WLP266: Higher Education and Being Social in Remote Organisations
04.00 “What’s Going On?” - with a focus on education
Pilar took part in a panel at PA2021 for Project Access International, where they’re using collaboration tech to help disadvantaged students all over the world access higher education opportunities. The futures of work and education are so closely intertwined, and Pilar shared the platform with Bernie Mitchell (Episode 158), and Niklas Huppmann cofounder of Human Aid - who build and launch disaster response projects online, such as Covid Africa.
The event was hosted in Hop.in, and included a careers fair in breakout sessions, followed by an education panel, with exciting updates about how extended reality tech is being used for learning experiences from engineering to surgery.
It’s so interesting how the tech is changing the way we learn, and recorded lectures for example give students the opportunity to go back over anything missed. After a year of mostly online learning, people will be able to keep what works and choose what suits them in future, just like in the world of work - hopefully leading to greater diversity and opportunity, which enriches the experience for everyone.
The higher education students of the next few years will have experienced online learning, and even in schools things are changing fast. Maya recently wrote about an adaptation to classroom video learning to address attendance issues, Single Sign-on for Programmable Video, just one thing we may not have needed in the workplace hopefully. And just like at work, the panel predicted that a hybrid approach blending online and face-to-face is what to expect in future, with interesting implications for building professional networks.
Pilar has also been working with BeNext on virtual leadership, and exploring the strengths of cohort based learning - a great strength of the online space, as People Matters agrees: Article: Ten reasons why cohort-based programs are the future of skilling — People Matters. Once again the networking and asynchronous connection opportunities that remote offers us has so much to offer.
This brings us nicely to another theme for today:
21.57 Socialisation in the online space
People talk about missing social interaction when forced to work from home, and often the solution seems to be to arrange specific out-of-work opportunities for this. But this is to imply that social interaction at work only takes place in the pub afterwards! Which isn’t how it works in the colocated workspace - so why should it be online?
The last thing we want to do is give people yet another video meeting purely for the sake of it, or to give off any suggestion that social conversation is discouraged in everyday interaction. Social conversations can easily take place within, around, and even about the work itself… just as it naturally would in a shared office.
This is how we learn from each other, synergise ideas, and co-create, so it’s essential that the way we work together online holds space for this and lets it happen. As we keep saying, in online team communications things need to be intentional and deliberate which might otherwise have evolved spontaneously.
It sounds like a lot of organisations have missed out on addressing this through lockdown, to the detriment of individual well-being and happiness - unsurprisingly perhaps, because promoting social connection requires time and resource allocation, and someone tasked to make it happen. Recent episodes with Chris Coladonato (262) and Goncalo Silva (264) have some great ideas of how to do this well, and there’s also episode 170 with Jochen Lillich on the DIRECTT framework (Decision, Insight, Result, Emotion, Contact, Troubles, Thanks) for working out loud. Small actions and prompts can easily open the space for this kind of social interaction, like our own ‘presence’ bot in the Virtual Not Distant Slack - which prompts us all to share when we’re going to be around and what we’re working on, providing an intriguing snapshot of what’s important to each of us as we start each week.
Finally let’s not forget that where we choose to work (when we can choose) reflects and reinforces our socialisation needs - so if you have not enjoyed working from home, then co-working spaces and other third places can offer more buzz and interaction, including with people who are not your colleagues.
How are you making space for sharing and connecting in your organisation? Don’t forget to let us know, and maybe our in-house podcasting service could help, if you want a new way to relate to one another in your online team.
43.51 Our community
With everything segueing beautifully today, this takes us into our LinkedIn question of the month, Now that you're not working in an office together, how are you capturing the learning in your team that happens away from each other? generating fantastic and insightful responses from friends like Bart Van Roey (episode 261) - we’d love to know what you think too.
Thanks to Rachel for connecting, and also Pedro Valero for sharing the update in Spanish on visible teamwork: "La información sobre usted que otros recogen por ósmosis en el espacio físico debe comunicarse con intención en el mundo en línea." (which reminds us of the need for deliberate communication in the online space).
The message is now international!
Thanks to YOU too, for listening. Please contact us, or you can tweet Virtual Not Distant, or Pilar and Maya directly, with any of your thoughts and ideas. Let us know if you have any interesting publications or research to share, or if you’d like to hear more about our training or ‘podcasting for connection’ service, helping remote teams work together better for 2021.
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