The global pandemic and the shutdowns of the branch offices that emerge from it have brought about changes in how work works. Although essential people in certain sectors have continued their work in ways that are relatively well known among layers upon layers of personal protective equipment, many companies have had to look for ways to pursue other work at a “social” distance. And in those situations, employees need to find ways to work through what they did when they were packed into toilets, open floor plans, and all the other different patterns of modern office space.
Workplace changes due to COVID-19 will not go away any time soon. Tech companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft have delayed the return of employees to offices until well into 2021, and Twitter has stated that employees should never return to the company office. Companies in other sectors do the same kind of calculations, while employees think about not only how they work, but even where they live.
It all depends on the evolution of tools that make this remote way of working possible. For some of us – well, like anyone who has worked for Ars for example – this is not something new. As I mentioned earlier, I have worked primarily at home for over 25 years, and being an early adopter of any technology that could reduce the distance, that I have lived through the tenacious pain of collaborative software and dispersed teams.
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Unfortunately, even though companies have adopted collaboration tools, it seems that the vast majority of them until recently were confused about how to use them. Previous generations of “collaboration” were about processes and structure – and have not done much to reduce the need for out-of-band communication.
What continues to be “normal” in the coming years will require a lot of collaboration tools, as organizations re-examine how they can achieve their mission and remain financially viable. The new world of collaboration will require organizations to replicate the unstructured interactions of the office and help employees feel part of a cohesive team, even when they are at a distance, enable social interactions and strengthen the team’s agenda in the absence of up-close face time.
Based on years of remote collaboration at various organizations and observations of things that multiple organizations have done over the past six months to adapt, here are the things I see as keys to successful team action in the lockdown and post-lockdown world.
The foundation
In the beginning, ‘collaboration software’ was mostly about communication. “Groupware” products such as Lotus Notes move collaboration away from simple email to document and data-centric communication. These capabilities – messaging, document-based collaboration and light structured workflow – remain the basis of collaboration of most organizations.
It takes a lot to get organizations to go beyond these basic, unstructured collaboration tools – mostly because they are unstructured and flexible. Email has been declared dead hundreds of times in the last two decades, and yet we still use it all to send documents attachments and route work. And despite the attacks of September 11, 2001, which briefly gave rise to video conferencing, it took the growth of broadband internet and ubiquity of devices with built-in cameras – not to mention nearly another decade – to make collaboration with video conferencing palatable for most organizations.
However, many of these technologies worked quite early on. I was an early adopter of Ray Ozzie’s Groove back before it had a Microsoft label on it, and I wrote highly for Wikis, SharePoint, and other tools at companies I worked with because they made my job as a remote employee. But there were simple reasons why these companies, and many other organizations, did not adopt those tools: they cost money to deploy and maintain, and they required embracing some cultural change.
That’s not to say that Microsoft didn’t sell a lot of SharePoint (especially to the government) a decade ago, or that companies didn’t spend heavily on custom workflow systems. They did, but the results were usually far from collaborative. Like the major ERP projects of the past two decades, these early initiatives were top-down, compliance-focused efforts to make major changes to not only technology, but how people did their work. (And let’s be honest, who really enjoys use with this kind of tool? Hand show for everyone in the audience that is fact-for-real loves SharePoint. Mmm-hmm. I thought so.)
What will happen in the coming years for “normal” will require a lot of collaboration tools
However, technological and cultural shifts in recent years – and the need of the past six months – have reduced or completely leveled barriers to new forms of collaboration. Many of us already live in Slack, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and several other ad hoc collaboration tools. Many of us have a taste of the future, and we are ready for more. Others will need to be coached along the way.
