Sacha Connor: Learn, Skills, Mindset, Behaviors | Work 20XX Ep27

Sacha Connor: Learn, Skills, Mindset, Behaviors | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick, Ep27
English Transcript

Cold Open
Okay, great.

So I'll count us down and we will go in, three, two, one.

Jeff Frick:
Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here. Coming to you from the home studio for another episode of Work 20XX. And we've got a great industry veteran here that I'm really excited to have on. You know, there's a few people that got introduced to the idea of remote work when Covid hit, and there's a whole bunch of people who've been doing it for years and years and years, and she belongs to that club and cohort. So excited to get her perspective. And she's Sacha Connor, the founder and CEO of Virtual Work Insider. Sacha, great to see you. Coming to us from Philly today, I believe.

Sacha Connor:
Yes. Hi. Hi Jeff, Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me.

Jeff Frick:
Absolutely. Thank you for coming on. So let's jump into it. So your story, which you're on a lot of podcasts. So it's great for people to listen and find out. But it started with your desire to kind of get close to family but not leave the job that you love. So I wonder if you can take us back. I think it was like 2009, 2010 of, you know, what motivated you to try something so radical and different to actually leave the headquarters, but keep your job?

Sacha Connor:
Yeah. So let's we can take you back to 2009, when my husband and I had our first child, my daughter Nevin, and we were living in San Francisco, in the city, and I was working for the Clorox Company. So that's a $7 billion consumer packaged goods company that is headquartered in Oakland, California. And I was leading new product innovation teams at the time, and I had already been at Clorox for seven years at that point, six years at that point. And I loved my job. I loved working with the marketing teams, I loved working with the sales teams, new product innovation teams. But my husband and I wanted to move back to Philadelphia because that's where my family's from, that's where his family's from. And we wanted Nevins to grow up near her extended family. So I asked a bold question, which was, could I keep my job, but do it from the opposite coast? And so they agreed to that. So in 2010, we picked up and we moved to the other coast, and I had to start to figure out how to do my job. But from 3,000 miles and three time zones away.

Jeff Frick:
So what I thought was interesting, you know. One, it’s great that they gave you the trust and they said, you know, we'll use you as an experiment, as a guinea pig to see if this is work, but they gave you some really rough conditions, which I thought were interesting and I’ll just read them out, you know, ‘The Buts,’ I think you described them. ‘But’ you'll never get promoted, you know, ‘but’ you'll never get to work in certain roles. And ‘but’ you've now moved within, I guess, the HR system from being tagged as a high potential employee to a low potential employee. So, one, I don't know if they're just trying to set your expectations or you know what, you took that I think as a personal challenge because those are kind of rough conditions. Clearly, you had made your priorities. You initiated this process. But what did you think about when they, you know, kind of threw out the buts?

Sacha Connor:
So I would say first, I was very happy that they were willing to experiment. And that experiment came about because I didn't come to them with an ultimatum, which was, unless you let me do this, I'm going to leave. It was more of like planting seeds over the course of even before being pregnant with Nevin, starting to plant the seeds of wanting to move but stay with the company. So I was super excited for them to see me as an experiment, to innovate in the ways of working, to allow me to do this. But those caveats, I think came because of what you said, Jeff, about setting expectations, because Clorox is a really principled place, which is why part of why I loved working there. And so they didn't want to set a faulty sense of expectations. And they were a little nervous about it. Right? This was new. They didn't know how this was going to go. But as you said, I took that as a challenge. I said, okay, we’ll just get me back to Philadelphia. And in my head I said, like, I'll show you. I'll show you that I can get promoted to director level. I'll show you, I can do those roles that you said had to be at headquarters, but I didn't know how, you know. So that's where the experimentation started. Was like, how was I going to make this work to show them that they had put down all these barriers that could actually be overcome.

Jeff Frick:
And it did work. So how long did you work for Clorox from Philadelphia?

Sacha Connor:
For eight years. I spent eight years leading large distributed teams from Philly.

Jeff Frick:
Wow. So we're going to get into a lot of the potential issues. But I know then you left to start your own thing, Virtual Work Insider. What was kind of the motivation to do that?

Sacha Connor:
Yeah, and just to even kind of close the loop on those, barriers that they threw at me from working virtually for eight years, I was able to overcome those barriers. It took a while. It took a lot of influence and showing that the business could actually still meet its goals while I wasn't co-located in the headquarters. But I did get them to promote me to director. I did get to work on those businesses, they said that I couldn't. And I did get them to de-link potential from location. So while all that was happening, the reason why I was able to influence was because I was learning so much about how to change the way that I was working with my teams from a distance. I was realizing that, what I was learning to do fully remotely was actually applicable to 95% of the company because we were working in distributed teams. We didn't have that word back then to describe it, but we were working with teams across different office locations. So sales offices, even our technical center for Clorox was a 30-minute drive from headquarters. So that was a virtual relationship. So I was realizing that the skills I was learning from really hands-on experience were applicable even outside of Clorox, that there was a business opportunity to help teach other teams how to work in a virtual environment.

Jeff Frick:
Right. That's great. So as we've all learned from Darren Murph, his great line is and they were all remote, was that, you know, it forces you to be good at things that all companies should be good at, which is communication and managing objectives, etc. So we're going to get into all that. But one of the things I wanted to start with is when you were at Clorox, you were responsible for innovation, and a lot of people, that's one of the big buzzwords. Oh, how can people do innovation? How can they do brainstorming? How can you, you know, come up with new and innovative products if you're not in the room in kind of the classic case of the, you know, standing there and somebody got a marker up at the whiteboard. But I find it's funny is that the people that really want to go back to the whiteboard are people that generally were holding the pen, not necessarily the people sitting around the table. So talk to us a little bit about innovation, and how do you do innovation, as a remote person or as a distributed team?

Sacha Connor:
Really great question. Because when I went remote, I was leading new product innovation teams for a consumer products goods company. So really tactical, tangible products that needed to be used or touched or smelled.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Sacha Connor:
So, not a tech company where, you know, things were being operated in the cloud anyway. And there is a certain irony to it now that I think back on it, that the low-risk job was the job that was working on the actual new product development. So what I love about it, though, is it gave me the opportunity to rethink how we were working in our innovation teams because I was 3,000 miles away. And so some days I felt like I was, you know, had one hand tied behind my back or was blindfolded because I had to constantly think about how am I going to stay connected to my innovation team that was located in our tech center, that was located in our headquarters. We were working with product supply people as well that were working from plant and manufacturing sites. So thinking about how could we operate within this distributed team differently than what a normal innovation team would have been doing if they had been located at headquarters in the tech sector? So, for example, what you're saying about the brainstorming piece, you know, so as we think about innovation, ideation is a really important part. Even backing up from the ideation phase, you at a company like Clorox, consumer insights are critical as well. So one of the benefits of working remotely in a different location where than the location majority when working on an innovation team, is that we started to tap into a different market to get consumer research for. So for example, when I was located in Oakland, California, in the headquarters, we would do a lot of our consumer research in the Bay Area, which is not always representative of the rest of the United States.

Jeff Frick:
Or the world for that matter.

Sacha Connor:
That too. But it's, it was local. It was, you know, less expensive than having the teams travel. But now I'm in Philadelphia, so I actually can do some consumer research in my area here and get some different insights, even go up to New York City, for example. New Jersey is close by. I could bring some people out from the Oakland area to my home area and learn a little bit differently about the consumers here, so that was one benefit. And then when it came to that ideation phase, you know, those post-it note parties that you're talking about, Clorox, we loved our post-it note parties. We’re all in one room. Post-it notes everywhere on the wall. But we couldn't wait for me to fly out to Oakland to have a brainstorming session. So we had to very early on start to experiment with some early technology tools that to enable us to virtually brainstorm.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Sacha Connor:
So my team, we used to use, so Mural didn't exist back then. For example, we used to use different software to allow us to asynchronously put in our ideas and then group them and then have a brainstorming session about them. Or if we had a post-it note party, I had to have a buddy in the room with for me so that I could message them with my post-it notes, prompts, and they’d put them up on the wall for me.

Jeff Frick:
It's really interesting. Kate Lister likes to talk about, you know, most of our greatest ideas, you know, come in the shower, they come on a walk, they come kind of outside the context of the post-it party, because that's when, you know, you kind of free your mind and it can roam a little bit and you can find and discover different things. So, you know had, did you see, you mentioned it kind of a parallel, change within your ideation process, you know, kind of being forced with you being remote to say you know, let’s move some of the initial stuff to asynchronous because a lot of times what happened is it’s just the loudest person in the room whose ideas get presented. And then you get kind of confirmation bias and nobody wants to go against the boss. So it's actually, you know, isn't necessarily the best way to do it all at one time, all together, all in the same location.

Sacha Connor:  
Yes. But it took a change in behavior because when you learned that ideation is all synchronous in a room together, doing something different takes a behavior change. And, you know, having to teach a new technology tool in order to enable this different type of brainstorming process took a couple steps. But one of the benefits we also saw from it was the ability to capture all the ideas electronically from the get-go, because what we used to have to do was give an administrative assistant, executive assistant, like all of the post-it notes, to then have to retype into a format that we could digest, and then use to iterate further from.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Sacha Connor:
So it actually caused us to be able to ideate and get to next steps faster by starting with the digital approach.

Jeff Frick:
I love that. So we’re going to jump all over the place. But one of the things is vocabulary. And so again, with Covid, you know, when people had to leave, a lot of people suddenly had this idea of remote or hybrid, when in fact teams have been distributed forever. And Clorox is a big company you had sales offices, I'm sure, all around the country. So as both at Clorox and now in your existing business, do you ever tell people, listen, it's distributed. It's or it's digital first for the benefits that you just talked about. Because all the notes and all the all the rough stuff is all captured in one of these digital work platforms. So it's really not that different. And don't get hung up on hybrid and remote and all this other stuff. Think digital first or think distributed first, and then it kind of makes sense and it's not quite so new and scary. I would imagine.

Sacha Connor:
Well, part of the reason we're called Virtual Work Insider and not remote work insider is because first, I knew that that remote word, especially before the pandemic, was a little scary to companies because they were not yet on board with allowing that location flexibility. And the programming that we were providing to enterprises was not meant specifically for remote employees, because a lot of times I would get the question like, oh, can you come in and can you teach our like small group of remote employees how to work better with the rest of the group? And I have to say, well actually it's the ecosystem that all has to learn the new skills and behaviors to work together. It's not just the remote people who need to learn how to work differently together. And when we come into an organization, you know, we are helping them to work better together across distance, whatever distance means for them. So they've already decided what their policy is around flexibility, whether they are hybrid structured, hybrid flexible, whether they allow, you know, people to choose to work fully remotely or must come into the office. All that’s mostly been decided by the time that we come in and help enable them to work within that atmosphere. But you're right. We do have to remind them that even if they are a hybrid structured organization. For example, if they've said to their employees, you must come into an office Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday every week, that even when they're coming into whatever their local office is, they're still working across distance, more than likely with other people that are within their cross-functional or functional teams.

Jeff Frick:
Right. So another kind of classic push back on distributed, digital, whatever the phrase the company uses is the proverbial water cooler? Right, this magic that supposedly happens all the time around the proverbial water cooler. How do you replicate that in a distributed world? Because it doesn't happen, and I don't know how many water coolers are actually in companies. If you ask some kid who's under 30, I don't know if they even know what a water cooler is, but that's obviously a concern. And there is a lot of benefits in, you know, kind of random chance crashing in of people and ideas and sharing their ideas. So how do you help people kind of replicate what they think they're missing from the water collisions when they go to a more distributed, organization.

Sacha Connor:
Yeah, I think the water cooler conversation has been interesting because I always like to break it down into what does that represent? Like why is that important? Because it's so easy to just throw out that phrase. And so a couple things to think about. One is, have you ever read the book *The Medici Effect* (by Frans Johansson)?

Jeff Frick:
I have not, but I've heard you talk about it.

Sacha Connor:
Oh, you have, okay. So I love this book in terms of, you know, it talks about the intersection of different ideas coming together. They inspire more innovative ideas. And it's called the Medici effect because they're talking about like a long time ago in Italy (14th - 17th Centuries) where the Medici family would bring together, you know, artists and bankers and financiers and poets, you know, all together into the same city in Italy. (Florence) And these people were literally bumping into each other in the coffee shops there. And that's where the Renaissance actually came from in terms of new ideas, innovative ideas, because you had these people who were intersecting together, sharing ideas and building new ideas based on those intersections. And so the modern day way of talking about that is the water cooler effect. And what I love about what's happened over the past couple years is that there's been more and more research about the importance of creating these intersections between weak ties or our ‘further out’ networks, because what Microsoft did a great study during the pandemic that showed that during pandemic remote work our close in networks, our close in teams, those times got stronger, but our weak networks got weaker. So our connection with our close in team, our direct reports, you know, we felt like we stayed connected. But those weak ties, those are the ones that we need. They're critical to intersect with for innovation, for problem solving, for our career progression. So when it comes to helping teams or individual people think about this, it's really thinking about this network analysis. Who are the people that I need to influence, who I need exposure to, up, down, inside, outside of my organization to meet my business goals, to meet my career goals. So you have to be super intentional about creating a plan to enable you to grow that weak tie network.

Jeff Frick:
The contrarian view is going to be you just told me this great thing, if I go to Florence, I'm going to get all these great creative ideas, which did happen. Again, how do you replicate that digitally? And I think, you know, you're probably gonna say it, but I'll give you the lead in, which is intentionality, which is one of the most important words in this whole thing. Right? Don't leave it up to chance and try to create it intentionally.

Sacha Connor:
Yeah. So, you can do it both using technology tools and also kind of offline. So meaning like intentionality through, you know, building a plan. So we have a workshop that we lead that’s called, you know, Building our Influence and Exposure Plan Across Distance. And part of that is the first step is to map your sphere of influence, map all of the people that you need exposure to and need to influence up, down, inside, outside your organization. But then that's only your known network. You need to now understand your unknown network. So starting to tap into your manager or your peers to kind of fill in who are the other people that you need exposure to that you aren't even aware exist within your organization? Because as organizations and enterprises get larger and larger, the silos become really problematic. And so needing to reach out across those silos, to intersect and to exchange ideas is important. So there's the piece around, like intentionally understanding what your network is and needs to be. And then you can use tech tools in order to create some of those intersections.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Sacha Connor:
So for example, there is a software that does like virtual speed networking where you can tag people from different functions within a company, different levels within a company, and tag them so that when they're in this virtual speed networking event, you are creating these intentional intersections between different groups within the same organization.

Jeff Frick:
I'm curious, when people go through that exercise, how many people are on their map that they identify, is it 10s? Is it dozens? Is it hundreds? or, you know, What is it 200 is like the classic wedding number of kind of a sphere? What would come back from those exercises? And I'm sure must have been crazy enlightening for people to actually go through and start to list them down and map them out.

Sacha Connor:
Yes. So usually what I hear is, ‘Wow’, I knew that my network was big, or the network that I need exposure to is big, but I didn't realize how big until I started mapping it out. Like they usually hear, like, oh, this is a big hairy map.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Sacha Connor:
And so the point is, there's no way that you're going to be able to gain exposure to all of those people, at least not right away. But the next step in the process is then to prioritize. Think about, you know, what are the first 2 to 3 people that you want to start to build that exposure influence with so that it becomes a muscle that you start to build. And then once you've figured out how to do this, then you can start expanding that to other people on your map.

Jeff Frick:
Right? So that's a great segue into another one of your favorite topics, which is when you ask those same people, who do you go to if you got a problem right now? These other two nasty biases seem to come up both in terms of proximity bias. You know who did I, who's close? Who do I like to talk to a lot? And recency bias, right? We love the path of least resistance. If you're my favorite contact and I just know that you're going to answer the phone and I love the feedback you get me, you know, it's hard to expand beyond the easy and the simple. So how do you help people get past some of these biases, which are just, it's not really lazy, but it's just human behavior to look for easier paths to accomplish stuff. So we free up time for other things.

Sacha Connor:
First is having awareness of it. It’s just the fact that now part of a lot of our vocabulary is this proximity bias or distance bias. You know, when I first went remote back in 2010, I didn't know that this was a bias that existed. It was like several years later that Clorox had hired in the Neuro Leadership Institute to do training on their SEEDS unconscious bias model, and the D in the SEEDS model is distance bias. And when I heard about it, I was like, oh my goodness, this is what I've been feeling all of these years. It's not that people are intentionally leaving me out, it's that our brain's natural processes is to put more value on the people and things that are closer to us. So I just felt a lot lighter. First of all, knowing that this existed and that we now at Clorox had a word that we could use to describe it when it was happening.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Sacha Connor:
And then the second part, the recency bias that you're bringing up, you know, when the pandemic hit and most teams had moved to fully remote, distance bias was less applicable.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Sacha Connor:
Because we were all calling in to these meetings and working fully remotely. So the recency bias piece was starting to spike in terms of thinking about the people that you've heard from or seen on a video call most recently. So first of all, is awareness of those unconscious biases and then thinking about what are the things that I can do to overcome them or mitigate them. And so one of the really easy tips I talk about is just post a picture of your entire team by your computer or your workspace, because next time you are thinking about assigning a project, or you need to go to somebody for a question, you want to think about your entire ecosystem and figure out who the right person to go to is not just the most recent person that you've heard from, or the person that is sitting closest to you if you happen to be in the office.

Jeff Frick:
Right? So one of my hypotheses is a lot of the pushback that we saw after Covid and return to office was basically lazy management, where, you know, no one had really had to be so specific with objectives that they were managing to objectives versus managing to who showed up at the office and got me coffee every morning. And I think it and, and I think that often rolled up, you know, I don't want to blame the middle managers, but, you know, maybe that stuff wasn't clear. You’ve said that part of your success was because Clorox had a very robust, management, or, you know, review system, not just once a year, but you had a very robust system in terms of keeping track of people and keeping track of objectives. I wonder if you could share a little bit about their system and do you see that consistently in some of your clients? What do you see out in the field?

Sacha Connor:
Yeah. So as we talked about before, Clorox is over a 100-year-old company, so lots of systems, lots of principles in place. So from a performance management process, it was something that was kind of very ingrained in the work that we did. And so we definitely had every fiscal year coming up, we would create our new performance objectives. They would usually flow downward from your functional lead, you know, down through the teams. And then we would be required as people managers to be checking in with our direct reports on progress against their performance objectives, at least quarterly. I used to do this almost on a monthly basis, where we talk about performance against our objectives, talk about developmental opportunities as well. So one of the things that I learned from being a studio leader at Clorox, which while I was in the brand management function, I was operating as a general, mini general manager, where I had many cross-functional team members who laddered up into my studio. One of the things that we started to do was get really clear about sharing our cross-functional goals with each other, because, as I said before, usually the goals were flowing down from the functions. But once we started sharing, you know, what were the sales team members goals versus the marketing team members goals versus the R&D members goals? We started to see some inconsistencies and some tensions, and tension is always, it can be good. But what we found at times was they were in opposition to each other, the objectives. And so what that exercise allowed us to do was then throw up a flag and say, hey, we need to actually get these things aligned so that we can move, progress against our business objectives faster.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Sacha Connor:
And to your question about what do I see when I get into our client engagements is I often see that the performance management processes are nowhere near as mature as Clorox’s are. And oftentimes at that team level, they have not done the work to actually share their objectives across the group cross-functionally, nor have they aligned to what the project objective is even for a cross-functional team.

Jeff Frick:
And do you think they that just because they could before? I mean, you had a great story that you shared in terms of, you know, what you just explained sounds kind of complicated, but you made it really drop dead dumb simple and just put the objectives on a placard and brought it into the meeting and leaned it up against the wall just to remind everybody that these are objectives. So, do they see that as part of their growth into being more successful in this world, is better communication of objectives and communicating objectives, making sure everybody knows what they're focused on?

Sacha Connor:
I think that there has been a lot of assumption of ‘Oh, everybody knows’ what the objectives are here. And so what you're referencing is, you know, when I used to be back in person with my teams, through our leadership development at Clorox, we always focus on what are the goals and the roles of the team members. And so I used to walk into meetings with a big foam core that output that said, you know, here’s the goal of this project team. And so as we're working with these cross-functional teams, within our clients we'll do some assessments. So for example, I've done some surveys where we've asked the team members, ‘Do you know what the objectives are of this project team?’ and usually we get a super high response, like 90% saying, yes, I know. And then we'll ask, ‘Do you agree with the objectives of this project team?’ And usually we'll get pretty high response on that as well. And then we'll say please list the three objectives, the top three objectives of this project team. And then you'll see a wildly different interpretation of what the project goals are. And that is just some great insight to have to say okay, well let's get aligned to what the goals are so that we can actually make progress against them.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. It's crazy. So shifting gears a little bit on communication protocol because I think, you know, I think that's a big part of, the friction that comes out because, you know, there's so many communication paths now you know, we have email, we have voice mail, phones, which we've had for a long time, but now there's all the digital workplace tools, there's all the apps within the digital workplace tools. And so it gets to be, unfortunately, a lot of interruptions. And I think a lot of people have, have not managed the expectations well so that, you know, what used to be, you know, get back to me within some period of time now has kind of morphed into, I need you to get back to me a whole lot faster, which creates interruptions. And no one actually has time to get work done. So I wonder if you can share some best practices around, you know, making sure everyone is codified and communicated as to what are the communication, expectations and most importantly, so that everyone knows when they send something out, you know, What is it? Is it important or not important? And what's the expected return?

Sacha Connor:
Yes. So we have been really specializing in this area of helping teams to create their team working agreements or team charters to codify these norms. And one of the things that I found through testing and learning this with teams is that if you start with the communication norms piece and the ways of working you end up in this bad cycle because you actually haven't first determined what are the norms in service of. And so to connect this to what we were just talking about is at first you have to start with understanding your purpose and the people on the team. So first, when you're creating a team charter, you need to do that work on team goals and roles, team values. What are the behaviors that we're trying to see from our team members? So for example, you know, what you're talking about is responsiveness. And we'll get into that in a minute. But is there a behavior at that higher level that we expect a certain level of responsiveness to each other? And also, is there a behavior around location inclusivity, meaning we know that we're across multiple time zones. We also need to be aware that we may not get a response within a certain amount of time because people are working from different time zones.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Sacha Connor:
So you have to start with your purpose, your people, building some connection, understanding goals and roles. And then you can get into the ways of working. You can get into codifying those communication norms, for example, that you're talking about. So again, we do some surveys with the teams that we work with. And what we see is that teams are really drowning in so many technology tools, so much pinging and digging, you know, getting interrupted left and right. They can't find the information that they're looking for because the information is being stored in so many different places. And so it is really freeing when a team can come together and they can say, okay, well, we're going to use Microsoft Teams for this kind of communication, and we're going to design Microsoft Teams into these different channels for these different types of communication. We're going to only use email for this other type of communication. So instead of the team having to find the information both on email or in Microsoft Teams, now they know where to look. Or you might have a team that because they're in a large enterprise and large enterprise, has lots of technology tools. They have some of their information stored in a SharePoint site, some of it's stored in Box, some of it stored in a Microsoft Teams site. So again, getting clarity to this team, we are going to post all of our collaborative documents in this one area. So Box for example, again what we see when we do the survey then after the team norms have been set is that then people are saying, I can find the information I'm looking for and I'm getting the responsiveness that I need from my team because people know where to respond to me and how fast a response is expected.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, it's really interesting. You talk about, you know, people just throwing tools at the problem, without necessarily the training on the tool or the expectations on the tool or how the tool fits in there, you just said, you know, kind of the whole tooling ecosystem. So it's just not another tool because we have too many tools and too many notifications. So have you seen a better uptick in communicating? You know, how these pieces fit together and what again, we expect it's all about expectations, right. What we expect you to do, where and how.

Sacha Connor:
Yes. And back to like what we talked about with innovation. You know, one of the things when you're taught as an innovator is like, what problem are we trying to solve here? And so making sure that the solution fits the problem instead of starting with the solutions first. And so in the example of the teams that we work with, we are first trying to understand what are the communication norms in service of right. What are the goals here? And then which tools would that best fit the goals. And as we're talking about the communication norms, what should be done synchronously versus what needs to be done asynchronously, right. And even with these teams I'm working with, like starting with defining even what synchronous and asynchronous means is important. So asynchronous meaning not live, not real-time. You know, people responding when they can best get to the information. And so then we start talking about the tools for the asynchronous communication. And what I find Jeff as you said is that, for example, Microsoft Teams, a lot of the enterprise clients we work with, they use Microsoft Teams. And when I come in, I say, oh, you know, how comfortable are you using Microsoft Teams? Oh, we know how to use it. We use it for our video meetings all the time and other communication. And then I say, do you know how to use the channels or are you just using chats? And then they say, what do you mean channels? What do you mean?

Jeff Frick:
<laughter>

Sacha Connor:
And then I say, oh, okay, well, there's a way that you can actually structure it so that you, you clarify, you know, which channel is for which topic area and make sure that the right people are included in each channel. Well, what they've been doing is all these different group chats that are super disorganized and they're having trouble finding the information. And so we have to kind of back up and say, okay, who needs to collaborate on which topics and how can we structure that for you? So even starting with showing them how to even set their notifications, they don't even know how to set notifications to make sure that they're not missing a message. So some of them are using the chats because they think that they're missing messages elsewhere.

Jeff Frick:
Right. It's funny. It's funny. You used Microsoft as an example because, you know, it's like Word how many features are in Word that none of us know, and have never, never known. You know, they’re so far under the covers or we just never had a reason to go there. So I want to shift gears a little bit. It's in the headlines over the last couple of days, ‘Dell's return to office or else’ and like, I don't know, 40%, 50% I don’t have the headline in front of me chose ‘or else’ which. And I don't even think ‘or else’ is defined, but it really drives to the fact that flexibility and trust and agency are the work benefits that trump everything else and that people are willing to, you know, suffer the potential consequences of ‘or else’ as you did for the higher priority thing around flexibility, not necessarily flexibility in days of the week. We're not going to talk about that at all in this interview, but really flexibility in managing their own schedule. Which then really begs for a level of trust. How are you seeing, you know, people kind of get it because what then what it drives to is team level agreements, right? And where, you know, somewhere down from Michael Dell, where are you finding the kind of the most effective area or size of team to really start to put in those team level agreements, because they can get hard and teams have cross, you know, they interact with other teams as well. So how are you finding kind of team level agreements, best practices?

Sacha Connor:
There's great research from the Future Forum that Brian Elliott and his team did that showed that employees want flexibility with their time even more than flexibility from where they're working from, which was interesting to me, because for me, when I went remote, it was all about location for me at first. But that really resonated for me. Later, when I was reflecting on the work that I did at Clorox, I was East Coast based, and the majority of the people that I was working with were on the West Coast. And so what that meant to me was that every night until almost 8 p.m., I had to be accessible. I was on video calls or needed to be accessible to respond to emails. And so my time flexibility felt very limited. And it got frustrating at times because of, you know, being a parent and needing that flexibility to do extracurriculars with the family. So, you know, as we think about that return to office and what you're saying about Dell and people saying or you know, I'm choosing ’else’, I'm choosing it's back to that freedom, it’s a piece of freedom, right? To be able to have that flexibility for my time and my location. But when it comes to then operating within that, there's an incredible amount of complexity that comes with everybody having the freedom to work where and when they want to work from. So it's positive in terms of giving, employees that freedom so that they feel engaged so that they feel like they want to stay at the company. But that complexity, it requires a lot of coordination. And so that's where the team level agreements can really help. And what I've seen from the team level agreement is there are some things that you can consider trying to do at that more corporate level. But usually they start to fall apart because there are so many unique situations, within a function or cross-functional team. So you want to start to look at that team level and then have the different teams that then create that intersect with each other. So if you think about that teams of teams type concept, those team leaders to start to share with each other what kinds of norms they've set within their team to see then where could there be some overlap and consistency. So for example, one of the clients that we've worked with now for over two years, where we're working with their marketing and tech cross-functional teams, whenever we create a team working agreement, we also deem somebody as the team effectiveness lead. So that person is responsible for that team's health moving forward and adjusting the team norms accordingly. But now we get to create some cohorts of these team effectiveness leads so that they can actually start sharing across the teams what's working and what's not working and evolve together.

Jeff Frick:
Interesting, I had never heard that. That's cool.

Sacha Connor:
One of the concepts within that realm is, I think you called it ‘Spark’ in one of your other interviews, or I always call it, you know, kind of mutually agreed to collaboration windows where there is some point of time where you say, hey, you know, I will be available for calls, I will be available for quick chats, I will be available, you know, for kind of quick responses. So is that something that you see pretty frequently where, you know, you do have times where you want to set aside for work, but then you do have times that you are set aside as if you were sitting next to one another in terms of somebody reaching out for, you know, via an IM or direct message or text or whatever.

Sacha Connor:
Yeah. So that gets to the coordination again across time zones. It starts with first understanding who's in what time zone on your team. And that might sound really simple and basic. And it's quite amazing when I get in with a team and I realize that they don't even know that some of their team members are in a different time zone. So we'll just start there. First, you have to do what I call is like mapping the geographic anatomy of your team so that you understand where you're starting from, and then from there discussing some norms around your synchronous time together. So you have some companies, like for example, Dropbox, they are a leader in virtual first, they have core collaboration hours where they’ve set aside to the whole company. You know, these are the hours that we need to be available to each other for live synchronous meetings. And what you were referring to about Spark Time? Well, this is something that I did with my team at Clorox many years ago where we were working across different time zones, and so what we had on our calendar was twice a week. We had two hours blocked on everybody's calendar, and that was so that we were available to each other for in the moment, impromptu problem solving, brainstorming, discussion, debate. Because otherwise it becomes really difficult to try to find time with each other on an ad hoc basis because we're in way too many meetings, overbooked back to back.

Jeff Frick:
Right? Right. All right, so you brought it up. You know, we have to go there unfortunately which is the meetings thing. You know, I think if people spent, I don't know, 25% of the time they spend worrying about days of the week on better meeting processes, better meeting etiquette, you know, canceling a lot of meetings that they don't really need, share some best practices around meetings, and really trying to get better meeting culture because I think a lot of people equate work to meetings and even some of the surveillance software that we hear about. It's like, you know, are you booked in meetings so many hours a day, it's ridiculous. Like, are you paying people to go to meetings? Are you paying people to actually do their job? So I wonder if you could share some of your observations on meetings.

Sacha Connor:
I would say that many enterprises have a highly synchronous culture, meaning that they're using meetings to get work done, they're using meetings to get updates on work and to talk about workflow. And it's a big behavior change to start to reduce that type of culture. And when I get brought in to work with a team, sometimes the vice president or the team leader will come to me and say, can you help us have better meetings? And I say, okay, so I come in and I observe some meetings and I start to understand what the goals of the team are, what I've seen over and over again is that the meeting situation is just a symptom of a broader problem. You can't just fix the meetings. You actually have to again, go back to what are our communication norms? How are we going to design our time to get things done synchronously and asynchronously? So you have to start putting into place some of the asynchronous communication norms in order to solve the meeting problem. Because what happens is the meetings are being used as a crutch a lot of time to get updates on progress on projects. And if you have no asynchronous dashboards, tools, communication options you're going to keep having these meetings where they feel like they're inefficient and ineffective because they're just being used to get updates. So that's number one is that you need to look at the whole kind of ecosystem of how is this team communicating and what can be done synchronously versus asynchronously. And then with the remaining synchronous meetings, what I like to talk a lot about is that meetings are not just meetings, but meetings are actually where your culture is being built or it's being torn down. Because when we think about culture, which is, you know, our values, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, how we operate as a team, how we work together, how we treat each other. Well if you're all in different locations, the only peaks that you get into that culture are in your live meetings or maybe in your asynchronous communications. And so those meetings need to take on a whole new level of importance, because it's not just this thing that we're showing up to and we're getting assigned tasks. It's actually where we're building or destroying our team culture.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, well, I would say they're building it, but not necessarily building it where they want it to go. I mean, the culture is the way they behave. So they might not be acting in the way that they want their culture to go, but unfortunately they're just reinforcing some of the bad behaviors. It’s funny, Shani Harmon, I had on from 'Stop Meeting Like This' and they asked her the same thing, you know, can you help us? And she says, yeah, I can help you, but you know, you're not going to get it. It's like dieting. We all know what we're supposed to eat and not eat and exercise more and keep an agenda and keep the notes and so it's not for lack of knowledge. It's just kind of for lack of discipline. And as you say, I think it's kind of a lazy way out of when you don't have those other kinds of communication methods. So we'll just have a meeting, you know, it's like this default thing. We'll just have a meeting, have a meeting and, you know, there's so many other options today besides meetings to actually get a piece of communication across or, you know, kind of what is the objective of this meeting? Because when you have a great meeting with engaged people who care about the topic and are educated about the topic, and you need to come to some decision around something, you know, that's not a status meeting where everybody’s checking out, and doing email on the side, and, you know, falling asleep. So I think it's pretty interesting.

I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about trust, and really asking for help, which is a super important thing for managers to have this culture where people feel comfortable asking for help so that they can get help on the things that are blocking their progress. That really takes a lot of trust and a lot of people, I think, sometimes might be afraid. If I ask for help, it's a sign of weakness and maybe I'm going to get whacked when they take out the bottom 10% of the company. So when you talk about trust and helping people establish, you know, psychological safety so they want to ask that question, what are some best practices to help people create an environment where the front line people, who are the ones that see most of the problems, are usually closer to the customers? And you need that information to percolate, especially negative information, because a lot of people don't like to tell the boss bad information, right? I'd rather not. And so what happens is they don't hear it until it's too late or too late to do something or something really bad happens. How do you build more trust so that people are willing to ask for help?

Sacha Connor:
Well, first we need to humanize each other. So if you think about when we were working in an office situation with each other, we had this continuous kind of informal connection with each other, whether it was like bumping into each other at the watercooler or in the elevator. We had different pieces of information about our personal life, maybe on our desk. That would cause somebody to ask a question about your family or a hobby or something like that. Now that we're all in these different locations, and even people coming in and out of a hybrid office are often working with people who are in a different hybrid office or working remotely, we have to intentionally humanize each other. We have to push past the transactional to get to that trust and that relationship being built. And when I come in to work with teams, oftentimes, especially these cross-functional teams, I'm just seeing transactions happening. I'm actually not seeing trust and relationships being built. And again, this might seem super simple, but one of the things that we teach is to create an About Me one pager. So some information that you're sharing on a one pager about your family, your loved ones, your hobbies, and then it can even get into things like your communication preferences, your hot buttons, your personal values, your educational background, your professional background, things like that. And it's not good enough to just fill this thing out and put it somewhere, but it's actively using it. So there are many ways to use this. For example, when we were talking earlier about building your network, if you are about to ask somebody to do a one-on-one virtual coffee chat to get exposure to somebody you don't know yet, you can send your one pager ahead of time. So it's almost like this introduction before the introduction, so that they get to know you a little bit. These become great pieces of information for somebody new, joining a team who can read through the files of the one pagers of the other people on the team. We often use them also to create fun pop quizzes within our meeting. So as we were talking about meetings where we build culture, we would create moments throughout a virtual training that we do, for example, where we're leveraging the fun facts from the one pager to create these moments of trivia, or using photos from the one pagers to build that feeling of connection and warmth with the group. Because if you do that again over and over across time, you're going to start to build that trust so that we get to what Jeff you were talking about around that psychological safety, to be able to speak up about something that may be an unpopular discussion point.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right. So we're getting towards the end of our time and we could go for hours. I have pages and pages and pages of notes. But one of the things I think that comes out even in this discussion is that it is not easy. You know, it takes intentional effort. And you talked about something in one of your podcasts about just change fatigue that said, you know, we're in an era where, you know, there aren't necessarily the answers. And it's really an era of experimentation and trial and see what works, see what doesn't work. And don't be afraid to necessarily not have the right answer out of the gate, but to basically get your hands dirty and start to try some of these different techniques. I mean, the world is not slowing down. And, you know, we have constant, you know, kind of changes and disruptions and, and what's happening, you know, the most latest being, you know, ChatGPT, which everyone is all up in arms about. So I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of helping people understand that, you know, we're not going back to any state. There's no stasis anymore. It's a constantly evolving world that we live in. And you really have to be open to listen and try new things and explore best practices and kind of get out of your comfort zone, and get kind of comfortable being uncomfortable because we live in an uncomfortable world. Or as Pierre Nanterme, the former CEO of Accenture used to say the, you know, VUCA, it's volatile, and it's a crazy, crazy world. So don't be afraid to try things.

Sacha Connor:
Absolutely. We know moving forward is that we're not going to become more co-located. We are going to be continuously working across distance with nationally, internationally, globally. And so we need to get more and more comfortable with working across multiple modes. So I like talking about a framework that we developed called being an omni-modal leader. So being able to move throughout the modes of being fully in person, in a hybrid environment, and then in a fully virtual environment. And be able to move between those modes even within a given day. And so we want to be able to communicate and collaborate and build relationships across all those different modes. And that is a really hard skill. And anybody who's listening now, I want you to think about what it takes to build that skill for yourself, for your team members. Because what I find at the more senior levels of an organization, they take for granted that they know how to be omni-modal, they know how to move across those modes. But the more junior employees within your organization, they need the enablement, the skills development to help them be comfortable across all of those different modes. So we can't take for granted what the other levels of the organization need in order to enable them into this forward-looking area.

Jeff Frick:
Right? Right. Yeah. So as we close, I mean, I think most people get async. The whole beauty of async is you move all the busy work off your plate so that the time that you do spend together, you know, you can spend on these types of things. You move kind of the garbage meetings off your plate so you can spend the time together on these other things that are much more important—building culture, building relationships, building trust, getting to know one another so that when the proverbial you-know-what hits the fan, you know, people know each other and you can call out and reach and get support because we know each other. So I'll give you the last word before we sign off. You know, you were a pioneer in 2009. You must have been banging your head, and when did you start this, 2018, still trying to get people to figure out it's not supporting the remote people. It's let's change our communication. And now suddenly, Covid hits. And as Kate (Lister) likes to say, the rock turned and started chasing her down the hill instead of the other way around. So as you look back with a little bit of perspective, what are your kind of final thoughts as we sign off in terms of what you see going forward over the next, I would never say more than two or three or four years?

Sacha Connor:
Well, I love that the positive of the pandemic was that it did accelerate a lot of the trends that we were seeing, that Kate was seeing from many, many years ago, that I was seeing from 2010 onward. So it accelerated a lot of those trends. So I think that that was a positive in that it got us to think differently about flexibility and allowing freedom in location, freedom in our time as well. But I think that those skills, mindsets, and behaviors to enable this kind of complexity are going to be really important. So thinking about how can you best enable yourselves and your teams to work within that kind of work environment?

Jeff Frick:
Awesome. And if you need help, reach out to Virtual Work Insider. Sacha’s got all the classes and the programs, and lots of experience in the space. So Sacha, really great to have you on. I appreciate you sharing your insights and perspective because you certainly have a lot of experience in the area. So thank you very much.

Sacha Connor:
Thanks for having me.

Jeff Frick:
My pleasure. All right, she’s Sacha, I'm Jeff, you're watching Work 20XX. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening on the podcast. Take care.

Cold Close
Great. Thank you.
That flew by. Thank you.

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