Email and intimacy

I lead a fair size team at work and have always been very proud of my reputation as a good manager. So when I got the results of the latest employee attitude survey a couple of weeks ago I was deeply concerned that the results had deteriorated quite sharply. Was this a sign that my management skills are in decline? Not sure. Certainly hope not.

After discussion with some colleagues my conclusion is that this is not a reflection on me, but on the more general environment. And also the arrival of several people who came to me as part of a protracted reorganisation, from teams which had experienced a period of uncertainty.

Having said all that, whatever the reason for the feelings amongst team members, it is clear something needs to be done. One thing quite noticeable is that, as a flexible and distributed team, we have lost the feeling of intimacy that we used to have and that the sheer size of the team might work against this. Is this a natural part of the maturity path of a flexible working team? Or is it an indication that a flexible team has an optimum size and that we’ve got too big? Possibly. However, it has been pointed out to me (thanks Diane) that the way we use some of the tools is also not helping. In particular email.

We’re very dependent upon email. And it’s a great tool. It allows us to communicate with many people at the same time, and is asynchronous – we don’t need to be in the same geographic space, or time space, for it to work. However, it is very impersonal, tone of voice can be very hard to get right – particularly for a group of people who come from different backgrounds – and can often be used without any real thought to the alternatives. So from now on whenever I need to get a message to just one person, I’m going to pick up the telephone and only use email rarely. That'll be much more intimate.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Feeling down...

Where I work we conduct regular research to find out how people are feeling and how ‘engaged’ they are. I recently got the results for my team. They were very disappointing. They’re still well above average for the company, but they have taken a dip compared to last year. The odd thing is there doesn’t seem to be any particular area which has declined. It’s just right across the board. So, I’ve been thinking about what to do.

Most of my team works remotely and flexibly. Sometimes it can be weeks before I see someone in person I work with regularly. Also, over the past year quite a few new people joined the team as part of a re-organisation. They also work remotely. So we’re now quite a big team, but we hardly ever see each other. When we were small, we all knew each other well and there was an intimate atmosphere. That intimacy sustained us when we were remote. I think over the past year we’ve lost that.

One of the things I’m going to do is encourage everyone to join up to Twitter – and have created a closed user group for that purpose. Although most of the team work in the technology space, we’re not all early adopters so it’ll be really interesting to see what happens. The danger is that a few take to the technology and get really well connected – better connected than now, but others don’t get on with it all and become even more remote from the group and end up being almost outsiders. I’ll have to make sure that doesn’t happen.

The other thing is to make sure that we use these social tools to facilitate face to face interactions, not replace them. I think that’s another key thing that has been missing over the past year.

I’ll let you know how it goes.