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And now, on to this week’s topic: communication.
As a knowledge worker, a lot of your work involves communication.
As a human, not all of your communication during work hours revolves around work.
Or does it?
Location does play a significant role for communication patterns, and it warrants your attention whether you are fully distributed, hybrid, or scattered across offices.
Whom do you talk to when you have a specific work-related question?
Whom do you reach out to when you want to discuss a movie you just saw?
Whom would could as for help you figure out what to gift your 4-year-old niece?
And who gets to hear about your first marathon when you can’t bring cookies?
For work related questions the company org chart can be a starting point, or maybe your team or your lead can give recommend someone.
Everything that’s not strictly work related?
You’d take that to the cafeteria, the breakout room, or the coffee machine if that option existed. Obviously, this restricts you to the people who work in the same location, taking a break at the same time.
That kind of restricted serendipity won’t create magic watercooler innovation. It’s much more likely to create homogenous sub cultures based on… well, location.
Siloed knowledge as a business risk
For a multi-location (and often multi cultural) company, delegating social conversations to in-person locations creates a tangible risk of siloing knowledge.
Social conversations are needed to create trust - and that’s especially true if you work across cultural boundaries (check out Erin Meyer’s work for more):
It’s this trust, and the recognition of everyone’s else humanity behind an avatar, that allows communication to flow freely. Why? Because if people care for other people, they are more likely to inform them proactively when they might be affected by a change.
That’s how PMs end up sharing ideas between business lines.
That’s how Marketing learns about an experiment in CX that could be leveraged on a grander scale.
That’s how Engineering understands why the Sales team is so frustrated this quarter.
No amount of processes can replace the fluidity of people trusting and talking to each other. You only need to offer the structure.
Homework for this week
So for this week, take note of your conversations, and then reflect:
So - whom do you talk to on a regular basis?
Where did you find them?
What do you talk about?
And when do these conversations happen?
If all of those conversation happen behind closed doors (in DMs or private channels), with people you met at some point in person, or with people that were introduced to you by someone else - you’ve created an onboarding risk for new hires.
Because remember: as a knowledge worker, a lot of your work involves communication.
And without a structure, communication channels go underground, accessible only to those who are involved already.
New team members, by default, aren’t involved “already”.
Experienced team members, by default, stay in their own subterranean channels.
The result: you risk to lose those who (for whichever reason) weren’t introduced to groundwater communication (yet).
How do you facilitate communication across locations?
Your goal is for people to have a place where they connect with other humans, for a moment, an inspiration, an emotion.
These places don’t “just happen”, they require for you to dig those watering channels above ground.
You can find some pointers in my post on communication design. You can hire someone like Darcy Boles to create the structure with you. Or you can empower your employees to help you shape the watering system.
Either way, it requires a decision.
So there you go: whom do YOU talk to? And where, and why, and when?
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I loved this article, Valentina. It's been really hard for me to put into words why the whole "but we need the serendipity that happens around the watercooler!!!!111" argument against remote work rings so false with me, but you really nailed it here. Thank you.