My neighbours moved away this month. It’s sad, because they are lovely people who enriched the neighbourhood. When they moved in three years ago, it seemed like everyone on the street got to know each other a little better. They spent a lot of time on their front porch, greeted people with great warmth, and generally just prompted us all to be a be less inward. They were especially kind and gracious with kids, mine included. On their walks to and from school, the local children were treated to charming, ever-changing animal displays in their front garden. My five-year old cried when their parting Valentine’s Day chalk drawings started to wash away with the weather.
We’ll miss them very much. All the more so because ours was a relatively loose tie. They were part of the fabric of our lives, but it was born out of proximity. Now that they’ve moved 800km away, we’re unlikely to ever see them again. It’s not a tragedy — we’ll get new neighbours, and they’ll enrich a new neighbourhood. But I feel the loss keenly.
There have been a lot of such losses these past few years, with Covid upending daily routines. We used to have a crew we would see every Saturday morning at the coffee shop. Those people were part of our weekly life for years. Then we all abruptly stopped going to coffee shops in March of 2020, and now it’s been four years (!) since we’ve seen them. I still miss them, and the shared sense of place we had together.
It has always been the nature of loose ties that they unravel more easily: people move, businesses close, children age out of the weekly singalong. But a lot of secular trends actually impede their formation. We transact more business online, spend less time sharing physical space with others, get pulled into our devices even when we are surrounded by people.
It’s not a neutral development. Loose ties make life a little richer and communities a little stronger. But they’re also fleeting, and they need regular upkeep. My neighbours’ move has reminded me how much I value those loose ties, and how much of a difference individual efforts can make. I hope I can draw some inspiration from their example: lose myself in my phone a little less, stop to chat a little more. Community doesn’t create itself — it builds over time from the small overtures of many.
Social Cohesion and Effective Teams
I’ve been thinking a bit about what makes teams effective, especially when they spend less time physically co-located in the same space. I’ve come up with three attributes that I think are both critical to a team’s effectiveness and particularly challenging to maintain when you are working remotely. Let’s call them the 3 SCs1:
Strategic Context
Systemic Convention
Social Cohesion
Strategic Context is each team member’s ability to connect their day-to-day work with the bigger picture. If you have good strategic context, you understand not just what you are doing, but why you are doing it, and how it connects with all the other work. Armed with strategic context, you can work autonomously because you’ll be able to recognize when your decisions or discoveries have implications for others. Without strategic context, you get a lot of false starts and wasted effort, because work can be technically well-executed and still not ladder up to the strategic whole.
Systemic Convention is the degree to which the team is able to operate with well-understood and consistently-followed norms. When you have strong systemic convention, people are able to jump right into the task at hand and collaborate effectively. There is a tacit understanding of everything from roles, to check-in cadences, to tools, to how you’ll name your files. When systemic convention is lacking, the job of figuring out how to collaborate consumes more effort, and it is harder to integrate the output across individuals.
Social Cohesion is a function of each team member’s ability to connect to each other as fellow humans. When your team is cohesive, there is a strong commitment to both the broader success of the team and the well-being of your teammates. Relationships have primacy, so your team supports one another to navigate trade-offs in pursuit of shared goals. Without social cohesion, team members focus on their individual tasks; especially when goals are ambiguous or shifting, that individual focus can sometimes be at the expense of team success.
None of the 3 SCs are easy or automatic, but if your team works in-person at the same location, you have a leg up. You learn strategic context at the monthly town hall, create social cohesion with a team building event, and adopt systemic convention by reading process documentation. But you also have countless organic, unplanned interactions that reinforce and strengthen the 3 SCs, make them richer, make them more salient. That combination of structured and unstructured interactions helps teams become more effective, and stay that way.
When work becomes remote (or hybrid), most of our organic, unplanned interactions go away. Our days are filled with formal, structured meetings and messages. That formality tends all of us towards staying “on task.” If we were all sitting around a meeting room waiting for it to start, I might ask you about your weekend (social cohesion), share something I saw from the client (strategic context), or see you using the new locking feature on PowerPoint (systemic convention). If we’re all sitting on a zoom, we are likelier to sit in silence, paying more attention to our inbox than the other people on the video call.
In other words, remote work costs us a really important reinforcement mechanism for the 3 SCs. The formal structures (meetings, documentation, events, whatever) aren’t as effective, because they aren’t buttressed by all the informal interactions — the clarifying question you asked because the person was right there, the jokes you cracked around the lunch table, the habits you observed and adopted without anyone ever giving you an explicit instruction.
At this moment in time, many organizations are ushering workers back into the office for three, four, even five days a week. Sometimes the reasons for that decision amount to little more than “we don’t trust employees.” But many of the rationales sound an awful lot like “our 3 SCs have eroded and it has had negative consequences for team effectiveness.2” That can be true even if individuals are completing more tasks each day. When individual outputs are less aligned, more disconnected, the team is less productive, in the sense of producing work that is less valuable.
That doesn’t mean remote work is doomed. It does mean that in a remote context, we need to deliberately orchestrate replacements for those regular, informal interactions that help reinforce the 3 SCs. The challenge is that most remote workers are already overburdened with interactions. Their days are an endless stream of emails and Zoom meetings and direct messages.
All the context, cohesion, and convention in the world isn’t going to help if employees don’t have time to actually sit down and do the damn work. Creating opportunities for reinforcing the 3 SCs is a nuanced exercise in understanding people’s workflows and finding ways to do that reinforcement with maximum impact and minimum disruption.
The Workomics #async_stand-up channel
At Workomics, we have a construct that has been really successful at reinforcing social cohesion; a Slack channel, called #async_stand-up. It’s meant to mimic the kinds of updates you get in a daily huddle, except typed out asynchronously. Most posts include a personal update and an outline of your day/week ahead.
When we started the channel, we were mainly thinking about the day-ahead aspect, as a way to create more understanding of everyone’s work and priorities (i.e. strategic context). That aspect is very helpful! You sometimes get replies like, “I’m working on [something related] — should we huddle first?” or “I’m behind on that [deliverable], so you won’t get it until closer to end-of-day.” Async posts keep us aligned on the day-to-day.
But over time, async has become much more important as a mechanism for social cohesion. These posts are where we share what’s going on in our lives outside work. In the last week on the async channel, you could read about:
East end take-out options
Reviews of True Detective and Avatar: The Last Airbender, Love on the Spectrum Season 2 (strong recommends all around)
How people’s various illnesses and injuries are progressing
The trials of helping parents set up a new computer
Visiting a sister back from a year in Australia
Adopting new pet rats
Transitioning kids to a new school
A 1960s Maclean’s magazine article about hippies taking over Vancouver
Progress on hobbies from birding to pottery to Wordle to Zumba
In other words, it’s anything and everything — the kinds of random things you share when you’re in person, that help you feel more connected to your colleagues.
The async channel creates a designated space to consistently share personal updates. There are other channels on the Workomics Slack for nonsense and general carrying-on. Those exchanges certainly don’t detract from social cohesion, but they’re not as effective at reinforcing it. Partly, they are too sporadic: sometimes a hundred messages get exchanged in an hour, and then nothing for weeks. But also, the other channels are rarely about sharing something of yourself. Articles you read, yes. Jokes and memes, of course. But finding out, “how is everyone doing?” Not so much. By contrast, async is a (near) daily practice that keeps us connected on a personal level.
That said, async is not a mandatory exercise. Forcing a certain kind of Slack post is just asking people to LARP their jobs rather than do actual work. With async, we have created space for a conversation, but we don’t require participation. It is a significant part of our culture and most people post pretty consistently, but others are more sporadic and that’s fine too. Posts can be long or short, detailed or not. Sometimes a post gets an emoji reaction or two; sometimes there are dozens of replies. Just as you wouldn’t force people into water cooler banter, you can’t mandate people bare their souls on Slack.
Ultimately, the async channel is effective because it allows everyone to participate in their own way, at their own pace, and without adding an extra meeting to the calendar. When we started it, we were motivated by the need for more strategic context, but it’s turned out to be one of the primary ways that our far-flung team members come together to create a unified, socially cohesive unit.
Workomics Staff Picks
This working paper on the Power of Proximity to Coworkers found that when sitting together in the same space, senior engineers gave more feedback to their junior colleagues, and that pattern was especially acute for women. However, that extra feedback came at a short-term cost in output. That means workplaces might face a trade-off with remote work: get more done now, but at the cost of less development and growth for staff. This feels like the core conundrum of remote work!
This Aeon essay explores how metaphors and analogies change the way we think. We were drawn to the example of cancer care: If cancer is framed as as battle to be fought, it puts an implied onus on the patient to do the fighting and suggests some ultimate victory or defeat. If cancer is instead framed as a journey, it emphasizes instead individual paths through an ongoing process. Research found that patients who have cancer framed as a journey report a more positive outlook, increased wellbeing, and spiritual growth.
We were curious to read about Pfizer’s new generative AI platform, Charlie, which they are using for pharmaceutical marketing. In the article, they talk about wanting to increase the output of the “content supply chain.” Colour us skeptical. Whether it’s pharmaceutical marketing or anything else, the difficult problem to solve is not volume, but quality and curation. Creating “more” just adds to the noise.
And that’s it for this month! Happy leap day to all.
In comradeship,
S.
You know I worked super-hard to make them all start with the same two letters.
For instance, here is RBC CEO Dave McKay in the Globe and Mail: ““All CEOs in every sector I talk to are struggling with a balance of developing talent, promoting talent, building culture, creating productivity. It’s tough, we don’t have the final model yet.”