THE BLOG
How Good is Your Gut… Really?
By: Tim Cynova // Published: December 9, 2024
The uncertainty of the last 4+ years and counting has had me reflecting on a slice of Daniel Kahneman’s work, specifically the three conditions he proposes for when we can trust our gut:
• We're in a predictable environment.
• We have regular practice with it.
• We get immediate feedback on your judgment.
Doing values-based org design work — or any work for that matter — during the pandemic seemed to call at least the first two of these conditions into question. Predictable environment? So you’ve lived through the uncertainty of a global pandemic before? Regular practice with it? And now your workplace policies, practices, and offerings need to be entirely redesigned for virtual work arrangements, overnight? As we’re about to enter another period of uncertainty, what from this recent period will still be relevant? And what and where do we need to recalibrate?
For me, the three prompts serve as decision making speed bumps; invitations to pause and (re)consider the accuracy of my approach. “I know that my gut says this is the way we should to do ___ (and maybe pre-pandemic that would’ve been accurate), but does that intuition still hold true?” And if not, what will be the data that provides me with immediate feedback on my approach?
𝗧his shows up everywhere in our organizations:
H𝗶𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴: Great at hiring for an onsite workplace? How about being great at hiring after a shift to remote work? Or with staff working hybrid arrangements?
𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝘀: Does our in-person workplace approach still hold for a hybrid or virtual workplace? Does it support people in their growth and development?
𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁: Does our intuition about what makes an “effective” leader reflect the knowledge, skills, and experience that's currently needed or that *will* be needed?
𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻-𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲𝘀: What if our instinct about the importance of various voices around the table is miscalibrated?
𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗖𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲: Are the team bonding activities that were seemingly effective pre-pandemic still what’s needed? Are they supportive of everyone?
Each of these areas and more present opportunities to pause and reflect on whether our instincts are (still) aligned and supportive in the current context, or if recalibration might be required.
𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗲 𝗱𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗺𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗯𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗳𝗶𝘁 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗰𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗴𝘂𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗹𝘆 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗯𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲d?
Check out our online Quick Courses and Epic Explores.
The courses include everything from how to reimagine your recruitment and hiring process, to creating distributed leadership and decision making models, to introducing race-based affinity groups. You can quickly get up-to-speed on easier ways to scope roles than traditional job descriptions, and consider if creating a Core Curriculum would aim your onboarding process.
Tim Cynova is an HR and org design consultant, an educator, and podcaster dedicated to dusting off workplaces to (re)center values-based approaches where more people can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR (SPHR), trained mediator, principal at WSS HR LABS, on faculty at New York’s The New School, Minneapolis College of Art & Design, and Hollyhock Leadership Institute. He has held executive leadership roles in a variety of nonprofits for the better part of the last 20 years, and is also an avid coffee drinker.
Inclusive Sourcing: Effective Strategies and Innovative Approaches
By: Tim Cynova // Published: October 12, 2024
“Where do you find great candidates?”
…asks a friend of mine imagining that there's some magical place to post they don’t know about yet.
Finding great candidates can be an adventure filled with opportunities to explore and test new ideas, deepen community connections, learn, and iterate. It can also be a nail bitingly stressful and anxious time... for everyone involved. Over the years, my colleague Katrina Donald and I have discovered some helpful approaches to this aspect of search that we're excited to share.
Whether you're a seasoned HR pro or an HR-is-accidentally-on-your-plate pro, we collected our reflections on recent experiments in this video and excerpted a few highlights below.
Sourcing, of course, is just one piece of the hiring process. Download the project management plan we use to guide our executive searches. Or, sign up for our online Inclusive Hiring course where we go into more detail about each stage of our process.
An invitation to reframe…
Think of Sourcing as a Marketing Campaign
If you were selling tickets to an event, you wouldn’t post one advertisement and expect it to sell out (I mean, unless you’re Beyoncé or Taylor Swift), so why do we more or less approach sourcing candidates that way? Post a job ad, share it once on the company’s socials, and then hope for the best in an “if you post it they will apply” kinda way.
Inclusive sourcing isn’t just about where you post or who applies necessarily; it’s about reimagining the entire ecosystem of how your organization attracts and interacts with talented people. Approach your search like you would a marketing campaign. Think about your organization’s special sauce, openly share information, leverage all your digital and multimedia assets, make it engaging and intriguing, connect with your communities, and center kindness. Treat this more as relationship building than an one-off transactional interaction. Who knows, after all, if the person who sees your ad is the right person for this job, your next one, or if they know someone who would be a great match.
The goal in sourcing is to make sure that as many potential candidates find out about your job opening, feel welcome and unburdened to apply, and find the process transparent and supportive. With a holistic approach like this, you can build a group of amazing people with whom to explore the opportunity.
1. From Passive to Active Sourcing
We've all been there—posting a job on the usual platforms and waiting, and waiting, only to find the candidate pool isn't as aligned with the role as we'd hoped. This is what I’d call “passive sourcing.”
Passive sourcing—just listing a position on a job board or two—might not build the pool you’re hoping for. Instead, shift from passive to active sourcing. Unpack the knowledge, skills, and experience of your ideal candidates for this particular role, then think about where they are — not just physically but in terms of the digital spaces they occupy — and what might resonate with them to pique their interest in the role.
Another challenge with passive sourcing is that your ad is but a brief moment in someone’s day; it flies across feeds with literally a thousand other things competing for a potential candidate’s attention. (Consider using an Empathy Mapping approach to tune in to where your ideal candidates might look for or learn about their next role.) Alumni networks, niche industry forums, and affinity groups can often be better places to post than the more generalized job boards. Or, even better, post to all of the above. (It probably costs more but so does a failed search, especially when you factor in time, energy, and opportunity costs.)
Specialized Job Boards: These are a starting places to share. Consider niche platforms tailored to specific industries or roles. For instance, if you're in the arts, platforms like the NYFA in New York or Springboard for the Arts in Minnesota can connect you with passionate sector-specific professionals. (When we work with organizations on their searches, we typically post a role to 15-20 different job sites ranging from general, like Idealist, to hyper-specific communities like Black Administrators of Opera.)
Professional Associations: Tap into networks like SHRM for HR professionals, or the Association of Fundraising Professionals for development roles, etc. While many require a fee, the return on investment often comes in the form of aligned candidates who are actively engaged in their respective field.
Alumni Networks: School and professional development program alumni groups are treasure troves of talent, as are your fellow volunteers or community choir mates. Sharing in these spaces can connect you with individuals who have specialized training and a shared connection, and are likely networks that don’t exactly replicate yours. #ProTip: People have a lot going on and a request to “share with your networks” can feel like it’s coming out of left field and another item for their lengthly To Do list. Go the extra step to assist. Sometimes people need to be reminded that they’re connected to, say, the Presidential Leadership Scholar Program to then quickly share with that group.
It's not just about where you post, but how you engage. By actively seeking out a range of platforms, you're potentially connecting with so many more people you might not have otherwise reached. This is also why you want to give a search at least 4-5 weeks to marinate in and through networks. It often takes time to connect with people, get it posted in various places, and for candidates to then find time to express interest.
The Inclusive Sourcing Schematic explored in our video below
2. Leverage Your Organization's Ecosystem
Surprisingly, many organizations miss opportunities to leverage their own digital ecosystem. Beyond posting the job on the company’s “Careers” page, think about how your broader online presence can support your search. We often invest a lot in our brand awareness campaigns, and completely neglect our employer brand ones.
Could your company’s podcast discuss this role and its significance within the organization? Could your blog feature an article that highlights the backstory behind the role’s importance and the projects this new hire will lead? Every channel your organization uses to communicate with its audience—whether it's a newsletter, live stream, or social media—can be repurposed to spread the word and engage people.
By weaving job postings into the ongoing story of your organization, you elevate the visibility of the opportunity and make it a natural part of your larger activities.
Blog Posts: Write about upcoming projects or initiatives related to the role. This not only provides context but also showcases your organization's culture and values.
Podcasts and Live Streams: Host a session discussing the role, featuring team members who can share insights. Take viewer questions. This personal touch can engage potential candidates on a deeper level. Host “office hours” about the role and search. Link to the recording for people who missed it.
Centralize Information: Ensure all job-related information is accessible in one place from the company website. Use all of those marketing opportunities to direct people to one page on your website. (Most people won’t remember where they saw the job posted but they’ll know to go to your website.) Then, include links to relevant information, downloadable resources, audio versions of the posting, screen reader compatible versions, and clear instructions on how to apply for them to consider if this role is a good match.
By using these channels, you're not just posting a job—you're telling a story about who you are and why someone might love being a part of your team. You’re helping candidates answer the question, “Can I see myself working there in that role?” In this way, it’s even engaging to people who aren’t even interested or right for the current role, but who might be bigger fans or fits for future roles. One search can seed the next.
Slide from Social Sharing Kit from a previous search
3. Maximize Social Media Outreach
Social media allows you to take your recruitment campaign beyond job boards and your website. Using platforms like Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn lets you experiment with different formats and methods of engagement. Posting a simple link to a job description is one way, but what if you could turn that posting into shareable content?
Social media is a powerful tool to connect with potential candidates, especially those outside of your current network. For our searches, we create Social Sharing Kits like this and this.
Experiment with Platforms: Don't limit yourself to LinkedIn (although we go into that more below). Platforms like Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook can reach different audiences. Try posting at various times and see where you get the most engagement.
Engaging Content: Think about all of the ways you could repurpose search-related content. Create quote slides, short videos, or behind-the-scenes glimpses of your workplace. Visual and interactive content can grab attention more effectively than text alone. Invite staff to suggest content they think would resonate. Experiment.
Accessibility & Inclusion Matters: Always include captions and transcripts with your content; create audio versions of the posting and related content. This ensures that your message is inclusive and accessible.
Each platform has its unique strengths. By tailoring your content, you can engage candidates in ways that resonate with them. This offers a terrific and low cost way of testing out options.
Heads up: Be prepared with how to respond to candidates who DM the company or staff through personal or professional social media channels. What should someone say or not say? Is there a standard reply that you will use? How can the experience be consistent?
4. Harness the Power of LinkedIn
LinkedIn deserves its own spotlight as a unique tool for recruitment. While it's starting to become more crowded with content these days that makes me think I’m scrolling Instagram, things like LinkedIn’s Recruiter Lite features powerful tools to identify potential candidates based on region, title, or specific skills.
For organizations looking to be more efficient with their search budgets, consider using LinkedIn’s recruiter licenses for short bursts, activating it when the search is most active. Even without Recruiter you can start by exploring your own connections and asking colleagues and board members to do the same. The goal is to connect more intentionally with the people in connected networks and build from there for both a broad and highly specific reach.
Personal Networks: Start by reaching out to your own connections. You might be surprised who is interested or might know others who would be a great fit.
LinkedIn Recruiter Tools: Consider using tools like LinkedIn Recruiter Lite to filter and find candidates based on specific criteria. This can be especially useful if you're hiring for specialized roles and for connected with candidates who might be open to new opportunities but are not actively searching.
Mindful Outreach: While it's tempting to message everyone, focus on genuine connections. Personalized messages are more effective and respectful of everyone's time. Use this as an opportunity to catch up with those you might not have connected with recently. Especially given the disruptions of the last few years, pinging people about a search is a great excuse to reconnect.
#ProTip: During a Board call, set aside 20 minutes for Board members to pair up and scroll through the other’s LinkedIn Connections. Give them the goal of identifying 20 people or places that might be worth connecting. Sometimes the external lens on our own contacts highlights people and places we wouldn’t otherwise notice.
5. Cultivate Meaningful Relationships
When thinking about sourcing as a process of building relationships, rather than broadcasting information, change the tone of your outreach. Personalized connections are key. If you’ve worked with someone who might know the perfect candidate or have a connection to a valuable network, don’t hesitate to ask them to help spread the word.
This relational piece also applies internally—make it easy for team members to share the job posting within their own circles and with people who might be a match for the role. By tapping into these existing networks, you’re casting a more thoughtful net, and one that likely more closely aligns with your organization's values and culture.
At the heart of inclusive sourcing is building and nurturing relationships.
Be Genuine: When reaching out, authenticity is key. People appreciate sincere interest over generic messages.
Leverage Internal Networks: Make it easy for your team — if they want and feel comfortable doing so — to tap into their networks. They likely have connections that are perfect for the role, or their connections have connections that are perfect for the role!
Resource Management: Be mindful of your time and energy. Focus on quality over quantity to maintain meaningful interactions. That said, one of the reasons people partner with Katrina and I on searches is that we can help send quality messages to a lot more people than they have bandwidth in their day. (We average sending about 300-500 individualize messages during an executive search, which is seldom possible with internal-only resources.)
A note about bias: It’s present in every hiring process. It’s important to design recruitment and hiring processes and practices that adapt for the biases that exists. In our Inclusive Hiring course we explore in more detail how bias shows up in the hiring process and what you can do about it. For now, using a number of different sourcing strategies – not just personal networks – as well as having multiple people on the search committee who can help adjust for others’ biases are two ways of mindfully approaching this.
6. Simplify the Application Process
Let's face it—lengthy applications can deter even the most excited candidates. “I need to submit a resume, a cover letter, three references, write or record a video with answers to five questions that are specific to this search, AND provide a work sample? No thanks!” (Say too many candidates who would otherwise be awesome for the role.) Work to calibrate the effort required of a candidate to where they are in the process. It’s not that you can’t ask for references, but wait until you’re at that point in the hiring process and then request of only those candidates. Ask yourself, how can you keep the bar as low as possible for people to express interest and then design a hiring process where you learn more about each other as it progresses?
Use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS): Tools like Breezy HR or JazzHR can streamline the application process, and simplify the process for both you and your applicants. It allows you to handle a large influx of candidates, provide timely acknowledgement of their materials, track where applicants are in the process, and maintain clear communication with all candidates—whether they’re advancing or not.
Minimal Barriers: Ask only for what's necessary upfront. Consider allowing applicants to express interest in various formats, whether it's a resume, a video introduction, or an email. Work to calibrate where someone is in the process to the effort required of them. You likely will jettison more than 50% of people who express interest without even interviewing them. Think of all the time you’re asking of candidates and reconsider the ask.
Candidate Care: Communicate promptly and respectfully with all applicants. Even if they aren't the right fit now, they might be perfect for a future role.
Creating an Accidental Core Value: A friend recently applied for 100 jobs. She only heard back from 20% of the organizations with either an invitation to interview or that they filled the role. For the other 80 organizations, ghosting and not caring about people, in her mind, is now one of their organizational core values – even unintended as it likely is – and one she’ll share with others when asked about those companies. Oftentimes in hiring, we get the chance to make one person really happy and potentially piss off a bunch of people who are/were fans of the organization. I totally get the time commitment this communication takes, and am guilty myself of sometimes skipping it in the past. That’s why using an ATS can be such a great tool. It makes communications less time intensive and easier to avoid the missteps that undermine all of the goodwill you could be building instead.
Inclusive sourcing isn't just a strategy
Inclusive sourcing is a commitment to the work that connects us — thoughtfully and intentionally — with people who are aligned with the knowledge, skills, and experience needed for a given role. By expanding where and how we search, leveraging our networks, and making the application process welcoming and considerate, we not only find the right candidates but also strengthen our organization's culture and connection to communities.
We're passionate about these strategies at WSS because we've seen them work. We hope you're inspired to try them out and iterate on them. Drop us a line to let us know what resonates with you and what you’re exploring that’s working.
Sourcing Strategies Video
Katrina and I cover the above content in more depth during our Sourcing Strategies backgrounder video. If you’re looking to skip to a particular section, here’s the index:
00:00 Introduction to Inclusive Sourcing
00:47 Understanding the Sourcing Schematic
01:43 Diving into Places to Post
04:26 Traditional Job Boards and Websites
14:01 Maximizing Your Organization's Website
22:52 Leveraging Social Media
30:00 Exploring LinkedIn
41:15 Building and Utilizing Relationships
44:48 Facilitating Applications with an Applicant Tracking System
Check out our online Quick Courses and Epic Explores.
The courses include everything from how to reimagine your recruitment and hiring process, to creating distributed leadership and decision making models, to introducing race-based affinity groups. You can quickly get up-to-speed on easier ways to scope roles than traditional job descriptions, and consider if creating a Core Curriculum would aim your onboarding process.
Tim Cynova is an HR and org design consultant, an educator, and podcaster dedicated to dusting off workplaces to (re)center values-based approaches where more people can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR (SPHR), trained mediator, principal at WSS HR LABS, on faculty at New York’s The New School, Minneapolis College of Art & Design, and Hollyhock Leadership Institute. He has held executive leadership roles in a variety of nonprofits for the better part of the last 20 years, and is also an avid coffee drinker.
Best Instant Coffees for the Hybrid Work Experience
AI interpreting the very first cup of coffee I ever drank.
By: Tim Cynova // Published: April 12, 2024
The first cup of coffee I ever had was Sanka. I was six years old and still remember those sips vividly… as well as heaping spoonfuls of powdered creamer into the cup in hopes of improving the awful taste. Was it my unfamiliarity with coffee or was it Sanka? Probably both.
Fast forward several decades to when I worked in an office with eight different ways of making coffee — drip, Keurig, AeroPress, siphon, single-cup pour over, Chemex, French Press (3 cup), French Press (8 cup). We even had a group of coworkers who would gather every day at 3:30PM to engage in an incredibly precise coffee making process using their own fancy beans. If you wandered through the kitchen at just the right time you might even score their extra cup of coffee. That office had such a strong coffee culture – and, to be fair, a burgeoning tea contingent – our talented coworker even illustrated a “12 Days of Coffee” e-book as a year-end offering to share with our members.
After riding the Third Wave and that office’s coffee fanciness, my senses were slightly better calibrated than in those early Sanka days. So, you might imagine my skepticism when I encountered craft coffee shops selling their roasts in single serve instant coffee packets. (I mean, I knew Starbucks was pushing instant with their Via line but, never being a big fan of Starbucks, I dismissed it as a non-starter.) It was with that *healthy* dose of skepticism that I bought a few boxes from craft roasters, conducted side-by-side taste tests using the same roasters’ regular beans and the same roast in instant, and quickly became a convert. Did the cups taste identical? No. Did I mind it once I discovered new use cases for the instant variety? Not at all.
Planes to Trains, Campfires to Conference Calls ✈️ 🚂 🔥 💻
Making a cup of pour-over coffee for me is an often meditative experience. A rare moment of calm and focus in frequently uncertain and hectic days. I also find that because of limited time in the day or due to my travel schedule, the traditional pour-over process isn’t always possible. Once I tossed a few instant packets into my bag a whole new world of better tasting coffee began to unfold. And with it, a faster yet still meditative moment in my day.
A few of the places where instant coffee started to change my coffee game:
Asking for a cup of hot water on planes and mixing my own craft brew.
Using the hotel room coffee machine to heat up water and mixing in a pack of instant.
Camping coffee? Sure, you know, if camping is your thing.
I occasionally use an instant packet as an emergency cup of coffee in the morning to power me to the *actual* coffee shop. (Sometimes you need coffee to go get coffee.)
When time between Zoom meetings is too tight for the slower brewing process. Instant to the rescue!
As my colleague Katrina and I were facilitating search committee meetings, an impromptu coffee break with instant packets came in handy to keep the group focused during our post-lunch interviews. It was there I learned from another colleague about the myriad Japanese varieties that are now on my list to explore.
After realizing the regional nature of many craft instant coffees, my colleagues from across the U.S. and Canada started bringing them to use as trading cards of sorts when we gather for in-person meetings. We each bring a box or two from various local roasters and then share them to create mix-and-match batches to take home. Also part of a coffee-loving crew? Consider adding this to your next in-person staff gathering, or even a conference add-on. It’s kind of like when people go to the Olympics and trade pins with fellow spectators from around the world, or so I’ve heard.
The Brew in My Queue: What’s Currently Percolating in My Cup ☕
As with anything that comes in multiple varieties, part of the fun here is trying different brands and roasts. Below are some that I’ve tried and keep in regular rotation. First, a technical note. Instants come in two grind varieties: coarse crystals and a fine powder. I’ve found that the fine powder sometimes hardens in the packet, requiring a bit more work to avoid ending up with coffee sludge in the bottom of your cup. The challenge here is that the coffees made using the fine powder method often are more flavorful and interesting to me. For that reason, if I’m buying the packets in person, I sometimes open the box to check that the packets haven’t hardened.
A terrific coffee roaster located in Burlington, Vermont with three different roasts to explore – Calypso, Guatemala, and Ethiopia Ardi. You can also often order the same roasts in whole bean to conduct your own side-by-side taste tests.
Offers a veritable rabbit hole of great roasts with their 12 different instant varieties. They even offer some favorites in larger form packaging. Occasionally you can locate Verve at stores like Whole Foods.
I like to toss different Partners roasts into the rotation every now and then. If you live near one of their physical stores, you can sometimes find different varieties than what might currently be available on their website. They also offer a decaf option.
This one is new in my mix and is a limited edition offering. So, I imagine at some point soon I’ll be sad that I didn’t stock up on more of these packets before the run ends. (The Samra shouldn’t be confused with Blue Bottle’s Instant Espresso that I personally find to be *way* too salty.)
While Mount Hagen probably won’t win any major awards, it’s (1) relatively easy to find, (2) won’t break the bank, and (3) makes a better than average cup of coffee. If it’s going to be a multiple cup of coffee day, I don’t hesitate to make it with Mount Hagen (then my heart immediately wonders why I didn’t go with the above Partners decaf). To be fair, Mount Hagen also makes a decaf option.
When discussing instant coffees with my colleague Nico, they reminded me that our former coworker at the aforementioned eight-ways-to-make-coffee workplace raved about the magic of Cafe Bustelo. I’m including it here as homage to that office crew and, like Mount Hagen, it’s relatively easy to find and less expensive than many other instant varieties. (I guess, come to think of it, we had nine ways of making coffee in that office.)
Once I began mentioning that I was writing a piece about craft instant coffees, people started sharing their favorites with me. Full disclosure, I’ve yet to try Swift’s line, but it came so highly recommended from a coffee lover that I’m including it here.
Not ready to make the leap to instant just yet?
A few coffee roasters are making their brews available in single serving pour over packaging.
The original pocket pour over brand splits the difference, if you will, between your home set-up and instant packets. You can choose from 6 different roasts, and know that you’re also supporting people and the planet while enjoying your morning coffee. The expandable pour over is a bit more work intensive than instant packets – I definitely wouldn’t attempt it on a plane – but it offers a bit more of the classic pour over experience in a portable package that’s starting to be replicated by various other roasters.
Dripkit offers individually packaged pour overs from a variety of different roasters including Le Colombe, Stumptown, La Pacifica, Rival Bros, and more. And, if you’re a fan of coffee subscription services, Dripkit even offers an avenue for that exploration.
If you’re more of a coffee making “gearhead,” the Pourigami might be something to add to your stable of equipment. It’s more work intensive than an instant packet or all-in-one pocket pour over, but it’s a cool low-profile design for easier packing and portability.
What does all of this have to do with the workplace?
Well, besides the obvious, of course: That people in the U.S. alone drink hundreds of millions of cups of coffee each day while working?
Don’t Let Perfect Be the Enemy of Good (Enough)
There’s a concept called the 85% Rule. Simply put, aiming for 85% in efforts can prevent burnout but maintain high standards without demanding perfection. In other words, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good (enough).
Sometimes the time and energy it takes us to complete the remaining 15% of a project isn’t worth those resources. 85% is more often than not good enough. Few people even notice – or care about – the additional “value” of that 15%, especially if the alternative is 0%. We can see this in instant coffee, right? Is it 100% of its original, no. But in the use cases above instant’s 85% is often lightyears beyond the alternative, and takes less time and energy. It’s good enough.
Coffee and the “Solved Problem”
A great cup of coffee — and the ways it’s made — could be considered a “solved problem.” We had so many solved problems in the workplace circa January 2020. We knew how to move money, how to hire, how to communicate and coordinate projects when everyone was physically in the same space; we knew how to [fill in the blank of a policy, practice, procedure that was “just done that way”].
Then, seemingly overnight, most workplaces could no longer rely on the solved approaches. We were forced to experiment, iterate, and adjust. We had to ask “What If?” and “How might we?” It was in this exploration that we discovered countless other ways of approaching previously solved problems. Approaches that some thought were previously impossible (“Virtual conferences, impossible!” “Great tasting instant coffee, never!”), but they were certainly good enough in the absence of the original thing, and in many ways *better* for more people. We discovered approaches that were more resilient, that were more aligned with the values we hold today than when the processes and procedures were created. It prompted us to pause — many for the first time — to ask “why exactly do we do it this way again?” and “what would happen if we tried a different approach?” Or even “What would happen if we just *didn’t* do that?”
To previously solved problems we discovered new and different ways of going about our work. Some were Sanka quality — no need to try that again, not even spoonfuls of powdered creamer can improve it. Others were craft brew quality. Ah, so vibrant and opens up a range of new possibilities; even leaves time and energy for other things!
Crafting Coffee & Crafting Org Design
The craft of coffee and the craft of organizational design require a similar balance of “solved problems” and innovation, experimentation, and iteration. And even an application of the 85% “good enough” rule.
Just as a simple packet of instant coffee can pivot from my original image of it — Sanka is just the way instant is done — to become a craft item worthy of a connoisseur’s consideration, organizational design too can take its dusty frameworks, pause, and reimagine how they can evolve and adapt into dynamic systems that allow more people to thrive.
Try out a few of the above brews. And when you tear open a packet, consider where in the robust world of work – and workplace design – that it’s capable of change, of reimagining “solved problems” to (re)center values-aligned approaches that create meaningful experiences. Where can we dial it back to 85% and actually open up other opportunities? And if none of this resonates, maybe we can just agree that if work shouldn't suck — why should our (instant) coffee?
Want to explore ways to iterate on solved problems?
Check out our online Quick Courses and Epic Explores.
The courses include everything from how to reimagine your recruitment and hiring process, to creating distributed leadership and decision making models, to introducing race-based affinity groups. You can quickly get up-to-speed on easier ways to scope roles than traditional job descriptions, and consider if creating a Core Curriculum would aim your onboarding process. BONUS: These courses pair well with craft instant coffee!
Tim Cynova is an HR and org design consultant, an educator and podcaster dedicated to dusty off workplaces to (re)center values-based approaches where more people can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR (SPHR), trained mediator, principal at Work Shouldn’t Suck, on faculty at New York’s The New School, Minneapolis College of Art & Design, and Hollyhock Leadership Institute. He has held executive leadership roles in a variety of nonprofits for the better part of the last 20 years, and is also an avid coffee drinker.
From Zoom to the Tune: AI's HR-Approved Karaoke Playlist for the New Normal
Discover the perfect formula for a successful office karaoke session and unleash the power of song. Explore an AI-curated, HR-approved playlist designed to engage and uplift your team with valuable tips on fostering voluntary participation, promoting inclusivity, and engaging remote team members.
ChatGPT singing its heart out at company karaoke.
By: Tim Cynova // Published: March 26, 2023
I used to work with someone who was a genius at creating the perfect music playlist for every occasion. Coworker’s birthday celebration who loved dry martinis, France, and fine chocolate: Done. Dance Business Bootcamp: Done. It was a wonder to behold each new playlist in a, wow, that song selection and order really does capture the energy and mood of this moment.
As someone who doesn’t possess those song curatorial abilities, and as an HR professional who has thought on more than one occasion during office karaoke sing-a-longs, uh, that’s kinda weird people are singing about *that* in the workplace, I decided to consult AI to curate an HR-approved karaoke playlist. Why? As companies bring many employees back into the physical workspace after years of being Zoom squares together, there’s a good chance that the culture-building classic of office karaoke will make a reappearance.
As a former musician who has worked with and for a lot of arts organizations, I’m all for the power of music to create connections and transcend differences. As an HR professional, I’m also all for not having my calendar packed with a bunch of meetings after a karaoke session as people want to discuss the impact of inappropriate song selection. This is a workplace, people, not an episode of Glee.
My question of ChatGPT: What’s a playlist and queueing of songs with HR-approved lyrics and themes that would be appropriate to sing in the workplace?
Below is that list, complete with a link to the playlist on YouTube if you’re ready to skip straight to the singing part. Even with this, it’s still important to consider the context and specific workplace culture when selecting karaoke songs, but hopefully this gets you headed in the right direction. After the playlist below, I include some thoughts on how to design this kind of culture-building activity in the “new normal" workplace.
The HR-Approved Karaoke Playlist on YouTube
Pharrell Williams, “Happy” – This song has a catchy beat and uplifting lyrics, making it a great way to start the karaoke session and get everyone in a good mood.
Katrina and the Waves, “Walking on Sunshine” – Another upbeat song that will keep the energy high and get people singing along.
Whitney Houston, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” – This dance anthem is a fun song for getting people moving.
Cyndi Lauper, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” – A classic karaoke song that's always a hit.
The Jackson 5, “I Want You Back” – A Motown classic that's guaranteed to get people singing.
The Beatles, “Hey Jude” – A timeless classic.
Fleetwood Mac, “Don't Stop” – A catchy, classic rock hit that's perfect for karaoke.
The B-52's, “Love Shack” – A fun and funky song that’s great to sing with a group.
The Monkees, “I'm a Believer” – A classic karaoke song that's always a hit.
Journey, “Don't Stop Believin'” – One of the ultimate karaoke songs that nearly everyone knows.
Bon Jovi, “Livin' on a Prayer” – Another classic rock anthem that's perfect for karaoke.
Gloria Gaynor, “I Will Survive” – A classic disco hit that's perfect for getting people moving again.
Elton John, “Your Song” – A beautiful ballad that's perfect for changing up the tempo and getting people singing along.
Sister Sledge, “We Are Family” – Another classic disco hit that's a fun song with a great message about unity and togetherness. (But also, the company is not a “family,” so maybe skip this one.)
Neil Diamond, “Sweet Caroline” – A classic sing-along song that's always a hit with a catchy chorus that everyone can sing along to.
Aretha Franklin, “Respect” – A classic soul hit that's perfect for getting people moving.
Taylor Swift, “Shake It Off” – Another modern hit that’s upbeat, and has a great message about shaking off negativity and having fun.
Queen, “We Will Rock You” – A classic rock anthem that's perfect for karaoke. It's a great song to sing with a group, and it's guaranteed to get people stomping along. (Maybe forewarn your downstairs officemates.)
Stevie Wonder, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours” – A classic Motown hit, a fun and upbeat song that many people know.
The Proclaimers, “I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)” – Another song that has a memorable chorus everyone can join in on.
Billy Joel, “Uptown Girl” – A classic 80s hit that's an upbeat song perfect for karaoke.
Dolly Parton, “9 to 5” – A classic country hit that's a fun song with a great message about the joys of life outside of work.
ABBA, “Dancing Queen” – A disco classic song with a great chorus that everyone can sing along to. (Are great choruses a key to group karaoke?)
The Pointer Sisters, “I'm So Excited” – Another classic 80s hit that’s fun and upbeat, sure to get people moving.
Earth, Wind & Fire, “September” – A classic disco hit that's perfect for ending the karaoke session on a high note.
As organizations navigate the return for many employees to in-person work in the wake of the pandemic, fostering a strong and supportive workplace culture is more important than ever. When approached thoughtfully, karaoke events can promote team-building, boost morale, and help colleagues (re)connect. However, as we adjust to the new normal, it's essential to consider several factors to ensure that office karaoke hits the right note with everyone.
Prioritize Health and Safety: Pre-pandemic, I never gave much thought that karaoke is an activity where people pass around a microphone that’s been held with sweaty palms and repeatedly breathed heavily upon. It’s an activity perhaps only rivaled by that birthday tradition of someone breathing all over food and then passing pieces out for coworkers to eat. As people return to the workplace, ensuring their health and safety needs to remain a top concern. When planning a karaoke event, consider implementing safety measures such as providing hand sanitizer, maintaining proper ventilation, and encouraging employees to give the singers a safe distance while singing. Additionally, consider using disposable microphone covers or regularly sanitizing shared equipment to minimize potential risks.
Consider Your Remote and Hybrid Team Member: The pandemic has reshaped the way we live and work, with many employees now working remotely or in hybrid arrangements. Don’t forget this when designing your activity. To create an inclusive event, consider incorporating virtual participation options for remote team members. Platforms like Zoom or these specialized karaoke apps can enable employees to join in the fun, regardless of their location.
Encourage Voluntary Participation: While office karaoke can be an excellent team-building activity, it's essential to remember that not everyone enjoys singing in public or may feel comfortable participating. Create an environment where employees can choose to participate without feeling pressured, and ensure there are alternative ways for them to engage in the event, such as cheering on their colleagues or assisting with logistics.
Be Mindful of Mental Health and Stress: As employees return to the workplace, they likely are encountering at least some increased levels of stress and anxiety. Office karaoke can be a welcome distraction and a way to let loose. However, it's important to strike a balance between fun and sensitivity, acknowledging that some employees may need time to adjust to the new normal. Don’t let karaoke be the only stress-relief or bonding activity you explore in your workplace.
Reflect on the Lessons of the Pandemic: The pandemic has highlighted the importance of empathy, resilience, and adaptability in the workplace. As employees return to the office and engage in team-building activities like karaoke, it's crucial to keep these lessons in mind. Encourage a supportive and non-judgmental atmosphere, emphasizing that the event is about having fun, reconnecting with colleagues, and celebrating the resilience of the team.
Office karaoke can be a fun and effective way to strengthen workplace culture and promote team-building as employees return to the office after the pandemic. By prioritizing health and safety, catering to remote and hybrid teams, and being mindful of designing inclusive experiences, organizations can create an enjoyable and meaningful experience that helps employees reconnect and thrive in the post-pandemic workplace.
Tim Cynova is a leader, HR consultant, and educator dedicated to co-creating anti-racist and anti-oppressive workplaces through using human-centered organizational design. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR, trained mediator, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., on faculty at New York’s The New School and Minneapolis College of Art & Design, and for the past twelve years served as COO & Co-CEO of the largest association of artists, creatives, and makers in the U.S.
Disability Justice, Ableism, and the Workplace
By: Tim Cynova // Published: February 19, 2023
In Fall 2022, I had the pleasure of teaching a new course as part of Minneapolis College of Art & Design’s brand new Masters of Arts in Creative Leadership program. The course — “The Culturally Competent Leader & the Inclusive Workplace” — was designed to engage students with a variety of voices and perspectives focused on co-creating inclusive, values-centering workplaces.
One module that was particularly resonant with the group was when we explored Disability Justice, Ablelism, and Workplace Design. It perhaps felt so resonant given that many worked in organizations that were in the midst of rolling out “return to work” plans that, in some cases, felt like they were undermining the advances made over the pandemic to create more inclusive workplace policies and practices.
If you’re interested in exploring some of what we covered during that module, here is a sampling of those resources:
“What is Disability Justice?” by Disability & Philanthropy Forum
“10 Principles of Disability Justice” by Sins Invalid
“Creating a supportive workplace for neurodivergent employees” by Colette Des Georges
Disability Justice Audit Tool conceived and designed by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Stacey Park Milbern
“Disability in the new workplace: What companies needs to know and do” by Project Include (Executive Summary or Full Research Study)
“Ableism 101: What it is, what it looks like, and what we can do to to fix it” by Ashley Eisenmenger
“Ableist Words and Terms to Avoid” by Lydia X. Z. Brown
“People First Language: Usage Guidelines” by the D.C. Office of Disability Rights
Disability Etiquette by the Job Accommodation Network (JAN)
“Neurodiversity is critical for innovation in the workplace” by Ludmila Praslova
“The Spoon Theory” by Christine Miserandino
“What the office return means for workers with disabilities” by S. Mitra Kalita
“Remote work since Covid-19 is exacerbating harm: What companies need to know and do” by Project Include
“New data shows long Covid is keeping as many as 4 million people out of work” by Katie Bach
“The Curb-Cut Effect: Laws and programs designed to benefit vulnerable groups often end up benefiting all of society” by Angela Glover Blackwell
“There are disabled people in the future” interview with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Livestream Interview with Syrus Marcus Ware (Resources mentioned during discussion: Mutual Aid & Survival Resources)
“Long COVID Could Be a ‘Mass Deterioration Event’: A tidal wave of chronic illness could leave millions of people incrementally worse off” by Benjamin Mazer
“The Han Flowing Through My Veins” by Sophia Park via Womanly
“Mental Health & Well-Being Amid a Global Pandemic” Work Shouldn’t Suck’s Ethical Re-Opening Summit panel
MMG Earth Resources (formerly Bunny McKensie Mac) Black and non-binary led, MMG EARTH is a change management firm completely leveling and re-inventing the change management sector
Check out the multitude of Disability Justice resources — including some seminal books on the topic — available on Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s website.
Project Include’s Remote Work Report & Executive Summary
“Bring Your Whole(ish) Self to Work” by Tim Cynova
“Measuring Loss: The Inequities in Remembrance” by Sophia Park
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeow
“Working While Grieving” Work Shouldn’t Suck podcast EP03
“My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies” by Resmaa Menakem
“Remote work since Covid-19 is exacerbating harm: What companies need to know and do” by Project Include
The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.
What other resources should be included on this list for future course iterations?
Tim Cynova is a leader, HR consultant, and educator dedicated to co-creating anti-racist and anti-oppressive workplaces through using human-centered organizational design. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR, trained mediator, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., on faculty at New York’s The New School and Minneapolis College of Art & Design, and for the past twelve years served as COO & Co-CEO of the largest association of artists, creatives, and makers in the U.S.
[SERIES] White Men and the Journey Towards Anti-Racism
By: Tim Cynova // Published: March 23, 2022
In 2022, we largely paused our regular Work Shouldn’t Suck podcast episodes to offer a special mini-series: White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism. This series was created to be a resource for other white men who might be wrestling with questions like, “What’s my role in anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and justice work as a white man with power and privilege?” and “How might my personal commitment to do this work manifest itself in the organization I help lead?”
In the end, Season 1 featured 18 guys over 13 episodes who shared their stories, reflections, and responsibility of being a white male leader in organizations engaged in anti-racism work. (The season even unexpectedly produced a companion Study Guide!)
Profound thanks to all those who participated in Season 1. And we've got season 2 cooking right now. If you know of anyone who might be interested in participating, please ping us.
Want to receive more resources, research, and reflections on human-centered organizational design for thriving workplaces? Check our our previous newsletters and sign up to receive our monthly(ish) publication.
Tim Cynova is a leader, HR consultant, and educator dedicated to co-creating anti-racist and anti-oppressive workplaces through using human-centered organizational design. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR, trained mediator, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., on faculty at New York’s The New School and Minneapolis College of Art & Design, and for the past twelve years served as COO and then Co-CEO of the largest association of artists, creatives, and makers in the U.S.
Race-based Caucusing in the Workplace
By: Tim Cynova // Published: October 20, 2021
It was five years ago, in my work as Chief Operating Officer and then co-CEO of Fractured Atlas, that I was first introduced to race-based caucusing as part of our anti-racism, anti-oppression work. As a white man in leadership roles, I personally found participating in our monthly white caucus/affinity group to be an incredibly meaningful and life-changing experience. The learning and growth spurred on by that space profoundly influenced how I view and approach my work and life.
That’s why I’m so excited to be collaborating with Courtney Harge and Nicola Carpenter — two people who were instrumental in designing this work and helping guide Fractured Atlas’s anti-racism and anti-oppression journey since 2013 — in offering a course that assists other organizations with this crucial component of “The Work.”
As part of the course, Courtney and Nicola sat down to record the video above to answer thirty of the most frequently asked questions they’ve received about caucusing over the years. Everything from “What do companies need to do before they introduce race-based caucusing in the workplace?” to “Won’t caucusing lead to further division or segregation?” “What does it mean to have these conversations in the workplace?” to “What are common reasons people of color may be reluctant to join affinity spaces?”
During the course, we’ll cover the foundation and fundamentals necessary to support the work of race-based caucusing. We’ll dive into the structure, similarities, and differences between the People of Color caucus and White caucus. We’ll discuss what to do when it starts to feel like things are going sideways and how to expect the unexpected. And then we’ll close by putting it all together, including discussing important pieces like how HR intersects with this framework.
We have some spots left, but registration closes at 11:59PM ET on Friday, October 22. Join the course!
Other Resources
If you can’t join us for the course, but are still interested in learning more about race-based caucusing and affinity groups, might I suggest these resources. Of particular interest, “Working Apart So We Can Work Together” by Courtney Harge and Tiffany Wilhelm, and the most-read piece on the Fractured Atlas blog by about 100,000, “Resources for White People to Learn and Talk About Race and Racism” by Nicola Carpenter and updated recently by Nina Berman.
Want to receive more resources, research, and reflections on human-centered organizational design for thriving workplaces? Check our our previous newsletters and sign up to receive our monthly(ish) publication.
Tim Cynova is a leader, HR consultant, and educator dedicated to co-creating anti-racist and anti-oppressive workplaces through using human-centered organizational design. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR, trained mediator, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., on faculty at New York’s The New School and Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and for the past twelve years served as COO and then Co-CEO of the largest association of artists, creatives, and makers in the U.S.
The Ethical Re-Opening Summit
By: Tim Cynova // Published: April 8, 2021
As workplaces move to re-open, it’s not just be a matter of “un-flipping” the remote workplace switch from last March.
On Tuesday, April 27, a whole host of amazing and awesome humans are convening in conversation to discuss challenging questions like:
How can I maintain a sense of community, connection, and shared purpose as I manage different kinds of organizational cultures: fully onsite, fully remote, and a hybrid approach?
How can I employ and invent different organizing frameworks to share more power and equity in my organization’s decision making?
COVID-related employment law seems to change daily. What’s legal, and what’s not, when it comes to COVID and these quickly evolving employment laws?
How can I intentionally approach reopening my workplace with environmental impacts in mind?
What new policies, practices, and procedures should I institute to support everyone who works with us? And,
How can I help co-create a future where everyone thrives?
Have you been wondering about any of these things too? Well, you’re in luck!
Sessions include:
A Year in the Life [Opening Mainstage] What have we learned this past year? How can we use this knowledge and experience to craft thriving workplaces?
Alternate Power & Decision Making Models [Breakout session] There are different ways of structuring organizations in whole and in parts. We’ll explore ways to share power, decision making, and ownership.
Mental Health & Well-Being Amid a Global Pandemic [Breakout session] How can we and our organizations acknowledge and support the well-being of everyone as we continue to live and work through a global pandemic?
Employment Law & COVID [Breakout session] When it comes to providing a workplace free from COVID hazards, what’s required and what’s not? What’s legal and what’s not?
Intentionality & Environmental Impacts [Breakout session] This past year saw most work travel completely eliminated. How can we reopen in intentional ways that center our impact on the planet and each other?
Workplace Policies for Hybrid Org Arrangements [Breakout session] How do we create and maintain equitable policies and practices when our team works across differing onsite and remote arrangements?
New(ish) to Organizational Anti-Racism Work [Breakout session] Task forces, caucuses, book clubs, consultants? So many options. We’ll discuss different approaches to doing “the work” in our organizations.
Into The Future! [Closing Mainstage] What does it look like to co-create a future where everyone thrives? We’ll talk with people who are experimenting and iterating towards this future.
Tim Cynova is a leader, HR consultant, and educator dedicated to co-creating anti-racist and anti-oppressive workplaces through using human-centered organizational design. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR, trained mediator, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., on faculty at New York’s The New School and Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and for the past twelve years served as COO and then Co-CEO of the largest association of artists, creatives, and makers in the U.S.
Preparing for November 4: A Company’s Duty of Care
By: Tim Cynova // Published: October 22, 2021
This year I’m keenly aware of when my birthday falls. Why you ask? Because, this year, my birthday coincides with the U.S. federal Election Day: November 3. It feels like I’m getting hourly reminders of just how few days remain between now and then. And as Election Day quickly approaches, companies who care about the health and safety of the people who work for them must spend time — especially if they’re not already — planning for November 4 and the months ahead.
We are already seeing an uptick in hate crimes across the country as Election Day approaches. By all indications November 4th won’t bring a clear answer of who will be declared the winner of this election. This uncertainty is going to lead to an increasingly challenging period for this country and those who live here as the weeks and months pass towards inauguration day on January 20. In advance of all of this, my fellow Fractured Atlas co-CEO Lauren Ruffin and I have been holding conversations with our colleagues at other organizations to exchange strategies, ideas, insights, and support around how our organizations are and can show up for staff in this environment.
This piece is a compilation of ideas, actions, and themes being taken by a number of organizations, and it is informed by and drawn from conversations with a host of fellow CEOs. It’s not meant to be definitive, but a starting place. I want to give special thanks to an intrepid group of amazing people who hopped on an *early* coffee call recently with Lauren and I to help us think through this topic in more depth. This amazing group included Michelle Ramos of Alternate Roots, Deana Haggag of United States Artists, Caitlin Strokosch of National Performance Network, and Laura Zabel of Springboard for the Arts. If you’ve not visited their websites recently to check out the incredibly important work they’ve been doing, I urge you to make time today.
During all of these previous conversations, it was not lost on anyone that the moment we’re approaching is taking place amidst a global pandemic that is entering its eighth month in the U.S. This pandemic has forced the indefinite shutdown of nearly the entire culture sector as we once knew it, and to compound our issues we face climate threats from hurricanes to forest fires that are endangering the homes, offices, livelihoods, and lives of many of our staff and artists we serve. Additionally, while each organization we spoke with articulates them differently, we all share commitments towards advancing the work of social justice, disability justice, anti-racism, anti-oppression, diversity, equity, and inclusion. [If you’re new here, you can read more about Fractured Atlas’s own journey in anti-racism.]
Here are some themes and suggestions that came out of our recent calls with colleagues about what companies can be doing right now. This is a compilation piece and, to my knowledge, while each organization is doing some of what’s on this list, no organization, including Fractured Atlas, is doing everything here… yet.
Create space and make time:
Make November 3 a paid organizational holiday and close the office. Some of us already have a “We’re closed for the Federal Election Day” policy on the books. Doing this can help mitigate voter suppression. And this year, with record lines and wait times to vote being predicted, don’t assume people can quickly vote before or after work hours as they might have in year’s past. With wait times expected to stretch into the hours, remove the burden of people feeling stressed that they’re going to be late to work, or late to pick up their kids from school or childcare. This also frees up staff to be civically engaged on Election Day. Some of us mentioned having staff who are running for elected office or working for campaigns. Let’s encourage that activity by making Election Day a paid holiday this year and in years to come.
Make November 4 optional. Whatever happens on November 3, November 4 is likely to be a challenging day in this country with the possibility of weeks of uncertainty as mail-in ballots continue to be tabulated. Consider making November 4 an optional workday. Some people might welcome the office camaraderie and the distraction of work. Others, or even the same people, might not possess the energy or focus to be present at work. You know when you just realized you mindlessly read the same paragraph four times? I have a hunch November 4 is going to be like this. When people are worried about their personal safety and that of their loved ones, work concerns can and should tumble down the list of concerns.
Clear space during the week of November 2–6. What absolutely must happen that week? Many, if not most, of the things we do at work in any given week can probably wait a week or even two. While the work often *feels* like life or death, most of it usually isn’t. Over the past few months members of the Fractured Atlas FinPOps team (Finance, People, and Operations) have heard me say repeatedly as we’ve actively reshuffled and reprioritized tasks, “The only thing that absolutely must happen no matter what is that people need to be paid the amount they’re suppose to be paid on the day they’re supposed to receive it. Everything else on our docket can slide if we need it to.” Grant report due the week of November 2? Ask the funder if they will accept it the following week under the circumstances. Given these concerns also impact our colleagues in the funding community, I imagine they’d welcome a little less work that week too. Discuss with your team what’s firmly in that Venn diagram of Urgent and *truly* Important and call that the minimum bar for productivity the week of November 2. Then celebrate anything else you achieve over and above it. Actually, scratch that, celebrate that minimum bar. We’re living in a global pandemic.
Cancel all non-essential meetings for the week of November 2–6. Free up space. Who knows what kind of news reports will drop at odd times during the work day? Make space for people to continue to process this moment in which we’re living.
Cancel all external meetings for the week of November 2–6. See above. Related, one organization we spoke with is considering having its customer service team correspond only by emails instead of also using the phone that week. This change allows the team more agency in researching and responding to inquiries, something that’s often more difficult in the real-time exchange of phone calls.
If you have affinity groups, discuss with them now about holding space on the calendar that week. At Fractured Atlas, our race-based caucuses are discussing putting time on the calendar now so it’s there if and when the groups need it. It’s always easier to cancel a meeting than schedule one.
There will be a lot going on, don’t forget to remind your team about the atypical schedule. Don’t forget to set a reminder for yourself about this reminder either. Sometimes in the haze of it all we forget the simple things, like emailing our team on November 2 and (where applicable) again on November 3 to remind them that the office will be closed.
If you have People or HR teams, talk with them now about how you’ll check in with coworkers that week. No People team? Pull together a volunteer group to sketch this out. With many of us working in a largely or entirely virtual office it’s no longer as simple as looking around the office to see who hasn’t arrived by 11AM and then to really start worrying when you haven’t seen them by 12PM. Some organizations have adapted to this by sharing morning greetings and emoji in their staff Slack channel when they log on each day.
Again, People team or no people, take this moment to also ensure that you have up-to-date emergency contact information for every staff member. And *please* remember to keep personal information and circumstances private and confidential. Did someone change their emergency contact? It’s not the place and time to ask why. Just update the information.
Widening the Frame
We didn’t get too far into conversations about Election Day plans before the frame widened to include the past eight months. A pandemic that has infected and killed staff and loved ones. Hurricanes that have taken the homes of staff members and that have displaced communities. Forest fires that have taken homes and have displaced communities. And a social uprising sparked by the death of George Floyd this summer that has impacted our staff and organizations and communities in a multitude of ways.
Our conversations touched on the myriad ways people need and want to be supported right now and, because each human is unique, it’s not all in the same way. There’s a challenge around when organizations can and should be the container, if you will, for processing and when they are not, or shouldn’t be. And that’s not always an easy question to answer, especially when we work with people we care about and hold commitments to fighting and righting injustices that are often baked into our employment laws and organizational operating defaults. The challenge we face as leaders is to be clear about what’s possible, and appropriate, for an organization to provide. And, to be flexible as we balance organizational risk with what’s required of us as human beings in this moment in time.
To truly support people on November 4, you need to have larger support structures in place for the 364 other days in the year. This was echoed time and time again in conversations as a recurring theme of setting the conditions so that people had flexibility and agency in when, where, and how they did their work amidst other life commitments and concerns. Our colleagues reflected that people — themselves included — just need time away.
Experiment with the four-day work week. As I’ve written in the past, I think we humans are lucky if we’re able to accomplish 80% of what we were pre-pandemic. In recent weeks, I’ve spoken with a number of companies who are taking this 80% approach literally and experimenting with four-day work weeks. The actual specifics vary a bit: 40 hours in 4 days, 32 hours in 4 days, normed day off (e.g., Friday) versus floating day off for team members who usually need to manage a physical space. Almost universally, organizations who are experimenting with the four-day work week say that they’ll keep this going for the foreseeable future.
Establish core hours and flex hours. One organization talked about how they have created a structure where everyone works for the same 30 “core” hours per week (say 10AM-4PM), and then lets people flex the remaining 10 hours depending on their needs.
Focus Fridays. Even for those without four-day work week structures, “Focus Fridays” as one colleague cleverly dubbed them are gaining traction. Simply, no meetings are scheduled on Fridays.
No-meeting mornings. Another organization is implementing no meeting mornings (i.e., no meetings scheduled before 12PM). Both this item and the previous one reminds me of a case study I once read. A well-known software development company routinely missed release deadlines. That is, until they instituted a policy that prohibited meetings before 12PM. Their very next release after instituting this policy was the first that ever was achieved on schedule. The thinking behind this is that meetings can be good, but when they’re scattered throughout the day, it makes it tough to protect those moments when you’re “in the zone” and getting your “work” work accomplished.
Daily all staff huddle. Daily stand-ups or “huddles” have been around for years. We have several teams at Fractured Atlas who use them (synchronously over Zoom or asynchronously over Slack) but in September we experimented with daily all staff huddles. We heard in meetings over the summer that people wanted a better understanding of what teams were working on, more transparency into various projects, and more connection with others around the organization that some only saw once a month during our full staff meetings. So we experimented. The first step, we deleted all standing meetings and check-ins from our calendars for all of September. (The guideline was that other meetings could be added to the calendar, but we were encouraging everyone to not reflectively just add back the meetings that were deleted and included guidelines to do this.) Every morning for a month, everyone in the organization logged onto Zoom at 11AM ET. Each person had 60 seconds to talk about what they did yesterday, what they were working on today, and what blockers were in their way. And then they “popcorned” to someone else on the call. While the synchronous daily huddles weren’t universally loved, they did provide a moment during our day to connect with each other and feel the pulse of our work. ProTip: We organically developed a process where the first few people on the line each day decided what the pre-meeting topic was going to be. They essentially created a water cooler conversation that continued until most everyone was on the line. We discussed everything from yarn and Keanu Reeves to John Cage’s 4’33” and pickles.
Consider increasing paid vacation and sick days allotment this fiscal year. There are a couple schools of thought on this one. When thinking about the number of PTO days that the organization provides one colleague recently said, if your PTO is not sufficient, increase it! And if it is sufficient, really encourage everyone to use it! At Fractured Atlas we’ve provided staff with unlimited paid vacation days and 15 paid sick days for years now. (This is in addition to things like Parental Leave, Military Leave, FMLA, and other legally-mandated leaves.) Not having a ticker of vacation days relieves the psychic burden people often feel around using a diminishing pot of days. I’m not saying go all the way to unlimited, but maybe this fiscal year give each employee 10 more vacation days and 5 more sick days, use ’em or lose ’em. You can include that this doesn’t set a precedent for years to come; however, my personal opinion is I think this should become the standard number going forward but people can’t “cash them out” when they leave the organization.
Norm days off (i.e., everyone on a given team or in the organization takes the same day(s) or week(s) off). In norming days off, people who are off don’t feel like they’re missing something or need to stay connected in case the team needs them, and people who are working don’t feel like they’re covering extra work for colleagues who are off. Some organizations have introduced new “office closed” weeks throughout the year. Other organizations had teams who said on Monday, “OK, this Friday and next Monday our entire team is taking off.”
Encouraging people to take their PTO. In many of the conversations we talked about the challenge of getting some people to take time off and unplug since they didn’t feel like they could travel and would be stuck indoors. The additional challenge for a number of people is that their time off is not a “vacation” but spent caring for others and their household responsibilities that is now the 24/7 COVID schedule of work/schooling/home/caregiving/shopping for supplies. One organization talked about how they met with staff they knew hadn’t taken off more than a day or two scattered around this year. They said, we care about your wellbeing, and while there often never seems to be a good time, we really want you to take off at least a week in the next month. Almost universally people agreed that they needed time away. So, the supervisors followed up to say, by this time next week identify a week or two in the next month and put an OOO hold on your calendar, or I can choose and start to help you move your work commitments.
Benefits & Beyond
In addition to creating space and time, critical to supporting staff right now (and, well, everyday) is providing access to health and wellness benefits that extend beyond the standard medical and dental insurance coverage. Organizations are thinking broadly and creatively about this kind of support:
Know a PEO. A few months back our Fractured Atlas coworker Jillian Wright published a piece looking at the range of additional benefits that are often available to staff whose organizations use Professional Employer Organizations. Some of the less “traditional” benefits that PEOs provide include things like discounts for bike commuters and health advocacy services. (Full disclosure: Fractured Atlas uses Justworks as our PEO.)
Open Pathway Network. One organization we spoke with said that they covered the annual subscription cost for the Open Pathway Network and are allowing staff to use their professional development allowance towards these psychotherapy resources.
Another few mentioned they send regular reminders and information to staff about the company-offered Employee Assistance Program (EAP).
Does your organization have staff living in different geographic locations? We know of examples where staff members who felt unsafe at home during protests were able to stay with staff members living in another geographic area.
One organization used their existing Health & Wellness team that’s composed of members who are social workers and counselors to host daily meetings for those in need.
This summer, another organization provided a stipend for staff to support their community however they wanted (e.g., buy food, supplies, donations, etc.).
One organization talked about how they worked to find ways to involve non-program staff in program team activities after hearing that members of their finance and operations teams were feeling disconnected from the organization’s mission since they weren’t all in the office together.
Find ways to be joyful together
We are living during unprecedented and challenging times. We’re also human beings. It’s important to build in time to be silly, and funny, and joyful with each other. None of us will accidentally forget the challenges we face if we happen to spend a few minutes laughing together.
A number of organizations talked about how they have made space for impromptu conversations during meetings, often things that might previously have been held around the proverbial water cooler. In an unscientific poll, I’ve observed that a majority of arts organizations have spent time discussing Keanu Reeves in these spaces. Keanu, if you’re reading this (which I assume you’re not), thank you for this joy!
One team expressed disappointment that they wouldn’t be working in the office for their annual Halloween decorating tradition. So this year, they’re holding a pumpkin carving competition in the park and considering guest judges from other arts organizations.
Another group changed up the traditional Secret Santa process. Instead of giving a gift to the person whose name you draw, you deliver a toast in their honor. I should mention that this idea and the previous one are from two different organizations who said their team’s creativity and competitive nature quickly raised these activities to impressive levels. These experiences served as a reminder about the time our own Secret Santa Birthday process at Fractured Atlas had to be changed because people were finding so many ways to creatively stretch the $50 budget that things were, quite frankly, getting a little out of hand.
Another organization mentioned that the team takes moments during meetings to share what they appreciate about each other.
During our recent All Hands (virtual) staff gathering at Fractured Atlas week we included staff “Lightning Talks.” These debuted during our last All Hands and continue to be the highlight of these gatherings. Interested staff members get about 7 minutes to share an interest of theirs. People presented on everything from “The Love of Lists” and “How to throw a mug on their pottery wheel” to “KPOP & Activism” and “Plant Identification & Wildflower Bouquets.”
At Fractured Atlas, we started using the peer-to-peer recognition application Bonus.ly so that team members can, at any moment, recognize the contributions team members make.
Supporting the CEO
One last theme that I want to raise in this space is something I’ve heard repeatedly on calls and emails with colleagues over the past eight months: the need for support for those in the CEO seat. In the best of times the role can be lonely and isolating. Today, everyone from staff to board to funders and those we serve often look to the CEO for certainty in a decidedly uncertain time and ever-changing landscape. In these times when the standard playbook is completely useless, those answers can be challenging if simply impossible to even know. That’s a heavy burden to carry when you know the decisions you make can negatively impact real people during this unprecedented time. Putting a finer point on this: in working to build and lead an organization that is there for others, who is looking out for the CEO? This probably warrants its own piece, so I’ll leave this here for another day. For those interested in exploring a model that helps to answer this question, check out these resources about shared leadership teams.
What’s Next?
Recently I read a research study about what leaders can do to support the people who work for their companies. Essentially, the study concluded that leaders should just be caring human beings. I’ll take this a step farther, sans extensive research study. Let’s… Be human. Be empathetic. Be prepared. Ping your teams today to discuss what you’re going to do the week of November 2.
Profound thanks to all of our colleagues — named and unnamed here — for jumping on calls and email exchanges with little notice, and for turning those moments into mutual learning, support, and joy.
What ideas are you thinking about? What is your company doing to prepare and support your team? What resources are available that should people know about?
Tim Cynova is a leader, HR consultant, and educator dedicated to co-creating anti-racist and anti-oppressive workplaces through using human-centered organizational design. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR, trained mediator, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., on faculty at New York’s The New School and Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and for the past twelve years served as COO and then Co-CEO of the largest association of artists, creatives, and makers in the U.S.
Anti-Racism Is a Core Leadership Competency
By: Tim Cynova // Published: September 10, 2020
With my heart pounding out of my chest and feeling an urge to vomit, I raised my hand and then watched as the microphone was tossed across the cavernous room towards me. There I was, shakily holding one of those foam box microphones and standing in a room of some of the most recognized CEOs and companies in the U.S. I then opened my mouth hoping audible words would form as I nervously said that I didn’t think the Conscious Capitalism movement would be sustainable if it didn’t confront capitalism’s role in perpetuating racism and oppression.
Last October, I had the privilege of attending the Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit. And I do mean privilege, as I was in a room with the leaders of well-known organizations that I had studied, visited, and admired for years; that I looked up to in the way that they approached building workplaces where people could thrive. As I sat there, I was struck with a stark realization that has been nearly impossible for me to shake even a year on.
I was surrounded by the leaders of companies and industries; leaders who thousands of others look to for guidance on building organizational culture “the right way.” And yet there was a lack of demonstrated understanding around the privilege we all carried with us simply by being in that space and, by extension, the impact of decisions made in service of building that organizational culture. There was a patriarchal and white savior sentiment that imbued many of the discussions, probably not surprising given there were so many all-male panels and all-white panels throughout the convening.
In the well-meaning leaders I was surrounded by in that room, I recognized a belief that a space can be apolitical and that their companies or organizations can be apolitical. In truth, nothing is apolitical. When we white people try to make spaces feel apolitical to us, they’re more likely to be unwelcoming at best and probably are racist and oppressive.
Having been raised and surrounded by deeply caring and well-meaning white people, I recognized these leaders’ behavior and views in myself. My loving Lutheran pastor dad and dental office administrator mom raised me to do unto others as I would have them do unto me. By the Protestant work ethic. And that we’re all created equal in God’s eyes. Later in life, I would use those as guides — along with doing good by being good and all boats rise together — on a quest to create great places to work. But despite the best efforts of the kind and generous people who raised me, and the moral compass they instilled in me, this ethic isn’t enough.
This isn’t meant to be an indictment of the Conscious Capitalism gathering or organization. Or, maybe it is, but the criticism is truly coming from a friendly and caring place. For the record, I don’t believe *all* white male panels are necessarily a bad thing in rare cases. For example, I would’ve loved an all-white-male panel, in front of this predominantly white male audience, discussing the very subject of discovering one’s privilege and what their journey in anti-racism has looked like for them and their organizations.
When I left that convening I carried with me a question: Given what I had seen and heard, what was I going to do about it?
I had plenty of notes to write a scathing critique of the gathering. But even if my writing chops could support it, that wouldn’t be useful and didn’t sit quite right with me as a response to the experience. A critique might’ve been cathartic for a brief moment but certainly not helpful. Nor would it reflect that I, too, unconsciously replicated patriarchy, racism, and white saviorism. It also wouldn’t have addressed the fact that I met a handful of people at the convening who also saw it as a genuine problem that needed to be addressed if the larger movement were to be successful.
I could’ve kept my mouth shut and just walked away. I have enough to fill my day without adding more to it. But to remain silent and not own up the opportunity I was given by being in that room for a conversation with sincerely committed leaders would have been to perpetuate those very systems of power and oppression. So, I conveyed my concerns to Alexander McCobin — the CEO of Conscious Capitalist — and his team, as well as the others I met who shared similar concerns.
Those conversations lead to other connections and deeper conversations about what might be a way forward. And this is why I’m so heartened to have an opportunity to engage with my community around racism, leadership, and whiteness. On September 29, I’m honored to be a white male voice sharing about my journey as part of an all-white male panel. I’m heartened to have this opportunity to exchange experiences with fellow white colleagues so we can understand more about this work and how our individual and collective journeys unfold.
One Journey Towards Anti-Racism & The Benefit of Hindsight
White male leaders need to develop a true understanding of how racism and oppression function in their work and build anti-racism into the DNA of our work and our workplaces.
Leadership is about creating healthy, open environments for our teams to thrive personally and professionally. It is about holding complicated, conflicting truths at the same time and finding a way forward. OSHA has a stipulation where employers are required to create workplaces free from recognized hazards. What if we treated the hazard and harm of racism and oppression with the same level of care and scrutiny that we treat live wires, corrosive chemicals, and heavy machinery? Beyond that, what if we considered that racism might not just be a live wire but might be an entire factory constructed of asbestos? How can we move ahead knowing that racism is not just a bug, but a feature?
My personal journey in anti-racism began relatively recently in life. And it is intertwined with my professional journey and that of Fractured Atlas, the organization that I currently help lead. For years, Fractured Atlas put forward a commitment to diversify our staff, yet year after year we failed to make any progress towards achieving that goal. We set this initial goal to diversify staff — in every sense of the word — so that we would reflect the customer base we hoped to serve. Over the years as we delved into research on high-performing teams, we recognized that a truly diverse team had a higher ceiling for performance. A diverse team wasn’t just about attracting more customers, it was about changing how we approached our work and operations. This realization, in turn, led to a deeper exploration of what diversity actually means, and how we’d need to change more than just where we posted jobs if we were truly committed to this goal.
With the benefit of hindsight it’s easier to see some of the likely reasons as to why we weren’t initially successful at the goal of diversifying our staff. We were focused on where to post the job listings to attract more diverse candidates and not initially on examining the components of our hiring process and how they might hinder those efforts. We were excited about emulating some of the then-attractive components of a Google or Zappos or Netflix workplace — drinking together in the office, book clubs and co-learning, 5K fun runs — without first asking ourselves if these cultural elements were inclusive of everyone who wanted to work with us and the unique culture we ultimately wished to create for Fractured Atlas. We weren’t making the right kinds of efforts and as a result, our organization remained very white for a long period of time.
In 2013, what ultimately helped jumpstart our organizational efforts towards becoming an anti-racist organization was when two mid-level staff members used their annual professional development stipend to attend an Undoing Racism workshop by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. After the workshop, they returned with an idea about how that experience might help Fractured Atlas finally make meaningful progress towards our perennially-stated diversity goal. Their experience coincided with even more staff members regularly asking our CEO questions during staff meetings about why he felt like we weren’t making progress on our diversity commitment. This in turn prompted real-time, challenging conversations in a way that everyone could see, on a regular basis, how our early efforts were unfolding. Plenty of companies talk about how “good ideas can come from anywhere in the organization.” Few have leaders and founders who listen deeply to those ideas — especially when they challenge the status quo and could fundamentally alter the institution — and stay engaged and supportive of those efforts. (To be clear, I’m not the founder of Fractured Atlas, nor was I a co-CEO at that time.)
That moment after the Undoing Racism workshop introduced us — and me — to frameworks like the Continuum on Becoming an Anti-Racist Multicultural Organization. For the first time I saw how our organizational traits aligned with others on the continuum, and that prompted a challenging and uncomfortable realization. When you map your organization along the continuum, and hear from people around the organization about where they think it lands, it can be sobering to all of the great work you think you’ve been doing. But, when you sit with how your organization is structured and operates, you start to realize where and how it can and needs to change.
Knowing what I now knew about the machinations of racism both structurally and personally, what was I going to do about it? How was I going to approach my life and work differently? In this early exploration, a switch flipped for me. And once that switch flipped for me, there was no going back. I realized the way that I had been approaching my work of helping create great places to work, was fraught if it didn’t include an anti-racism lens through which to evaluate it. In all of this, I had unknowingly begun the lifelong work towards anti-racism.
Anti-Racism is a Necessary Component of Leadership
We are at a moment where many white leaders are starting to see for the first time in their lives how racism and systems of oppression have been built into the very organizations we lead, often at the DNA level. For leaders, understanding racism and oppression and its impacts on our work has now moved to the top of the list as a core leadership competency. Why?
If you’re not actively engaged in anti-racist work personally and internally, how can you and your organization understand the nuances of racial and social justice issues that are needed today? At its core, this probably boils down to leading by example. How are we supposed to engage in challenging conversations around racism in our organizations if we don’t understand the nuances of how and why racism shows up in our workplaces? If we don’t understand it first, how can we help set strategy and direction for the organization in a way that won’t inadvertently undermine the work? If we, particularly we white men, are not on this journey and doing the challenging work of understanding how things like white privilege, white fragility, and the characteristics of white supremacy culture show up in our lives and workplaces, we are shirking a core responsibility and should rightfully be left behind as the world moves on beyond us. It’s impossible to have an organization or an institution oriented towards social justice and equity without an internal dedication to those same values for its workers.
When leaders of organizations published Black Lives Matter statements of solidarity, I don’t think they realized that they had just embarked on a very long journey that will never fully be completed. I certainly didn’t fully understand that when I attended my first Undoing Racism workshop.
The work isn’t going to fit neatly into Q3 OKRs. It isn’t going to be solved simply by hiring a Chief Diversity Officer or outsourced to a task force if leaders are sincere in their commitment. (In fact, when considering these as stand-alone initiatives and the concept of moral self-licensing, it makes it even less like that organizations will realize true change.) Of course, if these organizations just published solidarity statements to keep up with the cultural moment rather than to commit to real change, they will face a reckoning from employees and customers and community. Sadly, one need only search the news for “racism in companies” to find countless examples of this in real life.
Building a Better Wheel
There’s a lot of talk about fostering innovation in the workplace, whether that be to create solid bike tires or adaptable operational models in the COVID era. What many people don’t realize is that the journey to become an anti-racist organization is itself an exercise in innovation. You’re creating something new — and in most cases unique — from systems and structures that were built for a few to succeed into ones where everyone can thrive.
Much like other innovation examples, anti-racist work isn’t linear. It is less like climbing a ladder and more like climbing, slipping, and finding new routes. I feel this oftentimes in my own work as I meditate on the policies, procedures, and work culture that I helped create and nurture. In many cases, I actually wrote those policies and procedures and felt excited about how they helped craft a work environment where I thought everyone could thrive. When it’s pointed out that this thing or that thing might only truly work for a certain group while excluding others — think the myriad issues surrounding virtual work arrangements that are coming up right now due to COVID — an inner struggle erupts as I sit with the feelings of discomfort to understand “the why” of that feeling. It’s only after doing that work that I’m able to iterate towards collective action.
When looking to craft new ways of working and operating, one of my defaults is to look to companies who are already doing something similar to what I’m interested in developing. Then, I leverage those learnings to inform the approaches we’re using in my own organization, iterating towards a future that fits *us,* what we want to be, and how we want to work. This is what initially led me to so many of the companies in the Conscious Capitalism movement. These are companies who are pushing the edge of what workplaces can look and feel like in service of a purpose higher than the bottom line.
In a similar vein, when I began my journey in anti-racism, I asked a facilitator if they could point me towards examples of companies who were similar to us and doing the work at an organizational level. Their brief reply has stayed with me to this day: “There aren’t any, but people certainly will be watching what Fractured Atlas does.” This is why I’ve felt that part of my own journey required me to document and share back — imperfect though it is — what that journey, and that of our organization, has looked like.
In the past, as I’ve shared parts of our journey towards becoming an anti-racist organization, I’ve been met with “why” questions. Why would you focus on that, it seems out of scope for the work you do? Amidst COVID and the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on people of color, and the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent social revolution, those questions have interestingly more often changed to “how?” People are asking me fewer “why is this work important” and more “how do we actually do this in our organizations?”
Advice for Leaders Beginning Anti-Racist Work?
I’ve learned a few things from colleagues and friends while on this journey that might be helpful to others. I humbly offer some thoughts here.
The first is to be kind to yourself. Especially now while we’re living in uncertain times amidst a global pandemic and social revolution. You didn’t create racism and neither did I. “Being kind to yourself” doesn’t mean letting ourselves off the hook for working to right wrongs. We white people, and in particular white male leaders, have benefitted from these systems and structures so much that we don’t even realize they exist in most cases. And when we do see them, we often reflexively rationalize and reason our way back to comfort. We have an obligation to engage deeply and meaningfully in the work to undo systems of racism and oppression starting inside of our own organizations.
We will all make mistakes. Heck, you’re already making those mistakes you fear. You’re making them and just don’t realize it. The difference is as we move along this journey we begin to recognize and understand why and when these “mistakes’’ occur. Then we can sincerely apologize when we inflict harm without expecting anything in return.
Relatedly, the fear of not “getting it right,” often leads us to workshop and burnish plans and ideas *far* past the stage when they should have shipped. This work doesn’t require an initial 50-page, 25-point strategic plan that’s been workshopped for 18 months. You just need to commit to the work and start doing it. This journey is more like a cross-country roadtrip where you decide the path en route. You map from one town to the next as the spirit, and detours, move you directionally towards the other coast, rather than taking I-90 the entire way.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Ground your approach in experimentation and iteration rather than in it being perfect. You’re not going to get this “right” from day one, or ever really. Frame the commitment to this work as solid and unwavering while the approaches remain fluid. We’re going to start with this to see what works and what doesn’t. If something isn’t helpful we’ll iterate. If an approach is helpful, we’ll double down.
Don’t get so caught up in planning and organizing that you overlook opportunities for immediate action. While some changes will require organizational backing, a multitude more won’t. Encourage staff to make decisions to show up differently starting today. Do this by focusing people on their agency in four main categories: Language, Policy, Practice, and Program. Some changes start as singular efforts and then expand to the rest of the team. (At Fractured Atlas, including our pronouns in email signatures is an example of this.) Framing it around agency and areas of influence allows people to see how they can connect to the work and include their voice in the direction, and is a much more likely approach to ensure the work becomes a part of your organization’s DNA.
And this last one might sound simplistic, but book clubs can be a great source of the learning that is foundational to being able to do the work. Start a senior leadership team one. Might I recommend Ijeoma Oluo’s powerful So You Want to Talk About Race to get started? Podcasts more your thing? Try the 14-part podcast Seeing White by Scene On Radio with an accompanying study guide. Or check out the list of resources we recommend for white people to learn and talk about race.
Anti-Racism as a Lifelong, Collective Journey
My lifelong journey in anti-racism is closer to its beginning than to its end. (Although having just said that I’m now keeping a keener eye out for live wires, corrosive chemicals, and heavy machinery.) Each day I add more books and articles and podcasts than I’ll ever be able to finish. Each day I encounter new situations that challenge my default way of being. I find more people to admire and learn from who have been doing the work for decades. At this point, if I had to sketch what the journey has felt like thus far, one of those wildly busy stock market graphs feels fairly accurate.
There have been gains and losses, sharp turns, and unexpected “wins.” But I’ve made this commitment to myself and those I serve and am accountable to show up every day, continue my own learning and growth, try to minimize the harm that my actions might inadvertently cause, apologize quickly when I misstep, be kind to myself and others as we’re all struggling and at different places on this journey, and approach it all in a way that reflects my commitment to my colleagues, and my community.
If you want to learn more about our journey in anti-racism at Fractured Atlas and some specific things we’ve done, perhaps join me for the Conscious Capitalism chat, or connect to discuss how we might work together, please ping me.
Special thanks to my Fractured Atlas coworkers, past and present, who I have learned so much from while on this journey. And as it relates to this specific piece: Nina Berman, Nicola Carpenter, Courtney Harge, and Lauren Ruffin helped me make sense of my thoughts in a way that resulted in a far more coherent piece than when I sent them the initial draft. Thank you!
Tim Cynova is a leader, HR consultant, and educator dedicated to co-creating anti-racist and anti-oppressive workplaces through using human-centered organizational design. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR, trained mediator, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., on faculty at New York’s The New School and Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and for the past twelve years served as COO and then Co-CEO of the largest association of artists, creatives, and makers in the U.S.
A Different COVID Haircut
Photo Credit: Edgar Chaparro
By: Tim Cynova // Published: August 13, 2020
Someone recently asked me, “When do you think we can start pushing our teams to achieve pre-pandemic performance levels again, I mean, it’s been five months?”
This past March in North America a giant remote work experiment began for many as an Adrenaline-fueled sprint. Organizations raced to get workers set up with home offices, stores sold out of computer monitors and tablets, and internet providers were inundated with rush requests to set up new or upgraded access. Coworkers helped each other learn how to use Zoom, access files on the physical server still located in their office, and move money without the ability to access check stock. The thought for many was, “let’s hunker down for a bit until this blows over. We’ll see each other back in the office in a few weeks, maybe a month or two, tops.” That moment feels like it was a lifetime ago.
Then came the mobile morgues lining the streets of my home of New York City, field hospitals set up in Central Park, and more than 150,000 of our friends and loved ones across the U.S. taken from us too soon.
Now more than five months into sheltering in place and physical distancing we have new hot spots rolling back reopening plans, and what initially seemed to be a stopgap has become the new norm. Maybe we’ll go back to offices in some form at some point. Maybe. However, we’ve spent half a year building new habits and routines that this has now become how we live and work.
I’ve read articles quoting managers and leaders saying their teams are actually performing better than they expected then when working in the office (there’s plenty of evidence to suggest under the right conditions this shouldn’t be a surprise). However, this evidence often includes the caveat, you know, except those who are parents and caregivers who are now juggling work, childcare, homeschooling, etc.
I think that’s a significant caveat when roughly 35% of Americans are working parents. And it becomes an even more challenging caveat when you consider caregiving falls disproportionately on women and those earning low incomes who are less likely to be able to “outsource” that care, and more likely to live in multi-generational homes.
So, you know, that aside, can we start pushing people and teams to again work at their pre-pandemic levels? My short answer: Proceed with caution.
The Other Kind of COVID Haircut
The early days of COVID saw plenty of DIY tips, from sourdough starters to home haircuts. Videos abound about how to trim your own bangs, and forums for finding sold out hair care supplies (ProTip: Petco).
In finance parlance there’s this concept of a “haircut” when booking the value of a loan. As in, we loaned an institution $100,000, but if they default on it, the collateral will only likely net us $90,000, so we need to factor in a 10% haircut on the loan. I’ve been increasingly thinking of that concept with regards to the performance impact on teams and organizations as we settle into “pandemic performance.” Let’s call this the *other* kind of COVID haircut.
The COVID haircut recognizes that we might need to take what was possible for our team to accomplish pre-COVID and shave off 10–15%. We’re losing that productivity because people are caring for loved ones, possibly homeschooling their children, and generally trying to survive a pandemic that’s much bigger than any one individual job. The COVID haircut means we might need to add more team members if we still plan on accomplishing the same things. It might mean we need to scale back our assumptions about what’s possible, even during a time when we’re facing the real possibility of so many companies closing up shop and needing to do more with less.
But, for those who say we need to press ahead per usual, be warned. Most of us, particularly our most vulnerable colleagues, have been operating deep in the red for a long time. Pushing people to achieve might actually result in you “blowing the engine.” What does blowing the engine look like in a human context? Disengagement and their eventual departure.
I recognize that what I’m saying here with this last point is really challenging. The cultural sector is largely shuttered. Except for a few bright spots, charitable contributions are likely to take a hit as donors shift their giving or tighten their belts for an extended period of uncertainty. And yet, if we’re going to survive, let alone truly thrive, time is not on our side to figure out solutions in the face of non-existent tours, canceled Nutcracker seasons that bankroll the rest of the year, and no real idea about when artists and audience will feel comfortable gathering again in indoor spaces. How can we work hard enough to survive as organizations and as a sector, while remaining compassionate and humane to ourselves and our colleagues who are dealing with fallout from several compounding apocalypses? (Related: And what can we learn from our colleagues and communities who have effectively been balancing these challenges for years?)
Reframe Productivity
Embedded in that person’s initial question — When do you think we can start pushing our teams to achieve pre-pandemic performance levels again? — is the concept of productivity. And here too, it’s not a simple answer. Productivity itself is a tool of racism and the violence of capitalism. It’s often paired with that Characteristic of White Supremacy Culture, a sense of urgency, making the challenge even more messy. How do we square that we need to take care of ourselves while also mustering the energy to do what’s needed to ensure that we all still have jobs and an organization this time next year?
One way to do this is to reframe productivity from time spent working to results achieved. We’re hearing more about shifting this frame with the increasing number of advocates for the four-day workweek. Let’s put the emphasis on *what* we’re doing rather than if Henry Ford would approve of the number of days and hours we spend trying to accomplish it. (Aside: I love that at the start of 2020 it seemed like 99% of workplaces felt they could never accommodate remote work. A mere six months later, with that dam finally broken and in the midst of pandemic and revolution, people are like, four day workweek? Why not?!)
This is what leadership means though, to be able to hold in your head that “productivity” can be weaponized against marginalized people (for example, you might not be as productive at your job if you’re tending to a sick relative) AND we need to dig into our reserves to survive AND we likely need to invent new and different ways of working to accomplish it.
Re-evaluate Your Deadlines
So what to make of this. I’ve written before about the Battle of the Urgent vs. the Important. Often when I talk about that, I say the Important is often relegated to a rainy day that never comes as we put out the constant fires of the Urgent. Well, good news my friend, that rainy day has arrived. The Important is now Urgent.
We can try those once far-fetched ideas that were brushed aside for years because now they just might be what saves the company. They might just be what’s needed to co-create a more just and equitable organization, sector, and world.
Each of us must now take a giant handful of spaghetti from the idea bowl and chuck it against the wall. It’s 2020, the impossible is now possible. What ideas stick now that might not have before? And how do we prioritize the work we need to do to survive and thrive? How do we scale back on what usually takes up the bulk of our days so that we can create a more sustainable and equitable future for our organizations?
As you’re trying to figure out how to make space and time for high priority work, I offer this frame of the three kinds of deadlines:
Hard deadlines: Absolutely must happen. Really bad things will happen if we don’t make this deadline. (Think: Paying employees on the regular date when they’re supposed to be paid. I consider that a hard deadline.)
Soft Deadlines. We really want to make sure this happens. It’s important, but maybe we set the deadline, or even someone else set the deadline, but it can be moved. (Think: Deadline to file taxes. For most, that date is actually a soft deadline since in many cases you can usually file an extension to buy yourself more time.)
Wishlist Deadlines: Jettison it or icebox it for another day. Actually, if you’re thinking “icebox it,” just jettison it. Once something has spent any time in the icebox it never comes out as fresh as when it went in. (I’m looking at you pint of forgotten Cherry Garcia ice cream). It might be great if it happened at some point, but we’re in triage mode, operating with less bandwidth, so we need to be really clear about our priorities and what’s actually possible.
Being able to identify what needs to get done right now, what needs to get done soon-ish, and what we’re just never going to get around to doing helps clarify our thinking and priorities. This in turn helps us all see where there’s room to flex and focus.
Lead With Compassion
Whether your employees are rock stars who aren’t performing at their usual levels or if they were struggling to hit performance goals pre-pandemic, lead any conversations about productivity with kindness and compassion. No one, except for maybe the crew at the CDC, signed up for this. We are still living through a global pandemic with no end in sight, while now increasingly — and much overdue — confronting the systemic racism upon which our country and most of our organizations were built. Parents are still juggling 24/7/365 childcare; coworkers are sick with COVID-19, and many are fearful that their two choices might eventually be: (1) return to a workplace where they don’t feel safe and that can’t actually protect them from contracting COVID, or (2) lose their livelihood.
If people continue to struggle, talk about what’s on their plate, how they approach their work, and what’s realistic given everything that they can complete. Seek to understand what’s at play when you have your check-ins.
If you haven’t cultivated psychological safety pre-COVID, don’t automatically expect people to open up about the challenges they face outside of the office. If you’re new to the concept of psychological safety, check out the amazing work of Amy C. Edmondson.
You might also find that there are people on your team who are thriving. There’s the concept of the 80/20 rule, or Pareto Principle, where 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In HR, I tend to think of it as the 95/5 Rule. Leaders and managers spend 95% of their time thinking about and working with 5% of their people, usually the ones who are struggling. Unfortunately, this makes us miss the great work being done day in and day out by the people who are thriving.
Scan your team. Who is actually thriving given the shift to an entirely virtual workplace? Learn from their experiences and share them broadly. We can often learn a lot from this group that can help those who are struggling. It might involve strategies around scheduling, or self-care, or organizing their workflow.
People can thrive for a multitude of reasons. They now have three extra hours in their day when not commuting. They don’t have to shoulder the burden of countless microaggressions experienced during their workday. They can stay in “flow” longer when not being constantly interrupted by colleagues popping by to ask them that “quick question.” They’re connecting with family and friends more frequently and are buoyed by those connections. They can go for walks in the middle of the day, or meditate without constantly thinking people will question whether they’re working because their eyes are closed.
At What Cost Do We Survive?
Underpinning this is a reminder to all of us: At what cost do we achieve our missions? Do we do it by burning through people? Do we do it without showing empathy and exhibiting humanity and understanding? Do we do it by further burdening those coworkers who are most vulnerable? Or, do we approach this in a way that demonstrates we are going to try our hardest, given what’s humanly and reasonably possible during this unprecedented time even with the knowledge that, for some organizations, it still won’t be enough to survive?
This is all no easy task. Or is it? In the best of times, leading means holding multiple competing ideas in your mind at the same time and still moving forward. In the midst of global pandemic and social revolution, it feels to have gotten even more challenging. However, let me propose that in the midst of a pandemic and revolution it actually makes it easier to do what’s right and just. We are living through the one moment in our lives when we can effect real, systemic change. All you have to do is to start doing the work today. That will lead to asking different questions and exploring other avenues so that the question — When do you think we can start pushing our teams to achieve pre-pandemic performance levels again? — ceases to be the question that we think we need to answer.
The missions we hold, and protect, and work to foster should extend to how we treat ourselves and our teams. If the gulf is too wide, our teams won’t be resilient or invested enough to really make the change that’s needed to survive in this new future we’re creating together. Fractured Atlas has been working on building an equitable and people-centered workplace, and sharing that knowledge on Work. Shouldn’t. Suck.
Tim Cynova is a leader, HR consultant, and educator dedicated to co-creating anti-racist and anti-oppressive workplaces through using human-centered organizational design. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR, trained mediator, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., on faculty at New York’s The New School and Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and for the past twelve years served as COO and then Co-CEO of the largest association of artists, creatives, and makers in the U.S.
Crafting Virtual Workplaces: Questions, Tools, and Approaches to Consider
By: Tim Cynova // Published: March 15, 2020
As a companion piece to our “How to Transition to a Virtual Workplace Overnight,” we recorded a Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. podcast episode with people who work in, and manage, entirely virtual teams and organizations. We asked them: If you had to transition to this kind of workplace quickly, how would they approach it? [Full episode transcript is below.]
We covered a wealth of topics from VPNs to video meetings; going “virtual first” to balancing life and work when they both are happening in the same space; isolation and loneliness to how exactly *can* people work when no one is watching them. Our guests’ advice in a nutshell: It’s OK to be wrong, we only learn by trying to new things. Keep iterating and adjusting.
Podcast guests include: Chief Technology Officer Shawn Anderson, Chief External Relations Officer Lauren Ruffin, Senior DevOps Engineer Andrew Hanson, and Associate Director of People Operations Nicola Carpenter.
The Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, and RSS Feed. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes to help others discover the podcast.
Episode Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I’m Tim Cynova and welcome to Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. A podcast about well, that. On this episode we’re talking remote work arrangements. Specifically we’re talking about what teams and organizations can do to introduce experiment and iterate on remote or virtual work tools and arrangements, especially in light of things like the spread of COVID-19. We’ll explore ideas about how to structure the infrastructure from software to stand-ups. We’ll talk about spoiler alert, how people can actually get work done when no one’s watching them and we’ll address things like building trust. Approaching this with intentionality and introducing agency in ways that allow people to better craft work arrangements where they can thrive.
We’re joined by people who have a wealth of experience building, managing and working in remote work arrangements. People with titles like Chief Technology Officer, Senior Dev Ops Engineer, and Associate Director of People Operations. Our guests include Shawn Anderson, Nicola Carpenter and Andrew Hanson, and a little later in the show, we’ll again be joined by podcasting’s favorite cohost, Lauren Ruffin. So let’s get going with Andrew Hansom and Nicola Carpenter. Andrew and Nicola, welcome to the podcast.
Nicola Carpenter:
Thanks for having me again. I feel like I’m on these so frequently that I can almost compete with Ruffin for the podcast’s favorite co-host, but Ruffin’s going to win every time.
Andrew Hanson:
And thanks for asking me to be on.
Tim Cynova:
Before we really dive into the meat of the topic, Andrew, most people probably have some idea about what an operations or people operations professional does. Also, Nicola has been on the podcast a couple of times talking about that, but they might not know exactly what a Senior Dev Ops Engineer does. Can you break this down for everyone?
Andrew Hanson:
I’ll try to make this as short of a rant as possible. It’s actually funny to me when I hear that somebody works in operations because to me what I do is operations. So generally in the tech field, when you talk about operations, those are the people that keep your servers running, keep your email up, keep it so you can continue to make Zoom calls and all those types of things. When I started in technology, that’s where I started my career, which was called operations. Generally you were either called a systems engineer or a systems administrator. That’s kind of where I started. And then the field kind of shifted a little bit and we came up with some new… I don’t want to call them titles, not that I’ll get into this now, but dev ops really isn’t supposed to be a title, it’s supposed to be a philosophy, but a lot of companies took that and have dev ops engineers now.
Andrew Hanson:
So I am a dev ops engineer, which basically means that I try to take my skills from operation side and managing servers and I try to also marry that with some development work and also understanding what the other developers that I work with kind of go through and making their lives easier on a daily basis.
Tim Cynova:
That’s awesome. So also a future podcast episode where you’ve talked about dev ops as a philosophy. We’ll be reaching out about that one too.
Andrew Hanson:
I have a lot to talk about on that one. That would be great.
Tim Cynova:
Great. Awesome. So today we want to take a moment, especially with a lot of organizations right now thinking about introducing almost immediately remote or virtual work arrangements as the spread of in particular, COVID-19 is really making people worry about gathering, taking transit, the spread of an infectious disease. A lot of organizations seem to be going from zero to 60 on this, without having given some thought to this that might allow them to be more intentional with rolling it out. So I wanted to have an opportunity to talk with both of you about in your experience, things you’ve done, things that have worked well, things that haven’t worked well, what tools are available for people to use maybe immediately? What kind of switching costs or adoption costs might be introduced into an environment where there is remote work? Let’s just go high level. When you think about the difference between working in a physical office with other people and working remote or virtual, what comes to mind for both of you?
Andrew Hanson:
Well, for me the first thing that comes to mind is a difference in the way that you interact with people. I think everybody can relate to working in an office or in entertainment or restaurant, any of those places where you’re kind of around people all the time and you have the “water cooler” talk and you have these kinds of face-to-face interactions with people that don’t go away when you do remote work but are definitely greatly reduced. And so the way that you interact with people needs to be more intentional because you’re going to have less of these non-intentional interactions.
Nicola Carpenter:
So we have this ongoing joke that just keeps on getting more amusing of the working from home and homing from work is how I think about it, my mind. But think of two comics. One of them is the things that you imagined someone doing when they work from home but in a physical office. So like there’s a laundry machine next to their desk and their pet is sitting below them, anything like that. And then there is someone working from a coffee shop that carries along with them a whole fax machine and printer and a physical phone and then just plugs it in, in a coffee shop. I mean, it’s an absurd thought, but I love how it kind of shows some of the things that we think about that might be different. And then also shows how we’re not doing those things.
Nicola Carpenter:
I mean, if we’re working from home, it’s not like we have an actual physical water cooler, which would be amusing if we all had water coolers in our homes. But I mean I think a Fractured Atlas, we try to… And I think we’ve gotten really good at communicating virtually in a way that is just as… I don’t want to say productive, but I guess it is productive but just as decent of a conversation as we do in person. I mean for example, we are recording this podcast virtually the experience of doing that is very similar to the two podcast I recorded with people in the same room. So I think that there are a lot of similarities that we don’t necessarily think there would be similarities for, but there are definitely differences. I think that if people were to say there are no differences, they would also not be correct.
Tim Cynova:
I saw on Twitter yesterday that someone posted, “I guess we’re about to find out which meetings really could have been emails after all.” And I thought, “Yeah, right. Yes. Finally.”
Nicola Carpenter:
I know. First, I just want to say not everyone can work remotely and I think that, that’s also important to acknowledge in a conversation like this. There are jobs that it is impossible to do remotely. I mean, sure there’s telemedicine, but for certain things you have to go to a doctor in 3D. There’s food service. There’s lots of various things where it would just be impossible to have that work in a virtual world. So I think that we are talking about a smaller group of people than every single employer, but also it’s bigger than I think a lot of people think. I mean, I do talk to people and they’re like, “Oh, well I could never work remote because of this, this, and this.” But they say things that aren’t necessarily barriers. But I think that, that’s something… Where was I? What was the actual question? I wanted to use it as a caveat and I was going somewhere that was going to be really interesting.
Tim Cynova:
We might actually find out what meetings actually could have been emails.
Nicola Carpenter:
What magic. What magic we need. Part of me is kind of happy that people are rethinking these because I think we always should have been doing this. We always should have been thinking about what meetings do we need? We always should have been thinking about, how can we have more flexible work environments? Because I mean, you already have people in your workplaces who live with disabilities, who live with chronic illnesses, who might not be as able to come into workplaces, et cetera, but part of me is thinking, “Oh, okay. Well, this is an opportunity to have people think of this, but I also worry that people are going to do things too quickly, not put any effort into making virtual work, work and think that it fails. I wonder if this push to have more people working from home will make more people think that it works or have more people think that it doesn’t work.
Andrew Hanson:
I think that’s a good point that you bring up because for context, I’ve been working on remote teams for probably six out of the 12 years that I’ve been in tech. So obviously in tech, remote work is something that’s very normal. Even here at Fractured Atlas, the engineering team has always been completely remote while the rest of the team has traditionally been in an office and has made that move only fairly recently. But I think it’s a good point that you have to be very intentional about these moves and you have to be very intentional about the things that you’re doing when you’re making this move to be remote. It’s very easy to just say, “Oh, you don’t have to come into the office because you have a laptop.”
Andrew Hanson:
But if you don’t think about the things that people do in the office, if you don’t think about the ways that people communicate, if you don’t think about the ways that meetings are handled about the tools that people have access to or don’t have access to when they’re not in the office, it’s going to sink and it’s going to cast a shadow on working from home, when the problem wasn’t working from home, the problem was the way that you implement it. So prior to coming to Fracture Atlas, I worked at a fortune 500 company and this is exactly what happened. We had an amazing manager. He did a very big push to do remote work and work from home.
Andrew Hanson:
Our team was doing very well at doing that remote work, but that wasn’t being reported back to my manager’s manager and so at this point it was cut off and suddenly everybody had to be in the office from eight to five every day. And one of the worst things you can do is to take your team who’s working very well, who maybe not all, but for the most part 80% or more are enjoying remote work and then suddenly take it away from them. Because remote work opens up a lot of really great things for people, a lot of freedoms in the way that they can work, in a lot of the things that they can do and generally speaking, people don’t like when something they like is taken away from them. That’s kind of the flip side of the coin, is that when you’re pushing for this momentum to do these things, you have to be very careful and very intentional. Because if you take that away, people are going to generally be upset.
Tim Cynova:
The loss aversion theory. You don’t know what working virtually is like and then you have it and you’re like, “Oh that’s actually really great.” And now you lose it and you didn’t know how much value you put on that. So I once was speaking at a conference in Canada and I did the classic thing where it wasn’t until like four days before the conference that I thought, “Oh, is my passport still valid?” I looked at my passport and sure enough, no, it had expired. So I had to go to the passport renewal website and look at expediting renewal for a passport. On the top of the expediting your passport page, it says at the time, “One way to avoid expediting your passport is to not wait until it needs to be expedited.” But I thought, “I mean, that is great information and great advice, but I’m sort of in this situation where I need to expedite my passport, so not really useful this time around.”
Tim Cynova:
I kind of feel like for organizations, yes you should have been putting a lot of thought into intentionally creating workplaces and how people work in different styles and whatnot, but at the same time we need to do this tomorrow is what I think increasingly a lot of organizations are feeling like. So for people who are like, “Yeah, that’s great. I’ll give some more thought to it the next time around, but how do I do this right now? What’s the first thing that I need to do? Where do my files live? We don’t have phones. We might have desktop computers and hardwired phones and a physical server at our location that has files maybe we have laptops. Maybe we use something like Dropbox. I haven’t heard of Slack. I don’t know what flow dock is. There’s this Trello, there’s Zoom, there’s BlueJeans. It seems overwhelming in the moment. What advice would you have for organizations who find themselves in this position right now?
Andrew Hanson:
Before we get into that, I have two points I want to say on that. The first thing is from a technical operations perspective, that’s absolutely terrifying. To have your boss come to you and say, “Tomorrow we’re going to have 500 remote workers.” From an infrastructure perspective alone, that gives me heart palpitations. So please if you’re listening to this, don’t do that. Try to be a little more intentional than that. The second thing is like it blows my mind that in 2020, this is the first time that we’re really having this conversation about this. What is so great about the typical office? What is really the benefit of the typical office? The thing that I hear all the time is like, “Oh, but you get people together and people need to be together.” But you look at all the research and everything out there and it shows that, that’s just simply not true.
Andrew Hanson:
All the research shows that people work just as well from home. People work just as well in remote spaces, doing remote meetings, things like this where we can see each other on a screen. So why is this the first time we’re having this conversation and why are we freaking out about this now, because this is the first time we’re having this conversation?
Nicola Carpenter:
I also think that it’d be very hard to say, “Oh 500 people, they’re all working throughout tomorrow.” It also stresses me out a little bit and I understand that there are companies that have to do that and are trying to figure out how to do that. I’m trying to think, I’m like what is the first steps I would say, but I guess my first thing is that, okay, you haven’t thought about this before, so it is going to be hard. I don’t think it’s going to be easy for anyone if you’ve never thought about it and you have to do it now. I think that kind of is a good? Well, I mean this is a reason that we’ve had as a argument for having remote work options from forever in that like what if something happens to your physical office? What if people can’t get there? What are your backup plans? So I think that, that’s maybe not the most optimistic and being like, “This is going to be hard for you.” But I also don’t want to make it seem like it will be super easy and set people up for immediate failure.
Tim Cynova:
One of the things I’m hearing from both of you or one of the themes or reading between the lines is it’s not one thing, don’t set it and forget it if you have it, if you’re not iterating and adjusting, I guess is the point. Yes, it maybe that one person that one time used to work remote when they needed to for whatever reason, but it never really worked for anyone else. Or we try it right now because we have to, it fails because we weren’t prepared and we never do it again rather than why might that thing have failed? Was it the right person?
Tim Cynova:
Were they able to work from home? Did they have the right tools? Or did it fail because they had to call in on a physical phone and they were the only person of 20 people who wasn’t in that meeting and their voice couldn’t be heard, literally or figuratively in that meeting. And then so how do you address for that? How do you iterate and adjust because of that? Not, “Oh, it didn’t work for us at one time.” Or, “It doesn’t work for us this time.” It must be in that, remote work does not work for our organization. Broadly speaking.
Nicola Carpenter:
I feel like that’s recurrent on this podcast is, how do you think about these things and iterate on them. But I would want that to be the biggest takeaway of, okay, we’re going to try these things now, but we’re going to continue to have those conversations that we don’t have to be in the situation again in the future.
Andrew Hanson:
I would definitely agree with that. And in technology there was this big shift and it came with the dev ops movement, so they call it agile. Being agile basically met you fail fast. So you build fast, you put out the smallest amount that you need just to get your product out to market and you fail on these small little things, but you iterate, you iterate very quickly. I think the same thing can be applied to this and I think it’s to that point, which is you shouldn’t just say, “Well, we put Slack and Zoom out there and people didn’t use them and nope, it just doesn’t work. We can’t do it as an organization.”
Andrew Hanson:
I have a hard time believing that most corporations, businesses, obviously with the exception of some things like Nicola pointed out before, I have a hard time believing that you can’t have remote work. I just really do. After being in the industry for 12 years and seeing the amount of remote work across a plethora of different types of businesses. It would strike me as very surprising that your company is the proverbial special snowflake that can’t make remote work, work correctly.
Tim Cynova:
One of the things that probably bears mentioning is at Fractured Atlas where we all currently work, we have coworkers that includes some of us who work in 12 different States and six countries. We’re an entirely virtual or distributed organization, but that didn’t happen last month or that didn’t happen all in Q4 of last year. It was multiple stages that took us from being a place that everyone worked in the same physical office to where we could support people that wherever they wanted to work. Because they had tools like a laptop and VoIP phones and it was virtual first.
Tim Cynova:
Everyone joins a meeting on Zoom because that’s just what you do even if you’re physically co-located and that Slack is the way we communicate and that everyone uses Slack. Not just this team or a couple of people, but we also did it in a way that rolled it out. Almost all of the tools that we used or the very beginning iteration of the tool started with our engineering team. Andrew you mentioned has always been entirely distributed but people vetted that and then thought, “All right, here’s how it works. Now, let’s roll it out to another team.” And then you sort of spread through that. So for those who have slightly more time, who are looking to do this over slightly more time, that’s one way to get the organization familiar with tools before company wide adoption.
Nicola Carpenter:
I would like to say, I mean, I know that people are feeling the urgency right now, but I hope that people don’t avoid thinking through some of these things just because of the urgency. I hope that people are still taking the time to think through all of the things that we like to think through when we do change management. How is racism and oppression layering over these changes that we’re making? How is this setting up teams for resiliency and self care? How is this… I hope that people are still thinking about all those things that we continuously talk about here and in our work at Fractured Atlas and with Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. I mean, yes, there is a sense of urgency here, but I also think that we can’t forget a lot of these things that we’re also trying to think about, at the same time of creating great places to work.
Tim Cynova:
Let’s go to some listener submitted questions because I think this will bring us down to the tools that we can use, how we can roll things out, how we can approach things. One of the things we’ve already touched on a little bit is something that Kate Stadel sent us around managing trust without micromanaging. It’s a really big theme. One of the reasons people don’t introduce remote work is because we hear this all the time, “If I can’t see people, how do I know they’re working?”
Andrew Hanson:
I always find that the most hilarious question. Because would you rather have the person underneath you, your work or whatever, working incredibly hard, as hard as they can, putting out a ton of work for five hours a day or sitting in an office for eight hours and four of those hours they’re on their phone looking at Facebook. People do this, right? Obviously you’re not going to work five hours straight, you just can’t, right? Our brains cannot focus in that way. We need to take these kinds of structured breaks from the things that we’re doing, but the point is kind of do you trust your worker? Are they getting their work done? Are they missing deadlines? Are they hitting deadlines? What does it matter if you can see them or not? If you don’t have trust in them, you don’t have trust in them. Quite frankly from my perspective, being a manager, that’s a management problem. That’s not a worker problem.
Nicola Carpenter:
I think if you’re talking about specific tools that help with this, I mean, we have a whole podcast about objectives and key results. It’s a way to transparently see and set priorities throughout the quarter to have these conversations more frequently. I know some people at Fractured Atlas have used something called GoalFest, to plot out what work is happening in a week. But yeah, I completely agree with Andrew that there’s got to be a way, besides seeing people sitting at a desk to assess if people are doing their work or not. Because sitting in a desk and looking at a computer screen doesn’t necessarily mean that work is actually happening.
Tim Cynova:
This kind of feels like designing for the one percent or maybe designing for the five percent, the edge cases. To the point that if you could trust this person to get their work done the way they’re supposed to get the work done before you introduce this, why would you not trust them until they prove you otherwise that maybe they can’t work remotely? Maybe virtual work just doesn’t align. There are some really amazing, high-performing, talented people who do not like working remote or virtually, they just don’t work well in that kind of environment. But let people demonstrate that after you’ve provided trust. If you can’t trust the people you work with, I think you have bigger problems than that and maybe things that relate to performance improvement plans or moving them along or whatever it might be.
Andrew Hanson:
I think just to tie into that point is that the old saying, the bad apple spoils the bunch, right? You’re taking a very extreme case and guess what? There are absolutely going to be people who abuse the system. There are always people who abuse the system for their own game. That’s just how it works. Are they necessarily on your team? Maybe, maybe not. There might be one in an organization, there might be five, there might be none. But we can’t take an extreme situation of one person or two people who are going to abuse the system in order to not have to do as much work and look at that as a reason to not do something across an entire organization.
Tim Cynova:
Paul Millerd posted some questions on Twitter, also wrote a great article about virtual work. One of the questions that they sent us was, how do people raise issues when they’re stuck? It feels related to this. I trust the people, what they’re doing, but getting stuck in person when you just spin around and talk to someone might be different than getting stuck and spinning your wheels for hours while you’re trying to figure it out. Because what do you do? Reach out to someone, toil away. What’s your advice for when this happens? When people have issues, they feel stuck. This might also relate to their other question about how do you control flows of information?
Nicola Carpenter:
So I think, I mean, if there was a company that had this question that they’re trying to look into what it would mean to working virtually, I would say, how do people do it now? If it’s that someone walks over and asks them a question, then maybe something like Slack asking quicker questions via some sort of messaging thing would work for that. But also, I mean that’s why we have some meetings. I think that setting those expectations is just as important in an office as it is working virtually. And that, yes, maybe you can’t walk over and ask a question but maybe that wasn’t the best use of time in a physical office anyway.
Andrew Hanson:
Being from the engineering team, I have a slightly different perspective on this. So first just let me say, getting stuck is not necessarily a bad thing. People come up with incredibly creative solutions when they get stuck. That’s something that happens all the time, especially in engineering where you’re dealing with a really tricky problem and you’re trying to figure it out and you get stuck. Sometimes if I spend an hour or two on it, I come up with a really great solution.
Andrew Hanson:
So let’s not get stuck on getting stuck is a bad thing. That’d be the first thing that I would say. The second thing, to Nicola’s point is you have Slack. We mentioned Slack a lot. There’s other chat tools out there as well. I worked at companies that have used Skype, which is now I guess transitioning Microsoft teams. If you’re a more security conscious organization, there’s self-hosted things like matter most, which is basically a Slack clone and other tools out there that you can use, but you have a chat system and you have private channels or you have being able to privately message someone and say, “Hey, do you have five minutes? I’m stuck on something.” Something nice and easy.
Andrew Hanson:
Maybe it’s just done via Slack or you say, “Hey, can you jump in? For instance, Zoom with me and I’ll share my screen. Can you look at this with me because I’m just stuck on it. I think it probably takes a little more… Self-discipline is not the right word, maybe it is. To reach out to someone and ask for help versus just maybe spinning around in your chair being like, “Hey, I need some help with something.” But to say that there’s no way or that there’s no real corollary between working from home and working remote between the two, I think it’s just incorrect. There’s absolutely ways to be able to do that exact same thing and have that exact same interaction.
Tim Cynova:
I know different teams approach this in slightly different ways. Andrew Taylor posted a question asking, “Curious about how you make opportunity for “drop-in” or unscheduled conversations among the team. Do you leave your video running during an open office hours or is it that you just ping someone on Slack and pop in? I know on the engineering team you have some pairing together. You also have open conversations where you just talk about other things, but some teams have fully scheduled days where there isn’t really a drop-in. You wait until the next meeting that you have and you bring your thing to that or you post a question in Slack. Curious if you have any thoughts on Andrew Taylor’s curiosity about this drop-in or unscheduled conversations.
Andrew Hanson:
So again, I think this is interesting because to me it’s the exact same as in an office. If my boss is running from meeting room to meeting room, I don’t really have a chance to drop-in and ask that question either. That to me is kind of the same thing. I can speak on engineering, specifically what we do is all the time with my boss and I’ll just private message him, “Hey, do you have five minutes? Do you have 10 minutes?” “Yeah.” We jump into zoom room, we do a quick five, 10 minute call. A lot of times it ends up being 30 minutes as most of these kinds of ad hocs do and then you kind of go on with your day. So a lot of this, I think for me with my background in psychology, just goes back to not knowing and then being afraid.
Andrew Hanson:
So people are afraid that you’re going to lose all these things when you go to remote work and you’re really not. There’s really not that much difference other than you’re not in the physical same space as the other person. Now you have to be intentional about the things that you do. You have to be intentional about the changes you make and the way that you put these opportunities forward for people. But it’s really not that different.
Nicola Carpenter:
I think that that intentionality kind of forces people to figure out what is important in the day and I think that that can be helpful. For example, I’ve learned that it’s very difficult for me to sit in front of my computer for eight hours without having some kind of either communication with people or podcast, if I don’t have some sort of interaction. If I don’t do that and I’ve learned that I should either intersperse this or there are a few people also work at Fractured Atlas who also work similarly where we’ll just like, “Oh, do you want us to talk about something?” We’ll either talk about something related to work and make an excuse to have a meeting or I’ll just listen to podcasts, which somehow fills that kind of need for human interaction. I don’t know. I don’t exactly know how that works, but it fills that.
Nicola Carpenter:
I think that that it’s helped me realize how I shape my day and how I work best and I think that if everyone has to think about that, I think that it helps people be more mindful about what they’re doing in a workday, how they’re shaping their day, what they need to be successful in that day, which are all the questions that I think that we have been asking with Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. from the start.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. They’re often the things that when you go to the office, you just know you show up at 8:00, 9:00. You leave at 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, whatever time and you assume without really thinking about it, if I’m at the office, I’ve been working and however I get what I need done during the day is maybe the best way to do that. When you work at home where you can work virtually distributed, you have to give some more thought to what times is the best time to eat? I need to make sure I get a shower and get dressed. How long can I work before I really need to stop because my brain just shuts off and I need a break? When we were getting ready for the transition at Fractured Atlas, we had a lot of monthly full staff meetings that just took a topic every staff meeting.
Tim Cynova:
Loneliness or creativity, what do people do? How do you set up your work day? Do you have something on your calendar that says you need to get up and have lunch? Do you have kickball scheduled at 6:00 PM three nights a week because it’s going to get you out of the house, otherwise you’d just work until 9:00 and then… Or not even realize what time it is.
Nicola Carpenter:
We should probably talk about how do people structure their day.
Andrew Hanson:
The one that I really want to talk about besides how people structure they day, I’d to talk about that one, but also how does anyone get anything done working from home? I think that’s such an important question and I always love when that question comes up. I’m a father of three, my wife is pregnant, my wife’s a stay-at-home mom. My house is constantly crazy. Probably unless we have a phenomenal editor, you’re going to hear that baby screaming at some point in some of these questions. So my house is super chaotic and that question comes up a lot. How do I get anything done from home? The thing that… I actually think that it kind of ties into how you schedule your day.
Andrew Hanson:
So for me, I wake up because I don’t have to commute because I don’t have to wake right up, take a shower and get ready to go to a workplace. I wake up at six o’clock I grab a cup of coffee and I’m at my desk by 6:10, 6:15 and I’m working for an hour or two hours before my house is even awake. I’ll tell you those are the most productive two hours of my entire day. And then usually around eight o’clock. I’m helping getting kids ready. I have one kid that I have to take to school, things happen. Then I’m usually back to my desk by 9:30 work until around noon, eat some lunch. But you structure your day how it works for you.
Andrew Hanson:
That again is one of the beautiful things about working from home. Within reason and depending on what your job is, if you’re answering phone calls and things all day, you might not be able to structure quite the same way. But you could definitely wake up a little earlier and answer those emails you need to or write those couple documents you need to, so you don’t have those things weighing down on you first thing when you come into the office. That’s a beautiful thing about working from home. You do have this sense of autonomy. When I was working as a psychologist, a big thing we studied that motivated people, big three, autonomy, competence and relatedness.
Andrew Hanson:
Those three things are the most motivating things that anybody can have. When you’re giving people the ability to structure their day in a way that works for them, you’re giving them an incredible amount of autonomy.
Nicola Carpenter:
Yeah. So I am still very new to working from home and it’s been a fun and interesting transition. I don’t know if either of you watched the Netflix show, The Circle. But I reference it very frequently and basically the premise, if you don’t know, is that there are a number of different people who are put into separate apartments and they’re communicating with other people through a voice activated social network basically. And so the only communication they have is via text and it’s very amusing. I find it charming and hilarious and just absurd in all the best ways. There’s this one person in it named Seaburn who just… They show different clips of people just hanging out in the day. There’s this one clip that Seaburn is just like sticking stickers to his face. I feel like there are some days when I’m working from home where I’m just finding random craft materials and just start playing with them, which is kind of silly, but I mean, I’m so used to doing so many tasks in an office that if I don’t have things to do, I have to make them.
Nicola Carpenter:
There was one day when I was like, “Oh, I can’t look at my computer anymore.” But there’s nothing to do in an office. So I just cleaned my windows. And so, I mean, my prom is going to be really clean now and so I feel like there will be a point when I’m more used to it, but I guess I just bring it up in that it is a transition and our brains don’t really like change and it’ll take some getting used to and I think that, that’s fine and I think also recognizing that makes it a little bit easier. So just like, “Okay, how can I make this easier? I’ll just have a little dance break or I’ll do something that’s not just sitting in one place so that I still get that kind of activity that I’m used to getting of walking around changing a light bulb or there’s a leak or other random things that often happen in a physical office.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. In the same way that organizations need to be intentional about introducing remote work arrangements, we as human beings should be more intentional about what those remote working arrangements look like because if you just go with the baseline, you’re going to get up, not brush your teeth, walk in, sit down, work from 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM not having eaten anything, not interacted with… Just the inertia of it. If you’re not giving thought to setting these things up, it could be quite bad if you possibly live by yourself or if the people you live with might be away for the day and you’re working someplace else or going to school, but setting this thing up might have a negative impact on you as your health, your wellbeing, self-care.
Nicola Carpenter:
Now let’s please all agree to brush your teeth and wash your hands. I was a little grossed out thinking of everyone just not brushing their teeth and just go on right in the work.
Tim Cynova:
No, I was going to make the connection to unlimited vacation days and what research has for unlimited vacation days, that people take fewer days and being more intentional about it.
Andrew Hanson:
I think that’s interesting, because like what you were saying, there were people taking less days when you have more vacation days. People tend to work longer when they work from home. That’s another reason why I find the question so interesting from managers, especially when they’re like, “Well, how do I know if somebody is working?” If you look at the research, most people end up working longer hours. I am in no way forced to work the hours that I work, I generally most days… I mean, now take it like I’m taking kids to school, I’m bringing kids back home from school, so on and so forth. But it’s not unusual for me to spend nine or 10 hours in a day to be working because I’m just here and I’m just doing my thing. And so I think the thread that we kind of weave throughout this entire thing is being intentional. And that’s the companies have to be intentional, the managers have to be intentional and the people have to be intentional when you’re working. It could easily-
Nicola Carpenter:
Yeah, I think that’s a good point too of also what you perceive to be the issues might not be the issues. The issue probably isn’t going to be that people aren’t working enough. It might be that they’re working too much and burning out. So I think that, that’s another thing that we need to about, is the expectations that we all have surrounding remote work might be totally incorrect. I think we have to be willing to correct those assumptions if our assumptions are incorrect.
Andrew Hanson:
Absolutely.
Nicola Carpenter:
But one of my favorite tips that a friend gave me was to have a virtual commute, to have some sort of thing that you do at the start of the your day and at the end of your day to notate that your work is starting or ending. I have been working on my kitchen table, but I sit on a different side of it than the side that I eat on and I specifically set up my laptop with my laptop stand, my keyboard, my mouse, my notebook, and I set it all up. I then start my Workday. At the end of the workday, I put it all into a box and I do not see anything related to my work. Because I don’t own, I don’t… I mean, I live in the New York city area.
Nicola Carpenter:
I have a smallish apartment. I don’t have space to have a dedicated desk just for working, but that is enough for me to kind of separate my workspace from my home space in a way that I’m not necessarily thinking about work when I’m eating dinner and watching The Circle. Although apparently I do think about work when I’m watching The Circle.
Andrew Hanson:
I like that you bring that up and that’s something that’s phenomenal for a lot of people is being able to really divide that time in your mind. I’ve been working remotely for a very long time. I still have a very hard time with that. And part of the reason is because even before I got into technology, at a very young age, I was very fortunate to have computers in my life. I am 100% a computer geek and I often not so jokingly say my hobbies are in the same place where I work. So I sit here in front of this computer and I work, and then this is the same place where I also like to do other things. I like to program my own things and build my own things. So sometimes I have a very hard time separating that and it’s very difficult because then I’m in the same space for 12 or 14 hours a day.
Andrew Hanson:
So I haven’t quite found a way to combat that yet. So even someone who’s been doing this forever, it seems like, doesn’t have it all figured out. But one of the things that I do that’s very intentional is when I’m not in my office, I’m not working. If I’m downstairs having dinner with my family, I’m having dinner with my family. If we’re watching TV, I’m not on my phone, we’re watching TV. If we’re outside of this house, I do not think about work. It is all about my kids and about my wife and about my family. That’s at least one way that I can separate at least a little bit. When I figure the rest out, I’ll let you know how I got there.
Nicola Carpenter:
So I went to this art event a few years ago and there was this art project where they were selling products and I ended up buying a pair of shoes. But before I could make that exchange, I had to sign this waiver that I would only ever wear that pair of shoes to work. It always has stressed me out because I’m like, “Well, does a commute count as work?” So I’ve never worn them. I mean, it’s kind of silly, but I’m like, “Oh, when does work start? When does it not? What happens if I go to event after work? Do I have to change shoes?” But I’m kind of thinking about having these shoes be my work from home shoes because I have my slippers that are my house shoes and I have my outdoor shoes but I kind of want to try having my work shoes. I just changed-
Tim Cynova:
Mr. Rogers.
Nicola Carpenter:
Mr. Rogers. Yeah, exactly. I kind of love that and want to have something, some way of changing the work to not work.
Tim Cynova:
I think this is one of the other things that you can do, when you’re working remote is sharing that. On our Slack channel, someone posted a couple of months ago, “Do you wear shoes and socks when you work from home?” A sincere question and the amount of new information and how people approach it, and, “I wear slippers, but only during these times of the year.” Was really fascinating. Just one simple question posted there really opened up all these different ways of people approaching how they think about their home workspace in a similar way. When I put these slippers on, do we have a coworker who has work slippers? When they put the slippers on, they’re working. When they take the slippers off, they’re not working. They have to have those slippers on. So I think that’s sort of a fun way, but also gets useful information for teams to connect, to see how everyone’s doing and also learn different ways of approaching maybe how you want to think about your remote work.
Tim Cynova:
So let’s transition to tools. We’ve mentioned a number of them as we’ve been talking. We’ll post links in the episode description so people can go directly to that description and find out what the tools are that we’re talking about. We had one question that came in that I want us to address first and then go to some of the other tools that we use for remote or virtual work. The question came from one of Nicola’s friends asking, “What’s a good remote desktop solution for Windows to Mac?” Does someone want to explain what that means and then let’s answer it.
Andrew Hanson:
With all tools, the first thing I’ll say is especially because we’re talking about work, if you have an IT department, if you have people who work in IT, please ask them first. That would be the first thing that I would say. You might have security requirements that you’re not aware of. You might have certain policies that are in place that you’re not aware of that you’re already in compliance with, because you’re in an office, so please always check with your IT person. Nothing is more frustrating than when somebody tries to get around those things and in some ways not only frustrating, but it can also cost the company a lot of money. That’s the first thing I’ll say about tools.
Tim Cynova:
Andrew, when you say that though, when I worked for smaller arts organizations, I always hated that I was the person who worked with the computers and the message comes up like, “Contact your IT specialist. I don’t know what to do about this thing that just popped up.”
Nicola Carpenter:
Same.
Andrew Hanson:
Well, in that case there a much wider tech community you can go to. There are lots of great places to go to. That specific tool. I did a little bit of research. There’s a lot of tools out there. There’s a lot of different implementations of something called VNC, some better than others. I’m not going to speak on which ones are which. I don’t really have a ton of experience with VNC. There’s also go-to PC. There’s a lot of tools out there that can do exactly what you’re asking for. All it takes is just a little bit of research. If you’re looking at GoToPC, go to news.google.com which is all the Google news type in GoToPC, see if there’s any horrible news articles in the last three years, talking about a giant security breach they have or something really terrible that happened with them or any of the VNCs or anything like that. Really just spending 15, 20 minutes of research. You’re going to find the tool that works for you. Almost every tool that’s out there as far as remote tools with rare exception, are going to work across both Macs and PCs.
Nicola Carpenter:
GoToPC years ago, might be the first tool that I used to start working remote. I was traveling for work, and for those unfamiliar with the tool, you essentially have it open on your “work machine” and then you can access it through a portal, wherever you might be from your phone, from a tablet, from a laptop, but while you’re moving it appears as though you’re sitting in front of your desk using a tool like that. GoToMyPC is not the only one. It was the one that we used at the time, but it does allow you to access things that you might not be able to access. Although Andrew’s advice about making sure that you inadvertently aren’t exposing the organization over various networks to a myriad of threats while you do this on the open wifi network in wherever place you choose to be working. I know he has a lot of thoughts because both he and Nicola had been in various ways working on solutions for this. I wanted to throw that broad enough.
Andrew Hanson:
I feel like public wifi is an entire another podcast. The short of it I’ll say is public wifi is generally pretty horrible and I wouldn’t recommend using it for anything. I definitely wouldn’t recommend you do your banking over it or anything like that. The general suggestion we give to people is, if you can’t work from home, if you don’t have good reliable internet and you have to be in a public place all the time, it’s generally about the same cost to go to Verizon or AT&T and get… They call it MiFi which looks like a little… We always used to call them hockey pucks, a little hockey puck that lets you connect to a wifi network and then it goes over the cellular network. Generally speaking, I would recommend that over using public wifi.
Andrew Hanson:
There are other things you can do on public wifi. You can use VPNs, you can do other things. The simplest is just not to use public wifi. I’m not saying don’t connect to it and look at Facebook, I’m saying don’t connect to it and do your banking or look at highly classified documents because you work at some banking company.
Nicola Carpenter:
So there was one day when I was on the New York subway and there were two people talking about things that made me think I should maybe call the SEC or something. I mean, they were talking about super classified things and they were like, “Oh yeah. Did you hear about that person at some golf course talking about something?” “Yeah, we should go and do…” Whatever this thing because of what they said. I was like, “This feels illegal. And also why are you giving me all of this information on the subway?” So I feel like that should be obvious, but maybe just pay attention to also who is around you when you’re having conversations or when someone’s looking over your shoulder, even if you’re not connecting to public wifi,
Andrew Hanson:
That’s an absolutely phenomenal point. In security, we call that OPSEC, operational security. You need to be careful what you’re saying, who you’re saying it to, when you’re saying it. I’m probably slightly over paranoid just because of the industry that I’m in. When I go into a Panera’s or a Starbucks or something, I tend to find a seat that’s against the wall, not close to a window. I don’t like people looking at my screen, even if I’m not working on something super top secret. But yeah, these are all things to be mindful of, if you’re going to be working in public. Again, intentional. The string of all of this, intentional. You have to be intentional with all of this.
Nicola Carpenter:
For those who might have flown and sat on an aisle, you can see someone who doesn’t have a screen protector on 10 rows back. You can read what they’re working on if they’re there. So yes, there are technology tools. There’s maybe “common sense”. Don’t talk about highly classified stuff in a crowded place and there are physical tools like MiFis and screen protectors that make it more challenging for people to read what’s on your screen. Let’s post the rest of them. We’ve talked about Slack, we’ve talked about Zoom and a myriad of other ones. I want to go with last thoughts or maybe not last thoughts closing thoughts on this topic for this podcast, especially recognizing these aren’t your closing thoughts ever on this topic. Nicola, what are your closing thoughts on the topic of organizations introducing remote or virtual work arrangements?
Andrew Hanson:
I would say that if people are coming to the Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. Podcast for this topic specifically, I think they should go and listen to all the rest of them and read the other things. Because, a lot of this stuff that we talk about in this podcast is relevant to making the transition to virtual work. I think that people might not necessarily draw that connection and I think that they should.
Tim Cynova:
Andrew thoughts.
Andrew Hanson:
As long as they’re not my last thoughts ever, then I’ll give you my thoughts.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. Not your last thoughts ever.
Andrew Hanson:
I know. I think as I’ve said kind of throughout the podcast, intentionality. Just make sure you’re very intentional about the things that you’re doing, whether you’re at the top of the food chain or the bottom, intentionality is the way to do this correctly. I think the other thing is to make sure you’re always iterating. Make sure you’re always making changes. Make sure you’re open to making changes. I joke with my friends all the time that my wife hears me say I’m wrong probably more times than any husband has ever said it ever. I’m perfectly fine with being wrong all the time. We only learn by trying new things and by looking at new information. I think part of that comes from being a scientist. Scientists should be wrong all the time. Our theories are always changing and this is no different. We’re navigating for a lot of people, uncharted waters, and it’s okay to be wrong and it’s okay to iterate and just keep moving forward. Don’t take something small and leave that as a sign as the whole thing is a failure and should be abandoned.
Tim Cynova:
Terrific advice. Andrew. Nicola, thank you so much for sharing your expertise today and for being on the podcast.
Andrew Hanson:
Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Nicola Carpenter:
Yes. It’s fun.
Tim Cynova:
To close out this episode. It’s again my pleasure to welcome back to the show, podcasting’s favorite cohost, Lauren Ruffin. Hey Lauren, how’s it going?
Lauren Ruffin:
Hey, it is a rainy morning in Albuquerque, which is rare and my voice hasn’t changed yet, thanks to daylight savings time. So hopefully I’ll be a little bit more chipper as our conversation goes. Guaranteed, because this is a dope conversation, but the voice is really something right now.
Tim Cynova:
We have a special returning guest on the show today, our fellow co-CEO and Chief Technology Officer at Fractured Atlas, Shawn Anderson. Shawn, how’s it going today?
Shawn Anderson:
Hanging in there. I’m in Denver. It’s not that far from Albuquerque, but it’s sunny and nice here.
Lauren Ruffin:
Dang! Shawn. That is brutal.
Shawn Anderson:
I can’t complain.
Lauren Ruffin:
Dang! Early in the morning, a knife to the gut.
Tim Cynova:
So this episode is all about remote work. Something many organizations have been giving serious thought to, especially in light of the spread of COVID-19. Both of you have extensive experience working and managing remote teams. Sean, for nearly the entirety of your career, I imagine you’ve only worked that way virtually and remotely. With that in mind and with your CTO hat on, what advice do you have for organizations now wrestling with how to quickly implement these types of arrangements?
Shawn Anderson:
Well, first of all, don’t be too afraid. The consequences for not finding a way to allow your workforce to engage remotely is probably greater than letting them work from home. It’s really important to get tooling in place as soon as possible. I certainly recommend using video communications over the phone or trying to rely on email. Those are both notorious for horrible lag time, feeling very disconnected. Video really does help get over a lot of the bumps that you would experience with managing a remote workforce.
Tim Cynova:
At Fractured Atlas, we use zoom. We’ve used BlueJeans, we’ve used Skype in certain situations. We used to use whatever Google had-
Lauren Ruffin:
Hangouts.
Tim Cynova:
Google Hangouts.
Lauren Ruffin:
People still use that.
Shawn Anderson:
My least favorite of the bunch, but yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, mine too. My computer doesn’t let me use Google Hangouts. It’s pretty finicky. So we use Slack as a messaging tool. We used to use Flowdock and there’s a built-in function though in Slack that allows you to hop onto video lines as well, right?
Shawn Anderson:
Yes. So Slack has integrated video and it also has integrations with tools like Zoom that you can launch off into your own Zoom channel at any time. I think those things are all great, but you really just have to get whatever the low hanging fruit is for your particular company or organization. So if you’re already in the Microsoft ecosystem, go ahead and lean into Skype, lean into Skype for business, look at those kinds of tools. If this is something that you haven’t really done anything with at all, I would suggest checking out. Even though I’m not a big fan of Google Hangouts, it’s free and it’s fairly simple to start rolling that out to your teams. But if you can’t afford to pay, we’ve definitely found Zoom to be a really good platform. It’s fully featured, it’s very easy for people to get it installed on their systems and I think that’s really the way to go.
Tim Cynova:
One of the things we haven’t mentioned yet on this podcast, I know we have a number of people who work with nonprofits who are looking for the free or inexpensive options. Oftentimes companies provide nonprofit discounts for some of the subscription services available. So it’s always worth asking.
Shawn Anderson:
For sure. That’s kind of our built in first request to any vendor that we work with across the board. So whether it’s a communications platform or just any kind of software license, it’s like a knee jerk. “Hey, we’re a nonprofit. What kind of nonprofit rates do you offer?” You’ll find that sometimes you’ll even get stuff for free. So Slack, we get an organization level membership entirely for free, which is fantastic. Thank you Slack. For Zoom, without any nonprofit discount you can get, I think it’s 40 or 45 minutes per session for free. So you can just try it out. Worst case scenario, you just hop right back in to the room again. But they also do provide nonprofit discounts. I can’t recall what the percentage is, but it’s a fairly healthy percentage.
Tim Cynova:
Or maybe your meeting doesn’t need to be longer than 40 or 45 minutes and Zoom tells you that.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, exactly.
Tim Cynova:
It’s like, “You’re done having this conversation.”
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. That’s my philosophy. 45 minutes max.
Shawn Anderson:
It’s a great built in reminder. We’ve actually done that a few times where we’ve scheduled meetings to be 40 to 45 minutes instead of the full hour to prevent the lengthening of meetings. I don’t know. I’ve just seen this tendency that if you schedule an hour, it’s an hour and five an hour and 10 minutes. If you’re seeing that tendency within your company, schedule 45 minute long meetings if you want to make sure that you get done in under an hour.
Tim Cynova:
Well, Lauren, we talked about earlier in the podcast, a lot of the intentionality that goes into how we work and how we need to work differently when it’s remote or virtual than if we were just all in the same place. Both of you have managed completely virtual teams. You’re a co-CEOs of an entirely virtual organization. I’m curious, Lauren, why don’t you start, how do you structure team interactions? What does that actually look like and how might it be different than if everyone were in the same space?
Lauren Ruffin:
There’s a mind shift that happens when you have employees who occasionally work from home to really being intentional about implementing sort of remote work practices, that I think those are totally different philosophies. Mostly because, and we’ve spoken about this on the podcast and I know that you chatted about it with our other guests, but to me it’s important that everyone’s having the same experience professionally. And so I found it particularly hard being the only non-engineer working remote at Fractured Atlas. It wasn’t even that the systems weren’t there, it was that the culture hadn’t shifted 100%. But I know the engineering team really felt that as well. But I manage my team remotely the same way I would manage them if we were all in the office. That’s just about maintaining fidelity to whatever model you set up as a manager.
Lauren Ruffin:
So we do stand-ups in the morning. They should be no longer than 15 minutes. Sometimes we do a little water cooler talk on Mondays and Fridays in particular, but we’re in and out just sharing what we’re doing during our day. And then we do our team meeting midway through the week and that lasts usually anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. But all the processes are the same for everybody on the team. And we always end up talking about trust and to me, trust starts with hiring. Hire people who want to do the job. But the shifting point for my team, we had people who we hired who were in the office five days a week and I think at one point it was pretty much only my team and Tim and Nicola were in the office five days a week at that point.
Lauren Ruffin:
Shifting to being virtual really had an impact on one of my staff members for sure. She couldn’t handle it, which is great and I completely support her self-awareness around knowing that remote work wasn’t for her and deciding to leave the team. But mostly it’s about making sure everyone has the same experience, which is what you want to do as a manager anyway.
Shawn Anderson:
Yeah, Lauren. Building on that, this idea of blending onsite and remote staff I think presents some of the largest challenges. We’ve had tons of meetings at Fractured Atlas, over the years where you have a conference room full of 10 to 30 people and then a number of people, maybe another 10 to 15 people coming in through a screen. That is the least ideal way to have remote work ongoing. I’ve heard anecdotally from other people as well that you end up with these separate cultures. That you have your online culture and then you have your onsite culture and that is a recipe for stress and strain within the organization and I feel like this outbreak that we’re going through, it’s an opportunity to lean in and try to set up something that allows remote work to flourish across a larger swath of the organization and just raising awareness here that if you think you’re just going to have five people working from home and 25 people in an office, there’s going to be struggles. There’s going to be problems in maintaining consistency across your whole team.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, I mean there’s nothing dorkier than when you’re on video and people are in the conference room. Somebody says something funny, everybody’s laughing. You’re like, “Oh, what happened? What are they saying?” And then they’re like, “Oh.” You just miss stuff.
Andrew Hanson:
You had to be there.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I’m like, “But I am here. I’m still a person.” It’s so awkward.
Tim Cynova:
Which is likely why I think when organizations are experimenting with this a little bit here, but everyone else really isn’t in person, they’re having such a bad experience with it. “We tried that once and it didn’t work.” Type of thing. Rather than virtual first. Everyone does it. It equalizes the experience and we figure it out together and we figured out what’s necessary for us to do on Zoom, necessary for us to do in email, when do we really need to meet in person, but this one foot on one side, one foot in the other, creates this place where it never works out great for the people who are not in the physical room because of those things. When you laugh it overloads the microphone so you can’t even hear the followup. You just know people are laughing and you’re missing something and you just have to sit there until it’s done and then hop back into the meeting.
Shawn Anderson:
One of the things we’ve tried at Fractured Atlas that I think works to a certain extent, even staff in the office can come to the meetings through a screen. You do have to watch out for having people sitting right next to each other because you’ll experience what latency there is, as you hear someone in real time in one year and then you hear them coming to the speakers on the other side. But aside from that, it’s a good way to try to go virtual first even if you don’t have everybody literally working from home.
Lauren Ruffin:
I do think that one of the things that has surprised me in the last couple of years as 10 people have reached out to us to explore going remote has been the idea that I think people overestimate the value they’re getting by being face-to-face. I like people well enough, not a whole lot but for the most part I’ve been fortunate but I find the being in the same space means that people lack boundaries and getting work done in the office is really hard, especially when you’re in a managerial position, people need your time a lot, so you can’t really structure it or set boundaries and it becomes really informal, which can be really distracting.
Lauren Ruffin:
I just keep thinking about just sort of the experience people have with commuting. Instead of being like, you’re not getting face time. Imagine a world without traffic. Imagine what your employees would be like if they could just be in the office in two minutes when they walk to wherever their designated home office is and especially in cities like LA and New York where the commute is just even on a good non-pandemic day, the commute is just so hard. And then you’re getting there. They have to shake off their commute. Working despite the time it takes to get to the office is really just, I don’t know, I just think there’s so many opportunities to going remote in addition to just the savings and overhead for once you hit a certain size organization like you do experience a return on the value is pretty significant.
Shawn Anderson:
Often people express concern over, “How do I know what my people are doing? How do I know that they’re being efficient?” I always say, “You think they’re being efficient in the office. There’s so much wasted time.” To Lauren’s point. That shouldn’t be your biggest concern. It’s just human nature. People are going to find ways to waste time wherever they are and I’ve found more often than not that when you allow people the freedom to start working from home, they are more committed to making sure that they’re getting the work done, that they’re being efficient in their process, that they’re staying in touch with people around the organization and then yeah, Lauren, you’re right. The commute thing. I lived in New York for a long time. I spent three hours a day going back and forth just to get to high school. That’s a lot of time that your employees have to spend and it’s kind of passive time that’s wasted that they perceive as part of their work day.
Tim Cynova:
Well, and I think there is the issue if you’re in an office, “Oh I can just walk over and say this to this person.” Without giving thought, “Do I need to walk over there right now? Is what I’m going over to interrupt them with, really important?” And when you’re virtual you have to give some of that thought. There’s a couple more hurdles before you could just talk to Sean on a video. From a managerial standpoint though, I think it’s sort of the flip side. How do you make sure that people who are on your team know that they can come to you? What kind of conversations do you have so that people just aren’t struggling for four days but that they feel like it’s not a big hurdle for them to ping you if they get stuck on something?
Tim Cynova:
What does that look like on your teams? We all have logistically it a team Slack channel for our specific departments. We can do one-on-one Slack exchanges. We have a full staff Slack if we need to talk that way. We have weekly check-ins like Lauren was saying that, are there stand-up? Also one-on-one team. What does it look like more managerial and guidance for people who might need a little more virtual assistance.
Shawn Anderson:
So on engineering, we do daily stand-ups but we don’t actually do them in a meeting format. We do them posted as a bulleted list in Slack and one of the things that I watch out for is people not posting their stand-ups. What’s going on? Why are you distracted? What can I help you with? Because a lot of the time it’s not them forgetting per se. That’s an indication that they may even be overwhelmed. On the other side of the stand-ups though, you can look out for people who are posting the same thing over multiple days, which suggests they are stuck and if they’re not reaching out and asking about it, it’s an opportunity and an indication that you need to reach out to them, which I will almost always do in a direct message.
Shawn Anderson:
So you want to be careful about how your communications as a manager are perceived by the rest of the team when it may be leading to a conversation that is a little bit more challenging or a little bit more personal in nature. But I use those kinds of things to know when is it time to reach out. And then the other thing that I have in place is every two weeks I do have an in person, but virtually, an in person meeting with every member of my team and they are encouraged to write the agenda. This is your time, not my time. Since you’re not seeing people in the in-between times, you need to be super intentional about giving them the opportunity to reach out and telling you about what is going on that might be impacting their work? What is going on that might be impacting them personally? And that really helps to keep them connected.
Lauren Ruffin:
Shawn that raises something I hadn’t thought about around the difference in providing feedback in an office environment and providing feedback virtually. Because when I worked in an office, open-door policy, there was a signal that happened, if someone was talking in my office with the door closed for a while. There’s a social signaling around the entire team knows this person is struggling, they’re having a conversation with their manager or how you provide feedback face-to-face versus how you provide feedback virtually.
Lauren Ruffin:
Perception shifts in remote environments because people don’t see all the conversations happening in an office environment, even if someone’s not privy to the conversation, they see the conversation happening. One of the things I try to do is I’m intentional about when someone needs motivational feedback. Doing that in a full… Picking out when to do that. Whether it’s when we’re all in-person on Zoom. Sorry, I’m using Zoom as in-person, but when we’re all on video as opposed to doing it in our Slack channel as opposed to doing it in a private message.
Lauren Ruffin:
All of those things do require a little bit more thought once you get to the point where you have a team member who is struggling and you need to let everyone else on the team know that you’re aware of it, the signaling looks a little bit different than it does when you’re working in the same space.
Shawn Anderson:
Yeah, it’s hidden. You won’t see it. You’re right. That’s one of the contrasts of working remotely.
Lauren Ruffin:
I guess what I’m saying is I tend to keep everything either in our weekly team meeting or in our… “You didn’t do your time sheet.” I don’t make that a private message. I do that in our department team Slack channel because I think it’s important. I think that when feedback happens or things that are shared that shouldn’t be known by the entire team, it’s usually the staff member reaching out to me one-to-one as opposed to me initiating a one-to-one conversation. I actually try to keep my one-to-ones pretty minimal.
Shawn Anderson:
My scheduled one-on-ones are really short. So they tend to last 15 to 30 minutes. I offer very often, “Hey, if you have nothing and I have nothing, we can skip it.”
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh yeah, no. I’m like, “This is your time. If you don’t need it, I’m happy to give it back. I am good to go.”
Shawn Anderson:
As far as the critical feedback out in the open or private, I think this might be a place where we differ. I tend to subscribe to the idea that you celebrate accomplishments in public and then you provide critical feedback mostly in private. Sometimes however, let’s say I was seeing something in a couple team members, let’s go back to those stand-ups. Not posting the stand-ups or the quality of the stand-ups diminishing. That is something that I might address in a team meeting or in our engineering Slack channel or say, “Hey everyone, stand-ups, mandatory enough detail so that anybody could read this and understand what you’re doing.” And then I would follow up with the individuals to say, “Yeah, that was you and I hope you knew it.” And if they didn’t know it, that leads to a whole other set of conversations.
Tim Cynova:
Well, I think the defaulting as much as possible to open in a channel even if it might not involve everyone. Let’s just talk about work in general. If you’re posting about this thing we’re working on, the annual appeal and you’re posting with what could be a one-on-one conversation, but in the channel the team has more context for what’s going on, who’s working on what, and it can be done one-on-one, but probably more useful, especially because everyone’s remote from each other to have this all in one place. I also would say, I think we also all differ or I differ from the two of you on check-ins. If you don’t have anything to talk about, I still want to talk to you. It doesn’t have to be as long, but this is also one of the opportunities to do the social check-in. The general question, how’s it going? And just let someone go from there often yields things that… It didn’t rise to the level of agenda item perhaps, but actually should be an agenda item to talk about whatever it is that sort of comes from that.
Lauren Ruffin:
Tim, does your team do daily stand-ups?
Tim Cynova:
We don’t do daily stand-ups.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. A lot of my social stuff happens during stand-up. I do check-ins on Mondays, but my check-ins yesterday were totally social. So I get that, but I wonder what my team would look like without a daily stand-up. Now that’s an interesting thought. I think they hold me accountable. I need stand-ups. I don’t know if the team does, but I need them.
Andrew Hanson:
If you’re in an office, you have that natural… You’re going to see people. You get a sense of where things are. I think in the remote working environment, some kind of stand-up is pretty much required. You need these reminders, stay connected, stay connected to your team. As a manager keep on top of the way people are feeling and operating. I’m sure there’s other ways, but stand-ups of all kinds are just a really simple way to make sure that you’re staying connected.
Lauren Ruffin:
I also, in my sort of paranoid brain, you got to know people are alive. If you’re working with people who live by themselves, who work remote, if they just start showing up the stand-up, it’s like, “Are you dead in your apartment?”
Tim Cynova:
Not dead in apartments. But we have had instances where we’ve had to call emergency contacts because we haven’t heard from someone. We’ve texted them, we’ve Slacked them and yeah, it does become posting a message in the morning or so when you start working, so everyone knows you’re online and sometimes things happen and that’s the way you find out about them. God, though to go straight to someone’s dead in their apartment, Lauren that’s like-
Lauren Ruffin:
well, I guess I think about it like… I had a cold a couple of weeks ago and I had this really bad coughing episode on my oatmeal, like an old person, and the first thing I thought was like, “I’m going to choke to death here in my house and nobody’s going to find me until four o’clock. It’s like nine o’clock in the morning. There’s nobody who would think twice about it. Just me and my house till pour little Enzo gets home.”
Tim Cynova:
Oh my God.
Lauren Ruffin:
I think a question that I would have for Shawn is, do you need a dedicated sort of tech specialists, for lack of a better word, to be able to implement remote policies?
Shawn Anderson:
Oh, that is a good question.
Lauren Ruffin:
Or can the relative lay person figure it out?
Shawn Anderson:
I would like to think that the lay person could figure it out, but I think the path to really effectively implementing a remote work policy, all of the remote work procedures, you are much better off having someone with knowledge of all of these tools to get you going. Otherwise, you’re going to bump into things that you’d be better off avoiding and you’re going to quickly sour, I think on both sides of the equation. On the management side as well as on the employees side. We’re going to feel like, “Oh, this isn’t for us. I guess we’re just going to have to all get infected with COVID-19 and deal with it.” If you want to get to the end in a shortcut fashion, I think you need to work with someone who’s the tech on their side.
Lauren Ruffin:
I mean to be clear, I think what we’re all saying is either you do the remote thing or you don’t do it, but-
Shawn Anderson:
Correct.
Lauren Ruffin:
The worst thing you could do is kind of that. If you want to work from home, you can for a long period of time. We either do it or don’t.
Shawn Anderson:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it’s like Mr. Miyagi said, “Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, think. Walk middle of the road sooner or later, squish like a grape.”
Lauren Ruffin:
You said Mr. Miyagi and I was like, “Mr. Miyagi didn’t say shit will get off the pot. It’s like, he didn’t say. That’s what I was thinking.
Shawn Anderson:
I know. I mean I have a love for the karate kid. I don’t know why. I think it’s because I grew up with it, but I always think of him saying that because it’s totally true. Whenever you do something in that halfway state, you’re taking on the risks from both sides. So you’re better off fully committing to a strategy that works than doing half measures.
Tim Cynova:
Shawn, before we say goodbye to you in this episode, what are your closing thoughts on the topic?
Shawn Anderson:
I think remote work is work. I don’t actually think it differs all that much from what people are generally used to. I think there’s a ton of benefits to the people who have families, to the people who are looking to not get sick, to the people who are trying to find a way to stay engaged if they potentially feel sick. I just don’t think it’s something to be feared. I think this is something to be embraced. I think what we’re going through right now as a country and a world is just a reminder that there are ways to stay connected that don’t require us all to spend an hour in the car, in a train and then eight hours a day in an office.
Tim Cynova:
Shawn, thanks so much for spending some of your time with us this morning. I always end our video meetings by saying something like, “See you online.” Of course, we already are online. So we’ll see you online in different ways.
Shawn Anderson:
Thanks Tim. Thanks Lauren.
Tim Cynova:
So Lauren, we’re talking remote work. We work in the cultural sector for the most part, a sector largely built on bringing people together in community to engage in experiences. One of those experiences is the annual South by Southwest Conference or convention in Austin that was announced late last week that it was going to be canceled. You wearing your Crux hat and your Fractured Atlas hat. We were on several panels. You had several events that you were producing. What’s the update on that? What’s going on?
Lauren Ruffin:
Well, I’m still going to Austin. Austin’s a fun city. Whether there’s something happening or not, it’s like this year it’s the not. But what is happening is so for South by, I partnered with an organization called Zebras Unite. Zebras unite is becoming pretty well known really around finding alternative capital vehicles for underrepresented entrepreneurs. So we were going to participate in a round-table and a series of discussions with them. That’s all going to happen online now. So we’ll all be in a venue together. Having these conversations, bringing people in from around the country, around the world, we just won’t be all in the same place as planned. The reality is between Fractured Atlas and Crux and time and pulling people together.
Lauren Ruffin:
This is sort of at the nexus of about not as much money as some people, but still five or six grand, which had they canceled the festival a day earlier from everything I’ve seen in people I’ve called to beg to plead to get this money back, if they had done it a day earlier, I would have been able to recoup a fair amount of all of those funds at the seven day policy. But it’s sort of the way they chose to cancel it means that I’m out of that money. But I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of how do you ethically cancel a large event? What are the ethics involved and how do you bring partners into the conversation?
Lauren Ruffin:
It’s clear that the city of Austin and the festival that South by did not come to an agreement. And so what ended up happening is the people who were attending are suffering. I think figuring out ethical cancellations isn’t just about a pandemic in the `Rona. It’s really about how the world is shifting. Climate change is real. We’re going to see more and more events happening, especially on coast that are going to be canceled. So how do you do that in a way that doesn’t… How do you have virtual opportunities anyway for everything you’re doing? So it’s easy to shift people into virtual spaces. How do you have those contingency plans? Hurricanes are real earthquake surreal. If you’re doing something in Phoenix in the summer, being 115 degrees is real. So I just keep thinking about what do the ethical practices look like in event management and I think that the conversation has to advance beyond where we are today. The only upside to this is I think it’s forcing a lot of conversations that we need to have anyway.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, a lot of things that were not possible or “weren’t possible” are all of a sudden possible because of this. I enjoy the pre-mortem exercise when you’re starting something. I find it sort of a really fun and fascinating exercise to go through for those who might not be familiar. A pre-mortem is after you’ve come up with your plans for something and they’re going to be wildly successful and everyone’s going to love it and it’s going to make a lot of money, you do a pre-mortem about what happens when that thing that you’re so excited about is going to end in tears and ashes and then you list all of those things and he’d go one by one to, if that thing happens, we will put them in order, what’s most likely to happen… But then you go one by one and say, if that thing happens, this is how we’re going to respond. And then you essentially put it in your back pocket.
Tim Cynova:
If that thing does happen, you’re much more prepared with what happens if an earthquake hits this area during our conference, a day before our conference, whatever it might be. And so I think yeah, ethical responsibility around convening people is something that needs to be at the top of that list.
Lauren Ruffin:
It really isn’t. Planning a convening at the end of September at Albuquerque, well outside of Albuquerque, and I’m thinking top of mind wildfires and what follows is normally a beautiful time, in New Mexico. It will be around the river, gorgeous resort. But I’m like, “What if there’s a wildfire?” Or, “What if there’s a wildfire and it’s windy, which happens here.” So it’s going to be like, it was during SOCAP a couple of years ago with the fires in Northern California where there was just ash blowing over, blowing across the bay into where SOCAP’s held. And then just heat. It’s normally beautiful in September here. But what if this year it ends up being super hot and the space that we have on the resort is an eight to 10 minute walk. Can I ask everybody from the conference to do that walk? They do have shuttle buses, but again how do you prepare for those things and how do you start just thinking about them way ahead of time?
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. Thinking about everyone who wants to be a part of that convening and is it truly open and available to everyone and what might be prohibitive and how can we remove some of those barriers so that it’s as inclusive as possible? No, just I would say inclusive period not as possible. Because I think a lot of people were like, “It’s inclusive as possible, right now.”
Lauren Ruffin:
But I think that just raises a larger conversation about physical spaces. We and I mean we, people writ large and I think the arts sector is one of those sectors that is particularly beholden to physical spaces on either coast. I had a conversation with someone a couple of years ago who was raising a ton of money for a physical space in a very vulnerable city. I kept thinking those hundreds of millions dollars could be repurposed and I said this because I’m crass. I was like, “Do you ever worry raising all this money for this thing that like could be gone with a couple of hard shakes of the earth?” And they were like, “Yeah, I do think about that, but this is what we’re going to do.”
Lauren Ruffin:
I kept thinking like if he were to spend that money doing a really, really great virtual version of the thing that you want to do, it can be accessed by so many more people and really pushed technology and really you could build something that could last forever. But our continued reliance on physical spaces and the work that it takes to maintain a large physical plant for performances, for art shows as museums and everything else, to me it’s wasteful. I mean for lack of a better… I mean, it’s legit wasteful.
Tim Cynova:
With your Crux hat on the virtual reality, augmented reality as it applies to convenings, you mentioned the Zebras Unite partnership that you have is going virtual. Who’s doing this really well? Who might be pairing these new technologies with virtual convenings to use as a case study for how might one do something that’s not “old-school conference, old-school convention.”
Lauren Ruffin:
Everything about my life is spent between sort of industries and organizations that I really love that I have a lot of work to do, structurally. The VR/AR space is no different. So AltspaceVR is a convening space online that people often use to have meetings, put on a headset. I love everything about immersive storytelling and I have a hard time spending more than 10 or 12 minutes at a time in a headset. So the hardware has to improve. But I mean, I think some of those are great, but I also… We’ve done lots of cool things just with Zoom. You can do breakout rooms, you can do small… You can bring people together, you can sort of sort folks into different rooms. That’s not super hard to do once you figure it out. So there are a couple of conferences that I understand.
Lauren Ruffin:
So I believe E3 is being canceled today, which is huge. GDC is on the bubble. Actually GDC might canceled. Actually, I’m not sure. So both of these are huge gaming and online entertainment conferences. My understanding is that E3 is doing something online. I haven’t checked Twitter yet this morning, but when I went to bed last night, the rumor was that E3 was being canceled today. So I think we’re going to have to figure this out really quickly. And the good thing is you have people who are really sophisticated technologists who are now in this conversation. I think that what today seems like a, “How are we going to do this situation?” Is in three months going to be, “This is how you do it.” I think we have people who are quickly blazing the trails on that.
Tim Cynova:
You brought up how long you could wear a VR headset and it reminded me of the Zoom meeting coefficient of the two to one. For those who have spent any time in Zoom, it’s twice as tiring as a meeting that’s done in person. It just takes a different attention. So if you have a two hour meeting in person that’s going to feel like a four hour meeting and you need to be cognizant of that, to build on breaks and ways to let people just decompress.
Lauren Ruffin:
You’re spot on. And I say this as someone who is difficult to meet with.
Tim Cynova:
I’ve worked with you for a number of years, Lauren.
Lauren Ruffin:
I think the last time we were together I was like, “Where else am I going to work where I can essentially spend hours walking in circles around the room and nobody thinks I’m a total nerd?” But the other thing I was thinking about is, how much easier it is to do everything with people. You’ve met in person or you spent a lot of time with. I was thinking, what if Zoom went down and the four of us had to do tacticals by phone? I could do a tactical with you. We could probably do a tactical on the phone. But there are… Look I’ve lost the skill of phone conferencing. Remember when you used to… I remember being a lobbyist and it would be like a weekly call with X client and there’d be 30 consultants on the call, which seems like a nightmare now.
Tim Cynova:
So yeah, still do that with law firms. That’s like the last remaining convening that is almost always on audio only and then it becomes, even with three people, you’re stepping on each other and half the meeting is just crosstalk.
Lauren Ruffin:
When I was in high school, I used to frequently do a three way call and then the connecting chain, there would be a whole bunch of us on the phone and we could do it. And I’m like, “How have I lost the skill?”
Tim Cynova:
You’ve developed other skills, [crosstalk 01:21:00].
Lauren Ruffin:
We hope that I’ve developed other skills since then.
Tim Cynova:
I totally forgot about the chain calls like that.
Lauren Ruffin:
But now being on the phone with any more than one person is a real challenge and so I say that to say, it takes a while to get accustomed to being on video. It’s always easier being on video. People you really know that I think holds true for anything. It’s hard having dinner with somebody you barely know. It’s not like video is immediately easy. You have to get good at it and you have to get to know the person on the other end. It’s interesting times. I’m such a fan of… I’m a total convert, I’m such a fan of remote work now.
Tim Cynova:
I was not.
Lauren Ruffin:
I know, I remember those conversations. You and Pallavi were the holdouts. Shawn and I were like, “Do it now.”
Tim Cynova:
There’s clearly a lot of benefit to it. My holdout was, I feel like we’re losing something as human beings in not being in a physical space together. And we are, but you also gain other things.
Lauren Ruffin:
Germs.
Tim Cynova:
Yes, exactly. We’re losing-
Lauren Ruffin:
Losing out on germs.
Tim Cynova:
Germ transmission. Yes. We lost on that one.
Lauren Ruffin:
Office gossip. I think that’s the culture.
Tim Cynova:
We’re losing positives and negatives, but we also gain in other things that I think you don’t, in having that. Having seen what those things are and how people can change the way they want to live and work. I’ve increasingly been a convert to, this is how you can work, even if it’s not the entire organization needs to go vertical, but having an intentional plan that’s set up or intentional structure that’s set up to be able to work this way and for everyone to be able to work that way and understand what that’s like. This is a skill that almost everyone in the 21st century needs to have in order to be effective or productive as just a coworker.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, I think you’re so right and I’m really excited in the summer months… Well, one, I love working from home in the summer. It’s fantastic. You can sit outside, you can sort of be in your best self. But in the winter time, one of the things I always hated about working in an office was I would get to the office when it was dark and I would leave when it was dark. And so if I wanted to run outside, if I wanted… I was walking the dog and the dogs are dark. I felt like I never saw the sunlight. And just being able to step outside or spend in Albuquerque, it warms up so much the middle of the day.
Lauren Ruffin:
If I was in an office all winter long when I knew it was going to be dark, but there was gonna be this beautiful 90 minutes where it was 55 or 60 degrees in November or December. But being able to just see that and get outside and experience it and work out there and breathe some fresh air is transformational. I’m so excited for you because once your foot heals-
Tim Cynova:
That’s all right.
Lauren Ruffin:
I don’t know if we’ve told our listeners that you snapped your ankle.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, I came back with some really cool Canadian souvenirs in the form of a handful of surgical screws. Yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
But once that’s over, you’re going to be able to ride your bike in the middle of day.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, you’re right. And that will be the subject for a future episode conversation where we talk about guilt that comes from taking time during the day to do something possibly even when you’re working.
Lauren Ruffin:
No, that guilt. I shut that Catholicism I was raised in. I no longer experience guilt.
Tim Cynova:
I mean, I think that’s though… We talked about this earlier in the podcast with Andrew and Nicola. When people work from home, they tend to work longer hours than they would if they went into the office because they don’t have an easier or clear delineation of start, stop. And then if you are working say eight or nine hours that you typically would, but you start earlier and later you might initially feel guilty to say, I’m taking two hours to go work out at the gym, walk around, stare at the sun, breathe fresh air, and then I’m going to come back. And there’s a hurdle that a lot of people need to address.
Lauren Ruffin:
I feel it in particular living with children. They get home from school and I’m still working and then it’s like, “What are you doing?” I’m like, “Working.” “Well, you were working when we left.” I was like, “Yeah, I was working when you left.” And then it’s like, “We’re going to bed. What are you doing?” “I got my laptop, I’m working.” But what I’ve been trying to do is… It wasn’t my own idea. I can’t take credit for it, was putting the laptop away at six o’clock.
Tim Cynova:
I love that Nicola puts her work laptop and materials into a physical box and then puts them someplace else so that in a small apartment she doesn’t just sit down for a quick email, but it’s physically in a different place.
Lauren Ruffin:
But in particular working on East Coast Time, there are days where I start working at 6:00 AM by time and you all have gone home, but it’s still, my brain’s still on my work hours, so I look up and it’s the only thing that stops me is that I have to fix dinner for somebody.
Tim Cynova:
I think that’s one of the challenges in that, when you do work with people across time zones, for instance, I do my best work in the morning if we’re accommodating an 8:00 AM Eastern time meeting, because we have people, our colleague Pallavi lives in India, and so there’s only a couple points during the day where we can have a meeting. I start my day in a different way, and then it rolls right into just the regular workday and meetings. And then some people work until 7:00 or 8:00 PM Eastern time. And you could stretch your day from 8:00 to 8:00 and not still have that personal time that you typically would because it becomes the other type of work, not the solo thinking ideating, if that’s still a word part of your day. It shouldn’t be a word if it still is.
Lauren Ruffin:
And Pallavi usually hops back on. I go to bed pretty early, so I’m climbing into my bed at 8:30, and Pallavi is hopping on at 8:30 PM, so it’s 10:30 PM your time. So it’s like, “Well, let me start Pallavi’s day by responding to these things and end my day by responding to these things.” On the whole I’ll take that as opposed to the alternative, which is working in an office from 9:00 to 5:00 and then still bringing work home with me, which is really terrible.
Tim Cynova:
Well Lauren, we have covered a lot of ground and a lot of different topics related to the overarching remote work conversation. What are your closing thoughts on the topic for this episode?
Lauren Ruffin:
I think there are just so many benefits to doing it and I think it’s something that allows you to future proof your organization. One of the things I’ve been thinking about in the last week is as I get emails from various cities, state governments, organizations, everyone else, we haven’t really had to send an email out to our staff at all. This has not impacted our work. It’s not… I mean, I’m sure our staff are feeling it, but what we’ve done is we’ve liberated our staff to figure out what to they want to make in their lives and the one thing they don’t have to figure out is how they’re going to work, which I think is just so I feel really fortunate as a manager to not have to be navigating these things on the fly.
Lauren Ruffin:
The only thing we know to be true is this isn’t the last time we’re going to have to figure this stuff out. So I would encourage every organization who’s really feeling it in a pinch right now to figure it out now. Commit to figuring it out, so that if we’re talking about months of this conversation or if we’re just talking about this becoming an annual conversation, which is what’s most likely is that this is going to be like a really, really bad freaking flu every year. You got to figure this stuff out,
Tim Cynova:
Lauren, it’s always a pleasure starting my day chatting with you. I hope you have a wonderful rest of the day and a great week.
Lauren Ruffin:
You too, Tim.
Tim Cynova:
If you’ve enjoyed the conversation or you’re just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up or five stars or phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. If you didn’t enjoy this chat, please tell someone about it who you don’t like as much. Until next time, thanks for listening.
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If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes to help others discover the podcast.
Tim Cynova is a leader, HR consultant, and educator dedicated to co-creating anti-racist and anti-oppressive workplaces through using human-centered organizational design. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR, trained mediator, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., on faculty at New York’s The New School and Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and for the past twelve years served as COO and then Co-CEO of the largest association of artists, creatives, and makers in the U.S.
How to Transition to a Virtual Workplace Overnight
By: Tim Cynova // Published: March 14, 2020
The question that I’m increasingly asked nowadays (and something the team at Fractured Atlas who helped manage our own transition have been discussing) is: now that we’re an entirely virtual organization, having evolved into it over 4–5 years, what if we had to do again, overnight?
Our planning and transition to an entirely virtual organization evolved over years. We went through multiple stages that lead us almost naturally from one iteration to the next. I’ve detailed that journey here.
However, with the global spread of COVID-19, many organizations no longer have the advantage of time on their sides. They need to transition to a virtual organization now. Below are suggestions to do this quickly (even if not “overnight”), recognizing that this piece itself came together quickly; every organization’s specific needs and requirements differ slightly to wildly; and some organizations have employees who quite simply must work in a physical space and possibly risk not being compensated if they don’t. We’ll be adding to this piece and have more resources dedicated to crafting virtual workplaces on our website Work. Shouldn’t. Suck.
A Spirit of Experimentation in the Virtual Workplace
First, approach this transition from a place of experimentation. Articulate that explicitly and openly with everyone in your organization. Say, and mean, that we will iterate and adjust as we discover the things that don’t work (and we need to find alternatives) and the things that do work (that we want to make sure become fundamental to this new work arrangement). But, unless something is definitively not working, stick with something for at least a month before iterating. Doing otherwise will send people bouncing in all directions and further exacerbate the negative impacts of change.
Talk openly about the stress and uncertainty of change, and that this is on top of the stress and uncertainty and worry that most of us are experiencing right now simply as human beings on this planet during a pandemic. Highlight things like SCARF to acknowledge the very human impact of change, and what altering how and where people do their work means for flipping those Freeze, Fight, or Flight switches. Refer to this piece for more of what can be expected as humans experience change initiatives.
When Work and Life Get Harder to Balance
Balancing work and life, becomes exponentially more challenging when both are in the same location. Especially as school districts shutter for weeks and students are expected to suddenly e-learn, caregivers are faced with not just the prospect of trying to figure out how to work remotely themselves, but helping others and balancing competing demands. When your “office” is also your kitchen table, or you need to make meals for people during what is typically the team stand-up, it can make balance a near impossibility.
For some, working in an office provides safety and security that they might not have at home. They might not have the physical space to set up an office or the capacity to install fast enough internet. And, please, please, please as you proceed with plans, don’t further burden people by expecting them to disclose, or to divulge this if you ask them. Craft plans from a place where this might be an issue, and continue to iterate towards solutions.
Research also shows two significant differences when people work remotely: (1) they work longer hours because they don’t have the physical cue of arriving and departing the office to punctuate their date, and (2) people become isolated and lonely.
As employees, we need to work to help create our own boundaries and routines, when possible, to delineate when we’re “on the clock,” and when we’re not. As leaders and managers, we need to be proactively mindful of what might happen when in the virtual setting we send requests outside of “normal” business hours. Previously people couldn’t do anything about that email sent at 9PM until they got to their office computer in the morning. Consider using a tool that allows you to schedule emails to send during business hours so there’s no question, and no implicit or explicit pressure, for people to respond outside of work hours.
Default to “Virtual First”
Don’t stand in the middle of the road. This is sound advice when you’re walking across a road, and when you’re quickly transitioning to a virtual workplace. Take this opportunity to go virtual first in meetings and your communications. Everyone going “in” on this right now will create a shared experience and shared learning. Those who wait will be left to figure it out themselves after their colleagues have already made it a consistent way of working. The process of going virtual first all together begins with documenting things virtually (and online) before you don’t have access to in-person meetings or the documents that are on your desk.
Going virtual first collectively creates a shared experience and prevents having to bring on more people in a later learning wave. I often think about the Stages of Grief here and how it’s better to go through this together than have some people exiting that process while another is just in the Denial stage. And, as a note from one organizational leader to the next: If you’re an executive director or CEO, lead by example here.
Virtual first also means that if anyone isn’t attending a meeting in 3D but joining by video, everyone joins individually using their video. It equalizes the experience.
If you’ve ever been the one person on a video call when everyone else is meeting in person you can attest that the experience usually sucks. It’s a less than inclusive experience, to say the least. When people laugh in the room, it floods the microphone so you just have to sit there pretending like you know what was funny. You then wait your turn only to get a slice of “air time” for your poignant comment 15 minutes after it would’ve been really useful for everyone else to hear and consider it.
Virtual first video calls also give people more practice leading and participating in inclusive group video meetings. This is one of the *most* underrated skills of the 21st century.
ProTip: You’ll quickly discover this if you don’t do it, please, default to muting everyone on a video conference call, especially if some people are joining from the same room. Once we went virtual first at Fractured Atlas, we started to realize that we were creating unspoken meeting procedures organically. One such procedure was that everyone muted themselves and, if someone had something to say, they would unmute themselves as a signal to the group that they would like to speak. As the meeting facilitator, we’d scan the group to see who was unmuting to queue up a comment, much in the same way that in the 3D setting you’d keep a pulse on the room.
The Video Meeting Exhaustion Coefficient
Those who frequently participate in meetings by video experience something that I’ve begun to call the “Video Meeting Exhaustion Coefficient.” It’s ~2X. Virtual meetings and convenings are roughly twice as exhausting as their 3D counterparts. You’re sitting still in a chair positioned in front of a camera and screen filled with tiny heads in a Brady Bunch-like grid. Staring and concentrating in that way is exhausting.
It’s not socially acceptable in the same way as a 3D meeting to get up and stretch or even gaze out the window. That signals you’re possibly not paying attention and/or you’re being disrespectful to your fellow meeting participants. To counteract this, include stretch breaks. Default to 45-minute meeting lengths rather than an hour. And take a moment to simply check in with people as humans to see how they’re doing (but be careful not to overdo that last one, nobody likes long meetings).
Lighten the Financial Burden of Having a “Home Office”
Always lead with putting the financial burden on the company. If it’s important for this person to work remotely, figure out how the company credit card can pay for things like phone minutes and internet connections rather than assuming people have, or can use, enough minutes and megabytes to cover their work.
Unless it’s absolutely impossible — in which case explore other “workarounds” like who truly, absolutely needs to use the phone — lead by asking for consent. Don’t simply assume your team is able to subsidize this transition with their own money. Give them a stipend upfront (figure out the pennies later) or, if it’s really not possible, have whoever does the finances prioritize processing reimbursements to people within the week. Please don’t ask people to shoulder additional financial burden during times of crisis and/or significant uncertainty.
When all is said and done, or at least a little more settled, consider reimbursing staff for all or a portion of their home internet access if they use(d) that to work. At Fractured Atlas, we currently reimburse staff for up to $100/month to maintain a high-speed internet line. Besides providing people with a work-issued laptop, keyboard, and mouse, that’s the one work condition that’s absolutely required, so we cover or greatly subsidize it for staff. (Aside from that, remote workspaces are often bespoke to the individual.)
Now Let’s Move to Communication Tools for Virtual Work
Email is not the best tool for communicating virtual at scale. It’s clunky and confusing to follow once more than a few people start responding to threads. If you’re not using a chat application like Slack, Flowdock, or Mattermost prioritize that adoption right now. Also, Zoom, Bluejeans, or Whereby.com needs to be at the top of the list too for video meetings.
Full disclosure: Fractured Atlas currently uses Zoom and Slack; although, as an organization, we previously used Bluejeans and Flowdock. My personal preferences are Zoom (certainly for the group video experience) and Flowdock.
Virtual Meeting Participation & Project Management
Sometimes you can’t simply print out meeting agendas or handouts and pass them around the conference table so everybody can “take one.” It’s additionally difficult to coordinate complex projects and activities with people distributed across space and time where you aren’t able to spin your chair around and ask.
Several helpful tools for both project management and remote meeting facilitation and participation include Trello, Basecamp, Team Gantt, and Jira. Over the years Fractured Atlas has used all of these tools; although, for the moment, we primarily use Trello to manage meeting agenda and projects within and across teams. If you’re someone who likes to see and work visually and you have a rainbow of Dry Erase pens always at the ready, then check out Mural. It’s a tool for visual collaboration in the digital workspace.
Remote File Access for Virtual Workers
If time is not on your side, and for many it’s not, just start putting necessary files online using applications like Google Docs, Box (tip from our Senior DevOps engineer whose accompanying comment was “like Dropbox but WAY better”), or Nextcloud. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good with this option. Just start using something that isn’t your physical file server in the office. Once the dust settles, you can go back and make sense of which document version needs to be stored where, and whether this is the right app to use.
Now most mission-critical and everyday operating files are accessible and you can communicate with your team and coworkers.
Remote Desktops to Access Files Virtually
Sometimes people need to the access of an office-based computer because a specific application is only accessible from inside of the office. For instance, maybe your donor database or accounting software is located on a physical server in the office. If you’re working, say, on the finance team and the only way you can access the accounting software is by using your computer in the office, consider using something like GoToMyPC (GTMPC). It’s another quick and easy solution for remote desktop access that you can iterate on later if necessary.
You can now work from almost anywhere that has an Internet connection. When pulling up the GTMPC application it will look like you’re sitting down at your office computer, sans the pictures of family and friends on your desk. When I’ve used it in the past with computers that have the same background images, one of the “problems” was that I got confused if I was working on my home machine or my work machine. (Pro tip: Change a background image.)
Over the years, I’ve even used GTMPC from my phone while on a plane so that I could increase a coworker’s credit card limit who was stranded in a snowstorm and needed to book a hotel. Not a great experience looking at a double monitor set-up on a tiny iPhone 6 screen, but it worked out and felt like I was living in the future.
Phones for a Virtual Workplace
This can get tricky, especially if you have an “old school” phone system and a physical server in the office that manages your email. If you have more time to plan the transition (or once you get a stop-gap in place move to this), consider VoIP services like Dialpad, Twilio, and Skype. (We’ve used both Dialpad and Twilio over the years at Fractured Atlas, and have used Skype to make international calls when our previous phone system didn’t allow.)
Hopefully, your current phone option allows you at least the ability to forward lines to other numbers. This buys you some time. You might even be able to set up Google Voice numbers so that staff doesn’t need to call from — and possibly expose — their personal numbers. Using an interim solution like Skype can allow the company to pay for minutes so that staff doesn’t need to use their personal phone and data plans for work use.
Email for the Virtual Workplace
If you can’t access your work email from a home computer because it uses a specific client that’s computer or physical server-based (and this suggestion doesn’t create a security breach), consider creating a work-adjacent email that you can use to correspond with people. And, if it’s an option, have your work email forward to that address for the time being. Create something like FA.TimCynova@gmail.com (which is a completely fake email address that I just made up here for illustrative purposes), but one that you can use until a better solution is found.
Security in Virtual Offices
Be mindful of where you’re working, who’s around, what you’re sending over a (possibly unsecured) internet connection, and who might be listening to you “read back that donor’s credit card information” in the coffee shop (Hi, everyone within 15 feet of me in this Starbucks).
If you’re out and about, consider getting and using a MiFi. Or, at least get one for those who do the most sensitive work like access your organization’s bank accounts. You can also use a VPN. Some to consider include: ProtonVPN and Mulvad. A piece of advice from our Senior DevOps Engineer Andrew Hanson about selecting a VPN is to do a Google News search for the one you plan on using to see if there’s anything that might concern you about the specific service provider (e.g., recent data breaches, etc.).
If you’re going to be working from a laptop in various public spaces consider getting a privacy screen like this or this. If you’ve ever sat in the aisle seat on a bus, train, or plane, you most likely have noticed just how easy it is to read someone’s laptop screen who’s sitting even five rows in front of you.
Also, so it’s explicit, consider the privacy of your staff’s personal information. I’ve mentioned personal phone numbers and email addresses here as two examples. Home addresses are another. It’s the organization’s responsibility to help protect and keep employee information confidential. Consider the scenario where everyone gets along fine now — that donor is great! — and then things sour or there’s a falling out. Proactively help people think about protecting their information.
Moving Money in a Virtual Office
One of the things I hear quite frequently is that remote work doesn’t work for every position. That’s completely true. There are some positions that simply can’t do the work they need to do without being in the physical space. I’m thinking about stagehands and building maintenance staff right now, but there are many others.
However, I think in many cases that is used as an excuse for not putting in the thought to discover new ways of working and alternative processes. For instance, I’ve stopped counting the number of times people have said their finance teams can’t work fully remote because they need to be near check stock and the check stock is kept in an office safe. Meaning, part of their job is to sit in the office and feed checks into a printer so someone can physically sign them.
Turning a finance role virtual requires a bit more planning and intentionality than other roles might, but we live in the 21st century. You don’t need check stock, you just need a way of moving money. And with that reframing, a whole host of options become available. Bank checks created and sent through your online banking portal. Wire transfers. Heck, in an emergency you could use PayPal, Venmo, or Zelle. As I can feel our Controller’s head starting to explode due to my last three suggestions, bank checks through the bank website often affords you the ability to institute important controls like daily limits, secondary approvals, etc., so start there first.
You could also explore using an application like Expensify. We started using Expensify a few years ago, and now all of our staff reimbursements are processed through it. Each of us have a separate, secure account that we pair with our personal banking information. When we have expenses we upload receipts to provide the necessary back-up, and within a day or two have the money sitting in our personal bank account. Expensify works well, but is probably one of the items to do after you’ve figured out the above, and doesn’t work for everyone.
This by no means the full list of how to be an entirely and solely virtual organization from a tech standpoint. (Our Chief Technology Officer Shawn Anderson will be writing more about those shortly.) Some of the things on the non-tech extended playlist include, what happens with your mail and how do you process and deposit checks in a way that doesn’t include any staff member? For that, you can use “caging services” to receive, process, and deposit checks, and companies like Earth Class Mail to act as the address where you receive company mail that then is automatically emailed or physically redirected to you, wherever you might be at the time.
Remote Work Doesn’t Suit Everyone
Now you have the basic technology infrastructure and processes in place.
But this last section isn’t about that. It’s a reminder that we need to remember we’re human beings working with other human beings and to be human. The tech is the relatively easy part. However, we’ve spent decades upon decades figuring out how to work together in a physical space and now, seemingly or literally overnight, we’re working distributed from each other. (Check out this piece and this podcast episode if you want to dive into that more).
Some high performing, amazingly talented people just can’t work in a virtual setting. They’ve found that it just doesn’t suit their style of working and what they need in a workplace to be successful and thrive. Many in this group have actually given it a solid try; more than just those few days they worked from home because they were sick.
This requires some personal introspection and managerial understanding. It requires us to meditate on when and how we do our best work. What do we need to feel supported. For some of us, we just find the Venn diagram doesn’t overlap enough with the virtual workplace in ways where we can be successful in that environment over the long term. Related, it requires managers to understand that some amazing people are unable to work remotely for reasons that they might not want, feel comfortable, or should feel at all obligated to discuss with their supervisor.
Explore this series about how others approach their virtual work experience
When we finally made the last leg of our transition into being a fully virtual company we acknowledged that not everyone would be with us when we got to “the other side.” Some people opted out in advance because they knew it wasn’t the best environment in which they could thrive; others gave it a try but found it didn’t, or couldn’t, work. It’s a different way of working than what most people signed up for. As leaders, it’s worth pausing to acknowledge that this changes the unwritten employee/employer contract that governs the employment relationship for many of us.
Intentionality
The virtual workplace is different than the physical workplace, and not just for the obvious reasons. It’s a different experience and, to be successful in the long run, it requires intentionality and thought and iterating and adjusting and reinventing and retooling things we seldom give a second thought to if we’re in a physical space. What does a conference room or whiteboard or cubicle allow us to do? What does having a physical separation between work and the rest of our lives do? And in the absence of those things, how can we capture the essence — the positive essence — of them in a virtual setting?
Earlier in my career I worked for dance companies. Something that the cultural sector has been wrestling with for years is the role of technology in disseminating performance. From a tech standpoint, it’s relatively simple these days to live stream a performance, especially if image and audio quality aren’t primary concerns. But a piece of art created to be performed in a theater with a live audience often falls flat when streamed online, even with the best video crew filming it. Art experiences that are designed to be experienced online first (or solely) are far more successful at making the connection with their intended audiences.
So, the above list is essentially the live streaming version of a performance. If you can’t be there in person, and really want to see it, it’s better than nothing. But to truly level up to be a work of art it takes approaching it from a place of deconstructive discovery. What is the essence of this thing? What are we trying to achieve? How can we create and craft structures to support it so that it can thrive?
And that my friends is where things really get exciting and awesome and liberating. Many of our cultural sector organizations are filled with creative administrators working to fulfill missions — putting incredible art on the stage, the screen, the public space — in environments that have changed little since the 1980s. The workplace is operated with some of the least adaptive and resilient structures that exist. This is that moment in our lifetime — *ring ring* the phone’s for you — born out of necessity and uncertainty and fear, when we get to unleash and direct the creativity we possess internally to craft workplaces that fit how and where we want to work, and in ways that allow people to thrive. Godspeed in your journey.
For those with questions about how to turn your physical team into a successful, creative, collaborative virtual team, we’ll be offering several webinars hosted by both People Operations staff and also Engineering staff.
Other questions? Hit me up here.
Tim Cynova is a leader, HR consultant, and educator dedicated to co-creating anti-racist and anti-oppressive workplaces through using human-centered organizational design. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR, trained mediator, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., on faculty at New York’s The New School and Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and for the past twelve years served as COO and then Co-CEO of the largest association of artists, creatives, and makers in the U.S.
The Behavior Dashboard: An Interview with its Designers
By: Tim Cynova // Published: March 6, 2020
A few years ago, the Fractured Atlas People team began an ambitious project lead by Jillian Wright and Pallavi Sharma, and greatly aided by our colleague Nicola Carpenter. They set out to workshop a concept for something that we hoped would help us be able to make more objective performance assessment decisions, particularly when it came to promotion decisions. We were trying to figure out if there was a way to assess performance so we would know what differentiated, say, an Associate-level staff member from a Specialist-level one, without the common and error-prone proxy, the passage of time.
After tons of research, piloting, iterating, adjusting, and an organization-wide beta test, we discovered that some parts weren’t going to live up to expectations, but that others yielded a tool we now refer to as The Behavior Dashboard.
I recently sat down with Jillian and Pallavi to discuss how the Dashboard came about, how it’s used, and their still outstanding questions and hope for its future. The podcast episode is linked below, or if you prefer your podcasts in transcript format, that’s also below.
The Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, and RSS Feed. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes to help others discover the podcast.
[Transcript from the above podcast interview with Pallavi Sharma and Jillian Wright.]
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I’m Tim Cynova and welcome to Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., a podcast about, well that. On this episode, we’re talking tools. Specifically, we’re talking about a tool called the behavior dashboard. The behavior dashboard was developed by the team at Fractured Atlas to help staff articulate the often murky areas of behaviors and quote unquote soft skills that differentiate, say, what’s necessary for someone to succeed and thrive as a senior director versus someone in a director position. Or what are the behaviors you most need to see from someone in the CEO role and how might those be similar or different from someone in an admin associate role? Spoiler alert, it’s not just the passage of time. I talk with Pallavi Sharma and Jillian Wright about the journey they took that helped lead the creation of this tool, what it is exactly, how it can be used, and what questions and future hopes they still have for it.
If you want to follow along at home, you can download a copy of Fractured Atlas’s behavior dashboard from our website at workshouldntsuck.co. So let’s get going. Jillian and Pallavi, welcome to the podcast.
Pallavi Sharma:
Thanks for having us.
Jillian Wright:
Thanks for having us. Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
So you both were the driving forces behind the creation of a tool used at Fractured Atlas called the behavior dashboard. Jillian, do you want to get us started with what is this dashboard and why did you two set out to create it?
Jillian Wright:
Sure. So the behavior dashboard is essentially the articulation of the knowledge, skills, abilities, this sort of sometimes called the soft skills that we feel like people need to be successful at the organization.
Pallavi Sharma:
And I guess if I had to talk about why we created it, it actually started during a performance review process and as with most organizations, we had a pretty traditional process where we focused more on metrics and key result areas and kind of job based performance. In going through one of those formative evaluation processes, talking to a number of different members of the team, it became quite apparent that we were missing something very critical, and that was stuff beyond just work performance and metrics and things related to how they were connecting with other people in the organization, what their behavior was like, what were the skills and abilities they were displaying that went over and above just work knowledge that was helping them and the team and the organization kind of do better. It also became more important as we started talking about growth and promotions and growth in professional development.
Pallavi Sharma:
As you move higher in an organization, job knowledge and specific understanding of the work that you have to do starts to become more standard. Most people at a certain level have the requisite knowledge to do a job. What sets people apart then is the so called soft skills, the abilities, the team dynamics, the behavior that makes them stars or superstars in an organization, and it felt like we were missing that piece in our evaluation process.
Tim Cynova:
How did you start to identify what are those things and how do we perhaps map this in a way that people could then use, either with the conversations between someone and their supervisor or to look at and think, “I’m at this level and how do I get to that level if it’s maybe not just the number of years that I stayed in a role.”
Pallavi Sharma:
I think this is where Jillian’s expertise and just the amount of work that she put into this whole process comes in, because when I started thinking about this requirement through the performance evaluation process, after the performance evaluation process, as I started to talk about it, I mean, what I had literally was a list on a document of some things that I thought were important. And again, these came out while I was having these conversations. It was helpful to capture them in the moment, but clearly what I had was a very rudimentary starting point. And then it was after that that Jillian and I started talking about what happens with this and then I’ll let Jillian jump in, because it went from like a basic, it’s like riding a unicycle to going full Concorde, is the analogy I’d give you, because where she took it from there, it was just like a place I never imagined was possible.
Jillian Wright:
Yeah, I feel like I saw a missed opportunity here, but being able to articulate this could be such a great management tool in a way that people could really start to see sort of what the future looks like. I just … I got really excited about it. I started doing a lot of research and I thought, this must be a solved problem. There must be some sort of tools or a set process or something out there that exists that we can just use and adapt and see if we can make it work for Fractured Atlas. I did a lot of research and I found some things, but nothing was quite sticking or nothing felt like, oh that’s really easily applicable. And it made me think even more, gosh, this is really something the field needs or something that the field could use. Yeah, I think Pallavi and I started just kind of thinking who’s been really successful at our organizations and thinking about we have really strong articulated core values, but we don’t have how those show up, and let’s try to figure out how to articulate how those show up at Fractured Atlas.
Tim Cynova:
You identified a need, you identified that there aren’t great tools out there to assist with this. How is the dashboard supposed to work? We’ve talked about a dashboard, but for listeners, what does it look like? How do you use it?
Jillian Wright:
First I want to say that when we built the dashboard, when we were thinking about these skills and knowledge and things that people need to be successful, we really tried to think across the organization, not just specific to a department. When we built it, we tried to think about this should not be a carbon copy of what our different titles of the organization are. It’s not just about associates are this, this is this. It’s really about the growth of your career and how things show up within that context.
Pallavi Sharma:
Yeah, I think if I had to frame it differently, I think it’s kind of an increasing level of impact in those areas, which is usually something that comes with time and experience and frequent usage of those skills and behaviors, and as folks have more exposure to the opportunities to use those behaviors, they usually become better and better at it and it manifests very differently. It’s kind of width and breadth and depth of impact, I guess in each of those areas, which doesn’t necessarily directly tie into kind of seniority in years, but again, like I said, I think more in terms of how many opportunities the person might have had to exhibit or use those skills and abilities that they had. To Jillian’s other point, it kind of crossed functional areas as well as levels of depth of experience that different team members may have.
Jillian Wright:
I think we also tried to be really mindful of that point too, Pallavi as you were mentioning, about seniority. It’s not a number. It’s not like you have to have done this for X years to be able to meet this sort of impact or have this sort of impact. We really wanted to think more globally about opportunities that you’ve had or ways you’ve been able to make that work show up.
Pallavi Sharma:
Yeah, which was also an interesting exercise, because as we obviously … As this behavior dashboard was developed, we tested it. I mean, and kind of whether it was internally or just thinking through it, it also becomes a management tool in that if you believe that certain skills or behaviors are necessary or valuable in a role, then you need to create the opportunities for team members to exhibit and learn those skills and abilities. And that actually became one of the interesting conversations we started having, is it’s not just about whether they exhibit certain behaviors or abilities. Do they have the opportunity to? Did we create the opportunity for them to use them? Because that’s what develops expertise in anyone.
Tim Cynova:
The tool that you created actually has four different tiers. One, two, three, four, with one being sort of base level. If you … When you enter the organization, this is what you should be able to do at say an associate level across the board. And then four being an executive leadership you need to exhibit all of the skills in one, two, three and also four. They don’t map directly two tiers at Fractured Atlas. There’s some … You need to do 3.5 or two to 3.5 in this area, and then others depending on what the column is. You have five different columns that cover expertise, what you need to know is number one or listed first, manifestation, how you do things is the second column, collaboration, how you work with others, leadership, how you lead and inspire, and vision, how you see things. Those are the four rows and then the five columns and then you two mapped each one of the roles, associates, specialist, associate director, director, senior director, sort of C level to all of those across the organization. How did you come up with those from your exploration? Why did you choose expertise, manifestation, collaboration, leadership and vision? Was this divinely inspired right out of the gate or did you like, okay, that’s not exactly … We’re missing a hole here or something like that?
Jillian Wright:
During some of the research process, I was able to see other examples of how other organizations were articulating these things. Some of these things are things that really resonated from that, thought were super applicable to things that we think people need to have when they are growing and having growth at the organization. Yeah, it was certainly a many, many, many times revised tool, and it continues honestly to be something that we look at, we assess, we think, hm, is this still what we should have for that?
Pallavi Sharma:
To put this in perspective, I mean, we have what, 20 boxes, grid boxes in this and the process took us a year maybe, more. It was definitely an iterative process. I mean, it didn’t just like suddenly appear one day. There was a lot of back and forth and a lot of evaluation and review and modification of each element of a grid. Definitely a long, well thought out or thoughtful process. Well thought out, history will tell us whether it was well thought out, but it was definitely thoughtful.
Tim Cynova:
I remember specifically you two were wrestling with, during that year as you’re testing and seeing where the holes might be, the distinction between a director and a senior director. In a lot of organizations, it just means time. The difference between a director and a senior director is that the senior director has been working in the field for 15 years and the director has been working for five. And you two were really wrestling with, no, that’s not. It’s not just time. Some people jump right into their careers and have the behaviors, the knowledge skills and abilities to be a senior director. That’s not necessarily time. Can you talk a bit about maybe that example or other things that you wrestled with that were particularly thorny to boil down to? What are the behaviors that make that distinction?
Jillian Wright:
Well, something I’d like to say too is that, so visualize in your mind each of these boxes and each of them have sort of a subheader. As you’re talking about that, Tim, it made me think of this one bullet point that we have. We went around on it Pallavi, and I think we came to a good place. Under manifestation, which is how you do things, a level three we have advising, and the bullet point that I’m thinking about specifically is this point that says, “You are not afraid to dive in and make mistakes when faced with the unknown.” And we felt like that was a pretty critical skill that people needed to be successful. People can make a lot, maybe it could be this way, but actually just diving in and doing it and not being afraid to make a mistake and just do the work. We felt that was a really important point.
Pallavi Sharma:
And the way that kind of showed up to kind of answer the question about senior directors versus directors is when it comes to opportunities, again to exhibit behavior or having had the chance. And sometimes it really is about how long you’ve been working, because the opportunities don’t all show up in one year. They show up over the course of time and as you spend more time in a working environment, you get more opportunities to exhibit that behavior. And so that ability to dive into the unknown, kind of this comfort with ambiguity, seemed to be really critical, because some of them at a senior director level or a C-level, not only has to be comfortable with that for themselves, but be able to drive the team to be comfortable with that. And that experience often does not come early in folks career, or not the experience, but the ability to manage that experience and handle that experience and show success in managing that experience outside of yourself.
Pallavi Sharma:
Managing ambiguity for yourself or within your role could be easy, but managing it for a larger group of people is where the challenge comes in. And folks who would have had that opportunity tend to be folks who have been, unless you’ve been in a startup environment or something where this kind of stuff gets thrown at you all the time. But even then, that tends to be more of an individualistic kind of achievement. I think that’s a very specific example, but it kind of speaks to the back and forth we had to put in in order to make sure that we were not only recognizing skills and abilities that are somewhat unique and maybe don’t show up that often, but also are critical to the organization and we need to be aware of as folks come into the team.
Tim Cynova:
I remember one of the challenges that you’re wrestling with was both the frequency of being able to do that thing, but also the calibration maybe of what that thing is when you’re in an associate role versus what that thing is when you’re in a director role. You may actually be doing that thing, but it could be different. And so there was this, how do you actually articulate it in a way so that it’s properly, I guess calibrated so that there is a progression.
Pallavi Sharma:
I think that’s where the subheaders actually come in and again, without actually seeing the dashboard or having it in front of you, and I would say please go to our website and check it out. I think it’s on there, the Fractured Atlas website, the subheaders actually do talk about the progression. If you take leadership, for example, as one of the columns, which is how you lead and inspire, level one talks about the self. Talks about how you show leadership for yourself, you hold yourself accountable for your own decisions, you share, you raise questions, et cetera. Then you get to team, where it’s just not you, but it’s maybe your immediate team that you’re working with. Then you go to community, which is a little bit broader. And then finally, at level four, you’re impacting the whole sector. It really is not necessarily about how much you manifest it, but as I said, right in the beginning, it’s about impact. How many people … What breadth of impact are you having with that behavior or in what you do and the kinds of decisions and choices you’re making. And I think that was a very, very critical part of how the progression was defined.
Tim Cynova:
How is this tool actually used then? Everyone in Fractured Atlas has access to this. What does it look like when it’s being used?
Jillian Wright:
We feel strongly that professional development conversations and opportunities should not just be stagnant to once a year. You only talk about it at one time and it’s queued up right with your self assessment and in the new year starting. We’ve implemented it in a number of different ways. We do use it during the annual self assessment process, which happens for us every summer, but we also have embedded it into when we bring new people on board. When new staff start, they go through a core curriculum program that we’ve developed at Fractured Atlas, and they really start to learn about this tool, and we hope that they have set conversations as they begin their tenure with us at the one and three and six month marker, and we have created some sort of targeted questions that help managers sort of talk through the dashboard with new folks, talk about where they’re fitting on the dashboard, what skills and opportunities can come up to help them sort of grow in areas where they need to grow. We also use this tool in our performance improvement plan process, otherwise known as PIPPs. When somebody is having a challenge with one of the behaviors that we think are really critical, we can really point to this tool and say, “This is where we can help you develop. How are we going to do that?” And kind of rally around some really clear guidelines on what those things are.
Pallavi Sharma:
Yeah. The other thing, I think we encourage managers to use behavior dashboard more frequently. Again, to Jillian’s point, this shouldn’t be something that comes up only at formal check-ins or formal evaluation timeframes. It’s something that should be used on an ongoing basis. Whenever behavior either manifests itself or doesn’t manifest itself when it should, this should be a conversation, and the behavior dashboard is a great tool to use to say, “Okay, this is what we’re looking for and you either manifested it or didn’t.” And then helping team members learn from that experience, give them the guidelines, the guidance, the help, the support they need to start exhibiting the behavior or become better at exhibiting the behavior or create more opportunities for them to exhibit that behavior. There’s a number of different ways, so it’s not just performance improvement, but if we find someone who’s a budding star, because they’re showing signs of using some of these skills and abilities at a level where maybe it’s not expected of them, then the idea would be how do we create more opportunities so we can help them grow and develop and maybe contribute to the organization more as well as just grow in their own development and understanding of their professional behavior and life.
Tim Cynova:
I know when this tool was originally envisioned, there was an additional piece to this that was going to … Hopefully, the idea was I believe, objectively assess performance in sort of a Myers-Briggs type, staff member completes this survey, a supervisor completes this survey based on where the person is in the role. It maps both of those things to the behavior dashboard, and then while we could see it’s perfectly calibrated, everyone … They are where they need to be for their role and their understanding of what they do is the same as what the … Or their abilities and behaviors are directly in line with their supervisors. That is not a currently a piece of this.
Jillian Wright:
Yeah. One thing that we really tried to address with the dashboard, with this questionnaire that we were building, was bias. Everybody has biases. Let’s try to figure out a way to much more objectively assess where people fall across the organization. It’s a challenge. It’s a challenge to calibrate results of that sort of questionnaire, it’s a challenge to articulate a soft skill in a way that’s going to be read the same by everyone. And I think that’s kind of where the challenge … Where we came up against some challenges.
Pallavi Sharma:
I can see Jillian’s trying to find a very dramatic way to say it. But I mean, it’s in the name. I mean, how do you put hard numbers to a soft skill? I mean, that’s effectively the place we ended up. Not even hard numbers, but hard data to a soft skill. And by definition, all of these traits and behaviors, and the fact that they were filled in by individuals, there was a difference in understanding. I mean, folks just read the questions differently. They interpreted how they had used it or manifested differently. I mean to go back to what something that we talked about earlier, which is kind of the incremental impact of what you’re doing, until we started to get more clear on the importance of the breadth of impact that someone was having in manifesting this behavior, a lot of folks thought they were at the highest level of manifestation.
Pallavi Sharma:
I mean, everyone was ending up at level four, because they were doing great. That was true, but it was true for the context of their role and the work that they were doing, and it was hard for individual team members to calibrate what their impact was in the context of the overall organization or the sector at large. And so even though we tried to figure out ways that we could find some way to differentiate between those impact levels, again there didn’t seem to be a quantifiable way to do that. It also felt like that’s where the expertise we needed maybe was different. What was built was built by business leaders, human resources and people ops leaders. And then this questionnaire kind of gets into the ultra high level market research type question.
Jillian Wright:
The people analytics.
Pallavi Sharma:
Yeah. Yeah. And I don’t think … We didn’t think it was a necessary component at that point to kind of invest in building out the super sophisticated tool. We first wanted to make sure the behavior dashboard, as it was created, was useful and helpful for everyone in the organization. But you never know. Maybe that’s something we can explore in the future.
Tim Cynova:
You two spend a lot of time with this, thinking about it, piloting it, iterating on it. What are some of the behaviors on this list that you were able to articulate that you’re like, these are core to people being successful in their roles and maybe just their professional careers?
Jillian Wright:
A couple things that I think are really interesting is when you think about leadership, you always think about otherness, like how you’re impacting other people, but I really liked how through the conversation in the vetting, we came to this idea of self-leadership. How can you really show up and inspire sort of at an individual impact level, if you will. Being a positive influence, sharing your thoughts clearly, even when they’re not popular. Holding yourself accountable for your decisions, like these are just things that are really valuable and might not be having a sector wide impact, but are really key to a positive environment in the organization.
Pallavi Sharma:
I would say much of this is contextual. When we look at Fractured Atlas as an organization, we are an entrepreneurial organization. We are always challenging ourselves. There’s a lot of change that happens with that. I mean, we challenge what we do, we challenge how we do it, which was how we ended up at the behavior dashboard. Change is an important piece of what happens in the organization, and with change comes ambiguity, uncertainty. And one of the things that I felt was really hard to kind of quantify or put into words, articulate … Thank you, I’m having trouble articulating that, are things around comfort with ambiguity. As we mentioned earlier, you’re not afraid to dive in and make mistakes when faced with the unknown. You also have to motivate teams. I mean, it’s not just about you. You motivate teams in the organization, you facilitate safe and constructive communication.
Pallavi Sharma:
And again with change and ambiguity comes stress and discomfort with lots of people. I mean, everyone’s … Nobody loves change. How do you kind of bring the team with you? How do you manage conflict? How do you get people on board with the idea? There was a number of things around that that I felt like were really relevant to Fractured Atlas as an organization and we hadn’t articulated that in a way or checked in with team members during that time with us on how they were handling that or how they were helping others handle that. And I think bringing that piece in really helped in some of the conversations we had after.
Tim Cynova:
One of the things we haven’t mentioned yet is how this helped in the job interview process. Things like comfort with ambiguity and constant change, we knew those things were part of sort of the Fractured Atlas environment, but … And we had ways of asking questions or doing scenarios around them, but it wasn’t mapped specifically to, in a specialist role, this is going to be key so that we could then create scenarios around that specific thing or questions or figure out how to dive into that, to then go a little bit deeper when we were interviewing people to get more understanding, more data, if you will, around does this candidate have those things that we know you need to be successful in this role?
Jillian Wright:
I totally agree, and I think that you have such a small window of time in an interview process to really learn about somebody and if you can be really clear about yes, these are the behaviors, you can’t see their work product. What you can see is how they might embody these behaviors based on scenarios.
Pallavi Sharma:
Yeah. In fact, one of the things that happened very quickly, not just after we finished the dashboard, but as the dashboard sort of started coming together in a much more cohesive way, is we started changing questions along the interview process. I mean, the programs team had a number of hires that happened after the dashboard was created and with every round, we got better and better at modifying the questions and making them more tailored to the specific role that we were hiring for, and there were a lot more questions around what if scenario planning or giving them examples of situations that they might face in the organization and in a certain role and giving them the opportunity to explain how they would approach it with the hope of kind of eliciting out of them the kinds of behaviors we might be looking for. We changed questions I think across the board all the way from associates to senior director level, we added in more questions that allowed us to kind of hone in on the things we believed would be most important in that role. Not just, did you achieve your results, key results in your job, but did you ever struggle with the team? And that really helped. That was, I think, a huge advantage in the hiring process overall.
Tim Cynova:
Are there any other things you still want to explore with the tool?
Pallavi Sharma:
I’d say I think that we need to be using it more. I would really say … One, it’s a new tool. Folks are not used to using it. We’ve definitely gotten better at going back to it when the time is right, but I think we need more active usage of it on an ongoing basis at all points, like we talked about earlier, in the hiring process, in every kind of evaluation along the way, in any conversation with team members, I’d say that’s probably the biggest piece of it.
Tim Cynova:
Jillian?
Jillian Wright:
We’re constantly iterating, so maybe taking another sort of fresh … Continuing to take a fresh look at how we’re articulating things and making sure that they still really mean what we want them to mean and are articulating as clearly as we can, what we still think is really important.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, the ability to change this … The usage of this into a habit. That’s not like, oh, we have that and then, oh, where is that? It’s like, no, this is just something that in regular courses of conversation, as we do with our programs and services, there is constant iterating. How do you make professional development and growth just a habit of the conversations that you have so that you’re setting people up, yourself included, for further growth inside the organization and outside the organization, but also making sure the things that we need to do are not being forgotten in the urgent versus the important rush of the usual day.
Pallavi Sharma:
Yeah. I remember when we were talking about how to encourage folks to use this more often, I recommend it to the programs team that they make this their screensaver or windows or the background, their laptop background. I’m pretty sure nobody did that, but … Including me. I’m as much at fault on that as anybody else. But yeah, I think really making this … That’s also how we would be able to evolve it. I mean, it’s … With usage is when we’ll be able to get more regular and consistent feedback, which will allow us to evolve it. I think the usage is not only helpful to make sure that we’re constantly reminding ourselves and each other about the behaviors that are needed to be successful that would allow folks to grow in the organization, but it would also be really helpful in ensuring that we have all the right abilities and skills captured and if any changes need to happen, that’s how it’s going to happen, from feedback.
Tim Cynova:
What advice do you have for other organizations who might be listening and think, oh, that’s a really interesting thing. I’d like to explore that, see that, maybe not the year and a half that went into developing this for us, but with the organizations who are thinking those are actually really great questions for us to wrestle with and to articulate, and maybe we don’t have this tool, but what kind of advice do you have for them?
Pallavi Sharma:
Well, as they say, smart person learns from other’s mistakes. Learn from our learning, not from our mistakes. I mean, the tool is there and it’s been shared and other organizations should definitely look at what’s available out there, because there may be something that comes close to what they need, but guaranteed that nothing outside there is going to meet their need exactly. I think modification and application to the specifics of your own organization is really key, so even if you find something that you think is close to what you need, take a very good, hard look at it and make sure it really maps to your core values, what’s important in the different roles within your organization and what you’re trying to achieve. Don’t assume that it’ll work as is. And again, as we do, iterate. Start somewhere and then build on it so you don’t have to take a year and a half. You could jump in with something that’s available, maybe tweak it a little bit and start sooner, and then build on it as you go along. Know that it’s an experiment. It doesn’t have to be something that’s set in stone from day one.
Jillian Wright:
Yeah, and I would just add that, I mean, we started with a list that Pallavi just kind of wrote on the back of a napkin. I don’t … If you just started thinking like, okay, what are successful people at our organization doing differently than other people? How do we articulate those things? And just really went from there and yeah, I think that would be sort of a good starting point. People were looking for ideas.
Tim Cynova:
What are your closing thoughts on the topic? Closing thoughts on professional development and growth and tools that work and organizations working to support people where they are and where they need to be and where they want to go and what they want to be when they grow up.
Pallavi Sharma:
I would say, on a purely intellectual level, this was a really fun exercise. We don’t often get to do things like this. Mostly your life is just consumed by tactical things that you’re doing on an everyday basis, you’re focused on your job and this was something completely new and not done before and so it was an exciting process to go through. It gave me an opportunity to work with Jillian on something completely different. For a change, we weren’t looking at finance numbers, and that was really great, because it also gave us a chance to get to know each other in a very different way. From that perspective, it was just a fascinating process to go through. But I think for me it also just reinforces, and I don’t think anyone should … I think a lot of folks as they’re entering their professional careers, and even along the way, they’re always thinking about, oh, what course should I do? What further degree should I do? And where’s this Excel class and where’s this writing class that I want to do? And there’s not enough talk put into what are the soft skills or the behaviors or values that I want to hold and exhibit in my professional life?
Pallavi Sharma:
And I would say, it’s never too early to start. I mean, the sooner you start, the more experienced and expert you’re going to be at these skills and abilities. I would say, I just wish more folks would be thinking about it early in their career and work on it at every step along the way.
Jillian Wright:
Yeah, I totally agree. I feel like this was a really exciting opportunity to help people think about their career path that they’re on. And really, it makes a lot of good organizational sense, because when people feel like they have an understanding of what’s expected and where they’re growing and how that aligns with the organization, they stay much more engaged and then I think that makes the work better, people feel better. Just a win-win.
Tim Cynova:
Jillian and Pallavi, it’s always a pleasure getting to spend time with you, working with you. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Jillian Wright:
Thank you.
Pallavi Sharma:
Thank you for having us.
Tim Cynova:
If you’ve enjoyed the conversation or are just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review in iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up or a five stars or phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. If you didn’t enjoy this chat, please tell someone about it who you don’t like as much. Until next time, thanks for listening.
Tim Cynova is a leader, HR consultant, and educator dedicated to co-creating anti-racist and anti-oppressive workplaces through using human-centered organizational design. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR, trained mediator, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., on faculty at New York’s The New School and Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and for the past twelve years served as COO and then Co-CEO of the largest association of artists, creatives, and makers in the U.S.
Assessing a Four Person Non-Hierarchical Leadership Team
The Fractured Atlas leadership team in 2019: Tim Cynova, Lauren Ruffin, Shawn Anderson, Pallavi Sharma
By: Tim Cynova // Published: October 9, 2019
Challenge
How does a Board of Directors (re)craft its annual assessment of the CEO when that role is filled by a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team? This was precisely the challenge the Fractured Atlas Board faced in early 2019. Below, in detail, we describe the process we crafted to answer this question.
Quick recap
Fractured Atlas has officially been operating with a shared, non-hierarchical leadership team since January 2018. Functionally, we’ve been doing it for about a year longer than that. In advance of Fractured Atlas founder Adam Huttler leaving the organization to become CEO of Exponential Creativity Ventures, staff and board leadership engaged in lengthy conversations about what succession plans might look like. Ultimately, we decided that instead of replacing the CEO “one-for-one,” we would explore a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team structure. There were multiple reasons why we landed on this model. Here’s more about that decision and how the whole thing works.
The Annual Assessment
One of the core responsibilities for a Board of Directors is to assess the performance of its chief executive. Performance appraisal is an area of HR that even those who do it daily find more art than science. Introduce a volunteer board, who might not possess this specific expertise, further complicate things in that they only engage episodically with its CEO, and you potentially have all the ingredients for potential disaster. Now call it non-hierarchical *shared* leadership among four staff members, and things get quite a bit more complicated. (And to make things more complicated for ourselves at Fractured Atlas, we specifically designed this team structure in a way to avoid a “first among equals” power imbalance.)
With all of this complexity and potential pitfalls at play, it’s one of the reasons why we love our Fractured Atlas board. They, like the staff, relish opportunities to venture into uncharted waters and wrestle with difficult, unusual scenarios. They bring a great deal of wisdom, and perspective, and humility to the table that enables staff and board leadership to truly work in partnership. Because of this, the staff leadership team doesn’t constantly feel like we need to “manage” the board. We’re not spinning information in just the right way to keep the board engaged but, you know, not *too* engaged. It was with this relationship that we set out to design a new shared leadership team assessment.
While we have effectively been operating as a shared leadership team for more than two years now, the *official* one-year anniversary rolled around earlier this year. And with it, the need to assess how well this atypical leadership arrangement was working for us. This prompt lead to multiple conversations between staff and board leadership, and caused us to question the basic premise and purpose of a performance evaluation: how might we can construct one that best suits our needs? What does an assessment for this kind of CEO arrangement look like? Even more fundamental, what’s the purpose and value of a leadership assessment? What’s the value of an annual assessment to the individual staff members? To this team? To the board, other staff, and the organization? How does this track to us fulfilling (or not fulfilling) our organization’s mission and purpose?
We surfaced several key criteria from these discussions:
We wanted to collect voices from around the organization.
We wanted to assess the four people collectively as the CEO function.
We wanted to lay the groundwork for future assessments.
Each of the four individuals on the leadership team oversee an aspect of Fractured Atlas, and they operate as the CEO of sorts for their department (i.e., Programs, Engineering, External Relations, and FinPOps (Finance, People, Operations)). We wanted this assessment structured in a way to evaluate the group as a whole. How well is this group functioning as the CEO of Fractured Atlas? Not the individuals. The leadership team makes decisions of consequence as one entity. It’s not Shawn making this big decision and Lauren making that one. We didn’t want the assessment to be about how well is Tim doing in his job, or Lauren, or Pallavi or Shawn, and then we roll it all up into a team. We wanted it to evaluate the “CEO” as this leadership team configuration. We know from research and experience, that a team can all be comprised of individual “B-level players” but function as an “A-level team.” That’s what should matter to the organization. Similarly there are plenty of examples in life where a collection of A-level players barely manage to function as a C-level team. [Insert your highly-compensated heartbreaking hometown sports team here.]
We settled on a three-pronged approach:
(Part 1) A modified 360-degree review collecting information from board members and from staff who had direct knowledge from working with the leadership team. Ultimately, six staff members and all of our board members were interviewed for roughly 60-minutes each over Zoom video. (For this part, we partnered with the terrific Kelly Kienzle of Open Circle Coaching.)
(Part 2) A way for the leadership team to assess its own team performance. (For this part, we used Patrick Lencioni’s Team Assessment framework.)
(Part 3) A way to capture an explicit professional development component for each of us. For example, in evaluating the four-person team as a single entity, we were omitting individual feedback that would be useful to each person’s professional growth. (For this part, we engaged in a confidential meeting for only the four team members. More on the structure below.)
Part 1: The Modified 360
For the initial assessment of the shared team, we felt it was important for people to weigh in who had direct knowledge of the group and their activities. We wanted people who worked with the team, saw the interactions firsthand, engaged with them in challenging conversations, and who knew the members for longer than just a few months. (In future years, we aspire to simply pull names out of a hat to pick people.)
The objective of conducting these team input interviews was to receive input from colleagues regarding the leadership team model’s areas of strengths, as well as how the model could be improved. Kelly conducted live, confidential interviews to gather suggestions for improvement that would enhance both individual performance and the performance of the team overall. Interviewee input was used to help assess both the effectiveness of this leadership model as well as the leadership team itself.
Her guidance to interviewees included:
Interviews of 60 minutes will be conducted with team members, direct and non-direct reports, and board members. Interviews will be conducted via Zoom video.
All information collected during these interviews will be held confidentially. No direct quotes will be taken and no names will be attributed to any comments.
A minimum of 3 interviewees expressing the same sentiment on a given issue is required to ensure confidentiality and to identify common themes in the feedback.
These common themes will be collected into a Summary Report that will be shared directly with the leadership team, the Board Chair (Russell Willis Taylor) and possibly other Board members.
In advance of the interviews, Kelly worked with the staff and board leadership to craft the following prompts that would be used to guide her conversations:
What are three words you would use to describe the effectiveness of this leadership model?
For what would you hesitate to rely on the leadership team?
What are the greatest collective strengths of the leadership team (not of the individuals)?
What would you prioritize as the leadership team’s greatest opportunities for development?
How could the leadership team foster a better working relationship with you personally or the organization as a whole?
To establish a baseline for the performance of this model: “How effective is this 4-person model in leading the organization as compared to the single CEO model when Adam Huttler was leading Fractured Atlas?”
Following these interviews, Kelly processed the information and compiled it into a 31-page document. That document was delivered to the full board, and discussed during a 90-minute Zoom meeting with the leadership team, Kelly, and board chair.
Part 2: The Team Assessment
The first part of the process collected external perceptions on the leadership team. We now needed a way for the four members of the team to assess our group performance. For this we turned to Patrick Lencioni and his infamous business fable The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
Lencioni has developed a 38-question assessment that team members complete to rate the group on his five dimensions: Trust, Conflict, Commitment, Accountability, Results. Each question is rated on a 1-to-5 scale of Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Usually, Always. You tally the individual scores at the end and, voila, there’s a numerical value for each component that maps to how well the team feels its doing. The idea is that teams take this on a regular basis (quarterly, semi-annually, etc.) to track how each component is tracking over time. (We complete this assessment on a semi-annual basis.)
Following this assessment, the leadership team met to discuss our reactions. What were the questions and components where we were all in agreement? What questions and components saw the most variety in answers? Why might that be? How might we approach our work in ways that address some of the more challenging aspects we need to improve in our working relationship?
Part 3: Individual Effectiveness
We felt like the first two parts of the assessments gave us great information about how we were working together as a team. However, we were missing a piece of *individual* feedback that typically occurs during one’s annual assessment: (1) here’s where you’re awesome, and (2) here’s where you can be even awesomer. Because of how we structured this overall assessment to focus on the team entity, we were missing an individual professional development aspect. For this component we again turned to Patrick Lencioni.
Each of the four of us answered the two questions below for each of the other three team members. And while we could have reflected on how we’d answers these questions for ourselves, we didn’t include that this time around.
What is [Lauren/Pallavi/Shawn/Tim’s] single most important behavioral quality that contributes to the strength of the team? (That is, their strength.)
What is [Lauren/Pallavi/Shawn/Tim’s] single most important behavioral quality that detracts from the strength of the team? (That is, their weakness or problematic behavior.)
This part of the process was entirely confidential to just the four members of the leadership team. We’ve cultivated a great deal of trust and understanding between us that enables our team to delve into challenging topics. We felt like if someone else joined this meeting (also done entirely on Zoom video), or if the information was shared outside of that circle, we’d potentially “pulling punches” rather than being open and honest, particularly when it came to the things we each needed to work on improving.
Assessment Themes
In Kelly’s 31-page document she highlighted a number of themes from her conversations. Each of the seventeen items below had a page of supporting comments. Some of these findings support our earlier understanding of shared leadership models from research; some we came to discover once we were actually doing the thing; and still others were new themes to contemplate and explore in the coming year.
The model represents and encourages diversity
The model reflects our values and mission
The model is effective and efficient
The model enables us to be bold
The model generates collaboration
Responsibility is shared and that’s good
Responsibility is shared and that’s difficult — Staff’s concerns
Responsibility is shared and that’s difficult — Board’s concerns
Seeking an answer from 4 people is frustrating and slow (but maybe the quality of the answer is better)
Create more transparency in decision-making
Make it easier to approach leaders
This model is exhausting for the leaders
This model is better than single CEO model
This model is potentially better if we address vulnerabilities
Re-imagine how Leadership and Board work together
Establish how the Board will evaluate the leadership
Need to understand why/how these individuals are so successful together
After she delivered her report, the Leadership Team met via Zoom video with both Kelly and Russell Willis Taylor. We discussed the themes and comments, sought clarification in a few areas, and then chatted about what future work to support this topic might look like.
Reflections from an Outside, Independent Party
At the end of her report, Kelly collated a list of recommendations (expressed by the interviewees) on what has made this model effective. She suggested that they might be of interest to other organizations considering a shared leadership model. A number of these align solidly with our previous research into the “how” of creating high-performing shared leadership configurations.
The leadership team must have:
Trust [Kelly’s Note: Understanding how this trust was created on this team is a key question that this entire process sought to answer. This model’s success appears to be fundamentally tied to the trust that exists between these four leaders and/or their individual capacities for trust. The question is whether that trust is a necessary prerequisite or invaluable end-product of using this model. Most likely, it is a fortunate combination of both.]
Collegiality and mutual respect
Comfort with complexity
A leadership assessment of each participant for key leadership qualities
An organization-over-individual ethos
Deep self-awareness
An understanding and acceptance of the flaws of one another
A representation of the organization’s values in the leadership model, while still maintaining equitable recruitment practices
A representation of strong expertise in each relevant content area of an organization
A representation of the fundamental skills of leadership: idea generation, aligning people and execution
Complete buy-in from all participants impacted by the model
A stronger board leadership, and especially Board Chair, than is otherwise required
A norm of non-crisis scenarios, as effective crisis response would be more difficult under this model.
Where to from here
The 2019 assessment process officially closed with a letter from the Board Chair to the Leadership Team. It memorialized this moment, went into the personnel file, and then we moved on. From the annual assessment, and our continued staff/board work, we identified two items specifically mentioned in the assessment to include in future conversations:
How might the Board assist the Leadership Team with the ongoing capacity challenges that they face as leaders of a very lean organization?
How must the Board’s role change in light of the new leadership arrangements to make sure that it contributes real value to Fractured Atlas?
Time will tell how we modify the 2020 assessment process. As with everything at Fractured Atlas, we’re continually iterating and adjusting to best align what we do with what we need. Stay tuned for that recap piece next year.
Tim Cynova is a leader, HR consultant, and educator dedicated to co-creating anti-racist and anti-oppressive workplaces through using human-centered organizational design. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR, trained mediator, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., on faculty at New York’s The New School and Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and for the past twelve years served as COO and then Co-CEO of the largest association of artists, creatives, and makers in the U.S.
Working From (Almost) Anywhere: Virtual Realities and a Fully Distributed Workplace
Long exposure image I captured after a productive day of writing in this former one-room school house.
By: Tim Cynova // Published: October 2, 2019
Fractured Atlas “Fun” Fact
Of the eight staff members currently at the Senior Director and C-level tiers, none live and work in the same state (Colorado, Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Vermont). And more than half of our Fractured Atlas team now live in 11 U.S. states and 6 countries, with fewer than half spending any time in our sole physical office on 35th Street in New York City.
Why do I mention this here? Because this is all part of our effort to create a thriving workplace — that’s entirely virtual (or distributed) — without any physical office by January 1, 2020. [Note: Our Programs and External Relations teams will be communicating more specifics about how this transition will change some of our processes. Stay tuned.]
We’ve been planning and moving towards this transition for quite some time. Our intrepid board of directors is already there with members living in four countries. Quarterly board meetings take place by Zoom video and see people joining from at least six times zones (with two people usually joining meetings from tomorrow). For our recent meeting, we had members joining at 2AM, 6AM, 8AM, 1PM, 3PM, 5:30PM, and 10PM. (That’s true commitment to an organization when you join a video call at 2AM.)
Fractured Atlas office circa 2009
Vintage Office
The decision to transition to an entirely distributed organization didn’t come out of the blue. Like many organizations, we once had one physical office where every single staff member worked five days a week. We each had our own assigned desk with desktop computer, phone with a cord that plugged into the wall, and a few photos of friends and family. When we had meetings, everyone who needed to attend got up from their desk and walked into our tiny conference room.
Iterate & Adjust
Eventually, we started experimenting with how to structure our work and workplace. “How about one Director-level staff member tries a set work from home day once a week for a few months?” Then we evaluated it. What worked, what didn’t. Iterate and adjust. Then we experimented with two people. Then that became a standard option for Directors (a position that affords more agency in the type of work they do). Then we introduced a computer-based VoIP phone application allowing people to untether from a dedicated desk to take phone calls.
This lead to us experimenting with a work from home (WFH) day for three months with a staff member at the Associate-level (someone who primarily provides customer support for members on phone and through a web-based helpdesk application). Then, we hired our first non-NYC-based employee. Then we increased the number of Associates working from home. Then we acquired and integrated a software development company where no two engineers lived in the same state. Then we switched from desktop computers to laptops, and bought an Ikea couch and comfortable armchairs for the office. Then we hired more non-NYC-based people. This evolved over several years to bring us to where we are today. Until recently, our official WFH policy simply stated “after working with Fractured Atlas for at least a year you can then request a set WFH day.”
Why Do We Do It *That* Way?
The journey towards becoming an entirely distributed organization started several years ago when we ran out of room and chose to renovate our office. During the run up to that renovation, we asked ourselves questions about how we used a physical space, and how that space could be designed to best support the different types of work we needed to accomplish throughout the day.
We asked things like: Why do we use a conference room? What kind of work does that type of space support? What if we didn’t have that space, how would we accomplish those things instead? What kind of environment best supports grant writing? Or talking on the phone assisting our members? How does energy and focus change throughout the day? And what conditions would increase the time we each spent in “flow”?
What does working at Fractured Atlas look and feel like in five years?
We stumbled upon a seemingly simple question that now contributes to our workplace iterating at Fractured Atlas: What do we want working here to look and feel like in five years? Contemplating this question helped us realize the leap we needed to make from maintaining a physical office to being a fully distributed organization. In its simplest form, in five years, working at Fractured Atlas doesn’t look like everyone working in the same physical office circa 2009, and certainty not one in Midtown Manhattan. If anything, the trend over the years for us has been for staff to relocate *away* from NYC rather than towards it.
As we thought about how this workplace vision intersected with our commitments to being an anti-racist and anti-oppressive organization, the transition made even more sense. It affords people rare agency to make decisions about how they want to craft their life in ways that weren’t previously possible. “You live [here] because your job is [here],” no longer would apply.
Specific City Not Required
This vision enables us to hire and retain amazingly talented people who don’t live in the same location. New York City is an expensive place to live. At Fractured Atlas, we anchor our strict fixed tier comp and benefits off of the NYC marketplace, regardless of where people choose to live (i.e., every person at a given tier is paid exactly the same regardless of how long they’ve been in that role at Fractured Atlas and irrespective of whether they live in NYC, Philadelphia, or Dallas). People are welcome to live in NYC, but they can now relocate to, say, Cincinnati, OH and potentially greatly increase their standard of living and purchasing power.
Juggling Multiple Organizational Cultures
Transitioning to entirely distributed would also eliminate a significant silo in our organization: those who work fully virtual versus those who work in HQ. It would go a long way toward “equalizing” that experience in a way that isn’t possible when a significant portion of people work together in a physical office.
How might we work to equalize the experience of working at Fractured Atlas, so everyone feels like they work for the same company rather than different experiences depending on their relationship with a physical office space?
There’s a wealth of research about how virtual work impacts employees. One particularly illuminating piece I read early on in my own journey was “Knowing Where You Stand: Physical Isolation, Perceived Respect, and Organizational Identification Among Virtual Employees.” It was co-written by friend and former Fractured Atlas board member Amy Wrzesniewski, and based on research she and her colleagues conducted. (A selection of other resources, some more anecdotally based and less scientific, are linked at the close of this piece.)
As more Fractured Atlas staff members were working virtually, we wrestled with the question about whether it was possible to “equalize” the experience for those who work fully virtual and those who work solely from HQ. Was it possible to make it feel like everyone worked for the same Fractured Atlas? Especially for those who were hired and then — even though they work closely on a daily basis — might wait upwards of a year before they meet the other members of their distributed team in 3D for the first time.
The more we dove into preparations to transition to a fully distributed organization, the more we realized that we were not trying to maintain only two different organizational cultures — one for those onsite and another for those offsite — we had created, and were trying to manage, at least five different location-related organizational cultures. We had:
(1) Those who worked entirely remote,
(2) Those who worked 5 days a week from the Fractured Atlas office,
(3) Teams where no two members lived or worked in the same location,
(4) Teams where part of the team was remote and part of the team worked from the Fractured Atlas office, and
(5) At least one team where — when factoring in flexible work from anywhere days, travel, vacations and sick days — they seldom had two days with the same HQ/virtual configuration.
That last item in particular exacerbated the stress, uncertainty, and anxiety of a distributed team, because you simply never knew exactly what the configuration would look like from one day to the next. And this feeling permeated at the individual, team, and organizational levels. Moving to an entirely distributed model would at least, in some ways, alleviate this stressor.
Some Staff Are Already There
It’s easy in a change initiative — particularly for those of us who are “losing” an office and our daily routines on 35th Street — to forget that we currently have an organization where more than half of our colleagues already work virtually. More than half of our coworkers have figured out how to do this well and, for them, a transition to being entirely distributed is only likely to improve their work experience.
How might their experience of working for and with Fractured Atlas change for the better? And what can we learn from our colleagues about how they’ve configured home offices and routines to thrive? What can we learn from our coworkers about how to schedule the day? Do people wear shoes when working from home? How do people replicate the positive benefits of those serendipitous in-office chats when it’s just them and maybe their pet? And, most importantly, how do you remember to eat lunch? [Our How We Work, Virtually blog series shares some of those stories.]
With So Much to Do, Why Prioritize This?
At any given time, the Fractured Atlas teams are juggling 3–5 significant, high-priority projects. Most of these focus on developing our products and services to better serve our membership. In some cases though, we focus more internally on how we approach — and can better accomplish — our work and mission.
There are several reasons why our move to be an entirely distributed organization rose to the surface:
Changing Work Patterns. Through our regular operations, we almost by accident ended up with more than half of our team working outside of the New York office. And everyone at Fractured Atlas now works virtually at least one day a week. This leaves an office designed to support 30 people routinely with about 5 occupants on any given day.
Finite Resources & Opportunity Costs. The ten-year lease we signed with terrific terms at the bottom of the real estate market in 2009 is quickly coming up for renewal. With finite resources and associated opportunities costs, every dollar and our related energy spent on maintaining a physical space for fewer and fewer people means we can’t use those resources elsewhere. Even moving to a smaller office still consumes a huge amount of capital and time that could be otherwise dedicated to delivering even better products and services to members, and a better working environment for staff.
Standard of Living & Larger Applicant Pool. In not having to work and live in NYC, Fractured Atlas has access to a huge pool of terrifically talented people who otherwise might not want to live and work in NYC. For those who love their work at Fractured Atlas but no longer want to be in NYC, it means they have the agency to choose where they want to live first. And for those who love NYC? It means many are now gaining upwards of 3 hours a day in discretionary time that previously was spent commuting.
Into the Future! When we reflected on the future of our organization, the culture we wanted to maintain, and how we wanted to create a place where people thrived, having a physical office didn’t rank high on our list of priorities or as a motivator to achieving our goals.
Think of All the Money We Won’t Save
When I mention our move to being an entirely distributed organization, many people respond by saying, “Wow, what a savings! It must be great to get rid of your rent and utilities expense!” In reality, the expense factor was almost an afterthought. (Don’t get me wrong, it was a thought, but not the one that directed us down this path.) While we will likely see some financial savings as a result of this transition, it’s not likely to be as significant as most people assume.
In exchange for rent and utilities, we’ve already incurred higher application subscription fee costs (e.g., Zoom, Dialpad, Slack, Trello). And we’ll incur increased travel and occasional coworking facility costs to address the effects that being physically isolated from coworkers introduces. Our Internet costs will also increase since we’re requiring that staff have high speed Internet connections as a work condition, and thus will be reimbursed for that monthly expense. (There are only so many video and audio calls you can do with spotty service before your coworkers and customers lose patience.)
You’ll likely be disappointed if money is the primary motivator to make this change. With any change initiative, the stronger and more substantive the underlying purpose for the change, the more ballast you have to steady the ship when it’s being tossed about on the sea of change. Why are we doing this thing? To save money — [cue sad trombone sound] — won’t inspire much. While wise resource allocation is important, it’s not usually a solid enough reason to get people to jump out of bed in the morning. Again, it’s not that it doesn’t have merit, but I bet you can drill down to a more purpose-driven answer than “save money.” For us, it’s about continuing to craft a workplace where people can thrive, and one that enables us to better serve our members. And *that’s* why we went about making the change.
Younger me, skeptical of Work From Anywhere arrangements.
I Haven’t Always Been a Fan
Over my decade at Fractured Atlas, I’ve seen us grow from a handful of people to nearly 40. I was part of the group that moved us, box by box, into our current office space that afforded us, at the time, *way* more space than we needed. I was there when we renovated it because we had too few places to work in an always-packed office. And I’m here now, almost as it was in 2009, with just a handful of people in a way too empty space. It’s beautiful and convenient and has colleagues in 3D that I thoroughly enjoy working with.
But lest you think I’ve always been a Work From Anywhere (WFA) evangelist, for many years I feared that in us being more virtual we’d lose the soul of what it meant to be Fractured Atlas. We’d drain the culture that made us, well, us.
Worried that more people working remote will change the company culture? For us, it did. It also allowed us to hire incredible people we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to work with. It introduced flexibility with how and when people do work so that they had more agency in their life. And, maybe most importantly, it has allowed us to serve our members in more and different ways.
What I realized a few years back was, just as I’m no less me than I was 25 years ago, I’m me, but different. Same with you. If we look at humans on a cellular level, over 25 years, most of the cells in our bodies have been replaced. But somehow, we’re still us. Organizations are similar. When I was afraid of us losing our organizational culture, I didn’t consider the culture we were building as a direct result of our organizational culture. The thing we were building was the thing we were building because of the thing we built. (Yep, I know, slightly convoluted, but thanks for staying with me there.) The DNA-level stuff about Fractured Atlas was still there, but now with increased resiliency and flexibility and adaptability as we cultivated a place where we didn’t all physically work in the same space.
Experiment, iterate, and be purposeful about the kinds of things you can do in a space. Also, don’t forget to be a human.
Crafting Your Own Experiment
Like much of what each one of us does in life, someone has figured out how to solve it, somewhere. It’s the proverbial “solved problem.” Part of our iterative and creative process at Fractured Atlas leverages those learnings. (It’s why we’re constantly reading, listening, and looking across sectors for case studies, different perspectives, and solutions.) And then we, in turn, feel a responsibility to give back by sharing what works and doesn’t work in our own approaches. There are 7 *billion* of us on this Earth learning and doing. Let’s not recreate the wheel if it’s not necessary.
When it comes to alternative work arrangements, you certainly don’t need to give up your office entirely to ask: What do we want work to look and feel like here in five years? With those answers in mind though, begin to experiment. Here’s what’s comforting to me about this: plenty of people have come before us and have figured out ways to address even the most complicated of these issues. We get to leverage those learnings to create an environment that fits us and our organization best and how we want to work.
If you’re not sure where to start, here’s a quick list of some helpful places to get you going:
Tools to Try
Even if you’re not convinced that people should work outside of your office, you can start to experiment and iterate with tools to improve workplace communication, transparency, and productivity.
Introducing communication tools like Slack or Flowdock will eliminate countless email threads when all you need to do is have a quick chat between a few people. Use a Zoom video for meeting the next time you’re trying to coordinate a meeting with someone offsite. (Think that “quick chat over a cup of coffee.”) Learning how to facilitate and participate in a video conference call is a professional skill people need to develop, just like the proper format for a business letter.
Try using a whiteboarding tool likely Mural to replace everyone standing by a physical board. Being intentional about using a tool like Mural has the added benefit of keeping you focused on the task at hand and often eliminates side conversations that take you off track or burn valuable time. Track projects and priorities in tools like Trello. (Pro tip: We use it to compile and manage meeting agendas, and then track our action items.)
Then there are frameworks like OKRs to create transparency, alignment, and accountability around the work that everyone is doing. Objectives and Key Results (or OKRs) are a huge asset when incorporating work from anywhere arrangements. They help build the trust necessary for high performing teams. Now I don’t need to physically see you “working” in an office to know that you’re making progress on our previously discussed and approved projects. Whatever you choose, just start experimenting and iterating.
Where Does This Leave Us
What will it look and feel like to work at Fractured Atlas in five years? I’m not entirely sure. I’d be lying if I said that I had a clear idea. What I do know is that we have a sense for what it might look like and are making directionally-correct iterations towards that goal. In the end, the important part here is making sure that what we do today sets up Fractured Atlas of the future with the things it will need to be successful in service to our mission then.
On a practical front, we continue to work through Project Blue Whale (as our coworker Nicola has dubbed this in the plan outlining each stage of this transition). Each day brings new, fun questions to wrestle with. How and where do we receive mail? How do we deposit checks, and cut checks? What’s our corporate address for tax forms when we don’t have an office? How do we get three “wet” signatures on this form when everyone lives in a different country? How often and where do we meet coworkers in 3D? Where do we store spare equipment like laptops?
However we end up answering these questions, it will be done intentionally as we work towards a future of Fractured Atlas that best supports our coworkers, mission, and members.
Tim Cynova is a leader, HR consultant, and educator dedicated to co-creating anti-racist and anti-oppressive workplaces through using human-centered organizational design. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR, trained mediator, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., on faculty at New York’s The New School and Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and for the past twelve years served as COO and then Co-CEO of the largest association of artists, creatives, and makers in the U.S.
Bring Your Whole(ish) Self to Work
By: Tim Cynova // Published: March 29, 2019
Remember when it seemed like everyone was trying to achieve “work-life” balance? More recently, perhaps in a nod to the challenges of balancing “work” and “life” in an always-connected world, or maybe because for those searching for meaning and purpose in their activities there’s not always a bright line distinction between “work” and “life,” the phrase has shifted to “bringing our whole selves to work.”
Well, with my HR hat on, it’s typically people who bring their whole selves to work who are the ones the HR folks need to have meetings with, or about. So, I’d like to propose a slight reframing: let’s aim to bring our whole(ish) selves to work. 85% of ourselves is probably just about the right calibration.
Why 85%?
In the end, not even our closest friends and family *really* want us to bring 100% of ourselves to our interactions. Yes, be present, genuine, and authentic. But no to bringing every single piece of us into the space. When we do bring 100% of ourselves into a space, how might that actually make it more challenging for others to show up more fully themselves?
Not scientific.
I’ll bet most people don’t exceed the 50% mark though. For many, it’s less about how to dial back from 100% and more about what conditions would be necessary to bring a little (or a lot) more of themselves.
Looking at this through the lens of building high-performing teams — where people can thrive — we can see even clearer why aiming for everyone to move towards 85% might be the better pursuit.
Psychological Safety & Diversity in Teams
Research shows that two traits of high-performing teams are psychological safety — the ability for people to participate without fear of retribution (the ol’ getting your legs kicked out from under you when you say something the boss doesn’t agree with) — and that teams are diverse in as many ways as possible. Both of these play significantly into people feeling comfortable bringing more of themselves to work.
Here’s just a sampling of the ways diversity can show up in our organizations: sex, gender, age, race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, income, learning modalities, education, culture, customs, life or prior work experiences, networks, style, speech, lineage, origins, political beliefs, appearance, and work styles (just to name a few).
Thinking about where people calibrate themselves with regards to that 85%, I imagine in U.S. corporate culture, aside for a number of heterosexual, White, cis-gender men in positions of power (or perceived power), many others feel a struggle of varying levels to bring their wholes selves to work, and/or are conflicted about what and how much they want to bring of themselves. This creates a drag on people’s ability to be authentic, do their best work, and thrive. And the sad fact here is that while we’re talking about bringing our whole selves to work, some of our colleagues are likely comfortable bringing only about 20% of themselves to their work.
How much richer and more meaningful would our organizations be if everyone felt comfortable bringing 85% of themselves to work?
How much more meaningful and engaged might someone be if they felt they could go from bringing 20% of themselves to, say, 60%? How might this result in more of us being able to fulfill our organizational missions and our personal search for purpose?
As we work to build more inclusive, diverse, and/or equitable teams and organizations, it’s incumbent upon those of us in positions of leadership — wherever we lead from in our organizations — to do whatever we can to assist in creating an environment that’s supportive of everyone bringing more of themselves to their work (and pointing out for those few people who might need to dial it back, when that’s appropriate too).
Why is this important?
First, because it’s the morally right thing to do. If leaders aren’t continually trying to make progress in supporting those who work for their organizations, they are failing at a core leadership responsibility. However, if we can’t agree there, let’s move more to the business case.
I’ve written about how research shows the vast majority of people who work at our organizations are disengaged from their work, and that more than half are looking for new jobs. (Quick recap: Gallup Worker Engagement Index found that roughly 85% of employees are disengaged and 51% of employees are looking for another job.) Recent research adds to that to show that disengagement and satisfaction in work — and the ability to “bring one’s whole self to work” — disproportionately, negatively impacts our colleagues of color.
In one study, researchers found that 38% of our Black colleagues feel it’s never appropriate in the workplace to talk about the bias they experience in life. This makes them twice as likely as those not in this group to experience feelings of isolation, three times as likely to have one foot out the door and be looking for another job, and 13 times as likely to be disengaged in their work.
And this is just as it relates to our colleagues of color. I’m confident that if we looked at findings as they related to other aspects of diversity we’d find similar disheartening results.
The Lovingkindness Lens
I’ve been meditating for a few years now. For those fellow meditators, you’ll be familiar with the Lovingkindness, or metta, meditation. For those less familiar, it basically goes like this: you meditate on phrases like, “May you be safe, be happy, be healthy, live with ease, live with joy,” while focusing first on yourself; then focusing on someone close to you. Next, you focus on someone you know but don’t really know (think of the Starbucks barista you see each morning). Then, you move to someone who really challenges you; and finally, to all beings everywhere.
When I was meditating on these phrases a few months back, I had an epiphany. The Lovingkindness meditation provides an excellent lens to use when seeking to identify blockers for bringing more of oneself to work.
It works like this: how safe is your workplace? Not necessarily physical safety (although that certainly might be part of it) but psychologically safety. How happy are you and your coworkers? How easy is it for you to do your work? Easy as in it doesn’t feel like people keep throwing obstacles in your way at every turn, not that your work isn’t challenging in a good way.
As I meditated on this, I was struck by one of the greatest ironies of the cultural sector. Our sector exists, in large, part to make the world a better, more beautiful and understanding place. And sadly — both anecdotally and backed by research — most people are unfulfilled (and some are downright miserable) doing the work. At what cost are we trying to achieve our charitable missions if we do it by blowing through and burning out our people?
At what cost are we trying to achieve our charitable missions if we do it by blowing through and burning out our people?
When we use Lovingkindness’s “healthy” lens here the shit gets real, fast. How many hours are people working? (And how much work is supposed to be accomplished during that period?) How many people don’t feel like they can step away from their desks for lunch? How many people feel like they can’t take more than a few vacation days a year? And when they do get away, they feel pressure — real or implied — to stay connected to email and voicemails.
Next, let’s use the “work with ease” lens. Again, this doesn’t mean work is easy, it’s that it doesn’t always feel like you’re pushing an ever-larger boulder up an increasingly steep mountain. “All I want to do is send out the annual appeal letters. Why does it feel like I’m participating in some Tough Mudder competition?!” And lastly, does your work bring you joy? If you personally can’t positively answer *that* question, again, I ask at what cost are we doing this work? Life is simply too short.
Some might find it helpful to plot their current positions on a Lovingkindness chart like the one above.
Let’s then ask ourselves, when reflecting on safety, happiness, health, ease, and joy in our workplace, how many of our coworkers can honestly say yes to those things? Is it just the executive director? Or, oh God, maybe not even the executive director. We might not like the results, but burying our head in the sand doesn’t mean that it’s not true. I can’t think of an organization that can check off all of these for every single person. However, (1) that’s no excuse for us not to continually be doing something about it, and (2) this Lovingkindness lens gives us a quick “balance sheet” or snapshot to start using. This snapshot highlights the often amorphous “organizational culture” components so we can pull them apart and begin identifying ways to address them.
The Lovingkindess Lens in Action
The beauty of using the Lovingkindness lens is that it can be applied at the individual, team, and organizational levels. Ask yourself first, do I feel safe in my work and workplace? Why or why not? What does safety at work look and feel like? What would help me to feel safer? Then, am I happy in my work? What would need to change for me to find daily happiness and joy in my work? What part of my work always feels like an unnecessary struggle? (At this point, you might find a job crafting exercise to be quite helpful.)
Sometimes, to bring our whole(ish) selves to work, we need a little help from our friends and colleagues.
Then, take it the next step and ask, who on my team or in my organization might not feel safe? Who might not be happy in their work? Then, before running to them as saying — “Hey, why don’t you feel safe to bring more of yourself to work?” — interrogate your assumptions. Why do you think that? What gives you that impression? If someone doesn’t feel psychologically safe at work, they’re probably not going to give you an honest answer to that question anyways. There likely is work that needs to be done in the organization before you will see progress here. (For more on building psychologically safe workplaces, check out the awesome work by Amy C. Edmondson.)
And lastly, expand this beyond people on staff to consider your board, your volunteers, and those you’re trying to serve. First, how engaged are they in the work? Are they happy with us? Do we help those we serve to be healthy? How easy is it for people to participate in our work? You will likely need to take a few liberties to map these lenses to your organization, but going down the list to articulate “What does safety look like for those we serve?” “How might what we do make it easier for people?” is a helpful starting place.
What can I do right now to move towards what I really want?
As we think about the 85% we aim to bring, about safety, happiness, health, ease, and joy — how do we decide what we’re comfortable bringing into a space? And how do we actually do it? Meditating on what to bring will surface things that are personal and bespoke to each of us. We’ll likely discover there’s a Venn diagram of sorts with two components: What you think you could bring that would make the most significant difference in your ability to make a positive difference in the world, and What you’re willing to bring.
We have but one pass at this life. If we’re doing it while overly throttling who we are as humans, to the detriment of ourselves, our ability to achieve our potential and make our dent in the universe, at what cost is this to us truly living? Showing up more fully — especially when it doesn’t inhibit someone else’s humanity — should be a goal we all feel that we can strive towards.
Tim Cynova is an HR and org design consultant, an educator, and podcaster dedicated to dusting off workplaces to (re)center values-based approaches where more people can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR (SPHR), trained mediator, principal at WSS HR LABS, on faculty at New York’s The New School, Minneapolis College of Art & Design, and Hollyhock Leadership Institute. He has held executive leadership roles in a variety of nonprofits for the better part of the last 20 years, and is also an avid coffee drinker.
Summer Reading Challenge 2019
Note: The librarian’s last name is Reading. How awesome is that?! (Also note, my mom saved everything.)
By: Tim Cynova // Published: May 24, 2019
Around Memorial Day each year when my sister and I were kids, our parents would take us to the McCollough Branch of the Evansville Public Library. It was that annual rite of passage — the summer reading challenge! We’d select a hefty stack of books, and then hope to God come Labor Day we’d have read enough of them to earn that sweet certificate for a free scoop of Baskin Robbins ice cream.
In the spirit of those early ‘80s summer reading challenges, I’ve pulled together what’s currently on my reading list for the summer. And, if I can complete just four of these books come Labor Day, you better believe I’m headed to Baskin Robbins, or Shake Shack, whichever is closest.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
Restorying Indigenous Leadership: Wise Practices in Community Development
by Cora Voyageur, Laura Brearley, and Brian Calliou
Restorying Indigenous Leadership: Wise Practices in Community Development is a foundational resource of the most recent scholarship on Indigenous leadership. The authors in this anthology share their research through nonfictional narratives, innovative approaches to Indigenous community leadership, and inspiring accounts of success, presenting many models for Indigenous leader development. These engaging stories are followed by a Wise Practices section featuring seven significant contemporary case study summaries. Restorying promotes hope for the future, individual agency, and knowledge of successful community economic development based upon community assets. It is a diverse collection of iterative and future-oriented ways to achieve community growth that acknowledges the centrality of Indigenous culture and identity.
Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance
by Edgar Villanueva
Decolonizing Wealth is a provocative analysis of the dysfunctional colonial dynamics at play in philanthropy and finance. Award-winning philanthropy executive Edgar Villanueva draws from the traditions from the Native way to prescribe the medicine for restoring balance and healing our divides.
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race
by Beverly Daniel Tatum
Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides. These topics have only become more urgent as the national conversation about race is increasingly acrimonious. This fully revised edition is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of race in America.
Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
by Martin Ford
What are the jobs of the future? How many will there be? And who will have them? As technology continues to accelerate and machines begin taking care of themselves, fewer people will be necessary. Artificial intelligence is already well on its way to making “good jobs” obsolete: many paralegals, journalists, office workers, and even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by robots and smart software. As progress continues, blue and white collar jobs alike will evaporate, squeezing working- and middle-class families ever further. At the same time, households are under assault from exploding costs, especially from the two major industries- education and health care- that, so far, have not been transformed by information technology. The result could well be massive unemployment and inequality as well as the implosion of the consumer economy itself. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren’t going to work. We must decide, now, whether the future will see broad-based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity. Rise of the Robots is essential reading to understand what accelerating technology means for our economic prospects- not to mention those of our children- as well as for society as a whole.
So You Want to Talk About Race
by Ijeoma Oluo
Ijeoma Oluo offers a hard-hitting but user-friendly examination of race in America. Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy — from police brutality to the mass incarceration of African Americans — have made it impossible to ignore the issue of race. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair — and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend? In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to “model minorities” in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life.
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
by Cal Newport
Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way. A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored.
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
by Ira Katznelson
Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by Southern Democrats that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between black and white people actually widened despite postwar prosperity. In the words of noted historian Eric Foner, “Katznelson’s incisive book should change the terms of debate about affirmative action, and about the last seventy years of American history.”
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
In The Second Machine Age MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee reveal the forces driving the reinvention of our lives and our economy. As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives. Amid this bounty will also be wrenching change. Professions of all kinds―from lawyers to truck drivers―will be forever upended. Companies will be forced to transform or die. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar. Drawing on years of research and up-to-the-minute trends, Brynjolfsson and McAfee identify the best strategies for survival and offer a new path to prosperity.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
by Rebecca Solnit
Written as a series of autobiographical essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Rebecca Solnit’s life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place. Solnit is interested in the stories we use to navigate our way through the world, and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves, or losing ourselves. While deeply personal, her own stories link up to larger stories, from captivity narratives of early Americans to the use of the color blue in Renaissance painting, not to mention encounters with tortoises, monks, punk rockers, mountains, deserts, and the movie Vertigo. The result is a distinctive, stimulating voyage of discovery.
No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work
by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy
The modern workplace can be an emotional minefield, filled with confusing power structures and unwritten rules. We’re expected to be authentic, but not too authentic. Professional, but not stiff. Friendly, but not an oversharer. Easier said than done! As both organizational consultants and regular people, we know what it’s like to experience uncomfortable emotions at work — everything from mild jealousy and insecurity to panic and rage. Ignoring or suppressing what you feel hurts your health and productivity — but so does letting your emotions run wild. Our goal in this book is to teach you how to figure out which emotions to toss, which to keep to yourself, and which to express in order to be both happier and more effective.
Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
by Safi Bahcall
Loonshots reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behavior that challenges everything we thought we knew about nurturing radical breakthroughs. Drawing on the science of “phase transitions,” Bahcall shows why teams, companies, or any group with a mission will suddenly change from embracing wild new ideas to rigidly rejecting them. Using examples that range from the spread of fires in forests to the hunt for terrorists online, and stories of thieves and geniuses and kings, Bahcall shows how this new kind of science helps us understand the behavior of companies and the fate of empires. Loonshots distills these insights into lessons for creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries everywhere.
Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do
by Claude M. Steele
Claude Steele shares the experiments and studies that show, again and again, that exposing subjects to stereotypes impairs their performance in the area affected by the stereotype. Steele’s conclusions shed new light on a host of American social phenomena, from the racial and gender gaps in standardized test scores to the belief in the superior athletic prowess of black men. Steele explicates the dilemmas that arise in every American’s life around issues of identity, from the white student whose grades drop steadily in his African American Studies class to the female engineering students deciding whether or not to attend predominantly male professional conferences. Whistling Vivaldi offers insight into how we form our senses of identity and ultimately lays out a plan for mitigating the negative effects of “stereotype threat” and reshaping American identities.
Bring Your Human to Work: 10 Surefire Ways to Design a Workplace That Is Good for People, Great for Business, and Just Might Change the World
by Erica Keswin
As human beings, we are built to connect and form relationships. So, it should be no surprise that relationships must also translate into the workplace, where we spend most of our time. Companies that recognize this will retain the most productive, creative, and loyal employees, and invariably seize the competitive edge. The most successful leaders are those who actively form quality relationships with their employees, who honor fundamental human qualities―authenticity, openness, and basic politeness―and apply them day in and day out. Paying attention and genuinely caring about the effects people have on one another other is key to developing a winning culture where people perform at the top of their game and want to work.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
by James Clear
Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving and will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits — whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
by Robin DiAngelo
In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.
Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within
by Robert E. Quinn
Don’t let your company kill you! Open this book at your own risk. It contains ideas that may lead to a profound self-awakening. An introspective journey for those in the trenches of today’s modern organizations, Deep Change is a survival manual for finding our own internal leadership power. By helping us learn new ways of thinking and behaving, it shows how we can transform ourselves from victims to powerful agents of change. And for anyone who yearns to be an internally driven leader, to motivate the people around them, and return to a satisfying work life, Deep Change holds the key.
Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution
by Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell
Beautiful Trouble brings together dozens of seasoned artists and activists from around the world to distill their best practices into a toolbox for creative action. Sophisticated enough for veteran activists, accessible enough for newbies, this compendium of troublemaking wisdom is a must-have for aspiring changemakers. Showcasing the synergies between artistic imagination and shrewd political strategy, Beautiful Trouble is for everyone who longs for a more beautiful, more just, more livable world — and wants to know how to get there.
Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers
by Trent Hergenrader
The digital technologies of the 21st century are reshaping how we experience storytelling. More than ever before, storylines from the world’s most popular narratives cross from the pages of books to the movie theatre, to our television screens and in comic books series. Plots intersect and intertwine, allowing audiences many different entry points to the narratives. In this sometimes bewildering array of stories across media, one thing binds them together: their large-scale fictional world. Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers describes how writers can co-create vast worlds for use as common settings for their own stories. Using the worlds of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, A Game of Thrones, and Dungeons & Dragons as models, this book guides readers through a step-by-step process of building sprawling fictional worlds complete with competing social forces that have complex histories and yet are always evolving. It also shows readers how to populate a catalog with hundreds of unique people, places, and things that grow organically from their world, which become a rich repository of story making potential.
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
by Priya Parker
In The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker argues that the gatherings in our lives are lackluster and unproductive — which they don’t have to be. We rely too much on routine and the conventions of gatherings when we should focus on distinctiveness and the people involved. At a time when coming together is more important than ever, Parker sets forth a human-centered approach to gathering that will help everyone create meaningful, memorable experiences, large and small, for work and for play. The result is a book that’s both journey and guide, full of exciting ideas with real-world applications. The Art of Gathering will forever alter the way you look at your next meeting, industry conference, dinner party, and backyard barbecue — and how you host and attend them.
Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being
by Martin E.P. Seligman
Flourish builds on Seligman’s game-changing work on optimism, motivation, and character to show how to get the most out of life, unveiling an electrifying new theory of what makes a good life — for individuals, for communities, and for nations. In a fascinating evolution of thought and practice, Flourish refines what Positive Psychology is all about. With interactive exercises to help readers explore their own attitudes and aims, Flourish is a watershed in the understanding of happiness as well as a tool for getting the most out of life.
So, what’s on your summer reading list?
Tim Cynova is a leader, HR consultant, and educator dedicated to co-creating anti-racist and anti-oppressive workplaces through using human-centered organizational design. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR, trained mediator, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., on faculty at New York’s The New School and Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and for the past twelve years served as COO and then Co-CEO of the largest association of artists, creatives, and makers in the U.S.
Opportunities to Live Our Anti-Racism, Anti-Oppression Values
By: Tim Cynova // Published: January 8, 2019
[This time of year brings a whole host of looking back, looking forward pieces. Instead of a round-up of the top books or movies, or predictions about what’s to come in 2019, I thought it might be a good time to check in on our anti-racism, anti-oppression journey at Fractured Atlas.]
A number of years ago when Fractured Atlas was beginning in earnest our journey towards becoming an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization I asked someone working in the space if they could point me in the direction of case studies about other companies with similar complexities to ours who were doing the work well. (When embarking on something new, I often scan the space to see what kind of learning is available that I can leverage and then iterate on in our own work.) The person essentially said, nope, they couldn’t think of any, but that people were watching Fractured Atlas as we embarked on this journey and would be interested to see how we approached it. That was about four years ago.
Lauren, Lisa, and I at TCG’s CultureMakers gathering. (Photo: Ryan Bourque)
Increasingly in recent months, my Fractured Atlas colleagues Nicola Carpenter, Courtney Harge, Lauren Ruffin, Jillian Wright, our Board member Lisa Yancey, and I have had opportunities to chat with awesome people around the country about where we are in our organizational journey, and share ideas and experiences around the “how” of operationalizing commitments to creating anti-racist, anti-oppressive (ARAO) teams and organizations.
It’s not uncommon for us to meet with those in predominantly white organizations and find people wanting to do the work, but not sure exactly how to approach it. In the absence of a template, clear path forward, or “buy in” from their board of directors, they remain stuck. And in doing this work, it quickly becomes evident that we’re either moving forward, or we’re falling behind.
There is no neutral. Racism and oppression don’t take days off.
Specific Things We’ve Been Doing
We created the image below as a kind of snapshot of what’s happened over the past few years during our ARAO journey at Fractured Atlas. The graphic (and duplicate list below) includes things we’ve explored and implemented to support the creation of a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace, and some significant milestones that have occurred along the way. The image is the result of a quick, almost stream-of-consciousness round up of the many things we’ve experienced at Fractured Atlas, with many happening in the past two years.
A snapshot of opportunities from the past few years that have allowed us to live our ARAO values at Fractured Atlas. (Not necessarily listed in chronological order.)
Committed to becoming an anti-racist, anti-oppressive (ARAO) organization
Created staff ARAO baseline & provide monthly race-based caucuses
Crafted ARAO Community Guidelines & created a staff review committee
Developed Negative Interactions Protocol to guide challenging interactions
Acquired & integrated our for-profit software development subsidiary
Developed four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership structure
Founder & CEO departed after 20 years
Launched an impact investment fund focused on the intersection of exponential creativity & technology
De-siloed our four core programs into one Programs team
Adopted Objectives & Key Results (OKR) framework for increased transparency, alignment & accountability
Launched all staff core curriculum training
Introduced unlimited vacation days
Focused on employer brand & unbiasing hiring process; training more staff to interview & hire
Published How We Work: A Guide to Working at Fractured Atlas
Created a humane, respectful, trusting, and flexible hourly-based staff tier
Cradle-to-grave family leave policy & structured support
Strict fixed-tier compensation structure
Renovated HQ with eye towards how physical space can best support people’s work
Global Board with members in 4 countries, 6 time zones, and 2 people joining from tomorrow
Transitioning to be fully virtual organization by January 2020
Oh, almost forgot! We launched a companion site for this work at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck.
The list is by no means exhaustive. It’s been an incredibly busy couple of years filled with exploration, change, and iteration on many fronts. (Here is a round up of changes we experienced in simply one year alone.) This list also largely omits numerous changes in our programs and services, as well as developments in our software and technology infrastructure — both of which have experienced an entire grid of activity in their own rights — in favor of focusing more on ones firmly intersecting our People Operations work.
What If? How Might We?
Each tile on the grid above reflects opportunities where we asked ourselves a series of questions that usually began with a “What if?” or “How might we?” How might we better live our anti-racism, anti-oppression principles to serve our amazing members? How might we craft an organization that is more diverse, more inclusive, and more equitable as we approach this new thing? How might we create a workplace where more of our coworkers can thrive and make their dents in the universe?
Then we got more granular: What if we approached designing an organizational leadership structure that was more reflective of our ARAO values rather than how conventional “wisdom” suggests organization to structure hierarchically? How might [insert item] be an opportunity for us to better reflect our ARAO commitment, support people, and move our organization forward? If we all don’t live and work in the same city, how might we build a unified organizational culture, rather than one that varies depending on where someone is located?
Each item in the grid could have its own blog post, if not a book, delving into the how, the why, the stumbling blocks, and the lessons learned. Fortunately, we *have* written about some of these efforts here, here, here, here, and here. (And have more pieces in development.) Other items we dive into more deeply during our Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. bootcamps, HR Hours, and brown bag lunch chats with various organizations.
Has It Made Any Difference?
Looking at staff composition is one way — but certainly not the *only* way — of seeing how this work, and our journey, has impacted Fractured Atlas. Given that when we began this work we were a white-led organization with only one or two people of color on staff; we primarily worked from one office in New York City; and, we only had white men on our software development team, personnel metrics became a helpful proxy. Below is a snapshot of how those demographics changed over a five-year period.
A few of the metrics we tracked to see how our staff composition changed over 5 years.
Moving Forward in Ambiguity
The journey certainly hasn’t been without challenges, as any foray involving change is certain to include. (I wrote an entire piece about the psychological impacts of change here, and we’ve ticked off numerous instances of each during this journey.) We have and continue to struggle in places, and encountered unexpected hiccups in others. We made the best decisions we could at the time and then, importantly, iterated when things didn’t work out as we had hoped. This process continues to this day because, once on this journey, the work never ends.
There’s still no reliable template that I’ve found to do the work of dismantling racism and oppression in the workplace, which often leads to expressions of disappointment when people ask. It all depends really. It depends on where you are as a team and organization. It depends on your available resources. It depends most of all on your joint commitment — staff and board — to do the work, especially when it seems hardest and like you’re not making any progress. We move forward in ambiguity, an old friend of mine used to say, and we keep moving.
Because this work, and world, are ever evolving, we at Fractured Atlas couldn’t even follow the path we took if we were to do it all over again. That’s a liberating thought, though. The work is bespoke. All of us can use our creativity — wherever we find ourselves in our organizations — to move it forward. Simply reflecting on this question can yield helpful ideas: How might the decisions I make right now about [this thing] move us towards a more diverse, inclusive, and/or equitable team and organization? We all have agency, even if it might not initially seem so.
Ideas to Explore
Creating a negative interactions protocol and starting monthly race-based caucusing are great ways to move the work forward. But, depending on where you and your organization are in the journey, there might be other things you want to explore first. Might I suggest a few items for your consideration?
Here are a few ideas:
Begin introducing yourself using your gender pronouns, and ask others theirs. List yours in your bio or email signature.
Start a staff book club to explore new ideas and skill development. Might I suggest something from the lists here, here, and here.
Bring more new ideas and perspectives to your work from outside of your sector through a regular Visiting Professionals Series. #ProTip: Ask your Board chair to be the inaugural guest. Or, ask someone from a group who’s doing diversity, inclusion, and/or equity work to come and share their journey.
Strengthen board/staff connections and understanding by having an annual board/staff reception before a board meeting. It doesn’t need to be fancy, the sheer act of getting people together will be appreciated by those in attendance.
Take a few minutes to complete the Core Values Exercise Patrick Lencioni details in The Advantage. Why?
Learn more about how to create high-performing teams and organizations by listening to Adam Grant’s Work/Life podcast.
Are you a White person? Listen to Scene on Radio’s Seeing White series and use the study guide resource to discuss it with other white people. Or explore similar resources.
Increase organizational transparency and understanding by circulating your board meeting packet — unredacted — to staff. Then, take questions about the contents during your staff meeting. #ProTip: Use Google Forms to create a way to anonymously accept questions. This is particularly useful for sensitive inquiries or for staff members who might otherwise feel uncomfortable standing up in front of the entire organization to ask a question.
Level up that transparency — share the agenda from your leadership team meetings with the entire staff.
Recognize that resilience and self-care are a crucial part of this work if we’re to be successful. Check out my suggestions on that work here.
Google’s re:Work site offers a wealth of free resources, including for Unbiasing & Strategic Hiring.
Speaking of strategic hiring, remove educational requirements from your job postings. Why?
Make space for the different ways people process information by introducing a 30-second “Introvert Pause” after asking a question in meetings.
Formalize the members of your People Operations team. #ProTip: Members don’t need to focus 100% of their day on People Ops. For instance, the three members of the Fractured Atlas People team — Jillian, Nicola, and I — split our time, in various proportions, over FinPOps (Finance, People, and Operations).
Questions? Want to explore this more? Let’s chat!
If you have questions about how we approached anything on the list above, or other work we’ve done in the area, please ping us for a free HR Hour chat, apply to attend our upcoming Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. bootcamp on February 23 (deadline to apply is January 15), let us know if chatting with your board would be useful, and we also love lunch and brown bag-style conversations with teams too.
Register to attend our upcoming Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. Bootcamp if you’re interested in exploring more about how these tools can be used to create high-performing teams and organizations.
Tim Cynova is a leader, HR consultant, and educator dedicated to co-creating anti-racist and anti-oppressive workplaces through using human-centered organizational design. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR, trained mediator, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., on faculty at New York’s The New School and Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and for the past twelve years served as COO and then Co-CEO of the largest association of artists, creatives, and makers in the U.S.
4 Task and Time Tracking Approaches
By: Tim Cynova // Published: January 3, 2019
How many minutes each day do you spend drafting emails? How about attending meetings? Chatting on Slack? Water cooler conversing with coworkers? Do you measure it in any way? Or, when you think about it do you merely quantify the time simply as a “lot/little” or “more/less than I used to?”
So much of our day just rolls by in the blink of an eye. We arrive, we’re busy, we rarely get to — let alone finish — the things on our “Important List,” and then we log off for the day and go home. (A phenomena I’ve previously explored here with tips to address it here.) We seldom take time to measure the specific activities that fill our day, in what configuration they fill it, and how this is multiplied across our team and organization.
“Effective executives do not start with their tasks, they start with their time. They start by finding out where their time actually goes. Then they attempt to manage their time and to cut back unproductive demands on their time. Finally they consolidate their “discretionary” time into the largest possible continuing units.“ — Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive
Outta Sight, Outta Mind
It certainly *feels* like I’m spending all day composing and responding to emails, but am I? Is it because every five minutes I’m switching back and forth between different types of tasks in different domains? Running financial management reports; processing payroll; fixing the office WiFi that just crashed; writing a blog post; attending a team meeting. Maybe. Is it because I’m being interrupted every five minutes or so? [Ping. Slack alert!] Possibly.
For the record, I’m not assigning a good or bad, too little or too much to activities. It all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish, over what period of time, and with what resources. But, if we aren’t mindful of how these things show up in our day, it can easily slide towards the too much and negative side of the scale.
We often hear about working “smarter” not “harder.” For many of us, that prompt can evoke the response, “Well, I would try to find a way to do that if I wasn’t working so hard right now.” We find ourselves playing the Scarcity Paradox’s juggling game. And when that occurs, it often prevents us from accomplishing the things that positively impact our organizations and the world. And, *that’s* when we end up thinking if we only worked harder we could actually get it all done.
How to approach working smarter?
A time and task assessment might be a helpful way to get started and gather useful data for you and your team. Below are four approaches you can experiment with to lay the ground work for smarter working.
A pared down version of the one we used at Fractured Atlas
Approach # 1: Low Tech
Ingredients: Spreadsheet, piece of paper, and writing utensil
Several years ago, we had a system at Fractured Atlas where we’d take a week every six months or so to plot how each of us spent our time during the day. The system used a grid on a piece of paper and manual entry (and looked similar to the condensed version above).
Each person would jot the number of minutes they spent emailing members, each time they did it. Then the amount of time spent processing donation checks. Then how long it took them to review a grant proposal. Then how long they were on the phone with that foundation program officer. Imperfect yes, but it gave us a rough sense for the amount of time we were all spending on various activities throughout the day.
We could use this information to see roughly how much of our week was spent on email, phone, in meetings, etc. We could see the program areas and activities where staff spent the most time working. We could see if people bounced from activity to activity, or worked in long stretches on specific tasks. We could then use it as the basis for inquiry and self-reflection about what approaches might yield the most productive results, and areas where we could make wholesale adjustments to improve things across the organization (i.e., No Meetings Friday).
If you have a tool like Excel or Google Sheets, it’s a fairly simple template to create. You can even take our format above and tweak it to suit your domain areas and tasks. Then, use it for a week. The data won’t be exact, but if you’ve never done this before, you might end up with some interesting information.
One of those days when you’re between Thinking, Meeting, and HR.
Approach #2: High Tech
Ingredients: A Timeular; iOS or Android device, and/or Mac or PC
Those looking for a more accurate tool to slice and dice a time and task assessment might want to use a Timeular. It’s a physical device that syncs with an app on your phone or computer to provide you with fine-grain activity data.
The first step after pulling the Timeular out of the box is to assign each of its eight sides with a specific type of work to track (i.e.., Email, Phone, Slack, Writing, Meeting, Thinking, etc.). The idea is that these task types should be universal to your work and independent of the content (e.g., “Email” versus “Emailing About Accounting”). Timeular allows you to create tags in the app to further slice and dice activities to gain more insight into various projects (like the amount of time spent on all activities related to receiving that grant). Now, you’re ready to go.
Physically flip the Timeular so “Email” is facing up, and start reading the email from that program officer. Move it to “Meeting” when you head into the team’s daily stand-up to discuss the proposal. Then flip it to “Writing” when you start drafting that grant proposal. At the end of your day, you have a colorful depiction of how you spent your time, in the exact order, and on which projects. Then, you can dig into the flow.
Do you see large chunks of specific work in the morning and then bouncing back and forth in the afternoon? Do you tend to focus on grant proposals in the morning and accounting tasks in the afternoon? Why? Maybe you want to put a block on your schedule in the morning to protect your time for writing, and then slide that grab bag of quick, relatively mindless items to the afternoon.
Approach #3: Human-to-Human
Ingredients: Another human being, preferably someone who doesn’t know the exact contours of your work. An inquisitive mind seeking to understand. The questions below, and a bit of self-reflection.
I recently had a conversation with someone who was stressed about the lack of time to get their work completed during the workday. Sensing a disconnect with what *they* meant when they said “work” and what *I* assumed they meant, I asked them to specifically define it all for me.
We started with questions like: What kind of work do you do during your day? Do you do any “work” before arriving at the office? What does that look like? Walk me through your day from one thing to the next and how you approach it. When you arrive at the office, what’s the first (second, third, etc.) thing you do? Is that what you did last week? Last month? Do you ever feel like you’re in “flow,” when you effortlessly make progress and the time flies by? When do you feel that way? When do you feel like you get your best work done? First thing in the morning, late in the day, on the weekend? How do you define “best work?” When you say you’re “writing a proposal,” what specifically does that process look like?
After everything was on the table, we dove into the reasons, value, and approaches of doing each thing. Why do you do that? How do you approach writing emails? How do you prepare for meetings? Why do you do it that way? Habit? If you *couldn’t* do it that way, how might you approach achieving the intended impact? Do you rate [that activity] relatively more or less important than [the next activity on your list]? What would happen if you flipped that activity to the afternoon, or Tuesday, or once a month?
Approach #4: Mindful Process
Ingredients: Thought & intention
You don’t need to buy a fancy gadget to track your time, or stop and write the minutes on a piece of paper next to you. You can simply start by being more mindful of how you’re working. “I’m switching from Email to Slack.” “I’m stopping writing to go meet with someone about hiring a new staff member.”
I recently ran across this study in the Journal of the Association of Consumer Research that found “the mere presence of our phone — even if it’s powered off, and even if you’re actively and successfully ignoring it — reduces available cognitive capacity.” (The New York Times published an article about the specific phenomenon.) I’ve been trying to keep my phone hidden in my bag so at least there’s additional friction of me mindlessly reaching into my bag to check tracking on my delivery from Amazon, or Twitter, oh, Weather. Is it going to snow? The simple act of thinking about reaching over helps me cut down on that activity. “It’s sooooo far away, I don’t have the energy.”
In a similar way with my phone, the motion it takes to flip the Timeular, or to pick up the pen to write the minutes I just spent doing a task, serves as a similar reminder. Just thinking about reaching over to pick it up and hunt for the next activity, cuts down on quick switches and helps me stay focused on the task at hand. And when I do reach for it, I’m more mindful of what I’m switching to because I literally need to find the word “Email” on the Timeular before popping open Gmail and diving in.
You don’t need a tracker to use this approach, and you don’t need to wait until you’re in the office to try this. When you wake up each morning and reach for your phone to bounce through apps — Facebook, Instagram, Weather, Email, News — mindfully note which ones you click on, which you feel like you get the most value from checking, and approximately how long the entire process takes. Reflect on how that whole morning routine makes you feel? More stressed out about the coming day, or more centered about how you’ll approach your day and at ease?
Maybe try skipping the morning app routine for a week. Just roll out of bed and go. Or, start with a waking up meditation like this one by Alexis Santos before you pick up the phone.
Making Sense of It All
You probably only need a week or two of data to start seeing useful patterns. Once we start to mindfully observe the activities of our day, and unpack our approaches, light bulbs begin going off around “smarter”solutions. What kinds of work do I do that I should do at home before going into the office? What kinds of work can I only do when I’m *in* the office? Where and how can I slot my proactive work (writing grant proposals) in the day to separate it from the reactive work (donors needing me to answer their gala inquires) that always seems to encroach on it? Can I block off 8:00–10:00AM each morning to just write. Can we all agree to “No Meeting Friday?”
The beauty of doing this kind of assessment with your team is that you can all help and hold each other accountable for the solutions you pick. Ugh, I know if I get up and do that, Pallavi is going to call me out for not sticking with the thing I’m supposed to be doing. It’s a peer pressure form of accountability.
Give an activities assessment a try and please let me know how it goes for you.
Register to attend our upcoming Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. Bootcamp if you’re interested in exploring more about how these tools can be used to create high-performing teams and organizations.
Tim Cynova is a leader, HR consultant, and educator dedicated to co-creating anti-racist and anti-oppressive workplaces through using human-centered organizational design. He is a certified Senior Professional in HR, trained mediator, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., on faculty at New York’s The New School and Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and for the past twelve years served as COO and then Co-CEO of the largest association of artists, creatives, and makers in the U.S.