When you aren’t allowed to question, you are probably also not allowed to have a bad day or express frustration. That limits how much of you can show up in the workplace.
That is not the way to get employee engagement and the best efforts of the people who work for you. In today’s job market, it is a good way to lose them.
Being remote is different. You have to over-communicate to make sure that people are in the loop. You have to create collaboration opportunities and build camaraderie purposefully, and they can’t be team trust falls. You have to get creative about how you work together and interact.
Most of all, you have to be purposeful about it. You have to create opportunities for people to interact and allow them the freedom to create their own patterns and relationships. You have to learn how to work asynchronously so that you can have more meaningful meetings.
It was an interesting conversation, and I hope these conversations can help us in the eDiscovery industry think about employee wellness, mental health, diversity, and other issues that can result from doing things the way we’ve always done them. It’s time for this conversation to be had across the industry. If this can spark more of that, I would be very happy.
Something I’ve been thinking a lot about in the industries I have worked in has been this idea that remote and asynchronous work is something that makes it less likely that the only people we can hire are the ones who are both willing and able to dedicate their entire days to be in the office and also willing to jump in and do more work at any hour of the day and weekends. That eliminates a whole bunch of people from even applying, especially women with kids, neurodiverse and disabled candidates, and underrepresented groups without a large presence in the area where your office happens to be. (When you start a company in Silicon Valley, Seattle, Austin, or some other “hot” area, your candidate pool is limited to the people who live there now or are willing to move immediately.)
There is a lot to chew on in the HBR article below. Starting with how often women overqualified for a position will get hired anyway versus overqualified men.
Admittedly I’m a few months behind on podcasts, so be patient with me as I discuss a couple of ideas that came across some of my favorites back in May that I just listened to this week. First, I want to talk about the idea of Model/Coach/Care, an approach to management discussed by Microsoft CEO…