Current Situation – March 2020
It’s hard! On a personal level, family, society, economy and in general for us humans.
Lots of us struggle these days, especially since a lot of companies’ current business model is not ready for remote work. PS: Most governments announced that people in almost every country should/must stay at home.
Instead of seeing the downside, ask yourself:
- What opportunities do we have, that we didn’t have before?
- How can we leverage our current company (employees and assets) to deal with this situation?
Where is the bigger benefit for society in our organization? - How does this make us stronger as an organization?
As a society? As humans in this world?
The impact on company meetings
If you have found a way to deal with the situation you might want to leverage the opportunities from this situation for the future.
Ask yourself:
- Which meetings would you never run remotely, and now you do?
- How can you make those meetings work?
- How do you run meetings and workshops now?
- How can you leverage this in a future where people are allowed to gather in physical rooms?
- How can we descale our meetings to be more effective?
Our experience
Remote meetings are different and the internet is full of tips to make them work for you.
A great resource to learn about remote work is https://www.remotekit.ch/
What we found interesting for most companies:
- Which meetings would you never run remotely and now you do?
- Quarterly Company Strategy Meeting, Salary Negotiating meeting, Social Skills, and Team Trainings, 2nd in-person job interviews, Design Thinking workshops,…. are a few that come to our mind.
These events can work online-only, they work very differently though. - Maybe more 1on1 video meetings are suddenly necessary to build up trust.
- Maybe use the “Silent Meeting Manifesto” by Amazon
- Quarterly Company Strategy Meeting, Salary Negotiating meeting, Social Skills, and Team Trainings, 2nd in-person job interviews, Design Thinking workshops,…. are a few that come to our mind.
- How can you make those meetings work?
- The meetings above have a different touch if you run these remotely. Tackle the socializing problem with “remote liberating structures”, leave more time, connect with people, have clear rules, upfront agenda, … all the usual meeting tips apply.
- Make everything a shared responsibility
- Live note taking and collaboration over those notes –> “These are our notes” (not mine or yours)
- Be crystal clear and transparent
- Make your work visible
- Make decisions visible and make the process of how you make decisions visible
- How can you leverage this in a future where people are allowed to gather in physical rooms?
- Reduce the number of meetings and think “remote meeting first”
- Build up trust in your organization by focusing on different metrics and values.
Everyone is a role model for behavior we want to see.
- I would highly recommend keeping all the things above that make your remote meetings better.
- For the rest… Experiment, Inspect and Adapt ????
General Things that help remote only
- Be Data-Driven
- Collect data
- Highlight what data is important to your organization
- Make data visible to everyone
- Share your “manager.readme” and “colleague.readme” to everyone (what is my role, promises, expectations, successes, quirks failures and secrets 🙂
- Delegate Problems not Work (in your Scrum Teams)
- Be careful on behaviors that sneak in -> “There is no ‘they’ on Santa Fe“