What to prioritise during your days working in the office vs WFH?
January 14, 2021
Don’t be a desk monkey in the office
January 27, 2021
What I talked about last week was this idea of prioritising collaboration and connection. What I’m going to talk about this week is the idea of making time for the water cooler.
Principle #1 – Prioritise Connection/ Collaboration
When you are in the office can maximise time your key stakeholders, customers, suppliers, staff. Leave your own work for the home office.
Principle #2 – Make time for the water cooler
What I’m recommending is that you keep at least 1-2 hours free for informal chats while you’re in the office. Don’t fill all your available time with meetings.
Here’s the reason why:
The more I work with different organisations and team the more I realise it’s actually the way the collective system works together that matters in terms of performance and output. The interactions between people in many organisations are governed more by human dynamics and relationships than by system constraints and rules created by the organisation. So if you want something to “flow better” both levers matter.
Now when you’re working in the formal system (of the organisational polices and ways of interacting), it’s not a great place to develop trust. Whereas in informal situations, and we all know this, people tend to be more spontaneous, they tend to open up more, and it seems to be a place where relationships can really develop.
If you think about any outcome you want on a project or with your team, or in terms of your own career or influence, we need to work both systems to achieve that outcome. We can’t ignore the formal but we also know that it’s through relationships and information conversations we get a lot done.
We’ve got an incredible opportunity while in the office to work the informal system but we can’t do that if we don’t prioritise time for the watercooler or hallway conversations. It’s much easier to do this face to face than virtually so if you get the chance to be face to face with people then take it.
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.
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