle Market is a partnership between Ohio State and Chubb. With us today is a special guest and an old friend of mine, Jessica Lipnet.
Speaker: 23 years ago, she and her late husband Jeffrey Stamps wrote a wonderful book called Virtual Teams, Reaching Across Space, Time, and Organizations with Technology. Several decades and a couple of editions later, that book is still in print along with a library of other resources about getting high performance and satisfied customers and workers from teams that are dispersed.
Speaker: Jessica has also spent years consulting to companies around the world about virtual teams and networks and how to make them work. And so Jessica, it's a real pleasure to welcome you to the market that moves America. Thank you, Tom. It's lovely to be on this program. So as we talk in the middle of March 2020 and in the midst of the COVID -19 pandemic, companies all sizes around the globe are sending workers home to work.
Speaker: universities are delivering classes online, airplanes are empty, the helplines and WebEx and Slack and Zoom are jammed. A lot of big companies have had some kind of virtual team capability for a long time, maybe because they've had multiple locations to coordinate. But for many smaller mid -sized companies, this is a brave new world. How do they get off on the right foot into it?
Speaker: Yeah, that's kind of the question that many organizations are asking themselves right now. Even the really big ones that have been, you know, kind of, they've had remote workers for a long time, doesn't mean that they've introduced the best methods for doing it. And ultimately, getting people to be aware of what they're doing together in a very clear way is the best way for them to get started.
Speaker: So what does that mean? That means having lots of conversations about the work that really needs to be done. So it's not that complicated, but people get really hung up on the wrong things. So ask me what the wrong things are. Yeah. What are the wrong things? What do they get hung up on? They get hung up on the technology. And, you know, so much time gets spent figuring out should we use this tool or should we use that tool or this tool? You know, I don't have access to this or that or I can't log it, whatever.
Speaker: a whole bunch of stuff around the technology. But the reality is that the technology is very unimportant. What's important is the other part of it, which is the sociology. And we came up with this quip many years ago. It's 90 % people and 10 % technology. So getting the focus on the right thing, which is the sociology and how people actually understand one another and one another's work becomes the critical initial work to be done.
Speaker: And a lot of people just sort of blow right past that and try to jump online. Likewise, a lot of people regard having email and chat as a way of working virtually, certainly important, but it's not enough. So thinking through the whole kind of picture of what the work is becomes the first task and getting people to know one another around those objectives that they have. Let me unpack that a little bit when you say thinking about what the work is.
Speaker: Give me a story. What do you mean by that? You've got a group of people who normally are coming into the office, and there's this wonderful picture in the Times this morning of Microsoft, their collaboration space, which is enormous, and there are two people sitting there. Normally, people are just talking to one another, exchanging things as they walk past one another,
Speaker: That's a way of clarifying the purpose of what you're doing, is that you have these ongoing continuous conversations. You can't do that when everyone's distributed. So the very first job of the team is to come together and clarify the purpose of what they're doing. So you have a meeting that just talks about the mission.
Speaker: and what you need to do, and then breaking it down to the sub tasks that need to go on to achieve the mission. This is old standard project management work, but it hasn't been done a great deal in the virtual context. And that's the challenge that people have right now, is how do you actually get a clear picture that everyone can share of what needs to be done.
Speaker: So that's kind of the first thing that needs to happen. Does that answer your question? Yeah, it does. But I'm also thinking that there are sort of two phases in that. One is the we're all going to get together from wherever we are with whatever medium we need. And it could just be a conference call, right? And sort of reaffirm what the mission is, what the job of our team is. Not today's job necessarily, but our overall job. This is our job. Obviously, we then need
Speaker: my project management, to turn that into what's today's job, this week's job, this month's job. We're managing all that as well. That probably means getting back together regularly. Right now, at the National Center for the Middle Market, we're having a 9 a .m. half an hour huddle. It reminds me of, remember the beginning of these old episodes of Hill Street Blues where the cops would all get together and they'd say, be careful out there.
Speaker: I mean, it's like, what's, what do we got to look at today? What's going on? But that's got to be done in the context, first of all, of setting what's the team trying to do overall? And then here's, let's break it down for the day of the week, the month. Yeah. And I think that, that you've just naturally gravitated towards that as a very good sign. So that's the kind of thing that's going on right now where people are having these standups, what, you know, they call them standups. Sometimes people at the very beginning of the day, they have their, their huddle to talk about what they're going to do.
Speaker: Doing that online is a great way to do it. Then check -ins, you know, when people would be going for coffee breaks or, you know, just going to take a look out the window. Any of those moments offer the opportunity for more socialization and allowing people to be more in contact with one another. I interviewed a younger woman, she's probably in her mid -30s, you know, so not at the beginning of her career, she's been at it for a long time, and she works for a pet supply company.
Speaker: And that company, they have about 500 people. They're in many locations. They had a good work from home policy before, but once they realized they were going to have to do this, they prepared. They made sure everyone was equipped. And then they started these kind of incidental
Speaker: get together so that people are now getting together in the morning as I mentioned this coffee break idea and then even in the evening they're doing these socialization things where they all get online and maybe play a game or you know exchange information about what they did during the day or what's going on with the kids or whatever it is but this what I'm what I'm driving towards here and I think you're talking about the same thing
Speaker: Being able to have as much communication as possible in as many different media actually increases the chances that the work will get done because you're creating these incidental conversations, which is so very important right now. And people need it. People are lonely. That was the other thing that she brought up. You know, the biggest problem that they got is people are really lonely and they're not used to being at home.
Speaker: all day long and not seeing anybody else. Now we're not even supposed to go out. It becomes a real challenge to one's autodidactic, is that what that's called? When you teach yourself, your ability to keep yourself without going stir -crazy. Also without going out of focus. Pardon me because I'm doing this from Manhattan and
Speaker: And I'm on a street that has a hospital at one end and a hospital at the other. So occasionally ambulances go by and you can hear that. But, but, but, but, but it's also, I think there's also this interesting question, I think of trying of what your, what I'm here, you say is that operating in this sort of virtual environment, you also need to balance the poke your nose in, have a cup of coffee, happy hour at the end of the day with also the,
Speaker: the need to focus. I mean, I still got work to get done. And I may have the kids running around my running around or I've got, you know, Twitter ever more accessible to me. And so sort of needing needing to get that combination of these are our deliverables, this is what we got to do becomes a really important part of making sure that virtual work gets done and you stay connected, but you also stay focused. Which points to another really important you did a really great job of explaining what the problem is there, Tom,
Speaker: The really important. I'm familiar with it. Yeah. Yeah. And for a long time, too, I think you've been, you know, kind of a somebody who really understands this stuff. The the ability to document what you're doing is probably the most important feature of any of the online tools so that people aren't having to log into 15 different websites in order to find out what's going on.
Speaker: keeping clear track of progress towards the goal becomes very important. So you need to make sure that whatever gets decided is recorded, whatever kinds of changes have been made to the plan is recorded, and that it's easily accessible for everybody. So the clear thing, you need the communication, but you also need the documentation. So both those things become the really, the guideposts for getting you to where you really need to go. And I can't stress -
Speaker: Yeah, communication and documentation. Yeah. So I guess, like you said, the project management term before it, I'm seeing this Gantt chart, you know, I'm seeing people, this is where we are, this is where we are on Monday, this is where we are Tuesday, and I have a question that just occurred to me that I haven't heard answered anywhere, but I imagine you had experience with it, which is this.
Speaker: So we got a team, and we got a team of 20 people or whatever it is. You mentioned this pet food distributor company. There are people who can work from home, and there are people who are in the warehouse loading boxes. There are people who cannot work from home. And there are teams that are, shall we say, heterogeneous in that way with some people who are working from home, some people who are not. I could imagine that there might even be some resentment from one side to the other or both. But there's also sort of tricky questions
Speaker: How do you manage that situation? So I think that that is probably a more accurate description of what was going on before last Friday than anything else around virtual work. There's always this hybrid mix of some people who are face to face and some people who are virtual. And the trick up until now, the challenge up until now was to make the virtual people feel like they're part of the team.
Speaker: But now we've reversed the balance, right? Now there are probably more people working virtually and fewer people working face to face. And having the face to face people feel included becomes what the challenge is. So what does that all point to? Expert facilitation. This is the moment for facilitators.
Speaker: If ever they needed work, they can just knock on every door that they can, because everybody needs help with that right now. How do you have, you know, bring everybody together for that morning conference call? And, you know, there are five people who are standing, looking over one person's shoulder who's holding their phone that's operating as a speaker phone. And then you've got everybody else luxuriously sitting around in their pajamas, sipping coffee, sitting on their sofa. You know, that's a, those are very different work environments.
Speaker: and a very skilled facilitator will be able to handle that and make the communication common regardless of what the actual circumstances are of the person who's speaking. I want to push back on that because I think that's a great answer for a big company. But if I've got 200 employees, if I've got an HR department of three and a half,
Speaker: If everybody's sort of wearing two hats and juggling lots of balls, how do you do that? I guess the question is, how do you create that inside facilitation? And who is it? Is it the boss who should do that? Is it somebody? How do you get that happening if you can't call the brilliant Jessica Lipknecht? For example, there's somebody like that who can help me out.
Speaker: Right, so I would bet, I don't bet much Tom, but I would bet that in every organization there's somebody who has a natural talent for facilitation. They may not have been called out for it, but you know in a meeting who the people are who are kind of scanning the room all the time to make sure everyone's talking, the people who will bring it up inappropriately because they see that someone's been ignored, there are people who just know how to do this. They aren't necessarily paid for it.
Speaker: They aren't necessarily rewarded for it. And they don't necessarily have it as their job title. But there are people who are just natural facilitators. And it's a matter of pulling those people out, which brings me to an important point. There are a ton of tools out there right now. If you Google online facilitation, you'll find lots and lots of tools. And in fact, across the world, this has been an incredible development
Speaker: a group of people like me, of which there are now, I mean, we were like the only ones for a long time. Yeah, I know. But you know, among a handful of people who did it. I was shocked when I was invited into this group. There are so many people doing this. And they're posting their material as best they can. So a little Googling will go a long way to giving people the tools that they need. There also are a ton of online diagnostic tools
Speaker: you know, the ones that are really, really well known like DISC, which allows organizations to do like quick personality analyses, and then the people in the team can see who's going to be best at communication, who's going to be the most, you know, the best at making quick decisions, and all these things that these kinds of tools reveal become critical
Speaker: to knowing how to go forward. So my simple answer to all of that, going back to the original question, is you definitely have got somebody in your organization who can do this. They just may need a little help in knowing the best ways to go about it.
Speaker: You know, you made me think that this is sort of like that scenario where people are marooned on a desert island and suddenly somebody turns out, you know, the schlemiel turns out to have a valuable skill, you know, something that you didn't know. It seems to me like one good peace thing that could happen in this situation is that indeed some people might
Speaker: shine. And I'd like you to, you know, who you would didn't expect, there might be real opportunity since part of a leader's job would be to, to look for these talents that you may not have over, you may have overlooked before and might have that opportunity and other people's job to raise their hand and volunteer. And thinking of that, what are some of the other like, surprise upsides
Speaker: that people might find from this enforced change in work. And then later I'm going to ask you about some of the surprise downsides they might have as we come, as we start thinking this through. Yeah. So, you know, they, we assume, assume that, you know, when people go home, then they're really going to be able to concentrate and get a lot more work done. So that's kind of, or they're going to be totally distracted by the laundry and the kids running around.
Speaker: And there's nothing in between those two things. So allowing the group to understand that the time that people spend alone in these concentrated ways can produce really good stuff as long as after they isolate. And I'm talking about the old kind of isolation, not what we're dealing with right now, but the old concept that you go and you concentrate. And then you come back together to collaborate
Speaker: becomes a very important rhythm. So some people think that it is impossible to do good creative work when people are distributed. Well, there has been study after study after study that's shown that virtually distributed teams are actually more creative than the in -person teams.
Speaker: Now, everyone rejects this when you first say it to them. But if you look at the really complex projects that have gone on over a long period of time, they're almost all done virtually. The very first computer virus that we had, which was about 30, 40 years ago, was one that was solved by virtual working. The people were never, ever able to come together and they solved it very quickly. So that combination of isolation and collaboration, that rhythm,
Speaker: together apart can actually be highly productive. Yeah. And highly productive. Exactly. Exactly. And going to your second, the second part of that question, it can also be really, really hard for some people, people who are crawling the, you know, crawling the walls and, you know, what is that? Yeah. Just climbing the wall. Yes. Right. The skin is crawling at the climbing the wall.
Speaker: I'm thinking about spiders and webs and networks. Climbing the wall. By being by themselves, you can't ignore that because that becomes a real symptom of the team falling apart. Maintaining that continuous contact to make sure that people are connected and are actually being heard. This becomes especially important for introverts.
Speaker: for people for whom the language that your group is meeting in is not their first language, for people with any kind of hearing deficit, any kind of, you know, anything that could get in the way of all that. And there are people who are phone averse. You know, they just hate the phone. So, you know, it's not a great medium for them. So we have to find other ways to accommodate, you know, these different communication styles. So that's a lot to think about.
Speaker: There is a lot to think about, but I actually I think you've given us an extraordinary amount to think about to think about and real things that that leaders and teams and team members can sort of grab a couple of things that I'm hearing. Number one,
Speaker: focus, first of all, on figuring out what the work is and not on the technology. Communication and sociology are more important than platforms and technology, although you might find them and use them. I mean, that's the first thing. I think the second thing that I heard you say was make sure that the team gets together and reminds itself or does for the first time
Speaker: that sort of gathering around why are we here? What is our purpose for being? What is our mission? What's our overall job? And then make sure you're translating that into, as you said, using sort of project management skills and do, all right, if this is what we're trying to do, this is what we've got to do today. This is what we've got to do this week. This is what we've got to do next month. So you have that design and you're working that regularly as a
Speaker: the way you'd manage a project and manage a project team and touching base all the time. That's the first day, first group of things. Second thing I'm hearing is facilitation, facilitation, facilitation, that it's really important to manage, not just the work itself, but sort of the emotions and the interactions of people so that we are connecting as human beings and we are
Speaker: you know, talking to each other. And I love this idea of an end -of -the -work virtual happy hour or various other sort of events that people can create so that you can make the connections. And I think I heard the third thing I heard at the end was this, don't forget the outlier. A person who may struggle with this or may have the language problem or something like that, the person who may be poor,
Speaker: reasons, technological or psychological, have a hard time and make sure you're bringing those along. And if you do that right, you're actually maybe more than pleasantly surprised. Is that what that was? Well, I think, yeah, you got it. You got it exactly. It's not that hard, Tom, if you just think about what really needs to go on. There's one other thing that I really want people to hear, which is the concept of rotating roles.
Speaker: so that if today you're facilitating the meeting, tomorrow you'll be the note taker. The day after that, you'll be the one who calls up everybody on the team to make sure everybody's still linked in. So this business of moving from one role to another actually makes people much more agile in this situation. And if ever a moment has called for personal agility,
Speaker: This is it, right? We really don't know how to operate. And rotating roles also means that somebody's not always stuck with the note -taking and never gets the same. Exactly, exactly, exactly. You don't have a Marian Martha problem. Yep, yep, yep. Jessica Litnak, this has been an extraordinary conversation.
Speaker: And I just want to thank you so much for your time. For those of you who would like to learn more about Jessica and her work, you can go to Jessica. What's the best way to learn more about you and your work? Your blog? Yeah, my blog. It has a tremendous amount of information about this. I've been reposting it on Facebook. I'm on Facebook and all my posts are open to the world.
Speaker: I have some stuff on Medium. The main thing is, yeah, it's important to look at the experts, but it's more important to trust yourself and know that you can do this very well.
Speaker: So the address, the URL of the blog is endlessknots .netage .com, right? Endlessknots .netage .com. And that's not with a K as in tying knots rather than endlessly saying that. Endlessknots .netage .com. Exactly. Thank you. Very good. And thank you, Jessica. And thank you all for listening to The Market That Moves America.
Speaker: never miss a new episode. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever fine podcasts can be found, or you can subscribe and learn more about us at our website, which is middlemarketcenter .org.
