by Janus Boye
The future of work unfolding as a distributed and hybrid digital workplace is throwing us some new challenges. Andrew Pope's work for a government client surfaced one such challenge that digital working during the pandemic has caused: a lack of focus time when compared to traditional office working.
Finding focus when we’re largely away from the office requires new behaviours and habits to reflect new working arrangements. What happened in the office isn’t happening right now.
For our very first member call of 2022, Andrew showed us how introducing game-based cards can help teams, leaders and individuals find new techniques that help us both find time and introduce structures to provide more space to focus. He also generously shared some of the more popular techniques that have been adopted in both private and public sector organisations.
Below you’ll find my notes from the call, including the entire recording towards the end.
Everybody is struggling to find focus
As an experienced consultant, Andrew Pope started by sharing his take on understanding the problem. That’s always a good place to begin before thinking about applying solutions. As he said based on his conversation with customers:
“We are all doing work, but are we doing work well?”
In the former days of working in the office, pre-pandemic, knowledge workers used to have prompts to tell us whether we were on track, actually making progress and doing important work. These structures don’t exist in the work-from-anywhere setting and coupled with the stress of navigating uncertainty in a pandemic, it’s been truly hard to focus. Constant interruptions and the ‘always on’ syndrome are taking their toll.
His simple methodology to understanding the problem and making progress was two-fold:
1) Firstly, you need to collectively find what is important, and what we need to do better
2) Secondly, surface what might get in the way. What known issues will impede us?
Introducing the digital team builder
Based on years of refinement and collaboration best practices, Andrew has created a card game with over 150 workshop cards.
These are specifically developed for digital skills and team-building workshops, and has been used in organisations around the world, including a key UK government department.
The cards are packed with questions that make us think about work - here’s just a few of the goal cards he showed us during the call:
Are decisions made at the right level?
Are decisions timely and effectively communicated?
Are customers and stakeholders engaged in understanding problems and generating solutions?
Does every team member stand behind the group’s vision and value?
There’s also strategy cards and everyday practice cards to really take your collaboration to the next level.
Interestingly, while realizing that each team is unique, there’s one card that is picked almost in each and every workshop using the cards: The one with ‘lack of focus’.
What will help you find ways to focus in your digital work?
Towards the end of the call, Andrew asked the call participants to participate in a brief survey to identify what might work. He basically asked each of us, to look at these six questions and then consider what would help the most:
Share details about how you like to work
Keep digital teams small, ideally less than ten per team
Hold conversations in focused channels, not via email
Replace status update meetings with a threaded conversation
Adopt a token to say our team is a safe place to collaborate
Create an operating charter for teams you collaborate with
The survey was anonymous, which is also an important point in organisations in order to make team members comfortable sharing their honest opinion.
As you can see from the results, sharing details about how you like to work, came out the winner. As Andrew said from previous workshops:
This helps us to set expectations on how to contact us and crucially, when we might not be available – giving us a bit more control over our day
As the two other popular picks were:
Hold conversations in focused channels, not email
Replace status update meetings with a threaded conversation
Learn more about playing games to find focus
Interesting in looking closer at the cards? They are called TeamPlays and you can find more details, and also buy them at Hargraves Institute: Introducing TeamPlays.
The conversation on collaboration, building digital teams and much more continues in our community. If you are interested in expanding your network and meeting peers, do consider our Future Workplace peer groups.
You can also download the slides (PPT) or lean back and watch the entire 28-minute recording below: