By Sutter Shumacher
Over the summer break, I caught up on newsletters from some thought leaders. A lot of newsletters. Like three years’ worth of newsletters.
It was a fascinating time warp. The earliest newsletter in my reading pile was from April 2020 – feels like a lifetime ago! – when we wondered how we’d ever survive sheltering in one place for four weeks. Little did we know we’d live under stay-at-home orders for many months beyond that. Or that some people would still be dealing with restrictions, if not the physical symptoms of COVID-19, three years later.
It’s no secret that work life has changed for just about everyone on the planet since 2020. There was a constant refrain through the ups and downs those newsletters chronicled: the modern workplace has too many meetings and emails.
Working from home may have exacerbated the issue, but frankly, this isn’t a pandemic revelation. Meeting- and inbox-overload have been easy targets almost since the beginning of knowledge work and the internet.
Of the dozens and dozens of newsletters and posts I read about why meetings and email are the devil incarnate – and the countless articles they linked to, this one in The Atlantic and this one in The New Yorker gave the most nuanced arguments.
And it all got me thinking.
How much brain power has gone into (been wasted) trying to invent new ways to manage information overload? Filters & rules. Inbox zero. Focused and tabbed inboxes. The 4 D model for email management. No-meeting Wednesdays. Stand-up meetings. Meetings with strict time limits. “Golden rules” like never attend a meeting that doesn’t have an agenda. (I ‘ll take no agenda over a bad agenda…)
Perhaps the problem is that we’ve been throwing out the baby and the bathwater in our effort to reach workplace nirvana.
Humans are wired to connect. One of the most important ways to help a team connect – and hum – is meaningful communication. The opposite can be said for the power of poor / no communication to destroy that connection.
From Cal Newport in the New Yorker:
The need to interact with each other is one of the strongest motivational forces that humans experience. As the psychologist Matthew Lieberman explains in his book “Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect,” the social networks encoded in our neurons are linked to our pain systems, creating the intense feelings of heartbreak that we feel when someone close to us dies, or the total desolation that we might experience when we are isolated from other people for too long. “These social adaptations are central to making us the most successful species on earth,” Lieberman writes.
…
The flip side of an evolutionary obsession with social interaction is a corresponding feeling of distress when it’s thwarted. Much in the same way that our attraction to food is coupled with the gnawing sensation of hunger in its absence, our instinct to connect is accompanied by an anxious unease when we neglect these interactions.
If connection is what we all crave, then the answer isn’t to cut off that connection – or the collaboration that enables it. It’s about right-sizing it for the situation.
Or, in the words of Gustavo Razzetti in his recent book, Remote Not Distant (also on my summer reading list): “The key to building a thriving culture of collaboration is knowing when collaboration isn’t needed.”
Well-intentioned as all these inventions (interventions?) are, the answer is to take a more deliberate approach to how and when we communicate – to enable rather than destroy connection.
My career has evolved into helping teams work better together to get “stuff” done. I’m passionate about the practically magical power of clear communication to support healthy work culture and connection.
A few practices that teams I work with have deliberately and successfully adopted
- Set clear guidelines. As a team, decide how and when you will communicate. Also agree as a team when you won’t communicate or how you’ll signal that you’re offline (for focus work, for non-work time, to refresh).
- Use the right tool for the job. We have a strict policy at our company of using only #microsoftteams for internal comms. It’s one of our most sacred workplace rules. Email is reserved for external comms with clients or partners that can’t be had via Teams. Among the benefits, this helps us segregate information. It also means new joiners can see the history of what we’ve been talking about. Bonus points if you spell out when to use group posts (e.g., channel conversations) and when to use ad hoc or direct message chats. We follow a 24-hour rule to help decide what goes where – if someone’s likely to need to know it after 24 hours, it goes in a channel conversation. Brené Brown, speaking with Paul Leonardi & Tsedal Neeley about the Digital Mindset in the latest episode of Brown’s Dare to Lead podcast, said her team use Slack channels when people are in problem-solving mode. It takes work initially to get people away from direct messages but has a far greater long-term benefit on transparent decision-making and problem-solving for a wider audience so they can make better connections across their work. Pro-tip: Having a solid channel and folder structure is key – don’t just use the ‘General’ channel! And before you complain about having too many places to look for messages, if your company uses Microsoft 365 and you’re not using Edge as your browser, you’re missing out. It’s a breeze to search across your tenant for messages and documents.
- Make it okay to opt out. Does everyone need to be in that meeting (or seemingly unended email chain)? We’ve started asking at the start of a meeting “Do I need to be here?”. If the answer is “no” or “not sure”, it’s a free pass to leave. It’s not a free pass to stay ignorant about subjects connected – even loosely – to your work. The key here is following up with good succinct notes/agreed outcomes that all invitees can see after the meeting. There are some great tips for using today’s technology to call attention to specific people in those notes and communicate messages asynchronously after the meeting and before those notes go into the ether.
- Follow a consistent message structure. This helps keep informational / decision-needed messages short and focussed. A couple of my favourites are SBAR and WWHO (What, Why, How, Outcome).
Even more important than how you communicate is how you determine the right fit for your team. For example:
- Ask your team what they think. What do they think would work best for the team? What would they do if they were making the decision? This isn’t about giving everyone a vote, but it is about giving them a voice.
- Formulate a plan. And then share that plan so you can sense-check with the team for feedback.
- Experiment. Be clear that you’re trying this out. Agree to a timeline for when you’ll review what’s working and what isn’t, and either formalise or ditch the practice.
- Be disciplined. People will fall off the bandwagon in the early days. Identify champions who want to help the team stay the course.
- Be ready to adapt. This will be new, and everyone will be learning. While you can take inspiration from what you’ve done before, odds are you’ll need to adapt for today’s circumstances. It’s rare to get it right the first time. Or the second. But each step forward is a step closer to your new goal.
Post-script: I was so excited about this line of thinking that I wrote most of the post before I read all the New Yorker article. Imagine my delight when I got to the final two sentences of Cal Newport’s piece:
Technologies serve us best when we deploy their new efficiencies with intention, with an aim to improve the human condition. We shouldn’t banish e-mail, but we can no longer allow it to be used in such a way that guarantees our misery.
I couldn’t agree more.
