tWFH — TEAMWORK FROM HOME
How the dysfunctions of a team are more pronounced while working remotely and how to overcome them.
Introduction
Making teams work was easy. Then came 2020 which posed bigger hurdles than teams across the world had faced in decades. Team dysfunctions creep in when members start working in silos. This creates a hive of problems detailed in Lencioni’s book — The five dysfunctions of a team.
Collaborating from home has exposed teams to these dysfunctions further and has made his analysis more relevant today than ever before. As a remote data science partner to one of the world’s largest self-storage companies, I came across some of these dysfunctions in my team.
In this blog, we go over these dysfunctions and suggest possible ways that our team took to overcome them in these unprecedented times.
Four Dysfunctions of the WFH era
Dysfunction of having no trust is when teammates are not comfortable being vulnerable with one another. This is the genesis of all dysfunctions in a team. Working from home has taken away the human element of working in teams together. The added stress of remote working feeds into the dread for meetings, refusal to tap into another’s expertise, and the hesitance to offer help outside of individual responsibilities.
How do we overcome the absence of trust?
In our practicum team, we adopted the online version of the popular game, We’re not really strangers, to delve deeper into each other’s personal history and backgrounds which helped us understand the diversity in cultures we all belonged to and our working styles. Getting to know about each others’ credentials helped us gain trust in each other.
Dysfunction of fearing conflicts is a consequence of the foundation of all team dysfunctions — Absence of trust. When team members trust each other, they focus on the problem at hand and put emotions and feelings aside. We are all familiar with the concept of “difference in opinions” and the lengths that humans go to, to avoid them in any relationship. Whether it is asking that annoying roommate to turn down the volume even after multiple reminders, cold wars over trash duty with your partner, or calling out John Doe for arriving late to every meeting, the issue is all-pervasive. The discussion could be a heated and passionate argument but at the end of it, a solution is reached without hurt feelings. But more often than not, team members prioritize protecting each other’s feelings over engaging in healthy ideological conflict. This leads to bitterness in the team and gives rise to interpersonal conflict and personal attacks which lowers the team’s morale and commitment to the objective of the project. This issue is more pronounced when teams work from home owing to videos and audios being turned off during the course of the meeting. While peripherals being turned off is understandable in the circumstances that we are in, this makes it difficult for teams to gauge member’s opinions to the ideas proposed unless they decide to speak up. This fuels the false idea that everyone in the team is on the same page and even if there is a difference of opinion, members don’t express it due to fear of conflict.
How can the fear of conflict be overcome?
As trite as it may sound, one of the most effective ways to overcome this issue is to encourage conflict or simply active discussion of the topic at hand. This has to start with the manager and could be facilitated through Zoom polls that require every member to anonymously record their agreement/disagreement towards the idea and the reasoning behind it. The manager can then discuss each of these ideas in the meeting and encourage every member to voice their opinions towards every kind of opinion. The anonymity of the poll encourages interaction without the fear of conflict and over time, members will be able to actively engage in ideological conflicts without the masquerade.
Dysfunction of heedlessness to work-life boundaries
10 pm calls interrupting the bedtime story you were telling your daughter or the lunch that was had at 3 pm due to a 3-hour meeting since noon were problems that were primarily faced by those in consulting. Today, it is conventional to mold your post 5 pm plans around meetings that not only take up most of your day but your evenings and nights too. The concept of work from home has introduced a false notion of members being “always available” since you are at home where you live and make a living. This leads to disgruntled, overworked team members with strained personal relations that directly translate to poor productivity, mental health, and team morale besides endless gripes over the tolls of working remotely. Zoom fatigue is a great term that succinctly captures the cascading effects of working from home.
How can work-life balance be improved for teams?
The most effective solution would be to agree with your team members at the onset of the project what times work for everyone and what is the cut-off time after which no meetings are to be scheduled. The transiency of life mandates that these times be revisited regularly to accommodate for changes in schedules. While a time that takes into account every member’s schedule is not always possible, a round-robin of sorts could be employed to ensure that at every cadence, only a few members of the team need to work after their stipulated cut-off time. This rotation in replanning of schedules is the closest we can come to the semblance of the rush of “clocking out” of office the minute the clock strikes 5.
Dysfunction of apathy towards meeting etiquette
Working remotely has metamorphosed avoidance of accountability, which generally was connected with missing deadlines and key deliverables, into apathy towards meeting etiquettes. This has a detrimental effect on the inter-personal relationship with any client and reflects poorly on the entire team.
How do we establish meeting etiquette?
We started following these non-negotiable guidelines for our team:
1) Mute yourself!
2) Background noise hurts.
3) Being on video? Non-negotiable.
4) Be on time!
Conclusion
Successful teams become cognizant of the dysfunctions at an early stage and with focussed efforts attempt to resolve them. The key in this is to communicate, communicate, communicate. Come together as a team and take a collective look at the metaphorical mirror to reflect and retrospect in order to overcome the dysfunctions of your team.
