image: Photo by NeONBRAND https://unsplash.com/photos/Rohz2qhg8Wg
It’s more than 2 months that I do not put my foot in the office.
The same applies to my colleagues. The same applies to my family.
How is to work in a fully dispersed team? What about doing it while home schooling, while having the kids around all the time and while preserving quality time to interact with them?
Dispersed team
a group of geographically, organizationally and time dispersed workers brought together by information and telecommunication technologies to accomplish one or more organizational tasks
In a word, it’s different.
It’s different from working with remote teams. It’s different from working across timezones, cultures and organizations. It’s different from just having a couple of people working from home.
Openness, trust and respect are main components of my way of working and in the current environment they are needed more than ever.
Gone are the improptu discussions, gone are the quick exchanges, gone are the meetings you are pulled in while walking along the corridor (hurrah!): work activities are at the same time more flexible to accommodate individual (and family) needs and more structured to ensure touching points with colleagues and stakeholders.
I feel each of us is a bit more human, more family & health first, more respectful of the others, more willing to support each other, to achieve a win-win situation.
I love the daily virtual coffee with the colleagues as I love the focused time allowing me to complete more pomodoros than ever. I love the possibility to critically review the way I work, to openly share my thoughts, gather feedbacks from others and collaboratively reinvent it: compared to few weeks ago, we’ve now the time to do it, with urgent but unimportant activities being cut.
You start working as if you were in the office, but it takes really little time to understand that’s not the right way: you quickly start reassessing the priority and added value of your work activities, you start improving processes and tools to take advantage of the new modi operandi and to ensure your life at home is improved.
And then, you iterate.
We are learning on the fly what’s working and what’s not, an agile mindset is paramount not only to survive but to thrive in such environment.
Learning on the job while reinventing it is the norm
Forget about command and control, it’s a long gone approach.
Focus on building a solid common base enabling each individual to grow and work out the best approach leveraging her strengths, views and beliefs: provide the foundations and be open to revisit/adapt them based on the feedbacks received.
I feel I’ve more opportunities to expand my horizons, to learn, to read (Andy Lancaster’s “Driving Performance Through Learning” is a must read for anybody, not just for L&D practitioners) and to interact with “thinkers” outside of my company (I rediscovered Twitter and created my interesting bubbles via lists…).
It’s great and refreshing even if I’m definitely missing the internal chatter, the casual encounter in the company canteen and the joy of experiencing aircraft being assembled and tested.
We are moving to a different phase and I am really looking forward to see how the past weeks will shape the future of work, how we will combine old and new attitudes, how we will take the best out of both.