That being said, this isn’t going to change. If the people who work for you aren’t continuously learning your organization is going to fall behind competitors who are learning. The folks who want to learn will end up working for those competitiors. You’ll be left with a group of employees who are comfortable doing the same thing they’ve always done and aren’t interested in learning anything new.
Over the last few years though, as the number of online training sessions and meetings has grown exponentially, I still see it though. There are a significant number of users who will use Teams or Zoom chat instead of speaking up in many forms of gatherings. We should recognize that the chat tool is a perfectly legitimate way for people to interact with a speaker and each other during online meetings. Many people, but especially introverts among us, will be more comfortable chatting like that during a meeting. As a trainer/speaker, it becomes paramount that you learn to pay attention to what is happening in chat or have someone in the meeting be responsible for keeping up with the chat. Otherwise, you’re ignoring part of your audience.
The other interesting thing that shouldn’t be overlooked is that beyond providing a message board to start the class discussion, it’s also provided ahead of time. Those introverts who need a little time to process new information before providing any input are going to be much more likely to have something to add when there is time to consider the topic.
They focus on hybrid work, I think these commandments should be applied in every situation. I don’t care if you all work in the office full-time, remotely across the country full-time, or any combination in between.
Intention, communication, setting expectations, and living the example will go a long way with your team. There’s no reason to not follow these commandments for working as a team, regardless of location. This is a great outline for how to set the rules of engagement, provide the proper tools and solid communication, and continually measure the effectiveness of what you’re doing.
How does your team measure up to the experts?
Continue to be great at what you do and hope for an opening in management is not a career plan. That is what appears to be on offer at many companies though. They aren’t preparing anyone to be a manager in the future, and they aren’t increasing headcount that might require more team leads and managers, so how long do we expect people to wait? Add in the number of “senior” folks with higher salaries who find themselves part of a reduction in force, or the number of people who’ve watched their current job change over and over until they find themselves doing work they never signed up for in the first place, and it’s no wonder that workers are taking responsibility for their own growth, by choosing workplaces that give them better opportunities.
No one has to stay and work for you for the next 20-25 years. They can, and will, go elsewhere if there’s no clear path forward. I don’t blame them.
Last week, I shared an article and some of my own experiences around “culture fit” being a code for discrimination. We all know that is all too common, and an excuse for organizations to continue to hire “people like us”.
I saw another article over the weekend that reminded us that while that is common, there are some cases where someone is a bad cultural fit and there’s no discrimination involved.
Recently, Microsoft released a preview feature, making meeting notes collaborative using MS Loop. As part of the M365 newsletter subscription I offered a deep dive into the eDiscovery implications of the tool and how it works, but there was more I wanted to say about the functionality of it outside of that. Hence, I’m writing a blog post about how I looked at these notes as a trainer and leader as opposed to how I looked at them as an eDiscovery professional.