The Slings And Arrows Of Outrageous Fortune Running A Virtual Team

Japan has some set pieces around leadership.  The Middle Manager boss sits at the head of an array of desks arranged in rows, so that everyone in the team can be seen.  This is important because this is how the boss knows who is working well in the team and who isn’t.  They can be observed every day, all day long.  What time they arrive and what time they leave, who is late back from lunch – it is all there in front of the boss.  Meetings are easily arranged and follow up is a shout away – “Suzuki, what is happening with that report?”.  Now many of the team are at home, away from the constant surveillance of the boss.  The boss has little idea how they spend their days and our clients tell us many Middle Managers  are still struggling to supervise the diaspora.

In many cases, the day would start with the chorei, the morning huddle, getting the team together to go through what is on for that day.  These meetups can continue even when everyone is at home. During Covid, we moved it online. Everyone had to be on camera at 9.00am, dressed for business, rather than in a T-shirt.  If they didn’t come on camera that was a red flag.  There may have been some depression issues bubbling away in the background, as the isolation started to get to people. They began to withdraw. 

One of my team didn’t come on camera for three days in a row, saying there was an issue with the laptop webcam.  Was there really an issue?  How would I know that was the case, sitting in my study, at my home?  I immediately started organising another laptop to be sent out. I need to see everyone’s face every day, to check how they are doing.  In the end, it was a technical issue around the privacy settings in Teams.  The point though is, I didn’t really know what was going on.  I have to be continuously keeping an eye out for the emergence of any stress or depression in my team.

At the chorei we would go through good news reports, the vision, mission, values, the Dale Carnegie Principle for that day, who we are visiting virtually or otherwise and who was visiting us, each person’s top three priorities for the day and a motivational quote.  The whole thing took about ten minutes.  I usually spent another ten minutes talking about things like taking care of your health, standing up regularly because we tend to sit for too long, issues around coordination which have arisen, the latest news in our business, the cash flow situation and recognising good work.  We also had Coffee Time With Dale at 3.00pm every day for anyone who wants to just shoot the breeze and catch up with colleagues, they don’t physically meet anymore.  It wasn’t that popular so we dropped it.

The meeting cadence with direct reports continued online but it was easy for this to fade or drift.  People’s new work from home schedules seem to make it harder to connect.  Back in February 2020, when we started working from home, it had a temporary feel about it.  On reflection, I didn’t immediately embed some processes I should have.  These direct report meetings were a discipline I found I had to really enforce, because many of my staff seem to possess ninja level skills at avoiding talking with boss. I usually want stuff from them, I want it yesterday and I am very demanding. Talking with me is probably a pain, so some are quite creative in escaping the supervision. 

The biggest issue was coordination across the whole business, as we all descended into our little pockets of responsibility and started losing sight of the big picture.  I had to spend a lot more time making sure that key information was being shared and that I was also sharing key information, rather than hogging it to myself.  This was a time consuming activity, but we dropped the ball a couple of times because it wasn’t done properly.  Before I knew it, timelines started to drift, activities dropped out of completion sequence and confusion was not far behind.

This was when I discovered just how detail challenged some people in the team actually were.  In the office it got covered off somehow.  Being subterranean, it wasn’t noticeable. In isolation from each other however, wrong data inputs have a horrendous impact.  They spark a lot of effort to clean up the mess created. It draws people away from what they should be doing, dragging them into the morass of re-work.

We tried to get around these coordination and communication issues by creating one truth. There was a live document in Teams that everyone could access and all changes were noted there.  As a training company, we had training events scheduled LIVE On Line or in the Super Safe Classroom, so we could see which ones were being executed, which were postponed, who was involved, etc.  A limited number of people were allowed to feed into this document to enforce accountability and control.  Today, with people at home, you may need a similar live document that tells everyone what is going on, which is being updated continuously as things change. GIGO (garbage in garbage out) is an issue for any document, so the details have to be monitored carefully.

To overcome the isolation, one on one meetings were being held more frequently than when we were in the office.  However, I found it even harder than normal to get hold of people because they are often holding online meetings or were on the phone.  In the office, I could just walk over to their desk and signal to them to see me after they finished their call or grab them when they came back from their meeting.   

I find our younger people are not phone savvy.  They don’t check their phones for incoming calls they have missed. This wastes a lot of time trying to get hold of people, so I had to be pretty bolshie with them, about checking their phones for missed messages and to check their voice mail regularly.  It is a real pain, but sending emails or text messages as well seems to be the way to get their attention.

Many people are still working from home and are liberated from the daily grind of commuting in Tokyo which is good.  They are not necessarily pouring this extra time into their work though. As the boss, I have had to become a much more “supervising” leader than before, which I actually hate.  There are many more moving pieces now due to the residue of Covid-19, so whether I like it or not, I have become more interventionist to make sure it all hangs together.  How about you?  Has this been your experience too?