Andrew: 0:00

we're unfortunately bound by the laws of, currently known physics you then have to really pay attention to the language and the communication that is done within the constraints of the laws of physics. So you have to re engineer language before you can re engineer the speed of light.

Mark Ridley: 0:15

Does that

Andrew: 0:16

mean they have to use loads

Mark Ridley: 0:17

of

Andrew: 0:17

emojis

Mark Ridley: 0:18

in, Mars communications? It's just

Andrew: 0:21

I can only hope that that is one of the things that, uh, emerges.

Mark Ridley: 0:26

lots of thumb, up emojis and smiley face emoji.

Andrew: 0:29

The Mars landings were achieved through a series of aubergines and thumbs up. We're picking back up this conversation we've been having about virtual teams. So if you, you introduced us to the, uh, to the announcement by Amazon's Andy Jassy about their, uh, their, uh, dictat for everybody to return to the office forthwith. Um, and no, you know, no exceptions. Co present teamwork is now the modus operandi of Amazon, and we looked at the history of team working in virtual teams and some of the things, some of the issues that have befallen virtual teams. I want to pick up and move into maybe a little bit more on some of the specifics around about communication. I always think, like, if you take things to the extreme and learn how to mitigate for it at the extreme, then it can give you some indicators as to what to watch out for in the more pedestrian. Uh, settings and, you know, we do this all the time with teamwork. A lot of what we borrow and bring in, you're introduced to a business that's operating, you know, global teams. But frankly, what they do is. Basically, they work on laptops and email each other, um, but the understanding that they're employing to improve their teamwork has been developed by Arctic explorers or, um, people have climbed Everest or the military or space exploration. Um, and this is a good example of that, which is one of the really tricky problems that we face in reaching Mars and putting a, actually putting humans on Mars is, it's like a, You know, the modern version of that problem that the Apollo missions had, which is separation from Earth with the crew. But we're talking about Several orders of magnitude more. And one of the things that happens when you move to those distances is you get communication delay because the, as it's called technically, it's called signal latency, but communication delay, which is, um, the signal can only travel at the speed of light. And when you're, you know, Tens of millions of miles away that the length of time that signal takes to travel is actually significant. And we don't notice it when we're on Earth. It's so fast that it doesn't matter when you're when you're on Mars, you know, that delay can be up to 22 minutes one way. So that's a, you know, 44 minute round trip

Mark Ridley: 3:25

We can just

Andrew: 3:25

make it faster, there'll be some

Mark Ridley: 3:26

technology that improves on that, right?

Andrew: 3:29

Well, this is this is the fascinating thing, right? So, I mean, full disclosures. There's some, there's some organizations that are working on this that I've had some involvement with. but what underpins the problem they face is, and what's interesting to me as sort of team communication researcher is, well, you can't, you can't overcome the speed of light, or at least current technology has not given us the ability to engineer. Yeah, we're, we're, we're unfortunately bound by the laws of, currently known physics So, um, the interesting thing is you then have to really pay attention to the language and the communication that is done within the constraints of the laws of physics. So you have to re engineer language before you can re engineer the speed of light.

Mark Ridley: 4:16

Does that

Andrew: 4:16

mean they have to use loads

Mark Ridley: 4:17

of

Andrew: 4:17

emojis

Mark Ridley: 4:18

in, in Mars, Mars communications?

Andrew: 4:21

I can only hope that that is one of the things that, uh, emerges.

Mark Ridley: 4:26

lots of thumbs up emojis and sad,

Andrew: 4:29

Yeah,

Mark Ridley: 4:30

smiley face emoji. Yeah. Okay.

Andrew: 4:31

yeah. The Mars landings were achieved through a series of aubergines and thumbs up.

Mark Ridley: 4:36

Yeah, yeah, I

Andrew: 4:37

one as well.

Mark Ridley: 4:38

rocket rocket one hopefully not the explosion one

Andrew: 4:41

definitely, definitely. Um, so, uh, Kathleen Mossier and Ute Fischer, who are two, um, like, legends of the game of communication research, So they did a lot of work on the impact of, of signal latency on, on, on, uh, time delay. Now, let's not focus on the time delay thing because literally nobody listening to this is going to face the issue of like a 20 minute delay. Um, however, small delays. And there's some other work that I'm familiar with where they're actually trying to establish what is the so called edge of effective voice communication? Because this is actually something that the, um, the Artemis missions are going to face because, again, sort of technical long story short, there will be some signal delay even in the Artemis communication with Earth because the technology, because ironically, digital technology increases the likelihood of signal latency than analog did. and, you know, the edge of voice, the edge of effective coherence in voice communication is, it's not as big a number as you would think. the point is when you research what you need to do to overcome signal It actually gives you some really nice insights into what's going on when you're communicating virtually, in any context, even without delay. And I think the other thing is to say, yes, we're talking about signal latency, you know, literal distances, but sometimes there's sort of man made signal latency in virtual teams, you know, it's not, it's not all entirely synchronous. And so. You can apply some of this learning not just to sort of like, okay, we've got a dodgy line, but it might just be the rhythms of your working and the nature of perhaps, um, you know, working across time zones that create a degree of delay and some is really useful. What, um, Fisher Mossier established in this was what they called the three Ts, which I really like. So it's nice to have a little alliteration. So it's time, thread, and transmission efficiency. Um, and it's, it's paying attention to those things and how they impact, um, how you communicate with each other. So being aware of when a message was sent and where it sits in relation to other messages being communicated, um, a lot of technology does that for us, but it's useful to pay attention to. thread is about synchronizing discourse in such a way that things are in the right order, trying to retain order of things, um, and that translates to retaining common ground. the, importance of packaging, content in such a way that things aren't split up across messages sent to the extent that you, you lose uh, common ground. Uh, and they put together a set of protocols, I'm sure we can link to the paper, uh, but they put together a set of protocols that try to protect against these things. Now, if you're someone who's running a virtual team and a investment bank, you might not necessarily kind of go, okay, right. We need to adopt the same protocols that we use to, uh, to overcome, uh, transmission delay in a Mars mission. But it does make you think, right? Cause what they were finding is things like, what called step ons. So when you talk over each other because of a delay, um, and, uh, some linguistic terms that is. This is definitely a thing that, virtual teams and co located teams suffer from is, presumption around shared context, leading to, changing the way that you speak. So they talked about anaphora. So anaphora is just basically when you use, um, a kind of placeholder word instead of a specific word. instead of using the actual noun for the thing you're talking about, you say, well, Can you make sure that you get that finished, that finished before we next meet, um, instead of going, can you make sure that the report that is due for that specific client, that we've already discussed is finished before we next meet, um, and if there's any kind of delay, if there's any kind of issue with it. Synchronization when people resort to that kind of language common ground evaporates miscommunication happens and there's downstream knock on effects because when you're virtually, time might be of the essence and by not following the protocol. So I'm making sure that you never use that or it or. or equivalent. You always name it by its proper noun. You, you protect yourself from that confusion. And, you know, that's an example, as I was saying earlier, that's an example where, okay, you actually need to be intentional and change the way that you, uh, handle yourself and, um, produce your communication to mitigate against the environmental impacts of using communication technology. It just changes the way you communicate, um, and you have to be aware of it enough that you can overcome it.

Mark Ridley: 9:56

there's a couple of things that really pertinent to that and maybe to bring us crashing back to Earth from space travel. Um, to, you mentioned, globally diverse teams and that's, that's something that I've seen firsthand, both with hybrid teams and fully remote teams. And, uh, just as you were talking, we were talking about that latency, about 22 minutes and people on, on Earth, maybe not having to experience the same thing.

Andrew: 10:21

Mhm.

Mark Ridley: 10:22

remember a actually a hybrid team. So it was a team where some of the members were located in, in London and the UK, and some of the members of the team were located in, uh, Latin America. And so there's a three or four hour difference, depending on the time of year, three or four hour difference between London, uh, and LATAM. And, uh, one of the teams specifically, this was a team that was very new to working together. working in a hybrid way, not working together, but sort of these two teams coalesced. Um, and one of the, one of the really unusual things that I saw happening was the, um, the productivity of this team. was extremely low, because the team in Latin America were unable to deliver what they were supposed to be delivering. And one of the reasons for this, was that the the work that was being decided in the UK. And then was being primarily delivered by the team in Latin America. Um, but there was a restriction, there was a scoping of the work that was happening in, in the UK. So it's like, here is the work, this is what we expect you to do today. The team in Latin America would start working on it several hours later than the UK, and that work up, but would all, would often be blocked. By the lack of availability of the UK team members, and because of the scoping, because only one item of work had been scoped for that team to work on, they had nothing else to work on. And it was actually really, really important to identify the fact that sometimes they would get blocked, and the team in the UK had to scope several pieces of work. that they could work on in, in case they, they just needed an acknowledgement or something. Um, and this was, to an extent, one of the most severe local problems that I'd seen where created lots of cultural problems. You know, the trust wasn't there because it seemed that the Latin American team weren't delivering. They were trying to deliver, but they were blocked by the UK team. What, what was really interesting about that experience was, um, the team were very unused to working. With remote collaborators, and they were unused to working with people in in different time zones, and also we could talk about the some of the impact of the difference in cultural working, because obviously there's a very significant difference working across countries of how people work together, having worked with a French team. In a hybrid, hybrid French team, I've spoken before about how sometimes it was challenging without me realizing it for me to make myself really well understood by the French team. Not because my language, specific language wasn't translating, but some of my behaviors weren't translating across cultures. And obviously that's what you find in a modern hybrid or fully remote team. You are far more likely to find. geographic, cultural differences and time zone differences than,

Andrew: 13:09

Yeah, I should, I should, I'd say to you, uh, colleague of mine, Abigail Marx and, uh, coauthor of hers, they, they did a bit of work on this and that, that's, that's, that was something that they found was there is a tendency when you have geographically distributed teams, but you know, clusters like you're just describing UK and, uh, and, uh, South America, there is a tendency to. kind of culturally stereotype the other location and then shield yourself from it by, um, assuming a greater degree of identity with the people who are closer to you.

Mark Ridley: 13:47

the

Andrew: 13:48

and, and so that's, Yeah, exactly. Othering the, the other, the other locations. Um, and that can be cultural, so like national cultural, but it can also be to do with identity within an organization, you know, so you can kind of other the, uh, the people in the other department that you're, that you, that you're in a team with. them. Um,

Mark Ridley: 14:08

which was very surprising with a very large tech organization, where two very large organizational components of that organization really don't like each other, you know, see each other as, Being completely different. The culture being different. And actually, that's one of the reasons where I think the differentiating between culture and what we were talking about the shared mental models, you know, the sort of the shared mental models, the shared understanding, common ground is very much at team level, because it's very easy. And I've seen this before with a tech team and a sales team. who are physically co located to other each other very strongly. Um, one of, one of the things that I found very useful when I'm working with teams that are new to remote or hybrid working, um, And I actually had to do this with a reasonably large organization when COVID hit, because I had, fortunately, I, in my background, I had worked for a long time with a physically co located organization. I was almost allergic to having anyone work remotely. I was definitely in the Andy Jassy camp. Everybody has to be in the office all the time. If you're not here, you're not working. Um, and I didn't have any, I didn't have nearly as much data to back it up as, as Jassy. It was pure bias. After that, I actually went to work in a startup that was primarily remote. There was a small, small cohort in London, but actually the vast majority of the team that I was working with were, were fully remote. And I had to learn a lot from that. when I was going through that, when I was trying to understand how better to work in a very remote organization, two companies stood out. One was a company called Buffer and the other one was a company called GitLab. And I think it's absolutely fascinating with both of those, but I would say even more so with GitLab, which is larger. GitLab is about 2, 000 people in 60 countries. huge amount of the things that I have taken and applied with the hybrid and remote teams that I work with comes directly from GitLab's approach because they're very, very open about it. And they talk a lot about culture and a lot about communication. And just to that, to that thread that we were just pulling on, They are extremely explicit about documentation first, so, so everything everything is written first with the intention that it can be consumed asynchronously. So, what they, what they try to do with the culture inside GitLab is, As a very simple example, they don't really allow presentations. If you want to present something, what you're supposed to do is record yourself presenting, and then you can send it to the people that you want to present to. Even prefer to, that you actually write, you know, you, you write a long form prose document that people can consume and give feedback on in their time zone. And the GitLab handbook, um, the Fully Remote Handbook is available everywhere. An incredibly transparent organization. there's, there's actually a, uh, podcast episode with Sid Sijbrandij who is the, the CEO and founder of GitLab, and one of the things that he says in that is because of those cultural differences, because you have to be extremely precise, just to back up some of the things that you're saying, you have to be very precise with what the expectations inside the organization are, it's actually significantly easier to be fully remote. than hybrid. And he specifically says you've got the sort of the two ends of the spectrum, either fully remote or fully co located. And either of those are perfectly good models, but hybrid is, is really different really difficult to manage because you get these weird artifacts like four people in a meeting room. for people who are joining remotely to a, to a meeting call, like, you know, there's a video call and there is a difference of experience between the people that are fully remote and the people in the meeting room. And then, obviously, what happens when that meeting finishes is the people who are remote. dial off the people who are in the meeting room, go for a coffee, continue the conversation, overturn all the discussions that were had, and end up with something really different. And so, you know, there is this really interesting thing about, um, how we have to design the standards, the patterns, the communication protocols, very carefully, depending on the context.

Andrew: 18:19

that comes back to this idea of being very intentional about it. And you can see how, I guess, how intentional they've been. Um, and being aware of the risks of not doing that. Because the, some of the things we talked about earlier that, you know, lack of trust, dehumanization, depersonalization, um, resulting in, um, Disregulation of, of, of the way that you communicate. The research says that a lot of that leads to conflict. and the conflict tends to be harder to identify. it lasts for longer because it's harder to resolve. So these are none of these things are things that you want. you know, being being aware of the potential for that is important. And I think I can see why they find fully remote easier than easier than hybrid because the conventions of interaction, the baselines of conventions of interaction between those two contexts ought to be entirely different. If you try to achieve the same, one of the two constituent parties is going to feel short changed because what you ought to do to achieve a successful, um, interaction virtually is going to feel really weird. If you're face to face, the intentionality around about how you prescribe interaction is really, really important. And I think that's an example. I've seen as well in organizations is the, I don't want to call it lazy because that sort of sounds accusatory, but the assumption that, well, if I was having this meeting face to face, I would do a PowerPoint presentation or talk for a bit and then, you know, ask for questions. I can't do it face to face, so I'm going to do it virtually, so I'll just do that on a computer. The literature kind of says that's not really the way to do it. Now we're talking specifically about meetings there, but it's a, you know, often a lot of the interaction Takes the form of meetings, um, so there's a pretty strong overlap in the Venn diagram between virtual teamwork and meetings. It's about, you know, really, really being explicit about what is, what is the format of this? What needs to happen in advance? How is it going to happen? How are we going to use the technology to, to achieve what we need to achieve? And what are the conventions of interaction that we expect so that we all get the most out of it? Um, not giving any thought to that and just like, doing what you would do face to face but online is going to have a suboptimal result.

Mark Ridley: 21:02

going back to some of those cultural differences again, something that I experienced working inside a fully remote team. So this is, this is, um, one of my, of my companies, um, is, was built to be fully remote. And so we actually drew heavily on the GitLab and, and buffer experiences and advice when we were building it. One of the things that we noticed though, was just very specifically around, um, communication styles. between, particularly between, English people. Um, who have a very specific, so in this context, English people have a very specific, quite sort of hand wavy indirect way about them. You know, we struggle, English people in the team struggled to say, Hey, Andrew, can you do this for me by five o'clock? You know, that, that kind of thing. It's like, Oh, I'm a bit, a bit, overwhelmed right now. Means, Andrew, can you help me do this by five o'clock? But we don't say that because we don't want to be that direct. Um, with some, um, some of our European colleagues struggled with that lack of specificity would have, would have found it much easier. And so they, they were effectively missing some of the, um, some of this reading the air, uh, I think as Erin Meyer calls it in Japanese culture, which is a similar thing in British culture of, you know, you, you are just expected to interpret the feedback that British people are giving. And it was quite difficult for our European colleagues. And actually. much more specific and direct is much easier. So we had to sit down with the entire team and say We're we're missing a lot here. Like the the the british people inside inside the company aren't being direct enough and actually being direct is more important. So we actually Need to move away from this this very indirect very non confrontational british style of communication To something which feels really unnatural You so we, we had to encourage people if you need help, this is how you do it. And this is where GitLab are really good at, know, being a, a touchstone for this type of behavior, really then saying these behaviors are written down and codified into a handbook that when you come into the organization. All of these expectations are made clear to you. And there is that opportunity for feedback as well, which again, culturally can be really different. If you're seen to be stepping outside of the expected norms in that culture, somebody can nudge you and say, actually, that's not how we do things here. You don't send an email to, hey, everyone, could we get this done by, by tomorrow? As soon as you send an email to, to five people and say, Hey, everyone, nothing is going to get done. And so, you know, just being very explicit on some of those really small points. But it's really important then to make that part of the culture and make it part of the operating manual for the, for the organization and for the team.

Andrew: 23:58

I guess you're talking about etiquette here, aren't you, in a way? I mean, the, the, the human factors linguistics brigade would call it, um, protocols, uh, but we're talking about etiquette and making it explicit and they're rules. And if you inculcate a set of rules around about communication. People won't like it because for most of them it will require change. Change requires conscious effort. Conscious effort is tiring. People don't like to be tired. However, it creates common ground, um, and it mitigates for some of these problems. It mitigates from, uh, from lack of trust. It mitigates from a kind of festering conflict because, you know, The technology itself has a way of imposing itself that can frustrate people and, inhibit people's ability to get their work done. some of the stuff you're saying is similar to what Mossier and Fisher said with their astronaut stuff. It's like, see, here's a good example that they talk about in their, in their communication protocols when there's any kind of delay. They say, if there is a recognized crisis or emergency. Um, and there'll be a means of identifying something as critical. You are not allowed to communicate about anything else. So, because we're talking about a situation where there's a delay, what you don't want is, you're dealing with a, with a critical incident, a critical problem, but in the midst of all that exchange, something pedestrian and run of the mill comes through, which distracts, it blocks, uh, information flow, and so on. So there's a protocol in place there, which is, Completely transferable to a regular organization and it sounds silly, but you know, like you're saying the hey everyone email and we're going back to, um, communication protocols, which the same researcher Ute Fischer has a fantastic body of work on on this in terms of, You know, highly effective communication, uh, obligation statements, preference statements, task allocation statements. Um, you know, even identifying in an email, this is what I'm doing. You know, I'm, I'm, this is my, this is my obligation statement. I think this needs to be done. Um, but an obligation statement is like an open question. It's an, it's an unresolved thread. It needs to be It needs to have a task allocated to it at the end. Um, so the hey everyone, I think we need to get this done by Friday is an example of an obligation statement. Um, if you assume that that implicitly has allocated the task to someone, that's an example of what can be the seed of conflict.

Mark Ridley: 26:36

yeah, exactly right

Andrew: 26:37

communication protocols. It's important. You don't necessarily have to call them with such a formal name, but just recognizing the need to to think about it consciously. relates to leadership of virtual teams. Another feature that makes virtual teamwork different to co present teamwork is the literature tells us that, you know, leadership and management of. Um, of virtual teams is profoundly different. Um, one of the things is, it's less, maybe you could call it kind of less agentic, less, you can't be so kind of assertive and agentic as a, as a, as a leader of a virtual team, then you might be able to be in a, in a co present team. So, distributed aspects of the leadership role. Need to need to take place. You need to find a way of empowering the people that are distributed or in the virtual team to, um, take on some of those leadership behaviors to try and, um, to regulate the team and, you know, guide it towards its goals in an effective manner. That's certainly one thing that comes out of the literature. teams.

Mark Ridley: 27:44

Think there's, there is certainly a real challenge around performance management. which, is particularly highlighted with much more traditional organizations. If you are used to managing through presenteeism, then it is a real challenge you cannot maintain that same performance management structure with a fully remote team. Um, so you have to be designing for trust and you have to be designing to performance manage on outcomes. so it's way harder and, and you need to replace it. One of the other really interesting pieces of research that I found in, um, in, doing the background for this episode was this, um, acknowlegement that withinin a team and actually between teams within the organization, there is bonding, there's types of social capital. So, social capital is sort of your standing within the team or the organization. And there is bonding capital, which is how well you are bonded to people within the team and bridging capital, which is how well you can can bridge a connection from somebody that you're not always working with outside of the team. And specifically for managers, there was a piece of research. I think this was Microsoft research identified that, there was erosion of bridging capital for managers. Cause one of the, particular jobs of a manager or a leader is not just to manage inside the team, but to make those connections outside of the team to, um, allow the team to, to function more effectively, uh, to work with other people inside the organization. And they found that the, there was nearly three times the erosion of these bridging connections, the connections between managers and leaders in, in other groups than for average employees. So it was actually three and a half times for executives and 2. 7 Um, times for managers. So this would have been one of those things that was clearly seen within COVID. It sort of starts, it's okay, you've built up the, both the bonding capital and the bridging capital, the social bridging capital, but that starts to erode. And if you are a traditional organization transitioning to a remote organization, you have to put in place lots of things to do that. And that's where you have to think about what what do we have to do From whether it's an etiquette point of view, but almost more creating the cadence of interaction, which isn't just phone calls, but potentially things like off sites, uh, so away days, bringing, bringing members of the team together, specifically to create, recreate that bridging capital, because obviously with, you know, we tend to be focused on what's happening inside the team, that's the bonding capital part, and it's important within the team to actually make sure that there are virtual social interactions inside the team. But it's not just inside the team. And, you know, there is that element for managers, which is different.

Andrew: 30:25

one of the most profound and important things that someone can take away from a conversation around about virtual teams is recognizing that, in some shape or form, a relational Interaction is really important, and ideally, face to face relational interaction is really important. Now, we started the episode talking about Andy Jassy and started saying, Everyone back to the office, you must be in the office. I'm not saying that, I'm saying, and actually interesting, the paper that you referred to, that Amazon co produced with those other researchers, I'm That was talking about a kind of stage thing, which is depending on the stage of your team's, um, activity. So whether it was that kind of ideation. Yeah. So at what stage of the innovation process it was. had an influence on the extent to which you could, um, effectively work virtually or not. Um, cause that's, you know, Andy Jassy's point is basically like the best way to invent and be creative is to all be together. I mean, I, I would not argue with that. Um, the difference is That paper that precedes his recent announcement sort of said, well, it's a little bit different than that. It kind of depends what you're working on and what stage you're at. Um, nonetheless, the point being that at a relatively foundational level, a degree of shared context and a degree of face to face familiarity. It pays you dividends. I know you say off sites. recently did an away day for the UK Home Office, um, so civil servants, um, who are located between London and Manchester, um, so there's about 90 of them and, you know, half of them are in Manchester, half of them are in, are in, uh, are in Whitehall. I said to them, you know, like, yeah, I'm here, I'm doing your away day, I'm a team's guy, but actually the biggest value you're getting from the day is just being in the same room together and you're going to, you know, probably go for a bite to eat together later, that sort of thing. And it's just that shared. shared presence is, is giving you this, you know, talking about capital, it's sort of building your bank account of, human interaction up again. And you will draw upon that when you're working together virtually, when you go back to your offices. Um, and so designing in opportunities for face to face, uh, doesn't mean that you are actually even going to achieve any of your substantive work during those face to face periods, but It's a kind of, it's like a, you know, that kind of vitamin injection of the relational exchange that virtual teamwork tends to deny you. but I really love what you do. And, uh, and you know, one of your businesses, you've got your Friday, it was a kind of 4. 30 on a Friday. It's like beer and talk shit.

Mark Ridley: 33:31

that was one of those instances where we've tried to be really mindful about creating a fully remote team. Um, and so we tried to, to be documentation first and we tried to be very explicit about communications how to do task allocation, how to, how to request help things that the team weren't, weren't that clear on. One of the things that we've, we've done, the team have actually created themselves. They have, um, they have an open session. every morning at 10 o'clock, where they go and do puzzles together, which so they'll go online and do a bit of Sudoku together for 15 minutes. Um, and we have, we have some fixed regular meetings. So the team will have a kickoff on a Monday morning. We have a team time on a, on a Wednesday where it's sort of an open agenda, but it's generally quite work focused. And then on Friday, uh, uh, Four o'clock, we have a, like a weekly business review, which is really focused on some of the commercial elements of the business, but it's open to everyone. So, although it's a commercial discussion, anyone is, is free to come to the meeting, but at 4 30, that meeting transitions into the wind down. And one of the things that I found recently, I told you this story was, uh, we, uh, had a new member join the team. he came on board, um, and he, he came and he was watching these meetings and, um, well it was obviously seeing sort of transition from quite a formal agenda driven meeting for the first 30 minutes and then it just completely degrade after that, at which point, you know, by five o'clock, have, you know, picked up a drink or, or something. I'm not sure these are exactly his words, but he, he, he'd been with the company for about four or five months. And he said, I've been coming to these meetings for ages now. And I've just suddenly realized this is the bit where you just talk shit for half an hour. And it's like, yeah, that's exactly what it is. You know, the, the 4. 30 meeting on a Friday, Is has absolutely no agenda. It isn't intended to you can discuss what tv you're going to watch what video games you're playing What you're planning for

Andrew: 35:29

Yeah,

Mark Ridley: 35:30

um What you're going to cook? Um the last conversation we had about you know, what our favorite pen knives were or something, you know, so It is explicitly not to talk about work and invariably it will come back to that of the things that we've we've also added recently as well as that You is we've also, we use, uh, internally, we use something called GoLinks. So, um, something that some big, the big tech companies use. I know that Google use it. So you can go to URL go slash something. It's like a short link and we have go slash kitchen. And if you're inside the business and you go to

Andrew: 36:06

right.

Mark Ridley: 36:07

kitchen, it will open up a, a, a actually Google Hangouts meeting, like a Teams meeting. So it's an, it's a, an ever present, uh, video conference. So because we're fully remote, if you go, go slash kitchen at any point, then any of the team can just sit together and work with an open, Google Meet window, where it's a video call, they can turn, they can turn the camera or the microphone off, they can just sit there, so they can be working together, and maybe not feeling like they're getting anything for it, but, you know, maybe they're just quietly swearing under their breath about the piece of code that they're writing, the script they're writing, or, Or a piece of work that they're doing. And it's just a way of trying to foster some element of that togetherness you get when you're actually co located with someone.

Andrew: 36:53

you have to be willing to hold your nose over the awkwardness of creating these things to see if people will give it a go because, you know, it's like the whole like, okay, everybody, we're going to have fun now. And when you force people to have fun, they're like, well, I'm, you know, piss off. But it's the same thing. And There's a motive to it. And I think experimenting with it within your organization, whatever your organization may be, is worth it. And you're allowed to go, yeah, that didn't work. But just assuming we can trundle along, pretending that the virtual team, is the same as a regular co located team is, uh, is not what I would recommend. and what the literature tells us is we need to also remember that some of the things that apply to being an effective team In in person just don't apply to being an effective team virtually, and you have to adapt and and modify the way that you behave to to mitigate for that. Um, so my kind of top takeaways. Surprise, surprise, I go to, um, communication, but I think being mindful about communication protocols and what you're, what you are saying, when you are saying it, um, and, and how you're, uh, packaging. What you're saying is really important for virtual teams. Um, I think that applies as much to something like slack chat or email as it does to a virtual meeting, for example, um, some of the work that we looked up really, really lovely research from. Pamela Hines and other colleagues, Mark Mortensen, Diane Bailey. A lot of their research of talks about this, of making sure that you're clear about your communication protocols. You've just given good examples of it. I think having regular synchronous meetings is important and not necessarily having a huge amount on the agenda. So an awareness of the, um, tendency for virtual teamwork to slip into task dominated interaction. What are we doing? How are we doing it? When are we doing it? Who's doing it? Um, giving space in synchronous meetings, or even as you do, creating deliberate synchronous meetings where. The agenda is to do a puzzle or the agenda is to, you know, talk shit and open a beer in your, in the, in the, uh, in your own study or kitchen or whatever. Um, but having a rhythm, so that creates a sort of digital shared context. You know, so we always have meetings at this time, and it creates a form of digital shared rhythm that creates shared context, which, and we understand the importance of shared context for effective teamwork. And the other couple of things come back a bit to communication, which is, um, you know, You talked about this as well, clear practices around about documentation, how you collaborate. how you say what you say, and, um, and how you communicate it. So it might be flipping some of the things that you're used to doing face to face. It might be that. Well, if you want to produce something for a meeting, it needs to be documented first. It needs to be distributed in advance. Um, as opposed to just presenting as a PowerPoint to begin with. Um, it might be that it's recorded asynchronously. To top that off. You need to be explicit about what is happening when you call synchronous interaction. So, if something is a broadcast, it's a broadcast. And you need to be absolutely clear that that's what it will be. This is going to be as an aside, I'm not entirely convinced that synchronous broadcasts are always the most effective use of everyone's time and attention, but if that's the way you're going to do it, but it's being, okay, this is how I'm doing this, and then going, okay, I'm doing a broadcast, does it need to be an hour and a half? Or can I do a broadcast in 20 minutes and that, you know, because it's a broadcast 20 minutes is probably the attention span that's appropriate. Um, I think there's that there is a tendency in general for people to be like, okay, meetings usually last about an hour. So we'll schedule an hour. But all I'm going to do in that hour is talk at everybody, and I don't expect any interaction. or is it, an ideation, creative meeting, in which case, do you, is, is actually just everyone turning their cameras on and talking to each other the best way? Or do you need to use whiteboard or some other kind of third party technology that, that is going to facilitate that creative process more effectively? And again, being explicit about it, that's how we're going to do it. So, um, Being intentional, being mindful and being explicit about the format that your communication is going to take so that you don't You don't cross over messages get missed. Um, and, you know, going back to that example of, uh, space communication, if there's, for example, a crisis, there are understood conventions that mean, okay, so all other columns are off or focusing on this is how we're doing it. These are all things that I think are really important for achieving effective virtual teamwork.

Mark Ridley: 42:27

Yeah, there's, there's definitely things that resonate there. Um, the asynchronous communication is really key to me. Um, so that's one of the things that I have found most powerful in transitioning teams to either hybrid or to fully remote, where certainly moving away from the concept of having a meeting to present and then decide, building consensus before a decision is made actually works much better in a fully remote um, environment GitLab, um, are absolutely the example that I use for this. And I, I will try and train out in any organization that I work with. It is a move away from PowerPoint decks and slides and presentations to documents. Amazon are actually a really great example of this. They have something called a six pager where they fully expect a lot of work to go into a, uh, a six page. Very. very, very dense prose definition of an argument. It's normally for a business case, but you know, this is my argument, which is submitted out to people before, um, a decision is made so that people can actually have time to read it. They'll often be reading time at the beginning of a meeting for anybody that hasn't, hasn't had time to review it. And then the meeting specifically the synchronous meeting is to actually give feedback in, in the moment. One of, of the things that I've done a lot, uh, over the years is actually try to encourage teams and companies really identify which type of meeting they're having exactly as you said, but I, I thought about this and came up with this, um, D.I.P.S analogy, which is, um, Uh, a meeting is probably going to be one of these four things, decide, inform, plan, or solve. And they're all slightly different things. You know, that they, the strongest of those are the inform meeting. Exactly. As you talk about, I need to broadcast a message. It's, it's mostly one way. And, and this needs to be delivered. That could be training, or it could be something like Andy Jassy's, message that he sent about bringing everybody back to the office. Solve, on the other hand, is that big workshop. You know, we need to think creatively and it's going to be a very different thing. And so having these four types of meetings where you can actually say in advance, what type of meeting is it? But as far as possible avoiding any kind of synchronous meeting as much as you can you mentioned having the regular synchronous meetings I think it is important to understand where there is a synchronous meeting that has to be held for the business A good example in tech is a daily stand up where we're going to decide we're going to discuss what we're doing today You We can hear what everybody else is doing, but exactly as you said, some of those regular meetings are explicitly set aside for social interaction. how do you do team building? How do you expose the actual human part of a person to the organization to try and build some of that, that trust? If you, if you can, it's really important with the teams. to make it clear that working in a hybrid or remote organization in a virtual team is difficult, and how they might need to adapt their behavior, especially whether cultural barriers that need to be crossed as well. So making sure that the team have that training and, you know, the team building element of that as well, coming together. not just working fully remotely, but actually when you can, even if it's twice a year, bringing the team together to spend time in the same place. is often the most effective way to deal with some of those tensions that can build up. As you said, it can be really difficult to, to deal with conflict in a virtual team, and sometimes just being in the same place re establishes a small amount of trust, which makes it obvious how small a disagreement was, which then resolves itself

Andrew: 46:07

Yeah,

Mark Ridley: 46:07

from proximity.

Andrew: 46:08

some of these examples are, are brilliant and I, I think so much of it is about, it boils down to recognising that it's different, acknowledging it's different and assuming therefore you probably need to do some things that feel a bit uncomfortable or awkward. for the very reason that it is different. it's that suspension of disbelief again, try to just ignore the impulse to think, well, it feels natural and normal to do it like this in the real world. So I'll just try and recreate that online. and then it'll, then it'll feel right. Um, but as we've kind of covered, there's lots of reasons why that leads to problems that are hard to identify and even harder to resolve. you said maybe twice a year, like maybe once a year. Just if you can find any way to get your virtual team together, the positive impact it makes is just immeasurable, in my opinion. coming back to that original idea of, like, the utopia of virtual teams. Oh, well, now all teams will be virtual, and it's going to be amazing. The reason they're good Is because the unlock access to expertise and coverage, um, and potentially allow you to move faster in a more agile way than you would if you're trying to assemble people around the shared location and so on. So there are really significant benefits to working virtually. Of course, the other side is the nature of globalized commerce and, uh, and organizations. Is such that. Virtual teams are just sort of here by necessity now anyway for one reason or another. So we have to learn to live with them. I do think another thing that it's going to require a whole other episode, which I hope we do. things like inclusivity, um, things to do with. Uh, traditional behaviors surrounding perhaps gender, um, you know, other protected characteristics, neurodiversity in particular. I think virtual team working has the scope to far more effectively respond to some of the inequities that exist around inclusivity, um, in a way that it's just harder to achieve. In a face to face environment because normative behaviors take over some of the kind of, um, long learned behaviors that persist when we are together physically they don't impose themselves so much when you're in a virtual environment. The only problem is if you create a virtual team environment. around your assumptions to do with co presence, then you just reproduce the same problems. But things particularly to do with, autism spectrum, uh, people's, um, preferences around interaction, you can accommodate for those things far more effectively using technology in a virtual team than is necessarily achievable face to face. So there's huge scope for, um, you know, amplifying the benefits of virtual teamwork as we come to recognize the importance of accommodating. Things like neurodiversity, as we learn more.

Mark Ridley: 49:23

it's even been helpful when, in some of those situations where I became very aware how, this is probably a fairly British thing, but, um, the, the absolute dominance of the pub on a Friday night, For, for teams, that's an extremely exclusionary activity. Um, and, and it's exclusionary,

Andrew: 49:45

Yeah,

Mark Ridley: 49:46

you know, very, very much along gender lines. And especially when I was working, well, still, still, I'm working in an industry, which is heavily, heavily predisposed to, towards having, um, men working in technology, you start to think, well, actually having any culture, which even if it's implicitly encourages, you know, a behavior like, let's go to the pub at five, five o'clock on a Friday evening, um, is actually really damaging for, for a, a diverse and inclusive team. And so it's been actually really refreshing working with the fully remote team to say, we're not going to make alcohol a central part of the social bonding of this team, partially because we can't, but you know, it's, it's almost stepping back and saying that is not, that is not a healthy thing. It sure it's absolutely traditional and it's extremely common, but. that It will exclude people from certain activities or at least make them feel uncomfortable, which is the opposite of the intent.

Andrew: 50:44

Rounding off, and I hope we pick this up in a further discussion about that sort of thing in teamwork. It's really important. I've got a PhD student looking at it at the moment. Actually, he's doing really fantastic work, Lena, that to me sort of demonstrates that we've probably tapped just a small proportion of the potential of working virtually. There are actually real upsides that we've not. Remotely bottomed out yet. but as long as we recognize it's different, the difference of it and, and work within the, the constraints that, that, that exists, um, and then try and maximize the affordances that it creates, like virtual team working can be a real asset to, to, to any team.

Mark Ridley: 51:26

There's so much to talk about, so much left on the table as well. I'll end up with one question for you. Do you think Andy Jassy made the right decision?

Andrew: 51:33

Okay. Um, no. I don't think he did. I think from a point of view of team working, um, it's my understanding of the organization, somewhat reductive to pin everything to creative, inventive, collaborative, uh, Type of work that he's referring to as the justification for for the decision. And the things I highlighted when we discussed it at the start. I'm not entirely sure that actually the teams he's bringing back to the office actually achieve. The entirety of their teamwork through co present work anyway, and I could be wrong about that. Um, but it's not a panacea or, uh, uh, one size fits all kind of thing. Um, and there are all sorts of reasons why a degree of flexibility is important. Um, so Yeah, I'm not sure it's the right call. What about you?

Mark Ridley: 52:38

I'm, I'm very, I'm very minded to agree. So I, for, for me, I, I found finding that research, the, the, the Amazon coauthored research fascinating because I, I felt that's much more the type of, um, place where I would have settled, which is fully remotely suitable for some teams and not, not suitable for others or, or hybrid. Um, my, my, gut feel I can understand, I can understand why the decision was made because as we've talked about, hybrid is really difficult. And in an organization that size, almost creating a monoculture is going to be the easiest cultural thing to do where we say the monoculture is to be back in the office and this is how we manage it. I disagree with some of the statements that he made that you have to be co located to, um, to innovate. I'm sure it can be easier, but most startups start in a number of people's bedrooms, you know, they do not start in the office. That's where they, they end up. So they sort of scale into that. I don't think invention requires co presence. Um, and I do have this. When the Andy Jassy note was published, I think somebody on LinkedIn posted about it. In fact, I think it might have been a friend of the show, Dave Winsborough, posted about it. there was a conversation about, you know, was Andy Jassy really working from the facts? I think it's really interesting to try to figure out which facts he's working from. He had this research paper from 2022. He's made a statement that it's going to bring people back to the office, a really significant number of people polled inside Amazon. There was a poll run by a, uh, an employment website and a huge number of Amazonians said that they would look for alternative work. I mean, maybe that's the data that Andy

Andrew: 54:24

Hmm.

Mark Ridley: 54:25

Jassy is working from. Maybe it's not. You know, I think he's right in what he said. Innovation is easier if you're co located. Um, there is part of me that thinks maybe he's playing three dimensional chess. He, he is after all running one of the largest companies in the world and I'm not. So maybe he's playing three dimensional chess and he's working on some different set of data where the intention isn't just to innovate better, but actually maybe to reduce the size of the workforce.

Andrew: 54:49

So what you're saying is it's a stealth way of getting people to walk voluntarily than having to make people redundant.

Mark Ridley: 54:55

could, you could make that. assumption.

Andrew: 55:00

There's a degree of truth in what he's saying, which I think we've discussed today, which is, core presence is, it's inimicable. You can't replace what co presence creates for you. That doesn't mean that co presence needs to be wholesale 100 percent of the time. Nothing else is possible. Um, that what some of the stuff we've been saying is basically you need to find ways of achieving some co presence and topping up on the unique value that co presence gives you. And that will see you through some of the limitations that virtual working creates whilst allowing you to capitalize on some of the affordances it creates. Um, so I think it's a bit of a black and white argument to say, well, you know, co presence is the only way to do it, and so everyone back to the office. it lacks nuance and, you know, in ways it's also slightly contradicting some of the findings that he, his own organization, uh, discovered in, in work that it commissioned. So, um, yeah, it's, I think there is a, there is more nuance to the argument than he is, um, giving credit for.

Mark Ridley: 56:19

I agree. And on that note, we're gonna have to take some time to go and plan all of the other episodes about virtual teams.

Andrew: 56:26

If he wants to come and talk to us about it and talk us through it, like, we'll have him on the show.

Mark Ridley: 56:30

Definitely have them on today. So if any listeners know Andy personally, then please point him in our direction. We'll be, we'll be very pleased to have him, have him on.