When in the office, make time for watercooler conversations
January 19, 2021
Use The Disruption To Reset How You Work
February 2, 2021
Given that blended work – leading a team from home and sometimes in the office – is increasingly a reality for many of you, I’ve put together 5 principles that will help.
Today I am going to talk about #3 – not being a DESK MONKEY.
The idea is this:
We need to think about how we arrange our offices and spend our time differently when we are together. Being together is valuable and costs time and money. It doesn’t make sense for people to sit together in an office and do their own work. They could do that at home.
Here’s the backstory:
In 2019 I was visiting a client of mine and I observed the way they’d set up their office and everyone’s daily ritual.
Most of the workers in the office would do a 1-hour commute to and from the office. And they’d come into the office and sit down at their workstation with a 300mm high barrier and get to work. I would walk past and they were all are sort of sitting there, silent.
The crazy thing was that this was a consulting business that relied on human and client centred design as its differentiator.
It got me thinking that as leaders we need to start to do teamwork differently if we are going to be more creative and innovative. And then the pandemic happened. And we were forced to learn to work remotely. Everything got thrown on its head.
So I would encourage you (while we are already in transition) to take the time to think about:
- How you use time (especially to what extent you spend time at your desk while in the office)
- How you create spaces for those around you to get work done together
Some Recommendations that may work in your context:
Use virtual meetings while at home but don’t make them one way. If you want to get engagement virtually, you really need to think about how you create interactions.
Encourage your team to use the hour in the morning and in the afternoon (that they aren’t commuting) for themselves or family. . If on the balance of things, I think everyone wins if you encourage people rather than to work to actually use that time for themselves.
Change your physical space to allow people to collaborate – a lot of productive stuff gets done in the hallway so why not create spaces where information collaboration can occur. Or if you don’t have the physical space encourage people to work outside or where they feel comfortable.
What we got to do is to start engineer spaces for creativity. And one thing I know is that the desk monkey thing doesn’t work, the expectation that people sit there and just do their stuff is not going to get the creativity you want. In a world where repeatable processes will be done by machines, ideas and innovation become the path to success. Not quality, speed and repetition.
It’s been about how do you get people interacting with one another, challenging one another and sharing ideas for the benefit of your purpose, and how as a leader could you purposely sometimes disrupt this system now that you’ve kind of got the pandemic as an excuse to do it?
To summarise, We have got the opportunity right now to reset ourselves away from the traditional kind of desk monkey model. It’s really about how you set the tone by using time and space differently to enhance creativity.
Leave me a comment or Get in Touch
Hope that’s been useful for you. If you want to talk about your team. Send me a message or leave me a comment down below.
Talk to you soon.
When you are ready…. let’s work out if we are a good fit.
If you are a 50 person plus business, have budget to develop your organisation, and you have challenges with teamwork in your top 3 levels of leaders than we may be a good fit to work together. For more information, click below to watch a short video on my teamwork model and read testimonials from previous clients.
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