Do not go gentle into that good night

How can we make the most of home working before it’s too late?

At the start of this lockdown thing, my esteemed relative Helen sent me a link to Kit Krugman’s excellent and thoughtful piece on how Covid may change standards of professionalism.

One phrase in particular jumped out at me:

The decisions we make now will be encoded in our organizational psyche for the months and years that follow.

It seems as though every organisation has firmly decided that home working is going to be the new normal. Or at least a big part of it. We’ll move into a world where commuting is a distant memory and we’ll spend most of our days in the company of people we’ve chosen to live with rather than whoever happened to work for the company when we joined it.

But as Kit suggests, there’s a bit more nuance to this than being able to sing along to the radio between meetings. Most businesses have dived into distributed working out of expediency. There hasn’t been time to stop and think, we just had to get on with it.

But wait a minute. This is the best opportunity we’ve possibly ever had to redesign our whole way of working, in fact our whole way of living when you think about it. Work/life balance is up for grabs in a way that it’s never been.

If we’re going to make the most of this, we need to do more than just settle on the first approach that works. It needs to be considered, a service design exercise where we are collectively both the providers and consumers of the service.

That’s quite a big statement. So let’s start small, with a run-through of some of the things we might miss.

The tone of a voice

I’ve long argued that we need an internationally recognised irony font to make it clear that a bit of text isn’t serious. Something that doesn’t have the laughing-at-my-own-joke overtone of an exclamation mark, or the passive aggressive subtext that a misused emoji can bring.

If we’re going to make this remote working thing a regular feature of our lives, we’re going to need have a rethink on how we signpost humour without either ruining the joke or missing it altogether.

And clearly it’s not just humour. Losing the inflections that can’t be conveyed in flat text is often the cause of unnecessary stress and misunderstandings in a million other contexts. How many internationally recognised fonts could we need? The “Hang on I suggested that in the last call and suddenly you’re getting the credit for it” font. That’s definitely one. “Hi I’m the quiet one but if you let me actually finish a sentence you might find that that quality of an idea is not proportional to how loudly it’s mansplained.” Hmm … that one might need a special colour as well.

It’s no deep observation that body language and vocal inflections play a huge part in communication. eMail isn’t ideal* but at least there’s time to stop and consider what you’ve written before you send it. With the rise in real-time chat applications, we’re moving into a workplace where typing more than one sentence at time in a conversation is becoming the exception, and that opens up a myriad of ways to misinterpret each other.

*Ironic understatement. Insert appropriate font here …

Kairos

Kairos is a concept from Greek rhetoric. It’s also a principle used in experience design, which is where I came across it. Broadly speaking, it’s the opportune time to deliver a message.

Which is part of the game when you’re working in an office. If someone is wearing headphones and an intense look of concentration, probably best to leave that question about your expenses for another time. On the other hand if they’ve just sat down after a meeting and haven’t got started on anything else yet, then it’s open season, right?

The point is that without that visual contact, it’s very hard to tell whether someone is available for consultation or trying to get into the zone.

Not now I’m busy

Platforms like Slack do allow you to set emoticons according to whether you’re deep in a Pomodoro or available for a chat. But with the best will in the world no one is going to remember set theirs for every moment of their working day.

And no real office had a ‘timewasting corner’ which people could drag you into and bombard you with amusing stories. But every Slack or Yammer I’ve seen has a channel specifically for posting memes, satirical Jpegs and third-hand jokes. And they always seem to get responses very quickly.

So we’ve found whole new ways to stack interruptions. There is a lot to be said for the asynchronous communication forms that two-way chat apps can open up, but they also open up the ability to bring an entire department to a temporary standstill with a single kitten video.

We used to work from home so we could avoid interruptions. What do we do now they’ve followed us there?

The Usual Place

This is something that a lot of the better teams I’ve worked in have. The mutually agreed place where goodies are left. Sometimes things just quietly appear there, other times there’s an email alert. “I did some baking with my kids on the weekend. There’s carrot cake in the Usual Place.”

If you’ve been on holiday, or an overseas business trip you bring something back for the Place. Or it’s a share the wealth thing. “We had a ton of biscuits left over from the client meeting. I’ve left them in the Usual Place.”

It’s hard to tell which direction the value travels with a Usual Place. You’d have to say that mostly it’s a good team that creates the Place, but there is also a sense that having one makes a team better. There’s a peculiarly lovely buzz about a shared treat. Especially if you provided it.

The point is that it’s an exemplar for the blessings that having people in the same physical space can bestow. The running joke, the spontaneous payday lunch out, the moment someone decides to make the whole office a cup of tea for no reason.

Those ‘virtual tea breaks’ seemed like a really fun idea in week one of lockdown, but a month or two in and we’ve all found that 5 or more people in a Zoom call with nothing in particular to talk about can get very awkward very quickly.

Of course it’s possible to create camaraderie when we can’t slap each other on the shoulder to say ‘congratulations’ or ‘sorry to hear that, mate’, or argue whose fault it was that the quick after work pint ended in a nightclub at 3am. But have we thought about how exactly?

Right message, wrong medium

Years ago while I was working for a large system integrator, I ran a project for one of the less glamorous corners of the BBC. My opposite number there was an amiable enough guy in our first meeting but a week or so in he sent me an email which provoked an actual physical reaction in me. He seemed to be absolutely furious and I couldn’t figure out why. After a few goes at writing and rewriting a reply, I decided to clear the air by phoning him up and letting him beat me up verbally.

He was fine. In fact he barely even remembered the content of the email. It was just that email wasn’t his medium. I quickly learned that almost all of his emails were like that. It was like a sort of emotional tone deafness took over when he started to type. He’d make a request for a minor clarification sound like he was trying to start a fight in a taxi rank.

By the law of averages, the more channels we use, the more likely we are to find the wrong one for you. I’ve certainly had a run-in with a team that were fine in calls but became more like social media trolls on Slack. It’s going to take a bit of work on our collective self-awareness to combat things like this.

The point

So the point is that we know how to do this. It’s not difficult; it just needs a solid methodical approach. The linking feature of all of the above is that losing them removes an aspect of empathy by creating a physical or emotional distance, removing human cues or making it harder to respect each other’s time.

That should be easy. The point of user-centred design is to create empathy, to put ourselves in the place of the user. It’s just that in this case, the user is us. Funnily enough though, it seems harder to walk a mile in our own shoes than in some else’s at times like this.

But there aren’t many facets to this:

Tools — We’ve all sort of arrived at a communication pattern that works by now. The temptation is to stick with it because there are always more important things to do than fix things that are basically working. But did you or anyone you know actually do a thorough survey of the variety collaborative remote working services that are out there? Or ask anyone what they really need from them?

Mutual respect — We haven’t had to make much effort on this one in the past, it’s just sort of happened. But if there was ever a time to start thinking about how what we say and the way we say it impacts on our workmates, it’s now. This is something that will probably need to be arrived at as a team. A set of rules that everyone lives by for the benefit of everyone else.

Time management — Not in the traditional sense of finding enough hours in the day to get everything done, but being sensitive to the right or wrong time. I’ve written before about how everything about managing interruptions seems to fall to the person being interrupted. This is the time to start thinking about managing our own behaviour and limiting interruptions from the supply side.

Some other stuff — I don’t know what that is. Neither do you. What’s needed is a thoughtful service design process where we begin by identifying all of the needs and problems and then finding ways to provide for and solve them. What would the experience map of your post-Covid employee engagement look like? Only one way to find out …

Of course that’s a bigger task than one small paragraph might suggest. But there are only so many ways of saying “I’m sorry could you repeat that? I was too busy judging your kitchen to listen to what you were actually saying.” And we need to take action before we finally run out.