Distributed working can drive a personalised approach to employee experience

Optimising employee experience for business benefit is an emergent trend of our increasingly digitally-connected but physically distributed work forces.

Gartner's Future of Work Trends - with data gathered in April this year - already identified 16% of employers admitted to increasing the gathering of passive employee data collection. For example: virtual logging/clocking in and out; computer and phone use; use of email, internal communication and chats; and location or movement.

The data is available to far more than 16% of companies. Working from home has rocketed to closer to 50%. There are ethical questions of course. The same ethical questions facing us as consumers. How relaxed we are about having our every key-stroke captured, stored, diced and used to serve us depends very much on the discernible benefits to us. Increasingly we want to understand what's in it for them, too.

But employers can use this passive employee data more effectively for carrot than for stick.

Given the reported 'burnout' experienced by many - the increase in monthly hours worked (with estimates running at 20-30 extra per employee per month), the physical and creative downsides of parking behind a computer all day, given all this and more, there are new opportunities emerging for data-driven, employer-led wellness interventions.

We are fine when our car tells us it's time to take a break after two hours in the driving seat - perhaps passive data can be used to enforce mental and physical screen breaks? And if, from aggregating data the employer can understand more about what makes an individual effective, even applying some of the A/B testing techniques so readily applied to us as live, real-time consumers, then perhaps demands on us, styles of communications, engagement in meetings, workshops, pitches et al, can start to be designed to suit end user needs with the kind of specificity we have long enjoyed as customers.

Welcome to insight-led, experience-centred, employee and workplace experience. We just have to treat employees with the same respect we have come to understand the customer must be treated with.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

When almost every human interaction is a 'meeting'

A very smart connection of mine shared his list of rules for effective meetings. They were drawn up pre-Covid19. And I believe there are many circumstances in which they remain 100 per cent valid. You should download them for yourself and use them as appropriate.

But the list of best practices prompted me to think about the pivotal role now held by meetings in the organisational life of distributed teams. Where once they were simply part of the toolbox of human interaction prompts and touch points within an organisation, today, as we seek to maintain connection from our homes, they have become almost the only show in town.

If you have a sudden flash of inspiration, the kind you used to be able to call out to the person sitting by your side, or opposite your desk, now you have to go schedule a zoom/teams etc call. And the protocols of agendas, timing, note taking, action points, co-availability and all the rest may be too high a transaction cost for that idea. So you might just not bother raising it at all.

So in the current context I am wary of suggesting any best practice surrounding meetings.

In working with distributed teams for many years, I have learned that effective meetings start with social connection - the chat bit that we may think is non-productive, but which has huge value for team wellbeing, empathy building and well, caring about each other.

I get that other 'coming togethers' can handle the serendipity and idea sparks we are missing in our current daily interactions but I also think it may be wise to avoid any dogma around what is or isn't the right way to run a meeting when our contexts are changing so rapidly.

This is a time in which best practices will seldom be applicable, in which, instead, novel and emergent practices should be tested in order to shape a way forwards.

What we do know is high performing teams have strong empathy for each other, and enjoy an 'equity of conversation' - ie they all talk for about the same share of time when they are interacting.

Perhaps those are the initial constraints we should try applying to explore what meetings may become?

Photo by Alex McCarthy on Unsplash