Lisette Sutherland: Becoming a Connected Hybrid Leader

This talk focuses on how to become a connected hybrid leader, especially in the context of remote work. The speaker, Lizette Sutherland, shares her insights on maintaining strong relationships and team dynamics in a flexible work environment. She discusses the challenges of hybrid work, including productivity concerns, the importance of team agreements, and the necessity for transparency. Sutherland emphasizes that effective collaboration relies on understanding personal productivity styles and fostering an inclusive culture. She also introduces concepts like personal user manuals and team agreements to boost team cohesion and morale, ultimately guiding teams towards intentional and productive collaboration.

[Music] we are back one and all welcome back to Dev day Dev and cyberwise Europe 2024 that's right the very place you need to be if you want to hear about anything AI development or security related and you know the beautiful thing is we are broadcasting online around the world right now which means I know we are getting everyone in those communities finger on the pulse tuning

in from different countries all around the world and over the next few days we are ready to tap your brain in and download all that knowledge that's right because over the next 4 days we are going to have I believe it's over a hundred different talk got over 100 hours of content for you guys to sink your teeth into now I know you're already thinking what 100

hours of content what's going on there who are you even to begin with I'm Darren elme I'm going to be your host through this all for the first two days on this channel and although you may now be panicking and be thinking oh my God all that content what am I going to do how am I going to watch it all help me out Darren don't worry

got you covered these will be recorded they will be downloadable you will be able to view them later but I definitely recommend across the course of the day is that you engage as much as possible but before we get to the engaging I do need to thank our sponsors and we have quite a few of them which just proves that we are the place to be because

everyone wants a piece of the action our bronze sponsor of course is fitler Europe for this event we've got Platinum sponsor being progress software and we've got a bunch of golden sponsors coming in we've got swedbank Cloud amqp Dev experts so cyber revolute and our in-kind sponsors are going to be battery and tiia thank you to all of them because without them these type of events could

not happen we couldn't bring all this knowledge to you now I did mention that there's a bunch of different talks going on and your brain is like okay it's one thing I can download them but what if I want to watch them all what if I'm a psycho who likes to watch all seven of these stages at once that's right there are seven going on this is

just the primary stage but after our opening talk you will have seven different channels to choose from for the first two days I believe it is um also make sure you take advantage of this opportunity right like it's not just an opportunity to engage with these to make sure you're asking questions to our very knowledgeable speakers in the moment you'll be able to reach out to them

later and just always look at these as networking opportunities to talk to other people around the world so with that in mind I don't want to eat into too much of her time because you know I'm just going to say she's quite the chat box and quite the knowledgeable person I've got someone waiting behind the scenes our keynote speaker to open day number one here it is

of course Lizette suland uh she is the director of collaboration superpowers she also hosts a regular podcast where she interviews a bunch of different industry experts remotely across the world I can guarantee you she's good at the job because she's basically been in a way podcasting me behind the scenes and she is phenomenal to speak to so I not going to rob you of that pleasure anymore

it's time to welcome Lizette suland to the stage to open day number one to talk to us about becoming a connected hybrid leader thank you so much Darren that was amazing wow what an intro and uh thanks to everybody here thank you for spending your time with me here today I really appreciate it before we get started I want to let you know that all of the

templates and the resources that I'm going to be talking about in today's talk you can download them in the super kit if you go to collaborations superpowers docomo kit you can download everything I'm going to be talking about today and if you download it during this talk I'm going to pick three people at the end to send packs of these virtual meeting cards to uh yes in

the mail so uh if you go ahead and download that uh I'll send you three people a pack of cards I'm going to be doing Q&A throughout so we're going to stop a few times just to talk uh and make this a little more interactive and try to make this more of a networking event so it's not just me talking to you that we're all talking to

each other and I know that as developers and leaders you all are no strangers to remote work right uh you know its benefits we all love the freedom we all love the flexibility and we all love the ability to work with our teams and Lead our teams from anywhere however there are still challenges that we need to address those challenges of maintaining strong relationships and Team Dynamics

so in this talk we are going to cover how to be a connected hybrid leader I know that the return to office mandates are rising right leaders are saying that productivity is down people are disappearing and Company culture is suffering and in fact if you look at these Statistics over the entire world most people 50% of us want to be hybrid with about two to three days

in the office that's sort of the majority 30% of us want to be fully remote and 20% of us want to be back in the office again fulltime now people don't mind going back to the office if there's a good reason and the number one deterrent for not going back is the commute we all hated the commute before the pandemic and now that the pandemic's over we

still hate the commute if not more and also we don't want to go back to offices like my friend Abe here where we're going back to an office that is mostly empty and we're sitting at an inferior workstation to what we have at home and we're on calls with our colleagues all day right nobody wants to do that so office if there is a good reason and

what we know is that the future of work is flexible however we can't just do what we want otherwise it's chaos so is both flexible and deliberate because teams that collaborate intentionally are the ones that have superpowers and I thought it would be fun to start out this talk by taking a tour of offices over time just to see how things have changed and I'd like to

start us out in the 1970s so you can see in the 70s the open Office plan was the most popular plan and Furniture tend to be modular so you could move things around depending on the projects and we would track our time by physical boards on the wall right you would put if you were out to lunch if you're going to be out for vacation so we

could physically see where people were in the 1980s we start to get into the Punch Cards where you punch in and you punch out and you're paid for exactly the minutes that you worked and we see the rise of the cubicle so in the 80s you start to see more cubicles popping up and if you were really lucky you got a cubicle with high walls right just

to have some sort of semblance of privacy now this is me in my cubicle in the 1990s I worked for an engineering firm in my past uh my past life I was a hydrologist working on hazardous Wast sites and what I remember in my cubicle was that there was a secretary that was hired whose primary job it was to Route calls to individual desks all day right

P this is per four cell phon so people would call and to the company and ask for a person and that person that secretary's job would be to route that call to my desk or somebody else's desk so that's what I remember about those times and we used to if you had a really important message you would print it out and you would put it in one

of these interdepartmental Mail envelopes right and you would pass it to the next person and they would sign it when theyve read it and they would pass it on to the next person either in the hall or maybe in one of these mail room uh cubicle uh things and what's really interesting is to this day and every talk that I give probably somebody here you'll put it

in the chat I can't read the chats by the way but uh but use it for yourselves there are companies still using these to this day and then we get to the 2000s and the open Office plan makes a comeback again and to this day about 80% of offices in the United States are open Office plans at the same time we start to see the rise of

online social media right we've got live journals starting in 19 99 Myspace in 2003 Friendster also 2003 and Facebook 2004 and we also see the rise of cloud-based project management software right with base camp and Zoho projects coming out and Trello and 2011 and so people are starting to work a little bit more online and in the 2010s we start to see a little bit of a

split we see one split going towards making offices hipper and cool to try to attract the the younger generations to uh work on this new technology and we see start to see the rise of digital Nomads and online working because of the capability that all of these online programs were giving us and then 2020 hits right and the great work from home experiment begins and what we

see is that the companies that had remote first processes in place made a seamless transition during the pandemic to working from home and the other thing that we started to realize is working from home during a pandemic is not the same thing as proper remote work right this is not the ideal situation uh for getting something done so now we're sort of in this mindset shift where

we're going from the mindset of being office first where the office was the primary place that we went to get our work done and we're moving now towards a flexible first environment where the office becomes one of many places that we go to get our work done and if you look towards modern organizational design thinkers like Jurgen they say if you want an organizational structure that can

handle the challenges of the 21st century then you need to ensure that there's practically no difference between a physical team and a virtual team and so that's basically where we are right now and I want to spend the rest of the time of this talk talking to leaders who are saying that productivity is down people are dis appearing and that company culture is suffering so that we

can address these issues headon we are going to start by talking about personal productivity and it turns out that everybody has their own version of productivity and we are all Experts of our own productivity and I'd like to just start the discussion by asking you what does your ideal day look like if you could design an ideal day how would you do that go ahead and write

it in the chat and share it with others if you don't mind of just what does an ideal day look like for you for me my ideal starts my ideal day starts with my neighbor cat Hugo coming over he's one of these dog cat so he comes over for a coffee and then we go for a little walk around the neighborhood and uh then I come back

and I do a few hours of focused work in the afternoons I either go running or swimming or biking depending on the weather um and then I come back and do another few hours of focused work and in the evenings I have my evenings free that is my ideal day right I don't always get it that's not you know that's not the that's not the point we

don't always get our ideal day but I know exactly what it looks like and work life balance looks different for everybody some of us are Splitters we like to split our time like we'll work first and then we play right and some of us are blenders like myself like we go on a walk and then we work a little bit and then we do a little laundry

and then we work a little bit and then we do a little lunch and then we work right we blend sort of split and blend throughout the day and I'd like to ask you to do a poll question which uh if you go to slido.com the code is 38112 A5 or I'll get out of the way so you can scan the QR code I'd like to ask

the audience here are you a splitter or are you a blender and a fun fact is that out of all of all audiences that I pull it's always about 50 50 but I'd like to see what this audience is so if you go ahead and go to slido and pick it out we'll see how many of us are Splitters and blenders so again Splitters are the ones

that like to do work and then we stop and then Life Begins or we have some sort of a split and the blenders they like to work a little they like to live a little they like to blend a little and they like to work a little let's see what we've got going on here I'm going to show the results coming in in real so we can

see again this audience so far 5050 split like most audiences so we'll see blenders are starting to win out I'll give just about 30 more seconds for people to fill out the poll and we'll see where we are but indeed we are all Experts of our own personal productivity and it's just really good to know what kind of person are so thank you for sharing those numbers

all right so the Splitters and the blenders it's about it's about 5050 with the Splitters winning this time oh blenders coming up in the lead all right so we'll continue the poll what I'd like to do next is show a quick video of a woman named Rebecca seal and she wrote a book called How to work alone and not lose your mind and so I want to

play a quick video clip from her talking about what it is that we need when we're working remotely so Darren I don't know if you could please ceue up that first video with uh Rebecca and we will almost the least important bit of it I'm gonna start it over again here we go you have to figure out what are the things that pump pump up your work

Tire you know not just the work that you do in fact that's almost the least important bit of it um but what's the stuff that scaffolds you that that sits around you like do you need are you getting enough access to light are you leaving your desk enough are you taking enough breaks are you being the worst boss of yourself you could possibly be you know are

you saying as the boss of your tiny company of one and this is true even if you're a remote worker with an actual boss when you work by yourself you're the only one looking are you being really mean in a way that you wouldn't accept from a real human are you for example saying to yourself you may only have a lunch break which is 4 minutes long

and consists of you eating some dry cheese directly from this the fridge while Doom scrolling on t Twitter then you must return to your desk and expect yourself to do work like is that you wouldn't accept that if somebody in real life said that to you but are you doing that to yourself all right so I think uh I think there probably a little uh little laughter

happening when she's saying like eating dried cheese from the fridge because it's funny because it's true so one of the things that we know about our personal productivity is that we all have to take charge and one of the things that's become popular since the pandemic is the creation of personal user manuals and what this starts is as an exercise to really understand what is it that

we need and what do others need to know about us in order to collaborate with us so this is my personal user manual I've got it on my website you can check it out here with the QR code and in my manual I have just things like my languages uh the working hours that I have some of my communication preferences some of my quirks like I'm a

really slow writer so if you're working with me and I you need me to write something it's good to give me time um and things like that so what do I need to know about myself and what do others need to know about me now I've got this picture of thees mode here because I'm a big thees mode fan and I have that in my personal user

manual and a couple of years ago my father-in-law whom I've known for 15 years took a look at my personal user manual saw that I was a fan of depes mode and became a fan himself now of course I've known him for this long and we've never had a lot to talk about because he's a football guy and I'm a sewing person so there wasn't a lot

of overlap but now we have the PES mode so the power of the personal user manual is not just that people know about how to collaborate with you but they also start to get to know you right it's a networking or a team building opportunity my friend DEA has her personal user manual in notion and she's an agile coach and so and a leadership coach and what

she uses it for is during the interview process also during the onboarding process right so people can get to know her quickly when you work with DEA within a day you understand how to work with her and that is the power manual so one of the things I'd like to ask here is let's make this into a networking opportunity and if you have a personal user manual

yourself I'd love for you to share that in the chat and maybe have other people see uh your personal user manual so go ahead and share that in the chat and I'm going to go ahead and stop here and see if there are any questions so Darren I'll go ahead and stop here I've uh we have an agreement that he'll pop on if there's any questions and

if there's not I'll just hang out here for a second wait for it and then we'll move on otherwise in the meantime if you want to go ahead and download the kit if you'd like your personal user manual manual I've got some templates in the super kit for you all right we're going to move on so now we all have our own personal productivity but we don't

want to be out of sight and out of sync so the next thing that I want to address is When leaders are saying people are disappearing oh one thing I should say about productivity leaders keep saying that productivity is down however all the research that we see out there shows that that is not true leaders might feel that productivity is down but the data shows that that

is not true and in fact one of the more dangerous uh things that we need to worry about is uh people overworking burnout is far more of a problem than people not working so uh that that's one thing that I'd like to address on productivity all right but let's not be out of sight out of sync let's talk about team cohesion and some of the things that

go along with Team cohesion is both transparency and Alignment when we work together in an office we can see each other right we can we know what's going on because I can see what's going on when we go online we have to create new ways of being present and having context together so there's a number of ways to do that but one of the reasons that we

do that um is because group cohesion is knowing part of group cohesion is knowing what other people are doing so one of the ways that we can uh that we can create more transparency is by working out loud and making our work more visible to others I got this idea from John stepper who wrote the book working out loud years ago and he wrote it because he

was working at Deutsche Bank and he was the only person in his Department that had his particular job function and when the bank started downsizing he realized he was in danger of losing his job because nobody knew what he was doing and so he created the concept of how can I work out loud and make my work more visible to people so that people know what's going

on and it goes to this quote from Ryan from X team where he says people respect you more when they know how you contribute and they question your value when they don't know how you contribute so working out loud is actually really important because we don't want people to question our value just because they can't see us people are using tools in order to create transparency so

I wanted to just start with that right one of the ways just by being more present with each other so instead of having a virtual headquarters maybe we have a or instead of having a physical headquarters Excuse Me Maybe we have a virtual headquarters so Coco has been around for decades right this is a virtual office that you go to in your browser each one of these

individual boxes represents a room and each one of these dots represents a person in the room so the four of us down here in this room have just discovered that we're all cat lover uh but we're Des here we can only see and hear the people that are in the same room as us but if we want to go up here and talk in Henry's office we

just double click on Henry's office and then we're there with Henry right so this is one way of creating presence and context with each other I run virtual co-working sessions every week they're free to join you can just come and do work together with other people all over the world that come and use these sessions as a way to get work done I personally save my gnarliest

tasks for these sessions because uh it just makes it more fun to have other people around so I do my invoicing and all the stuff that I hate to do normally but I do it with people around it just makes it more fun so I hope you'll come and try it out sometime but in terms of more tools you can see that there are uh telepresence robots

these are basically robots that you beam into just like Skype or just or Microsoft teams or zoom and you can drive yourself around using the arrow keys on your keyboard right so at suitable technolog suitable Technologies the company here they've got 50% of their Workforce that come in in the flesh and 50% that beam in Via robot every day and of course you've got virtual reality software

right if you're not playing around with virtual reality or augmented reality um they're definitely missing out meet and VR is some of my favorite software where you just put on the headset and within moments you are in a room floating above space in an office room with your colleagues it's spatial so you know who's talking to the right or to the left of you you can draw

things in 3D and then print them out right absolutely amazing teams that are using these kind of Technologies really will have superpowers but it's not about the tool right it's about the behavior that we're trying to elicit from our team so while I am a tool junkie and I'm very excited about all the different possibilities that are out there I want to take us a little bit

more back down to Earth last year I had the opportunity to interview astronaut Paul Richards and I wanted to talk to an astronaut because I wanted want to understand how do they think about remote work from space right because they are dealing with different time zones and all kinds of uh issues from space and what Paul said was astronauts train to have the right information at the

right place at the right time and that is exactly true for what we need for remote teams right I've been saying this whole time that teams ones that have superpowers so we're trying to create more presence and more team cohesion then we need to agree on what's normal behavior for our team and some of the most common ways of doing that is by creating a team agreement

and agreeing on how to work together I've got a team canvas for you in the in the materials at the super kit link um but this canvas basically just helps a team layout what are our values what information do we need to share how are we going to share it what are the expected response times right how are we going to communicate with each other what tools

are we going to use how do we know what each other are doing and how can we work in a sustainable way without burning ourselves out right so we just get together we talk about all of these things and then my team put it together in an agreement where we just you can see here it's h it follows the same format in values information communication collaboration and

then well-being and I've even got a section here for things we don't agree on because not every team agrees on everything right but having an agreement that just specifically lays out how we're going to work together for the next one I want for the next video that I'd like to show I'd like to show you an interview that I did with Darren murf who was at the

time of the video the head of remote for gitlab now gitlab works in a handbook first way and in this video I'm asking Darren about why they work in this handbook first way and what is the benefit to gitlab for this so Darren if you could please ceue up the second video into next the um the handbook your central repository for how the company has run and

it's open to the public and it's very detailed so it's not like there's a public version and a private version there's one version so why the transparency yeah this blew my mind when I was interviewing and handbook undersells it to some degree what it really is is the actual operating manual of the company most people think of hand and it's some flimsy PDF that gets revised gently

and emailed around to the company once a year and you have to take some quiz to say that you've read it the gitlab handbook we don't expect everyone to read 13,000 pages of it during onboarding we just teach you how to search it so some people ask me hey is the handbook too big and I say well is there too much information on the Internet or did

you just learn how to use Google and that's a bit tongue and cheek but we just teach people how to find what they need instead of trying to constrict the amount of information it is public because transparency is one of our core values gitlab has six core values together they spell credit I would say Google the gitlab values page is a fascinating read you'll find all six

values as well as substantiating values sub values underneath transparency is a value because it makes us a better business and when our handbook is public to the world it reinforces our mission of everyone can contribute a lot of the gitlab product has been influenced by the community and if you aren't public with your product how will the community know how to make it better the same goes

for our organizational design we want our values to be public because we want others to look at it and help make it better if they so choose a few years ago we had someone who was a copywriter find our values page and they actually made a merge request this is a function within the gitlab program to update and edit some of the grammar on our values page

to make it more read that is exactly the type of behavior that we want to instill and the values page in particular is always evolving in 2020 alone we had almost a hundred iterations to the company values page and so I say the word values but in practice these are the actual tangible ways that we treat each other and the behaviors that we want to encourage across

the team as well as outside of it so I love how Darren puts that they use their handbook as a way to embody their culture so again another way of creating presence and context in the online environment or the hybrid environment now don't be intimidated by the 13,000 page handbook there's a fun fact about Darren murf in that he has the Guinness Book of World Records he's

holder for the most blog posts ever written so he might have had an influence on on the handbook uh but you know it can be something as simple as a Miro board this is a scrum team and they use a Miro board as their team agreement um they just have and they review this weekly so this is both their team agreement and their workflow it makes sense

to them and it works for them so there is no one right way of creating a team agreement it's really about what is going to work for your team and one thing I should say about team agreements is if you create an agreement and then you never look at it again it's not an agreement it's a kickoff document which is fine also very important but it's not

it's not a living team agreements those are different things now another example of an agreement that I just wanted to show comes from Ally green whom I've interviewed a couple of years ago and Ali is a digital Nomad and all of her colleagues are digital Nomads so their team agreement is that they agree to meet every Monday to talk about how they're going to collaborate for the

week right so a very different kind of way now I would like to ask you here let's just get an idea in the audience of who here has a person user manual and a team agreement in place what percentage of us have something in place so I'd like you to go back to slido if you don't mind and let's just write let's just see who has a

personal user manual and who doesn't the results might surprise you so if you go ahead and go to slido again or scan this QR code it should take you to the poll question and if you want to just fill out do you have a personal user manual or a team agreement or do you not have one they all come in very different forms I'm going to go

ahead and show the results in real time here so I'll put it here and I'll keep talking so so far the vast majority although the we don't have a lot of results in the vast majority are saying that we don't have personal user manuals or team agreements in place not a surprise I will say when I do these polls all over the world that I would 90%

of teams don't have any sort of team te agreement in place and for me I'll just say this is quite loow hanging fruit right having an agreement in place takes away a lot of the misunderstandings that are happening on a team so it just kind of uh evens things out I will say when I first started working together with my colleague Tahira she answers emails instantly I

don't know how she does it all day long she can answer emails in an instant I do mine twice a day and when we first started working together I was driving her crazy because I was happy I was getting instant answers but she would have to wait until I was at my inbox again these are the kind of things that team Agreements are great for so all

right we're going to see here most people don't have a personal user manual or a team agreement in place like I said before lwh hanging fruit great place to start and if you go to the Super kit link you can find facilitator guides and templates for all of this so I've said that the team agreement can help with alignment but there's one other thing that the team

agre can help with and that is information overload we're all suffering from it right messages from all over the place and in a recent survey one of the things that they found was that most of us have about seven work applications sending us notifications at any given time those are just work applications and the majority of us are replying to those notifications outside of our own designated

working hours these are the hours that we have set for ourselves and we're finding it difficult to switch off because we're preoccupied with thinking about what we're needing to do because we keep getting all of these notifications right all of this back and forth with the whatsapps and the slacks and the teams and going back and forth all the time and the statistics say that we check

our inboxes about once every six minutes and our instant messaging systems about once per minute right and in fact it says that all of this back and forth messaging forms a kind of Virtual Office with each other right that's how we know that people are online and working is because they're responding to our messages Cal Newport has come up with a term for this kind of collaboration

in his latest book a world without email and he calls this phenomenon the hyperactive hive mind and it's a way of collaborating made possible by all of these apps and notifications but it is not necessarily the best way to collaborate right most of us are knowledge workers and we need time for deep focused concentrated work and this constant checking of our inbox and going back to work

and checking our messages and going back to work is not giving us the focus time that most of us need so one of the things that he says is that this information overload it's not going to slow down right we and instead of trying to keep up which is impossible anyway we need to change how we work we've tried the flags we've tried the filters we've got

the priorities right we've got it all and it is not helping so instead of trying to keep up we have to change how work flows and one of the things that we can do is create one source of Truth for what's happening I worked with a small team they had about five people on the team but they had 20 25 different projects at any given time and

they were constantly meeting and emailing each other about the status of projects and in fact at one point they decided let's create a Trello board and we'll create a one source of Truth dashboard so that if anybody needs to know what's happening on the project we just go to the dashboard right what we're doing is we're moving people to the work so that we can share Collective

responsibility until the work is done now you all are professional developers I know that you know all of this but it's also good to just Rec uh just to uh remind ourselves that information overload doesn't have to be the natural state of things we can do something about it and in fact there are other tools out there ioba is one of my favorites basically allowing every team

to have their own board in any way that they see fit but each board can connect to each other so if you are leading this organization you can see everything in a bird's eyee view or you can zoom in on any one particular team now for the last video that I want to play for you today I want to play a short conversation between Matt mullenweg who

is the uh CEO of automatic the company that created WordPress and a conversation with him and Seth Goden talking about how WordPress eliminated email almost 15 years ago and they found a new way of working that doesn't require so much back and forth messaging with each other so Daren if you don't mind queuing up this third video we'll play a conversation with that yeah so we actually

eliminated email basically at the company like 14 years ago so I I get almost no internal emails yeah I see lots of downsides of email for example like when someone leaves an organization how much knowledge is left in their lost in their inbox which just kind of gone all the collective decision- making and what truly needs to be private so what we created essentially building on WordPress

we built this thing called P2 which is an internal blogging system you could almost think of it like an internal Twitter or Facebook or like a Yammer or one of these other things so you can use it for project management collaboration but every decision in the company is these blog threads where they have comments that are threaded people can embed videos or looms or YouTubes or Maps

or whatever is useful to move the and we've been doing this so long that it's uh it's kind of like an organizational blockchain so it's like a record of every single conversation decision that's ever been made in the company so how often do you come across something like we're looking at a product we haven't looked at in a few years we're like why is this rigid blue

there's probably a good reason and if you're you know uh because companies have so so much organizational like goldfish going around and forgetting everything like they just reinvent the same problems over and over again particularly in software where there's a strong incentive to rewrite things you recreate bugs or or you lose some of what worked about the old thing so we're able to look back and say

okay let's find exactly where it's decided that this widget would be blue and perfect like we can now tell and we can use that wisdom and intelligence to iterate on the next so I love how Matt and Seth or how Matt talks about that they basically have created an organizational blockchain so they can go back and figure out um how they made decisions they've T it's working

out loud in the extreme right they've sort of got everything documented so while every company needs something different it is worth thinking about how can we best visualize our work so that everybody knows what's happening who's working on what and how it's going so that's definitely uh part of the team agreement process and the next thing I wanted to show is an exercise that I use uh

in my workshops but it's also a great exercise if you don't know where to start this can be a great easy way to assess where are the problem areas in your collaboration so basically what I've done is I've broken collaboration down into four different categories enjoyment alignment communication and accessibility and I've asked this team to rate themselves how they feel about each of these four categories and

as you move to the outside of the circle you feel great the closer you are to the middle of the circle is it needs more work so as you can see here I've asked the team to rate themselves in each of these four categories and if I were coaching this team to me accessibility looks like the biggest problem area like everything needs work but accessibility is where

to start and accessibility means like having one source of truth it's easy to obtain information and support so I would work with this team to solve this and then I would move on to the other things because we can't just we everybody says let's improve collaboration but what does that actually mean this exercise can help you figure out which area of collaboration with your team to start

with first all right what I'd like to do is take a quick pause here and just ask if there are any questions or even thoughts maybe somebody just has a thought that they would like to share I just want to take a pause and just ask any questions or thoughts till this point talking about personal user manuals team agreements information overload the hyperactive hive mind how we

make our work more visual let me know if there's any questions I always wait till it feels awkward I'm to give it a few more seconds and see if it feels awkward hey Liza uh I actually just had a question that came to mind you know a lot of talk about team agreements here it's one of those things that I think we hear and we think as

like a team member are very useful but it's almost like you could imagine the bosses thinking oh another thing that gets in the way this is really frustrating so I guess my question there is when it comes to team agreements I feel like the bosses are usually going to be a big hurdle to overcome how would you go about convincing them to get on board with that

uh for I would you to me leaders are the ones that have to role model the behavior that they want to see so one uh I would I would say you know just asking your team are you a morning person an afternoon person a Twilight are you a night ow just sort of understanding the differences in your team will will quickly highlight the different assumptions that people

have on their team so if you're a boss and you're thinking like H yet another meeting yet another task I would say this is probably one of your more important meetings your more important task is to get everybody on the same virtual page because there's going to be enough misunderstandings out there right maybe people are silently driving each other crazy like my colleague Tahira and I right

we're just silently driving each other crazy our team agreement gave us a place to talk about some of these small things and on remote teams you can have a lot of passive aggressive behavior or virtual teams hybrid teams all of it right it's kind of the same you have a lot of passive aggressive behavior and our team agreements gives us a place to sort of hash that

out the other area that I really like about team agreements is the conflict management area as a team agreeing on how you're going to deal with conflict before it happens can go a long way to making uh heated situations better when I worked for management 3.0 we had a an agreement at the time that if you had a conflict with somebody and this was in our team

agreement if you had a conflict you would have to first try to work it out oneon-one if that didn't work you would go to the team if that didn't work you would take it to the team lead although we were very flat so there really wasn't any team lead and at one point we even had it so that if that didn't work we had to get an

outside facilitator to come in and help us guide the conversation now that was all pre you know pre-planned so it was sort of just you know nobody In the Heat of the Moment it's it's hard to make good decisions right and so we pre-planned it out so team agreements as a leader if you don't have one yet I promise you it will go a long way it

doesn't have to take a long time it doesn't have to be heavy duty you don't have to write 13,000 pages but just having the conversation with your team will really go a long way of taking out all those misunderstandings so thanks for asking that question Darren if there's another one let me know otherwise we're going to move on we're sort of hitting towards end all right I'm

going to take that as Moving on but we can always go back I want to end by talking about company culture a big word again like collaboration what does that actually mean so I've defined culture as culture is how we behave when the boss isn't looking right so you can kind of think of sort of the standard cultures like do we have a culture of fairness or

do we have a culture of corruption right do we have a culture of transparency or do we have a culture of blame right so culture is really about how we behave and that's why I say it's so important that as Leaders we must support and role model the behavior that we want to see so if we are emailing our team on the weekends does that mean they

have to answer right that's a good thing to have in our team agreement because you're always going to have people on the team trying to impress the boss right so we have to see and one of my favorite quotes comes from Chase Warrington he's the head of remote aist and he says team culture is primarily built by how you work together not how you socialize together so

this is why I've spent so much time talking about team agreements and presence and working out loud and creating context right because those are the things that build True Team culture having fun together is important it's absolutely important but it is not the key thing right and in fact it really came to uh to a head when I interviewed uh Carlos Valdez depa from the Mars Corporation

he said my wife and I we can have all the fun in the world at quiz nights and pizza parties and he was so adorable and he said and we will love each other more and more after every single event and then he goes but we should never hang wallpaper together so like we can have all the fun in the world but let's never hang wallpaper together

and what he meant by that is we can have fun together but it doesn't mean that we're going to work well together and if we really want to talk about team building and and bonding and belonging with the team we have to understand why people come to work to begin with right for some people it's all about solving challenging problems for other people it's more about who

they work with and for some it's just a job right so it's important to understand why people are there so that we can build them the environment that they need in order to thrive because you're going to motiv moate the person um who's there to solve challenging problems and the person for whom it's just a job in very different ways so for the next thing that I'd

like to ask you I'd like to ask what do you need to feel connected to a team I'm just curious so I've got a word cloud ready to be filled out at slido.com what connection so I know for myself you know I'm one of those people for whom who I work with is more important than what I'm working on so for me in order to feel connected

to a team uh I need to have humor I need to have personal contact you know I need to have sort of the background Chit Chats I need to have respect from my team so those are the things that I need to feel connected but I'm really curious what is it that you need to feel connected on a team so once again oops I'll get out of

the way of the QR code if you're trying to get to that we'll go to slido.com and then the number is 3811 285 what is it that you need to feel connected and in just a second I'm going to show the results in real time everybody needs different things maybe you need respect maybe you need trust some communication let's see what people need I'm going to show

it as soon as we get a couple of words on here here we go I'm going to show what people need so far we need belonging we need acceptance good intentions oh I love that cooperation a messenger purpose a I love it good communication so as this is one of my favorite exercises As Leaders of a team right you ask your team what is it that you

need to feel connected and then we build the team building environment around that look at this we need good communication cooperation oh those are the main things like-minded people a safe space meetings with cameras yes we'd love to turn our cameras on professional acceptance lunches together yes some of us need in-person experiences that's very important my husband in particular hates working from home hates we have very

interesting conversations he basically went out and got a job recently that requires them to go to the office because he likes it so much I love it honesty alignment somebody needs nothing they need nothing to feel connected right some of us don't need team building I've actually found that in some of my interviews that team building exists on a scale some of us need beer drinks are

always fun right meetings uh messenger humor Championship love it love it love it love it I don't see money on that list anywhere I didn't see pizza parties on that list anywhere or quiz nights right so some of the focus here here I should actually let me just keep this here in the background what I talk some of the focus on team building is often misplaced right

these are the things that we can focus on on leaders to feel connection on our team I love this is the best word cloud just uh now I've done this word cloud a number of times I want to show you what other people have said you're going to recognize some of the same words right common goals transparency psychological safety this came from a workshop that I did

a couple of weeks ago right shared humor honesty here's another one this came from a workshop over a year ago reliability trust laughing and jokes face-to-face interaction that comes in too right sharing the same goals here's one another one that I did from a conference common language safety a place to be heard you'll notice the the theme here this is what people need to feel connected on

the team so stop focusing on the pizza party so much connection happens when we pay attention to each other and in this flexible first way of working the challenge is finding ways to pay attention to each other personal user manual is a great way of starting that conversation of course team building ice breakers are a fun way but one of my favorite ways of paying attention to

each other is through gratitude and that is a super easy way to increase morale but also to increase team building is just by showing gratitude for a job well done my friend Abe sent this email to a slack group that he and I and a few other friends share and he said to me check out this email I got it made my day and it's just an

email from a a a colleague of his Nikki saying hey Abe just wanted to send you a quick note to say thanks for all your support on this project you've been the voice of reason several times along the way and there have been several thank goodness for ab slacks between Deb and I not only did Abe print this email out hang it on his wall to he

was so excited that he got this but he also shared it with his friends right just a quick email to say thank you made a huge impact so as Leaders if you are looking for ways to increase team morale showing appreciation and gratitude for jobs well done is a easy easy place to start when I worked for management 3.0 we uh implemented the Merit money system I

can definitely recommend it has nothing to do with money the way that it works is that every month everybody gets a certain amount of points and the only rule is you can't keep the points for yourself you have to give it to other people and you have to say why so I'd say like 20 points to Darren for being the most amazing host right and 20 points

for Lydia for being online and 10 points for Daria for sending me an 8 AM greeting this morning right so I can give out these points and it shows people what I appreciate about them the other thing that it does is it forms a 360 degree peer-to-peer continuous Improvement system so our colleagues learn or we learn what our colleagues like about working with us through systems like

this now uh don't have to do Merit money but having some sort of a regular feedback system in place um is really good and a feedback system that focuses on appreciation is even better so just to wrap things up I wanted to mention that we know the future of work is flexible right we are not going back to work like it was before the Pand mmic the

the toothpaste is out of the tube right the train has left the station or the the cheese has been moved if you've read that book right we can't go back to the way that it was before one is uh the world of work has fundamentally changed and most people don't want to go back 100% to the way that it was before but we can't all do what

we want so the future of work is teams that work intentionally are the ones that have superpowers and sadly there is no one right way I wish there were I would have sold that Silver Bullet formula like crazy during the pandemic but what works for one team is not necessarily going to work for another so the idea is to experiment and figure out what works best for

you but when we get it right the payoff is huge right we as individuals get the freedom to design our days around the things that we love the most and our companies get a stronger and more connected Workforce that is not dependent on locations so why while we see that the return to office mandates are rising and down people are are disappearing and Company culture is suffering

we know that the answer to how to rock in a flexible first workplace is one getting clear on our own productivity and communicating to others what we need in order to collaborate well creating team cohesion by working out loud creating agreements having one source of truth right making our work more ible to each other and creating company Culture by being deliberate about team building and building the

building the team that our team needs right through our beautiful word cloud of needs here that our teams need so what they need in order to feel connected on a team and just to end this out so that uh this is how you rock in a flexible first workplace right you want to have more personal productivity better team cohesion and a deliberate company culture so that if

you do go back to the office you don't go backwards in time I want to thank you all so much for your engaged attention this morning I know it's tough to sit through a long online presentation so I appreciate you being here with me and to end I'm going to uh ask Darren to come back on to see if there's any questions and I'll try to uh

I'm going to announce the three winners of the super cards so I'll go ahead and send you these cards in the mail now one qu one card that I want to tell people about when you get is this GMO card so in all meetings there's always somebody that goes on and on and on and you can't verbally interrupt them if you don't know what I'm talking about

it's probably you right so this GMO card can be used to just say like okay it stands for good enough let's move on so this is one of those cards all right so with that that's your last facilitation tip let's see if there's any questions all right thank you lazette yes guys if you do have any questions remember just click the Q&A Tab and you can type

out your questions and I will ask them across to LZ um great talk there really informative stuff there um you know there's some interesting takeaways I think you know one of the big things right near the end that kind of spoke to me is that whole idea of like the gratification emails I was thinking about this because recently you know that's sound a little bit pathetic I

even do it myself now I'm like yeah good job right and it it it kind of really hit me a few events back when there was a guy on the team that he would walk around like good job team good job good job and you're like oh boy I feel great and it it really made me realize you know it's kind of weird it's such a simple

thing but I feel like we never do it right like can you kind of have you ever been able to kind of like you know dissect why it is that even when we think and identify that someone does good work we never seem to voice it in these environments uh you know it's not even just a virtual environment that that that is challenging when I worked in

the office uh and managed my first project this was 25 years ago at the end of the project I bought everybody a plant to say thank you and I was trying to Green up the cubicles because it was so boring like these old gray drab cubicles so I thought oh I'll buy everybody plants I'll get plants and everybody gets a thank you gift the thing that I

learned from that was some of those people that was the first time in over 10 years that they had ever received a thank you gift on any projects that they had worked on so this is an ongoing Pro problem throughout the Decades of we don't show appreciation enough and it's not because of any sort of malice but it's just overlooked because everybody's working really hard but if

you're a leader in an organization building in appreciation Loops is incredibly important is one of the easy things that you can do for team morale so it's I think it just gets overlooked and especially when we're online it gets especially overlooked but it's not it's not native to online it's ALS so in person people it's easy to to overlook people in general so this is where I

think leaders can focus easily and get a lot of bang for their Buck here yeah I think it's like that classic one that comes to my the good old Employee of the Month type schemes right that almost have come I think like cringe worthy a lot of people like oh I even do that anymore but when you think about it it's almost like people do still care

but in a similar L they don't voice that care anymore right oh we oh we totally care everybody likes to be rewarded and appreciated for a job well done right we're bragging on LinkedIn all the time about our accomplishments like we want to be seen and heard um I was gonna now I forgotten my train of thought I was so excited about the the job well done

but it doesn't have to be cheesy oh the key to authentic feedback or the key to feedback is that it has to be authentic so I think these Employee of the Month things it's just like oh we've got to pick one employee of the month so it's kind of this automatic thing but if it comes spontaneous I think you spark a lot of Joy that's fair I

think like to give it a different look um with Activision Blizzard recently like a lot of things came out around how one of the the big kind of head hunches one of the key mines behind the company he quit because he was being told by higher-ups that he basically had to say who was doing a bad job and he was saying well no everyone's doing a good

job like there's no one underperforming but they were like we require to know who is the underperformer of these people cuz they wanted to basically chop people off and I I think that's like the opposite the polar opposite of that kind of experience where it's like once again forcing these cheesy non starters that that don't really matter right instead of just being like okay something good happened

um you're trying to put I guess a measurement on it that doesn't seem genuinely quantifiable exactly exactly and I think uh back to back to the authenticity like the key to good appreciation is that it has to be authentic so people people can see right through it and as an American I know like we try to put our enthusiastic Smiles on it but if it's not authentic

people can see right through me so uh we have a question come through from Andrea Jensen uh they asked something a little bit similar to what I was talking about earlier this whole idea of getting higher management to buy into the idea of Team agreements I think you know in Li of that because we kind of talked about a bit maybe a different way of going with

this is to ask of some examples that you've heard of or have been involved in uh like successfully got management to buy in a method that you manag to use to get them on board you know what I hate to to recommend this method but one of the the things that I see commonly is just usurping the leader and just doing it as a team anyway like

if it's from the ground up you know as a team you don't have to create something formal but it can just be like even as a team member if you start putting together like hey this is how I think we behave and then you show it to somebody else like from the ground up sort of thing as a the thing that um Team agreements uh powerful is

when they're useful so if you're just creating it to document how things are that's not very useful but if you're creating it because the team is doing things in different ways and you need to align somehow and agree on your behaviors that's when it's useful so if you have a really close-knit team you've been working together for 20 years you know you know you all know each

other you're on your barbecues you have less need for a team agreement than other teams however if somebody new comes on to that team and is trying to figure out all of your processes it's impossible for them to just break in and to osmotically feel what's going on like maybe in the office that worked but online you can make it a lot easier for those new people

yeah I think it's that whole idea of the company culture and then this assumption you just know it without having any sort of guidance whatsoever um an interesting one coming in from maxims in regards to the idea of the emails they're asking if it seems like emails are a little bit of an a synchronous communication and as a result of that does it not feel like you're

kind of going back in history right that you may be interfering with the team's efficiency with that method you know it's it's a matter of what what works for the team but most people are are feeling some sort of information overload with too many emails and indeed email is great for asynchronous but asynchronous also has rules and context right you want to make sure um that you

send enough information that you're moving the conversation forward so maybe you want to make sure to send links in those email or context about what you're talking about or maybe you're sending a novel and what would really help is if you had a tldr version at the top so that people understand like what is it that you want from me put that the first thing so there

are rules about asynchronous Behavior so it's not that email is bad but uh uh undeliberately unintentional just this back and forth Conant like what do you mean what what's going back what you know this back and forth that's what we're trying to stop so I'm not saying that email is bad but have it be intentional uh intentional communication that helps move the ball forward yeah I mean

In fairness you know your example you gave earli of everyone's looking at their phone every X minutes look the emails in a way probably refreshing to get a compliment in there instead of just having a new request um but I have to make a request for you Lizette I just realized the time we're close to going over and I know you've got to give away those I've

got three winners indeed I've chose three people at r and what will happen is you'll get an email from me afterwards that will show you where to send your address I delete the addresses after I mail them you will not get me coming to your door just so I'm very gdpr related um and apologies for mispronouncing your names I've just got email addresses so Martin tagger number

one Martin tagger uh Tom hermanek you'll know who it is when you get the emails sorry for the pronunciations and ron. LMK those are our three winners for today thank you all so much for sending that in and uh in the super kit I do have printable cards so for those of you who didn't win you can always download and print out your own cards all right

well congrats to Martin Tom and Aron uh make sure you grab those I'm sure they'll be very useful in the meeting I'll probably be the person that you're telling to shut up and uh to move on to the next subject but I I think it's about time for us to move on lazette uh you've been absolutely phenomenal thank you for opening the show for us but I

think I'll I'll let you get on the day and we'll look to get on with the show all right have fun everybody I'll see online thanks LZ okay guys so very short break uh we are going to be blitzing through this in about 5 minutes time we should have our next speak on this channel remember all the other stages are also active now so you know if

the next talk doesn't quite tickle your fancy you've got I believe it's six other stages virtual stages to choose from right now so have a look have a gandos on the pineapp decide what tickles your fancy hopefully it's here and I'll see you all in just a few minutes for