Keep Your Team Cohesive and Avoid Dysfunction
Unlike Leo Tolstoy's observation about happy and unhappy families, companies tend to descend into chaos for similar reasons: insufficient or inefficient communication, miscoordination, and lack of cohesion. As we know from the story of the Tower of Babel, this phenomenon is as old as history. Today, the very nature of remote work made this pervasive problem a lot worse.
Remote working is hugely popular with workers. Even though studies have shown that remote workers on average work harder and longer hours than office workers, they enjoy the flexibility of being able to tend to other parts of their lives and eliminate commuting that costs time and takes them far away from the other things they love. 65% of workers say they would not go back to a routine 9-5 office job.
For companies, going remote is a huge boost to their bottom line. Office rents cost companies on average about 20% of their budget, totaling about $400B (billion!) per year in the US alone. It’s typically companies’ biggest expense after salaries. So, saving on this is an obvious advantage.So, what’s the problem?
Recent research has shown that company culture and even creativity suffer tremendously from online-only communication. The spontaneous free-flow of ideas is missing from remote work. You may have also noticed longer lead times for new hires to become productive.
If you’re a remote-only company or a dispersed team, there are likely 3 things your company is missing:
1. Good ideas. Research has shown that collective creative thinking simply happens better when people are together.
2. Collaborating on decisions and development. Remote-working, without a venue for collaboration, tends to favor top-down decisions and leaders. But a flat hierarchical structure is easier facilitated in-person.
3. Building trust. Online-only communication tends to foster more impersonal and abstract relationships among your team. This can be very efficient, but often leads to disaster when there’s conflict.
Fortunately, there is a truly hybrid model that takes advantage of the benefits of remote working and provides short, focused and powerful doses of communal in-person time that companies and even workers need to make the best of their efforts and keep the company together and on the same page.
Cue the company retreat.
But this isn’t your old company retreat. The yearly rah-rah with the CEO standing in front delivering motivational pep talks (you know, the one in the hotel’s chandeliered banquet room with 1980s carpet and rowed seating).
This is an event more regularly held for your whole team or maybe 10–25 people. It might be a group that works together in dispersed locations, but doesn’t get a chance to meet together much. Or the people in your organization that really should be getting together to make new connections – intellectual, social – to push the company forward.
This meeting should take place in inspiring, unique locations that facilitate collaboration and focus – not speaker-oriented informational seminars.
This is where the big things happen in your company, where complex group decisions are made. Where people working in their home office – or garage or shed – can come together to make new things, to push the boundaries of what your organization can be, and build richer relationships as part of the team.
Remote working is hugely popular with workers. Even though studies have shown that remote workers on average work harder and longer hours than office workers, they enjoy the flexibility of being able to tend to other parts of their lives and eliminate commuting that costs time and takes them far away from the other things they love. 65% of workers say they would not go back to a routine 9-5 office job.
For companies, going remote is a huge boost to their bottom line. Office rents cost companies on average about 20% of their budget, totaling about $400B (billion!) per year in the US alone. It’s typically companies’ biggest expense after salaries. So, saving on this is an obvious advantage.So, what’s the problem?
Recent research has shown that company culture and even creativity suffer tremendously from online-only communication. The spontaneous free-flow of ideas is missing from remote work. You may have also noticed longer lead times for new hires to become productive.
If you’re a remote-only company or a dispersed team, there are likely 3 things your company is missing:
1. Good ideas. Research has shown that collective creative thinking simply happens better when people are together.
2. Collaborating on decisions and development. Remote-working, without a venue for collaboration, tends to favor top-down decisions and leaders. But a flat hierarchical structure is easier facilitated in-person.
3. Building trust. Online-only communication tends to foster more impersonal and abstract relationships among your team. This can be very efficient, but often leads to disaster when there’s conflict.
Fortunately, there is a truly hybrid model that takes advantage of the benefits of remote working and provides short, focused and powerful doses of communal in-person time that companies and even workers need to make the best of their efforts and keep the company together and on the same page.
Cue the company retreat.
But this isn’t your old company retreat. The yearly rah-rah with the CEO standing in front delivering motivational pep talks (you know, the one in the hotel’s chandeliered banquet room with 1980s carpet and rowed seating).
This is an event more regularly held for your whole team or maybe 10–25 people. It might be a group that works together in dispersed locations, but doesn’t get a chance to meet together much. Or the people in your organization that really should be getting together to make new connections – intellectual, social – to push the company forward.
This meeting should take place in inspiring, unique locations that facilitate collaboration and focus – not speaker-oriented informational seminars.
This is where the big things happen in your company, where complex group decisions are made. Where people working in their home office – or garage or shed – can come together to make new things, to push the boundaries of what your organization can be, and build richer relationships as part of the team.