In these non expected “home office days” leaders have being challenged to maintain and improve the performance of their collaborators.
Most of these leaders were not trained in how to do it, is not easy to provoke that each individual is able to improve their skills over time by themselves.
Human behavior stays the same regardless of worker locations and some leaders trend was to provoke resistance demonstrating they did not trust their distant collaborators and wanted to know everything they do. Leaders only saw they worked by evaluating how well they meet their objectives. Remote teams have been often more productive than office-based teams because they must meet quantifiable metrics.
These days showed us that going remote it is not only a robust online communication, it requires a collaboration plan.
Physical distance leaves a black hole in which people do not receive, or do not understand, the comments they need to help them do their job better. In the other side leaders fear that going remote is damaging productivity, but it does not.
We are close to get into the “new normal” facing big challenges:
- Solve actual problems
- Manage uncertainty
- Redefine plans, budgets, strategies
Teams will need to be together – having face to face meetings – looking to be highly effective (I mean, each participant should leave with an aligned, coordinated and synchronized understanding of what they shared) with a precise understanding about what has to happen from there and what is his role on it.
These meetings will need leaders that:
- Avoid assumptions.
- Set the conditions to have quality conversations.
- Provoke new understanding, new knowledge, that each person understands something that he did not do before.
- Create spaces where Collaborators commit.
LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (LSP) is an excellent tool to help leaders, in face-to-face meetings, that will need to have complete information, keep employees well-informed and committed to prevent waste of resources.