As part of the We Are Company Webinar series, we have been looking at how to enable our relationships to thrive in a time of social distancing and remote working.
On the first Webinar Andrew Williams (one of the Founders of We Are Company) unpacked 6 relational factors that will profoundly affect our organisations in the future. It’s vital that we keep these front of mind as we make our decisions in the present.
In the third and final of this series of three blog posts, Simon Barrington now unpacks the last two of the six relational factors that will be enhanced in the future, explains how businesses are responding to them in the midst of the Corona Crisis and leaves us with important questions we need to be asking now as we set future strategy and direction.
5. Bringing the whole of our authentic selves to work
Zoom calls have opened up our living rooms, studies, conservatories, flats and bedsits to our colleagues. Seeing your colleagues kids doing a workout to Joe Wickes while you have your team meeting, or having them nurse a child on their laps in their 1:1’s has changed the boundaries between work and home – for good.
People are being more real, more willing to share and more integrated in bringing the whole of their lives into the workplace. The move towards being more empathetic to people’s home lives and situations will continue. The transition to organisations becoming more wholehearted and embracing the whole of employee’s lives and gifts will accelerate.
One of our clients explained how they now understand more about the personal contexts of their team members than they ever had in the physical workplace. This has allowed them to recognise additional skills and giftings, as well as empathise personal challenges.
What are you missing by not knowing the true person who is a member of your team?
6. Structures will be more interconnected and fluid
Collaboration, teamwork and achieving as a team will become more important than individual performance and recognition. Togetherness will become a key theme with less emphasis on 1:1s and more emphasis on team meetings, team structures and team dynamics.
High performing teams will increasingly be equated with highly relational teams, in which colleagues see themselves as companions, looking out for one another, pursing a shared purpose.
Organisations will place inordinate value on growing their agility and nimbleness. This will lead to the transformation of what we measure, value and reward, along with new supporting structures and processes.
One of our clients is already identifying greater levels of individual team coherence in their team meetings, which have moved from weekly to daily.
What are you doing to build camaraderie and teamwork during this crisis?
Finally…..
It’s vitally important that leaders solve todays problems through the lenses of shared purpose, enhanced trust, vulnerable leadership, relational cultures, wholehearted people and agile structures. Only then will their organisations be sustainable in a post Corona Virus world.