Category: Team

The jury is out on hybrid work, but who’s really on trial?

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The year I graduated from high school, my aunt gifted me a shiny new coin. I was seeing this coin for the first time; the Canadian government had just replaced the paper dollar bill. I came across that coin recently, in storage for more than thirty years, and flipped it into the pile of change on the kitchen counter. Had my aunt intended a gift to last, she would have fished a paper bill out of her purse and given me that. The coin is now dull, ubiquitous – the bill is the novelty.

Working from home is like our dollar coin. Anyone who talks about “returning to normal,” if by “normal” they mean trekking every day to a shared office, might be trying to bring back the old dollar bill.

Job trends reporting on Canada’s workforce indicates that new postings offered as “remote” have gone up nine times since the pandemic started, to 12% of new jobs. Not only that, but those remote jobs attracted 20% of all applications. For software and IT services, remote jobs are 30% of postings, up from 12.5% pre-pandemic. For attracting and retaining talent, this upheaval in the market will have a disproportionate effect on support and service areas.

Still, as someone who used to have dollar bills in his pocket, I have had misgivings about remote work.

Ten years ago, our Operations team was on its own floor, behind a locked door, and for security reasons related to gift processing, the elevator didn’t even stop on our floor. Visitors had to get off on either the fourth or sixth floor, walk the stairs, and bang on the door.

The team was cut off from the life of the department and of the campus. We were largely invisible, which helped create an us-them dynamic in our support and service relationship. We were much less likely than members of other teams to volunteer for events, less likely to raise our hands to serve on departmental committees or take on new challenges. You might say we were remote.

Then the pendulum swung. We moved from our isolated aerie to an open-plan office. In-person collaboration increased, but there was less privacy and it was difficult to control distractions due to noise and people’s movement. Socializing became more visible and sometimes it was discouraged, either because it was disruptive to one’s neighbours or was perceived by managers to rob from time on task.

This is our story, but many workplaces have similar stories. Staff persons’ sometimes passionate defence of remote work is probably in part a backlash against the open-plan office.

That’s not all it is, though. I miss the old folding money, but I do favour employees having a choice about where work gets done. In that old office that isolated us from the rest of the department, I doubt having Zoom or Teams would have made the difference. Other things were missing – communication, shared goals, inclusivity – which by now we should know are not things we can leave to chance.

For hybrid to succeed, of course we must get the technology right. That’s only a start. We must look beyond individual productivity as the only meaningful measure of WFH effectiveness. We must consider team cohesiveness, engagement, shared values and goals, and culture. We must be deliberate about communicating objectives, about onboarding thoughtfully, about running meetings mindfully so engagement is not dictated by proximity.

In a year or two, this post might seem naïve – either the great experiment with remote and hybrid worked out, or it didn’t – but I don’t think it will be that clear. More likely, hybrid will succeed in some settings and fail in others. Its success in any given culture will be a judgment not on remote work but on the competencies of individual managers and leaders.

Tell your team’s journey story, and plot it in advance

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Managers and leaders spend their days in a state of mild to medium dissatisfaction. The status quo is rarely acceptable, there’s always a hill to climb, there’s always a distant horizon and a finger pointing “there.” Societal trends, shifts in priorities, leadership and staff changes, the imperative to evolve and grow the team – all rule out the option to stand still.

Some restlessness is healthy and necessary. But radiating dissatisfaction can wear your team down over the long term, if they feel their best is never good enough.

Sometimes you have to pause and appreciate what has been achieved. Recognizing and naming progress provides that sense of forward momentum that fuels the energy to keep going. Setbacks and reversals are like downturns in the stock market: Zoom out far enough, and they appear as minor blips in a larger story of growth.

I sometimes get to appreciate this larger story when I give a conference presentation. Sharing the story of our team’s journey with others is a source of energy-giving gratitude for me.

But journey stories don’t take their shape only in retrospect: They can be built into planning. Operations projects that are carefully scoped and defined as discrete packages of work with end dates are set up to be celebrated, simply because it’s possible to recognize when they’re done. (Even if a Phase Two waits in the wings.) Projects that are not scoped, or poorly scoped, will pursue various directions and never reach any kind of satisfying end that you can plant a flag on.

Looking back cantilevers your ambitious looking-forward. Celebrate it, and plan for it.

The front line doesn’t understand Operations … Does it matter?

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The Operations team deals with technical issues, difficult vendors, software downtime, data complexity, tight timelines, and high work volumes. These challenges affect the work of our colleagues on the front line, in development and engagement. Whether our colleagues really understand these challenges is another matter.

Should they?

If you work in Operations and find yourself feeling that your front-line colleagues don’t appreciate the issues you face, then ask yourself this question: Do you appreciate the challenges faced by your front-line colleagues?

We want our colleagues to recognize that operational realities exist. Lack of understanding can lead to unnecessary risk and unreasonable expectations. But I’m not sure it’s deep understanding we should aim for. We should try to build credibility and trust in ourselves instead.

Bad things happen when an organization ignores operational realities, it’s true. The way to prevent bad things is not to educate the whole organization on the fine points of risk, but to speak to risk from a strong base of credibility and trustworthiness. This applies not only to Advancement Operations but other offices – legal, audit, procurement – that advise on risk.

Trust is built when Advancement’s support function demonstrates that it really gets what the organization is trying to accomplish and knows how the world looks through the eyes of fundraisers and alumni officers.

It’s important that Ops staff internalize departmental strategy – that they be able to connect their daily work to the goals of advancement. And there’s a more personal element: Each of us should feel a little of what it’s like to be a fundraiser.

Sometimes I wonder if we should be sending Ops team members to conferences for development and alumni relations instead of advancement services. Would a change in perspective lead to stronger partnerships?

We can start by listening to understand the business end of advancement – not just react to what we might think of as its whims. Being responsive instead of reactive will help build a relationship that will remain friendly when the next disruptive technical issue comes along, or when a project is forecast to not be completed for another six months, or when a serious risk is flagged.

This responsibility for lens-shifting is not reciprocal.

It is more important than the Ops employee shift to accommodate her perspective to that of the fundraiser, than it is for the fundraiser to return the favour. The Ops employee looks through the fundraiser lens in order to provide more effective support and to build credibility and trust. There is no clear benefit in asking a fundraiser to see things through an operations lens.

A driver needs to learn how to drive the car; she doesn’t need to know what’s going under the hood. (Fine if she does, of course.) But no driver would trust a mechanic who has no knowledge of what it’s like behind the wheel.

Of preachers and lawyers

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Some have the gift of impromptu eloquence. Some, like me, do not. I have been humbled many times, after speaking to a topic tersely and inadequately, hearing a colleague offer their own explication that is as fitting as it is lengthy. I can speak my mind, but I have difficulty improvising; I covet others’ fluency.

I’m comforted to know that my slow-wittedness is a phenomenon known throughout history, and therefore, I suppose, quite normal.

In the 1570s, Michel de Montaigne, in an essay called “Of prompt or slow speech,” wrote: “So we see that in the gift of eloquence some have facility and promptness, and, as they say, can get it out so easily that at every turn they are ready; whereas others, slower, never speak except with elaboration and premeditation.”

Eloquence is the profession of lawyers and preachers, he says. The quick person would do better as a lawyer, and the slow person would do better as a preacher. A lawyer adjusts in the moment, adapting to every novel twist. A preacher delivers premeditated messages in a continuous stream without interruption.

I think our teams would do well to include both: the deliberate along with the nimble.

The traditional hiring process favours lawyers. The way we interview candidates prioritizes the ability to think on one’s feet. Some basic questions a candidate can prepare for, but hiring panels really like candidates who are articulate in the face of questions that are unanticipated. In these situations, the preacher, sensing disadvantage, compounds the problem by becoming nervous. With little to go on, interviewers see only the nervousness and conclude the candidate is not a fit.

Most roles in Operations do not require the incumbent to argue in court – or perform improv comedy, or field questions from the press. Why the interview process has been made to resemble these activities, I’m not sure.

A bias in favour of lawyers is not mistaken; it only lacks balance. There are ways to achieve balance. I have sometimes provided a question or two in advance, given exercises to work on, and invited candidates to deliver a prepared presentation.

I limit the amount of time to prepare. As Montaigne wrote, anxiety to present oneself well leads to overworking the material and yields an unnatural result – what we call overthinking it. “We say of certain works that they smell of oil and the lamp,” he wrote. “If it doesn’t go along gaily and freely, it goes nowhere worth going.”

Montaigne has a reputation as a bookish hermit but in fact he was mayor of Bordeaux, aspired to statesmanship, and was embroiled in the hazardous politics of his day. He preferred conversation to writing.

On the job, where again conditions often favour the lawyer, we should ensure all types get their share of the conversation.

The virtual work world presents some opportunities. I have seen effective use of meeting software that encourages team members to provide input in the form of written statements, which other participants in the meeting can upvote. The author may then be invited to speak to the statement. It is easier to elaborate on an idea that one has already put out there, especially an idea that has been upvoted, than it is to break in on others’ full flight with a new thought.

It helps if the meeting is run by someone skilled at facilitating who can gently elicit comments from quieter members of the group. The preacher isn’t necessarily a shy or unconfident person; it just takes a bit to prime the pump.

The goal is not to shut up the quick-witted in favour of the slow, but to allow the quick and the slow to contribute more equally, leading to stronger teams and better decisions.

Beware this work-from-home truism that isn’t true

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You may have heard this one. “Working from home is bad for extroverts, great for introverts.” This was never true, and as time goes on its untruth becomes ever clearer.

All people need and desire connection with others, including introverts. All people need quiet time to process their encounters, including extroverts (although they might not enjoy it as much).

When the workforce emerges from this pandemic, organizations will face a new expectation that work arrangements be flexible. Whatever the pros and cons, we should not fear that our teams will split into in-office extroverts and stay-at-home introverts. That’s not how it works.

Different people at different times manage their energy differently. That’s all. It has little to do with desiring either stimulation or isolation as a default mode. Beyond figuring out how to work well together, the introvert-extrovert scale is a red herring that doesn’t have much bearing on anything essential.

For my early morning walk before work, I often choose the same wooded path. I sometimes meet a man and his dog who share my routine. The man is middle-aged and bald, and his dog is a poodle, I think, with fur of light maple. The dog’s name is Sadie. I know this only because this morning she chose to hate me, and the man had to restrain her on a short leash. We exchanged curt greetings and moved on.

None of us were pleased to meet on the path. That’s fine. There are plenty of other paths in the neighbourhood. We can each choose a way that suits our mood.

Employee engagement across all sectors is low, we’re told. What would be the result if we gave everyone the freedom to choose?

Finding meaning and purpose in the all-team Ops meeting

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Meetings. Nothing revolutionary or innovative there! Yet, our shop has little or no history of gathering as a whole team. Maybe it’s because such meetings are expensive. Everyone leaves their station and work grinds to a halt. Bodies fill the boardroom and the round of “updates” begins. Not everything shared is of interest, and no decisions are made. Conscientious staff members may find this stressful.

We’re all familiar with the regular meeting that happens for its own sake. And yet: Not meeting has always felt like a lack. The regular meeting of any team should reinforce a sense of the team’s cohesion and unity of purpose. This is especially true of Operations, which risks being perceived (within and without) as a miscellany of services and functions.

When virtual work introduced a new convenience to the large-team meeting, the time seemed right to make a start. We’ve been moved to figure out what we want out of it.

Our team’s unified purpose is to facilitate opportunities for people to meaningfully engage with the institution’s teaching, research, and community mission. The front line builds and advances relationships – our team provides the tools to allow them to do that. That could be data, could be a CRM, a report, or a mobile phone. No matter one’s role, the work in some way enables or facilitates carrying out the Advancement mission.

Each team member knows what enabling and facilitating looks like from their own perspective. They may be less aware of how others enable and facilitate. That’s my goal for these meetings: To help everyone get a sense of the range of ways Operations drives the mission.

First, each team manager speaks very briefly about a few current highlights. Not the full range of what everyone’s working on. Just what’s looming large now, with an emphasis on work that directly supports front-line success.

Second, one team member gives a short presentation on any aspect of their work, ranging from 10 to 20 minutes. The topic can be anything. It doesn’t have to relate to everyone (or anyone) else’s work. Given the diversity of the team this isn’t possible anyway. The only requirement is that it provides a concrete example of how Operations supports fundraising, alumni and constituent engagement, marketing, donor relations, or communications.

The aim is not cross-pollination or collaboration, which already happens. Rather, I hope it provides a little inspiration.

If your team meets for the sake of meeting, if you’re stuck in the rut of “that’s what we’ve always done,” then consider going on hiatus for July and August, reformulate your purpose for meeting, and reconvene fresh in the fall.

Work-from-home productivity requires more than uninterrupted focus

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If each person on my team had a dollar for every time I stuck my head in their office for “one quick question,” they’d be set up for retirement. That would be pre-COVID, of course. Work-from-home means fewer interruptions (from the boss, if not from the kids), and that has some people feeling they and their teams are more productive now than they were in the office.

No doubt people are finding themselves better able to focus, better able to control how their discretionary time is used. Anyone who suffered in the high-traffic areas of open-plan offices is probably better off.

But how are we defining “productive”? Hovering over the inbox and leaving no email unanswered? Busy does not equal productive.

I feel we’ve done a good job in our shop along most dimensions of WFH. If I had to pick an area for improvement, it would be setting expectations and goals, and reviewing them regularly.

Cal Newport, writing recently in the New Yorker, says in the modern office, supervisors provide clear goals and leave employees alone to figure out how to accomplish them. This hands-off approach is appropriate for complex and creative office work, he says. Ambiguity and fluidity aren’t necessarily drawbacks, as long as they are balanced by continuous, informal course-correction. It’s this informal communication we’ve lost in the COVID era. (1)

These days, I’m much less likely to do the virtual equivalent of popping in. Not to overestimate the value of my unannounced visits, but these interruptions that contributed to distraction in the office were also the vehicle for a lot of clarification. The interruptions served a purpose, one we should replicate if employees are going to apply their newfound focus productively.

What was once informal (though disruptive) has not been effectively replaced by informal online interaction, which tends to require planning and a certain deliberateness. We have to be more deliberate not just about what we do, but how we do it, Newport writes. As organizations consider extending work-from-home into the future, beyond COVID, it is important that we diagnose these issues.

Newport suggests that our loosely-run organizations adopt some of the project planning tools of software developers, which provide transparency across the whole team as well as removing a lot of the ambiguity around which tasks have been assigned to whom.

“More structure, more clarity, less haphazardness,” he says.

Talk to your team and each individual about your, and their, expectations. Set goals and measures of success to ensure accountability. Regularly review goals and progress. Continuously reclarify at the team and individual level to maintain focus, and modify as needed to ensure progress is actually being made and that team members are engaged.

Remote work carries the promise of focus, but it will remain only a promise unless we ensure people are given a relatively small number of things to work on at a time and are able to go deep on them with a clear sense of direction.

  1. “Why Remote Work Is So Hard—and How It Can Be Fixed,” by Cal Newport, The New Yorker, 26 May 2020

Pivoting to hope

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Tigers living in the Bronx Zoo have been found to have COVID-19. I read that news on my phone late at night and asked myself, “Wait, you mean cats can get this?”

Is it helpful that, minutes before going to bed, my last thought of the day is that our neighbours’ roaming cats could be spreading the virus from house to house?

No, it’s not helpful.

The news has a seductive quality. Keeping up on developments feels necessary, even responsible, but the tiger story convinced me that it’s corrosive as well. From now on, I will tune in to the public health updates and do my best to tune out the rest.

Or at least tune in to the positive. The curve is flattening, even descending, in some countries and regions. This is not reason to become lax, but is evidence that this crisis won’t last.

It may be time to start talking about that with our teams. To this point, I’ve been stressing that we are in this for the long haul, because I wanted people to act quickly to make their home workstations comfortable and safe, and not to hoard (and, potentially, lose) their vacation days.

Some of us have family members who are in danger. I don’t want to minimize anyone’s genuine anxiety. For the rest of us, it’s time to devote some mindshare to the post-COVID future. When I get a chance to do so, it’s a welcome relief.

So implement your new CRM, plan for your next campaign, pursue professional development for you and your team, talk with donors about their dreams, work on strategy – and push on.

Since this thing began, we have been absorbing the idea that the way ahead is uncertain. Well, everything has always been uncertain, hasn’t it? What is certain is that this will end. How we think and behave now will decide whether we arrive on the other side exhausted and depleted, or invigorated and ready.

When the novelty of work-from-home wears off

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Our sector is undergoing a massive work-from-home experiment. The experiment is universal, but for our sector the change is especially dramatic. Whenever some of us get a chance to think (between one videoconference and the next), our minds turn to what this might mean for the future of the office.

No question, work-from-home is technically possible. A few weeks in, it is clear that cloud-based software and videoconferencing are passing the test. If there’s a drawback with remote work, it isn’t the tools.

However: consider what the current experiment means for its human subjects.

Everyone has moved offsite in a matter of days. People are now socially isolated, without normal supports. They may be forced to be productive in limited space shared with children, parents, roommates, and spouses who may also be working from home. Distance is impeding asking questions, sharing information, and getting to know others. On top of that there’s worry about an unrelenting crisis with personal, local, and global effects, with no end in sight.

If this work-from-home experiment were a real experiment, it would be ruled unethical.

The pandemic will subside, and with it, the need to isolate and the general anxiety that wakes us at 3 a.m. (However, if people weren’t already somewhat anxious before the crisis, they weren’t paying attention.)

Other effects remain to be discovered.

Remote work might be normal in the private sector, but I question whether it translates perfectly to mission-driven organizations. A mission-driven organization requires inspirational leadership and engagement around shared purpose, not just hitting numerical targets. To say that the higher education and non-profit sectors need to get with the times and embrace private-sector models of work would be classic bizplaining.

We should also recognize that the likelihood of having adequate home-office space breaks along the line of income and reporting level. Implemented poorly, across-the-board work-from-home would impose disproportionate costs on lower-income workers. Implemented fairly, work-from-home might be costly for organizations.

Certainly, the best thing for our students would be to be back in classrooms and labs. The common campus experience levels the field somewhat for students from different economic backgrounds. More fundamentally, a university without physical proximity is not really a university. An experience based on engagement with the world balanced with an encounter with the self does not translate to digital. I am not convinced this is opening a new era for learning.

It may, however, be a new era for administrative offices. I’m intrigued about the possibilities of more flexible work arrangements that benefit people and organizations. Employees skip the commute while organizations free up some space – it sounds win-win.

We may be still be blind to the downsides, though. Let’s get through this first, and take careful notes.

Advancement birds of a feather must flock together

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Cardinals are frequent visitors to my neighbourhood. Male cardinals are bright red, but I know them mainly by their distinctive calls. They are hard to spot because they stay so high up in the trees.

That may be changing. A few days ago, I was in the middle of an email when a cardinal landed right outside my window, less than two feet from the ground. As human activity on my street has lessened, birds are coming down to ground level more often.

Or maybe it’s because I’m at home that I notice birds. Maybe I’m just better at noticing, period.

I notice other things. It seems the birds of the Advancement flock are also exploring their changed neighbourhoods. But the experience has not been the same for everyone.

When this crisis hit, frontline staff suddenly found themselves with calendars cleared of travel and events. Never ones to sit on their hands, they turned to tackling neglected to-do lists, or reading the huge volume of quality content on philanthropy and engagement in times of crisis, or becoming thoughtful and far-thinking.

This reflective hiatus for frontline staff will be brief, and in fact it may already be over. Conversations with alumni and donors must resume – different venue, different topics – and priorities for annual appeals are shifting toward direct aid for students in distress.

For support and operations staff, the experience has been quite different.

The rush to get everyone set up for working from home is over. We’ve discovered that the tools and technology were already there, like a safety net, waiting for us to arrive. (Our friends in the private sector could have told us that.) A few venerable business processes have been swept aside, temporarily, to suit the new reality. As a result, the physical move wasn’t as painful as we might have predicted.

What now? Operations staff never had empty calendars. The meeting load has in fact gone up: Leaders and managers are communicating with their teams remotely while the need for collaborative project work goes on. The opportunity for reflection never happened. We are busy just keeping up.

Temporarily, then, half the flock is on the ground exploring new territory, and half is still up in the trees.

The volume of meetings should abate, and a kind of normalcy will return. It will be a different normal, however: Advancement shops are gearing up for engaging with committed supporters during what will be a protracted health and economic crisis. What does a “face-to-face” visit mean now? How do we shift to rich digital experiences in place of events? How do we measure meaningful engagement? What processes need to be retooled, not just temporarily, but for all time?

The descriptive phrase I hear from colleagues is “business as unusual.” In such times our most important task is keeping the flock together.