The following is a blog post I wrote that was published in HBR July 01, 2015. As we are trying to emerge from being totally remote, it seemed appropriate to revisit it.
"Many companies feel they face a conundrum when it comes to determining remote work policies. Perhaps the most common misconception about adopting virtual work is that it is an all-or-nothing proposition, such that once we have networking tools in place, there is no need to come together — or conversely that we have to be in the office all the time. But this paradigm often forces knowledge workers to choose between two strong drives: the need for autonomy and the need for a purpose that inspires and unites them.
It is neither wise nor effective to turn our backs on the benefits of having a virtual work force. But it is also true that in this increasingly digital age, we stand to lose something integral to what makes organizations both humane and productive places to work: the relationships and sense of purpose that can only be built by having in-depth, face-to-face conversations about important issues—what I call collective sensemaking (based largely on the work of Karl Weick).
The way to satisfy both needs is to blend sophisticated virtual tools with periodic face-to-face meetings. This involves what I call the “oscillation principle,” which allows you to tap the best attributes of both virtual work and face-to-face convening.
Virtual work allows for:
- Drawing on the global talent pool
- Reducing costs from office space
- Providing greater autonomy to workers by giving them room to experiment and control their workflows
- Being able to respond quickly to local customers
- More satisfying integration of work and family life
Convening fosters:
- Strong commitment to jointly made decisions
- Shared understanding of goals and a larger purpose
- The ability for components, developed independently, to smoothly come together into a meaningful whole
- Diverse and innovative solutions to complex issues
- A sense of community, cohesion, and belonging
One example demonstrates how. Proquest, an information company, has a Research Solutions Division comprised of three remote teams, with members scattered from Amsterdam to San Diego. They are in daily communication with each other using multiple forms of media, but everyone comes together for a three-day Summit every four months to plan the work they will be carrying out virtually. Taco Ekkel, the division manager told me, “We would need four scheduled calls to accomplish what we get solved around a white board in an hour. Without the Summits it would definitely slow things down.”
During the Summit, he creates a culture to foster collective sensemaking. This means: 1) actively seeking members’ input into the agenda, 2) abandoning hierarchy and giving decision-making power to the group, 3) whiteboarding to jointly design features and build group ownership of ideas, and 4) preserving social time to help team members build important relationships. (He makes sure work sessions end promptly at 5PM so they can socialize at 5:30PM.)
Outside of the Summit, he maintains this collaborative culture by holding (almost) daily virtual meetings so everyone is aware of what everyone else is doing. And they’ve learned which virtual media is appropriate for certain tasks. For example, email works best for requesting or passing on factual information, while a teleconference is typically necessary for a problem solving task, such as deciding who should represent the company a client meeting. A face-to-face meeting might be needed for a brainstorming discussion about ways to alter a product’s design. Proquest usually saves larger conversations about new features for their Summits. “We’d never really effectively get them conceptualized without the richness of face-to-face contact coupled with sketching,” Ekkel said.
In this example, workers are both virtual and remote. But the oscillation principle is equally applicable to organizations where workers spend some of their time working remotely—in a client office, at home, or even at temporary “hot desks” when they’re in the office. If these workers aren’t periodically connecting, in person, around issues that matter, they’ll find themselves disconnected from their colleagues and the driving mission of their unit.
And how frequently your employees come together depends on task interdependence — or the extent to which one person’s work affects what other team members do — and complexity. The greater the interdependence and complexity, the more frequently collective sensemaking meetings need to occur.
The more virtual organizations become, the greater the need for oscillating between being remote and coming together on a regularly scheduled basis. I can conceive of a time when employees will conduct their individual work where it is most convenient to do so. They will come together to innovate, share new experiences, understand issues they are all are facing, solve problems, and develop strategy. There will be an understanding that when they convene it is to make use of all the knowledge and analytical ability that is in the room.
Everything else will be effectively conveyed virtually. The normal way of working will be: isolate to concentrate, convene to collaborate."