Everyone was looking forward to it. The team had set aside time to escape the hustle and bustle, the routine. The quarterly offsite offered a rare opportunity for everyone to get together face-to-face. Whether to celebrate wins, share knowledge, break bread together, or just be in the same space, the offsite offered a critical time to connect.
Then, just like that, it had to be canceled. In the face of a pandemic, that precious moment to connect in person would have to wait.
But the connection would have to go on.
Teams crave connection — can’t exist without it. Being free to fire off ideas, troubleshoot problems, express concerns, and activate opportunities. We talk to be heard. We listen to understand. Through conversations over coffee, ping-ponging messages over chat, sending a funny GIF, or writing a brief or building a diagram about a project, connection makes it all happen.
Teams simply can’t collaborate without connection.
So why is it that today, when teams have even more ways to connect, we find it so very hard?
How do we make connection easy?
[text-ctt]The written word — text — is powerful for sharing ideas at scale, at a distance, and in a format that makes it easy to send and receive.[text-ctt] [text-ctt]Words are a wonder for connection and shared group experiences can make it easy to share a few words, even simple acronyms, and create rapid understanding.[text-ctt]
But teams need to know when words don’t work. Consider taking collaborative work to channels that are more robust — such as when you’re:
Combine multiple forms of communication — like mixing written words with a powerful visual. Break free from the tyranny of text to more clearly communicate with your team.
Is it finally time to go “back” to work? What does that even mean? Businesses that shifted to predominantly remote workforces in 2020 are now racing to determine what policies and expectations to set for their employees, asking questions like:
Exploring how to manage collaboration across physical and digital domains is a complex, evolving challenge we will be exploring in the coming weeks! Stay tuned.
When the executive global leadership team at ThoughtWorks was suddenly unable to get together in the same place to connect during their annual offsite, advisory services principal James Pickett got to work replanning the session.
“We needed a way for everyone to connect and interact with one another,” shared James, which is why the session was reimagined to happen virtually in MURAL. The result? A surprising way to achieve synthesis and consensus across the group.
For a lot of people, the sudden shift to remote work in early 2020 was a shock to the system. The boundary between work and home was not just blurred, but decimated, and it was harder for team members to feel connected.
Eugene Chung, R&D team coach at Atlassian, set about designing a workshop to solve this problem. He and his team prototyped the method, then rapidly tested and iterated on it in MURAL. The result was the Work Life Impact Play, a method you can use to build psychological safety and identify the right support for your team.
Carmen was anxious about the first day at her new job. She was thrilled to land her dream role in UX design but nervous about working at an all-remote company.
At least she knew that the company had an excellent culture. They’d won awards for it, and everyone she’d met during the interview process went on and on about how well their team got along. She knew she would be just fine — and she was.
Three months in, Carmen was settling in nicely. She got along well with her team. They did virtual lunch once a week, and their meetings were rarely dull. But still, Carmen felt like something was missing. And that something was not, to her surprise, face-to-face connection.
It was purpose.
Carmen had been working on an important design project all quarter — or at least, that’s what her boss kept saying. She never really understood why it was so important. In Carmen’s mind, she could just as easily be doing the same work for any number of competing companies.
So while she loved the people she worked with, she felt unmotivated by her work. She could work all day to improve the customer experience, but she lacked the ability to tie her work to outcomes.
How was the company making a difference? And of equal importance, how was she?
According to Malcom Gladwell, in order for work to be meaningful it needs to satisfy three characteristics.
Spotify uses OKRs to define their objectives and key results. Since COVID-19 hit the U.S. in 2020, Emem Adjah, global head of monetization at Spotify, has used MURAL to facilitate virtual planning sessions. Learn how they saved time, improved communication, and fostered accountability with remote OKR planning.
What I like to illustrate to my team is: here's the destination. I don't care if you walk, swim, fly, roll to the destination … You’re going to pick the best, most efficient way to get there.
Imagination is the human capacity to conceive of things that are not real, allowing us to conceive of a future that does not yet exist. [text-ctt]As AI and other technologies take the “thinking” work off of our shoulders, imagination will increasingly stand at the core of resiliency and ultimately business success.[text-ctt]
Hermen Lutje Berenbroek, strategic designer at Artifizer, helps teams develop, implement, and adopt business solutions faster through visual workshops and designed communication. Hermen recently visualized the experience of making space for imagination, a central theme at MURAL, by animating how teams can break free of technology to work together visually in a shared space.
Read Hermen’s 3 tips for bringing imagination to your next team meeting.
While technology empowers us to solve some of our challenges, it is people who are creative.
The team’s creative juices were flowing, and they were motivated in that moment to act on their newly found insights, to make a change that mattered.
“Eureka!” they thought. “We’ve solved it.”
But quickly, reality took over. A full inbox, Slack chats, mundane tasks, and meetings demanded immediate attention. By Monday the next week, a full-blown case of workshop amnesia had set in. Not only did the team forget what they decided and who was responsible to follow up, but they also lost momentum.
Having great ideas is meaningless if you can’t act on them. The follow-through to imagination comes from team mobilization, a commitment to realizing innovative concepts and putting the power of imagination into motion.
It’s not enough that teams are coordinated and managed. Collaborative teams also have to be mobilized — that is, they must act with strong, self-sustaining momentum and autonomy to get the job done.
At Zapier, everyone works toward the same objectives, but it’s up to each team how they execute on those objectives. Senior product manager Richard Enlow and his team turned to user research to chart their path forward.
Learn how they use visual methods in MURAL to organize user research and find patterns in the data — empowering them to take action with confidence.
We can actually ensure that the decisions that we’re making are the right decisions, both for our company and for our users.
“We need to talk.”
“We can work async.”
“Let’s take this offline.”
“I’ll set up a meeting to discuss…”
“...This meeting could have been an email.”
– Teams Everywhere
No one even questions it anymore. Modern work, including collaborative work with large, distributed teams, can and must happen asynchronously.
But that doesn’t mean “async” work is best or that it even works.
Asynchronous collaboration really took off with email as digital made it easy to send and receive messages within an organization irrespective of time. Now, this send-and-receive structure is used everywhere — whether it’s chat, recorded videos, or shared documents.
All this “unbundled” back-and-forth somehow works ... at least some of the time. When, and how, does it work best? How do teams effectively collaborate async? When should the work be taken to a higher level of engagement — that is synchronous?
[text-ctt]Push for meetings with “no follow-up” outcomes. Complete action items, eliminate uncertainty, and decide as much as possible when working synchronously with your team.[text-ctt]
Meetings are often seen as expensive, time-wasting activities. Though they certainly can be, synchronous moments with your team should be highly valuable. You want to maximize the value of together time.
Getting value out of real, synchronous time spent with your team is the responsibility of whoever brings everyone together. When calling a meeting, all-hands, or other synchronous event, take responsibility. Synchronous is serious business!
Simple actions can go a long way to maximizing the value of together time:
This marks the beginning of a continuous process of facilitating easier collaboration with your teams and organizations.
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Free your team's imagination. Get up and running with MURAL in minutes. Then, invite your team. It's easy and free.