Speaker 1: Hey Leader, David Berkus here, organizational psychologist and author of four best-selling books on helping leaders and teams do their best work ever, from wherever they are. And in this episode, we're going to talk about how to get your team to work together better. Specifically, if they're a remote team, how you can increase collaboration and make the team feel like a team. You know when the great work from home experiment started, right? When organizations around the world sent their people to work from home, or some people to feel like they were living at work. The thing that a lot of team leaders started to sense was that they didn't manage a team so much as they managed 12 individual relationships instead of a team of 12, for example. Because what started happening is people knew how to keep their boss accountable for the work that they were doing. And they knew they were on endless Zoom calls and things like that. But the collaboration from peer-to-peer on a team dramatically reduced. That took effect in a lot of different ways, right? So that took effect in decreased productivity over time. Some of that was offset by the increase in productivity from people working longer hours and not having solid enough boundaries between work and life. But over time, productivity ended up decreasing on a lot of teams and that feeling of loneliness, which then would trigger fatigue and burnout and things like that, would increase. But a lot of companies that have been working in a fully distributed fashion for a long time have managed to avoid that. And a lot of individual workers who might have been more experienced at working from home or working remotely managed to avoid it as well. And that's because what these teams and these individuals have in common is that they have began a practice before the experiment, and if not, they certainly developed it relatively quickly in the great work from home experiment. They developed a practice of working out loud. And what working out loud means is that you're working, you're working alone most of the time, you're on Zoom calls every once in a while, you're on Microsoft Teams video conferences every once in a while, but most of your work is alone. But that doesn't mean that you're treating it as if you're the only one who needs to know what you're working on. Working out loud means that you are constantly updating and informing your whole team on what's happening in your situation, what you're focused on, where your roadblocks are, how to ask you if someone else needs help, and that you are open about the requests for help that you have. And so in this episode, I want to cover three questions that you could start using in a weekly all-hands meeting or find some other way to incorporate them into your organization. These questions are derived from teams that have figured out how to work out loud for a long time. No surprise if you've ever done anything in the world of Agile, you're used to the idea of a scrum, and these questions were a large part of that scrum to keep everyone working out loud for a long time. When you ask these three questions, the idea isn't that you're putting people on the spot. The idea is that you're giving space to people in a regular way that can be captured easily to answer questions in a form of project update. So the questions really quickly are, what did I just work on, what am I working on, and what's blocking my progress? You could phrase these a bunch of different ways. I've seen them phrased in a variety of different ways, but the point is that we're focused on one question on what was just accomplished, one question on what we're focused on now, and then another question that becomes an opportunity for people to make requests for help or an opportunity for people to volunteer to help other people on their team. And all three together are what boost collaboration, but let's look at each one in turn. The question of what did I just work on, what did I just accomplish, et cetera, I mean, this one is kind of obvious, right? Presumably, we have a large project target, and we've broken the deliverables up into shorter-term objectives, and we want to know how we're making progress. So we need progress updates. We need people to say, this is what I've already accomplished. That leads into the next question, obviously, this is what I'm focused on, but this is what I need to accomplish really helps the team know exactly what we did, exactly where we are in this larger process, and it lets everybody know what work has been sort of covered. One of the weird things about a remote work team is that often people accidentally find out that they were working on the exact same thing without knowing it. So if you can kind of anticipate that and find out about it, maybe you can correct it when you ask the second question. The second question, what am I going to work on, this has the obvious effect of if everybody knows at a regular interval what people are focused on, maybe you're not duplicating effort, but there's an added bonus to this, which is that nothing is getting hidden, right? Nobody's dropping the ball on a project that we should be working on this specific activity, and we're not. It lets you as a leader know that everybody's got something covered, and it lets everybody on the team know where everyone else is. It also lets people know about potential project pivots. I mean, how many times have you got in thinking, I know that exactly what the deliverable is when you get into a project, and then you end the project with something entirely different? And if you've said every single time, then your work life looks a lot like mine. Project pivots happen as we run into trying to implement something, as we test it, as we get feedback on it, either by a market reaction, customer reaction, or even just what's feasible, we have to make some changes on our goals. And so the opportunity by saying, what am I working on right now, or what am I about to work on, is the opportunity for people to mention, oh, and actually, I know I said in this next period, in this next sprint, I'll be working on this. But in reality, I'll be working on something different because of this project pivot. So it makes sure that everybody knows everybody's got everything we need covered. It lets people know if anything has changed. And most importantly for you as the leader, it lets people know that no one is dropping the ball, no one is overlooking a crucial task, because we know on a regular basis what everyone's working on. And the last question, and this is my favorite question, I think this is the most important question, is what's blocking my progress? You see, the other interesting thing about a remote work environment, or really any environment where you're not keeping everyone regularly updated organically, is that it's much harder to make requests for help. You as the leader of a team, maybe working remotely for the last year, have probably already felt this. This is where that creeping feeling that, oh, I actually just manage a bunch of individual relationships instead of a team, sets in, because people make their requests, but they make their requests of the team leader. And now it's your job to keep a mental role at X of everybody's knowledge, skills, and abilities and who you have to refer them to. But in a co-located environment, it's much easier for people to gradually understand that, to walk down the hall, tap someone on the shoulder, and ask them for help with something. It's much easier to keep track of all of that in that co-located environment, because we're relying on proximity and other factors to do the work for us. In a remote environment, we need to be deliberate about it. So in a remote environment, we need to give space on a regular basis for people to say what they're struggling with. And you don't want to say, what do you suck at, what are you struggling with? So the idea that this is what's blocking my progress, I just answered, here's what I'm focused on, and now I need to mention what's blocking my progress, could be an internal thing, could be an external thing, like somebody else needing to complete their piece first. Regardless, it's that opportunity to raise your hand and say, I need help. Or it's your opportunity to just be open and honest about what questions you don't have answered yet. Maybe you don't know how to tackle that thing you said you were just working on, and that creates an opportunity when you say, this is blocking my progress, for someone else on the team to volunteer. That question is the key to increasing a sense of collaboration and teamwork on a team. It only works, though, if it's preceded by the other two questions. What did I just work on, and what am I working on now? Those are the status update questions, and this third one is the true collaboration question. Managing a remote team seems like it automatically means a lot less collaboration. But teamwork on a remote team is even more important. Keeping everyone communicating, keeping everyone collaborating and aware of what everyone else works on is hugely important, but it can't be left up to chance. It can't be left up to serendipity and all of the organic interactions that happen in a co-located environment. You as the leader need to make a deliberate attempt to make sure everybody is communicating. How you do that can be a variety of different ways. There are software tools you can buy, plug-ins to existing project management software that you can buy that will ask these questions on a regular basis. You could hold a weekly or a daily stand-up meeting on a video conference and go around and ask these questions. I've worked with teams that use a Google spreadsheet that just gets updated at the beginning and end of every week with these questions. The tool itself doesn't matter as much as figuring out your team's version of these questions, how they're comfortable asking them and answering them, and then figuring out a way to capture them inside the tools you're already using. That strategy is going to be best because it's going to get people comfortable with this regular update most often. Don't focus on the tools, focus on the questions. When you focus on the questions, when you write ones that are unique to your team and that your team is finally comfortable asking and answering on a regular basis, you'll find that your team, that the individual members of your team, have a much easier time focusing on each other. That is what really drives collaboration on a remote team. Hey, thanks so much for watching this episode. If you liked it, make sure you're subscribed or following this channel. And if you really liked it and you want to go deeper, then check out the resources we have for you at DavidBerkus.com slash resources. Guaranteed there's something in there that'll help you and your team do your best work ever.