WLP239 Match Your Visible Teamwork to Your Team Task Workflow
Pilar has been working on how the way in which are tasks are dependent on other team members’ affects the visible teamwork practices we adopt - and why.
Thanks go to Theresa Sigillito Hollema from www.interact-global.net for the inspiration - and she now has her book Virtual Teams Across Cultures on pre-order!
The principles don’t only help us to stay aligned in our teams, but they can help us to feel connected. (For more on Connection and Disconnection in Remote Teams, check out our 7 episode series!)
The principles of Visible Teamwork can be found here, and follow three areas:
Deliberate Communication
Work Visibility
Planned Spontaneity
Understanding the level of interdependence of your tasks will also help you see whether the systems of visible teamwork are going to help you mostly with coordination of the work, or to increase your sense of connection with each other.
The aim is to have happier, more effective and more flexible collaboration.
1. POOLED INTERDEPENDENCE
When we have this kind of interdependence in our team, we share the main objective, but not our tasks. We can get on with the work without affecting anyone else’s workflow. Our tasks can run in parallel to each other. The team’s work consists of the pool of tasks, contributed individually. In this case, the systems to make the work, or workflow visible will exists to help remind everyone of where their individual tasks and actions add value to the team or the organisation.
These systems might be more about sharing learning, creating a sense of connection and avoiding a feeling of isolation in team members. As team members will need little interaction to do their work, the adoption of the principles of deliberate communication will have more to do with team member visibility, reminding others that we are around for emotional support, than as a way of helping us work better together.
2. SEQUENTIAL INTERDEPENDENCE
our tasks can be dependent on each other if we need to carry them out in sequence. Until I finish my task, you can’t start yours. This kind of dependence is predictable, to a point.
Within this kind of workflow, individuals need to take responsibility to agree the deadlines with each other, (and keep a record of them online) and communicate the progress of individual tasks , even if it’s just marking them as Done. Certain aspects of deliberate communication also become important, to warn others that our situation might be becoming unstable and affect our work. Open conversations around questions, lack of information about our tasks, etc also become important as they might signal a bumpy ride along the way to completing a task, that someone else is depending on.
3. RECIPROCAL AND INTEGRATED INTERDEPENDENCE
When we work closely together on a task, and work in a cyclical manner, we can think of our interdependence as reciprocal, the flow of dependency moves backwards and forwards between us. How we depend on the other person’s input is less defined, and less predictable. When your level of interdependence is reciprocal, it becomes less important to share the progress of your task, but more important to share your thinking and learning as you work through your tasks, and to have conversations in the open when more than one of you are involved in a task.
Reciprocal interdependence tends to need a high level of synchronous communication, so when you have these, be aware whether the content of those conversations needs to be shared with those who aren’t present. Deliberate communication also becomes important, especially to know when we are open to be interrupted. Conversations within team members working on a complex task together tend to take up quite a bit of time.
ADOPTING VISIBLE TEAMWORK
When you begin to think about adopting the principles of visible teamwork, consider the kind of task interdependence you’re working within. Discuss in the team what systems will be useful to feel like your work is co-ordinated at the right level[1]. For example, if you’re working at a reciprocal leave and feel like you’re missing information, have difficulty getting hold of people or decisions seem to take a long time to make, you might need to adopt visible workflow systems and open conversations. On the other hand, having too many systems to follow when you are actually working as a pooled team, can result in a feeling of loss of autonomy and even competence.
The aim is to have happier, more effective and more flexible collaboration.
Finally, can you structure your task interdependence to help you increase team cohesion? Maybe that’s content for another episode…
Remember to get in touch if you need help working as a remote team, or transitioning to an “office optional” approach. And let us know if you’re interested in our upcoming Podcasting for Connection service.
If you like the podcast, you'll love our monthly round-up of inspirational content and ideas: