Endless Knots

Jim Ware to Yahoo: "You've got a management system problem"

Take a listen to my colleague, Jim Ware's interview last night, on Turi Ryder's WGN radio show on "The perks and catches of working remotely." Jim's been thinking about where work is headed for a very long time and is a thoughtful commentator. He is clear that he hasn't studied Yahoo! but, when pressed for what he would say to the company, he pointed out that there is a larger issue here than where people are working. "It used to be we all had to go to the office if we wanted to see people or access our paper files...the office is now operating in a free market. Marissa Mayer should have known this and maybe she does... but these companies need to create an office work environment where people want to be there."

Marissa Mayer, we need to talk: This genie is way out of the bottle

Dear Marissa,

Apparently, I'm not the only one who has a word or two to say to you. Tom Ashbrook (On Point, "Yahoos Ban on Working From Home") is holding forth with some savvy guests even as I type; Maureen Dowd has a biting op-ed in yesterday's NY Times ("Get Off Of Your Cloud"); and the bloggers have gone wild. Not to mention that I've received numerous emails including this one from a client: "Wish you could write a counter to this and have it published.  This does not help the cause..."*

I regret that I've had to make you a category here but with so much emotion swirling around the HR edict ordering all-hands on the Yahoo! deck, let's begin with some facts:

1. As a computer scientist, you might want to look at real data. There is little evidence to support the notion that people need to be face-to-face to collaborate OR innovate. Yes, there are moments to come together but not perpetually. Professor Tom Allen set the lie to this idea 35 years ago with his ground-breaking research for Digital Equipment Corporation. Simply, if people are more than 50 meters (150 feet) apart, the "probability that two people will communicate [at least once a week] as a function of distance separating them" plummets. Here's the chart:

2. "Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?" With two business school professors, we researched 54 high-performing teams in 26 companies across 15 industries and the resounding conclusion from the data was "yes, indeed." Here's the quick summary from the Harvard Business Review where the study was published as "Best Practices:"

Some projects have such diverse requirements that they need a variety of specialists to work on them. But often the best-qualified specialists are scattered around the globe, perhaps at several companies. Remarkably, an extensive benchmarking study reveals, it isn't necessary to bring team members together to get their best work. In fact, they can be even more productive if they stay separated and do all their collaborating virtually.

The conclusion for Yahoo!: unless you're doing very simplistic projects, i.e. routine processing chores, stocking shelves, and the like, you're staffing your teams incorrectly. If you're looking for innovation, you need diversity, the subject of many studies before and after ours.There is no way that you have that diversity in toto within driving distance of your Silicon Valley. It's 2013, not 1950, the year the number of manufacturing workers reached its peak in the US.

3. Which leads right into this point. As per the title of this post, the genie is waaaay out of the bottle. Do you actually believe that people today work in intact teams? When you force everyone to co-locate, you're most likely not bringing in the people who actually work together. Do you have contractors? Partners in other companies? Suppliers? Vendors? Developers in India/China/Philippines/Singapore? Do your sales people spend their time in the office? (If your answer to this one is yes, perhaps we've pinpointed a big part of your problem.)

Unless Yahoo! has completely turned its back on development trends that are, say, as old as the Internet itself, team members are scattered around the globe. Yahoo! should do a study of where its team members are situated. We can place a pretty confident bet that they're not all in proximity of Yahoo! HQ.

And that's just the start of what's wrong with this 20th century edict.

4. Let's talk about culture for a moment, one of the big points of the "YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION--DO NOT FORWARD" HR memo that All Things D's Kara Swisher had up within moments, it seems, and which has been published everywhere.

Forcing people into the office hardly builds loyalty. It's abundantly clear that Yahoo! is attempting a massive and quick turnaround of its culture. The insults about the workforce, as reflected in posts around the web, are legion. The parking lot is only half-full at 9:30 AM. Stopping right there, in some companies, this is regarded as a virtue, meaning that carpooling and the like are working, cutting down on carbon emissions. (For more on this, take a look at the pioneering climate initiative at Unilever, which has coupled aggressive carbon reduction gains with new ways of working initiatives, both increasing productivity and innovation and reducing travel miles.)

There are equally numerous reports on the new Google-esque perks at Yahoo! -- better food, dry cleaning services, nicer digs, for example. What builds culture is commitment, positive reinforcement, and challenging work. If you think people aren't coming into the office because they don't like the food, I strongly recommend that you commission a study on this.

Likewise, do you have evidence that people don't collaborate? That people truly are slacking off at home? Data in study after study indicates that people are more productive when they are able to get up, do whatever morning things they have to do at home (tend to kids/parents/animals/themselves) and then get right to work, saving needless hours on the highway. Hello? Aren't we talking about a bit of traffic on 101?

A most startling stat on this, "The hard truth about telecommuting," from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Labor Review last June by Mary Noonan and Jennifer Glass and excerpted in the Dec 26 Scientific American: telecommuters on average work 5-7 hours longer per week.

5. 24/7. After ordering people back to their cubbies, are you also prohibiting them from working at home? Consider what you're saying in the-now-much-quoted HR memo to Yahoos: "To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. Some of the best decisions and insights comes from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and important impromptu meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo! and that starts with physically being together." OK, Yahoos. Turn off your phones at home; don't check your mail first thing in the morning (or last at night); and absolutely do not call from your cars. That applies to you, too, Marissa. Are you referring to your "speed and quality" when communicating from, as reported, your 14-day maternity leave?

6. I nearly can't bring myself to comment on this last point for which the young mother-CEO has been excoriated from GMT-12 to GMT+12. A few of your quotes are enraging to other parents, as you've heard. Just this one will follow you for life: "The baby's been easy. The baby's been way easier than everyone made it out to be." I had "easy" babies too but I found it best to keep that under my hat. Most babies are not and it's quite hurtful to other women to rub it in, i.e. stuff a rag in that comment forevermore. And it's irking your coworkers that you have permission to build a nursery next to your office (even if you paid for it). When are you building sidecars for all the other new moms?

Meanwhile, Marissa, please invite in, say, 40 or 400 or 4000 of the mothers, not to mention the fathers, in your company and listen to what it's like to get through a day. I'm watching a software executive who's your age with major responsibilities, as she is juggling young kids, big corporate decisions, a lot of travel, and being a good family member while her husband, although he doesn't travel as much, is also running on fumes as he works very long hours, cooks, and tells endless stories to the kids. And they can afford help.

There is something profoundly unglued, unrealistic, and uncompassionate in your new approach. Virtual Teams work -- I know. I wrote the book. Maybe you should read it.

--Jessica Lipnack, CEO, consultant, writer, mother, grandmother, and unsolicited advice-giver

 

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. - See more at: http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/#sthash.BzYp4u24.dpuf

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. - See more at: http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/#sthash.BzYp4u24.dpuf

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. - See more at: http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/#sthash.BzYp4u24.dpu

*For the record, I posted the news as soon as it reached me last Friday.

Face-to-face for the Oreo tweet

Being a three-screen watcher of the Stupor Bowl, which tells you a lot about my interest in football (see for example, The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football, introduced to me by my nevertheless-Patriots-loving Daughter #1), I had a great time tweeting during the famous Lights-out of 2013. (Further disclosure: When the Pats are winning, I can't resist regional pride.)

Thus the now-famous Oreo tweet came up right away in my feed, even though I don't follow the cookie (never mind, I can taste it just thinking of it, scraping my teeth across the icing, dissolving the cookie on my tongue -- you're welcome, Nabisco, for the commercial).

Which made me curious about how decisions were made such that the tweet was up nearly simultaneously with lights-out. Lacking the time to turn this into investigative journalism requiring my actually contacting the ad agency responsible for it (360i.com), I did the next best thing: I read the posts from others. 

According to Buzzfeed's "How Oreo Got that Twitter Ad Up So Fast" (thank you, Rachel Sanders), the answer is co-location:

"We had a mission control set up at our office with the brand and 360i, and when the blackout happened, the team looked at it as an opportunity," agency president Sarah Hofstetter told BuzzFeed. "Because the brand team was there, it was easy to get approvals and get it up in minutes."

...The key? Having Oreo executives in the room, ready to pull the trigger.

My questions: Could they have made the decision as quickly if everyone was not in the room? Who came up with the idea originally? Were they shouting to one another? Sharing one large screen? Several? Were the Oreo execs making the call on every tweet (they had a near constant flood of tweets, of which this was only one)? Had they set out operating agreements for what would go live and what needed approval beforehand? Were the most senior Oreo execs online and watching the quick-acting team that garnered so much buzz so quickly?

Someone will make this a case study in social media, for sure. And it will be interesting to see what lessons are drawn about collaboration and proximity from it.

 

 

 

 

 

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Teams: We're There!

How great to discover while looking for something else we'd written that "Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?", the HBR article that we wrote with Ann Majchrzak and Arvind Molhatra, has been chosen as one of HBR's 10 Must Reads on Teams. Or in their words in the compilation:

This collection was previously published as "Harvard Business Review on Building Better Teams." We've moved it to HBR's 10 Must Reads series because the ideas are critical to the success of every manager and aspiring leader, meeting our high standards for must-read status.

We're in good company with Jon Katzenbach, among other great thinkers.

Thanks, HBR, Ann, Arvind, and our editor on that one, Ben Gerson!

"Developing Real Skills for Virtual Teams"

A lot of virtual team research crosses my screen, most of which is earnest and much of which is the equivalent of a Sunday-night eat-up of what's in the refrigerator. And then something like this comes through, "Developing Real Skills for Virtual Teams," from University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School. Not surprising, given that one of our two collaborators on the HBR  "far-flung teams" classic, "Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?" -- Arvind Malhotra -- is associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship there.

This ia a truly excellent white paper on the basics of how virtual teams can succeed, including lots of statistics, a good list of challenges, and some pointers for HR. Download and enjoy. Well done, Kenan-Flagler folks, and thanks to their community manager, Harrison Kratz, for alerting me back in February of this year. Good ideas never die; they just remain in the inbox until their proper moment.

Here's the outline for the paper; links will take you right to the sections of the paper.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Rise and Staying Power of Virtual Teams
3. Virtual Team Challenges
4. The Characteristics of Effective Virtual Teams
5. How HR Can Support Virtual Work Teams
6. Conclusion
7. About UNC Executive Development

Virtual Learning Company Questionnaire

Writing books has its downsides -- sore neck, publisher disagreements, pressure to always start another one -- but then something like this happens and it's worth writing a few more. This morning I received a really nice email from Archana Chandrasekar, who's working on a master's in Information Systems Management at Warwick Business School. Part of the research includes receiving responses to this survey on learning in virtual organizations. Archana is asking me to post a link to the survey so that my readers hopefully will take it. How can I turn down this request after reading the paragraph below that begins, "On a personal note...?" So, dear readers, please take the survey!

And for the record, as Archana suggests, I am always happy to help students. In the long sweep of human history, the study of virtual organizations is still an emerging field; we need all the research we can muster.

My name is Archana Chandrasekar and I am currently pursuing my Master's in Information Systems Management at Warwick Business School, UK.As a part of my dissertation, I am examining the applicability of Peter Senge's Learning Organizational Model within the context of Virtual Organizations. My research methodology involves a qualitative analysis of the learning processes within an virtually functioning organization. In addition to an in-depth case study analysis I have interviewed a few individuals working in Virtual Organizations and have found the results to be satisfactory and in line with my hypothesis. But as expected the number of employees willing to participate is disappointing as the questionnaire involves questions relating to sensitive topics such as appraisals, managerial approvals etc.

As a regular visitor of your site I have often seen questionnaires posted by other postgraduate students. I would humbly request you to do the same with my questionnaire as it would be of immense help. Kindly note that due to confidentiality concerns individuals are not required to fill in any personal details.

This questionnaire is targeted to individuals working in virtual organizations and how they learn and share knowledge. The questions are based on Pedler et al. (1997) "The Learning Company" questionnaire.

On a personal note I would like to thank you for all your contributions to the academic world. Your works are a prominent feature in my literature review section and have helped me understand virtual worlds better. For someone with no technical IT background, I know jumping head first into a topic like virtual organizations would be a colossal task but Lipnack and Stamps(1997) simplified the topic in the most profound way.

The questionnaire link is attached below and I kindly request you to post it on your site as this would be of great help to my dissertation. Thank you again for playing a vital role in my academic endeavors.


Link to survey   

And in case you don't click, here are the questions:

• 1. Does your company regularly take stock and modify business plans, direction and strategy when appropriate?

  Yes

  No

• 2. Do all members of the company take part in policy and strategy formation?

  Yes

  No

• 3. Is Information Technology (IT) is used to create databases so that everyone can understand what is going on and make sound decisions?

  Yes

  No

• 4. Are Systems of accounting and reporting structured to assist learning?

  Yes

  No

• 5. Do managers facilitate communication and negotiation rather than exerting top-down control?

  Yes

  No

• 6. Do flexible working patterns allow people to make different contributions and draw different rewards?

  Yes

  No

• 7. Are roles and careers flexibly structured to allow experimentation, growth and adaptation?

  Yes

  No

• 8. Does there exist systems and procedures for receiving and sharing information from outside the company?

  Yes

  No

• 9. Does your company participate in joint learning events with its suppliers,customers and other stakeholders?

  Yes

  No

• 10. Is there a general attitude of continuous improvement and learning where employees are encouraged to ask if do not know something?

  Yes

  No

• 11. Do employees have their own self-development budgets where they decide what training and development they want, and what to pay for it?

  Yes

  No

 

Leaderless? No, leader-full in the virtual workplace

Terrence Seamon, whom I had the chance to work with a few years back when American Management Association was putting together a new course on leading virtual teams (I was subject matter expert for the course and Terry held the management development portfolio there; together we did a webinar that you can listen to here), has a nice reflective post on what it takes to work successfully from a distance. He calls out the role of leadership in his virtual experience -- in his example, there was no appointed leader, as is the case when this works successfully, many people took on leadership roles:

Leadership - We were a leaderless group, where no one was appointed (or elected) as the leader. However, since a team needs leadership to be successful, leadership emerged as we went along. For example, several members of our team kept us informed of direction and guidance from the editors. Getting this input from time-to-time kept us on track, and kept us going.

The myth that virtual groups -- and networks -- have no leaders is one of the most pernicious misunderstandings about these work arrangements. It leaves the impression that they have no direction and no accountability for results ... and it's wrong. One of the gifts of these organizational innovations is that they allow all kinds of leadership modalities to surface.

Thanks, Terry, for the chance to board this particular bandwagon again!

 

Ware & Grantham: Managing Remotely

I'm about to give a series of workshops ("Managing a Remote Workforce") and to make sure I'm current on the best thinking, I naturally did my (re)search by googling that title.

Up came this great white paper, Managing a Remote Workforce: Proven Practices from Successful Leaders, from my old friends and colleagues, Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham. Their research was sponsored by Citrix, the gotomeeting folks.

Here are five practices that I've "stolen" (with their permission) for what I'm presenting today and tomorrow:

1. Develop formal, explicit, strategic programs with senior management sponsors

2. Work differently

• Redesigned business processes
• New technologies
• New ways to communicate
• Outcomes measured, rewarded not monitoring employees

3. Training is critical

4. Collaboration technologies are central to success

5. Unsuccessful without thoughtful planning; aggressive implementation; significant organizational, cultural change

 

Adapting agile development to virtual teams

This one's for the developers out there: "The Paradox of Agile PM and Virtual Teams" by Dr. David F. Rico. For those not developers, agile software development is the "just makes sense" way to go about what used to be called programming, doing small bits of work in small teams that include people from diverse functions, then running the code quickly to detect problems, then repeating the process again. As I am not a developer, I'm ready to take some heaved tomatoes for getting this wrong technically but...you get the picture. Make a little, test a little, then do it all again.

Of course it's more complicated than that - and it has its own special schools of thought (viz. lean development) but anything that involves people across functions and tests, tests, tests before full commitment to a final product/process has got to be good.

So, point of this post: see Rico's article, which takes many of the key practices of agile development and interprets them for virtual teams. Here, for example, is one set:



As we receive a fair number of requests from IT organizations, I'm posting this for their benefit. (And not just because the article quotes us ... but that's nice too.) Take a look, developers, and let us know whether this tracks for you.

Going it alone

Some heartening research for introverts. In this age of collaboration (telecommuting, virtual teams, remote working, etc), we might take a page from people who spend time alone (and not like this-alone, at the computer), according to "The power of lonely" by Leon Neyfakh in yesterday's Boston Globe. Witness these gems (and forgiveness please for not spending more time--alone--throwing in all my thoughts about this; have to go meet some people...):

[A]n emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking. There is even research to suggest that blocking off enough alone time is an important component of a well-functioning social life — that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with people, we should make sure we’re spending enough of it away from them. Just as regular exercise and healthy eating make our minds and bodies work better, solitude experts say, so can being alone.

One ongoing Harvard study indicates that people form more lasting and accurate memories if they believe they’re experiencing something alone. Another indicates that a certain amount of solitude can make a person more capable of empathy towards others. And while no one would dispute that too much isolation early in life can be unhealthy, a certain amount of solitude has been shown to help teenagers improve their moods and earn good grades in school...

...In an age when no one is ever more than a text message or an e-mail away from other people, the distinction between “alone” and “together” has become hopelessly blurry, even as the potential benefits of true solitude are starting to become clearer...

...When we let our focus shift away from the people and things around us, we are better able to engage in what’s called meta-cognition, or the process of thinking critically and reflectively about our own thoughts...

...Teenagers, especially, whose personalities have not yet fully formed, have been shown to benefit from time spent apart from others, in part because it allows for a kind of introspection — and freedom from self-consciousness — that strengthens their sense of identity...

[According to Univ of Illinois Professor Reed Larson,] teenagers weren’t necessarily happier when they were alone; adolescence, after all, can be a particularly tough time to be separated from the group. But Larson found something interesting: On average, the kids in his sample felt better after they spent some time alone than they did before.

And lest we forget:

The leaders of the world’s great religions — Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Moses — all had crucial revelations during periods of solitude.