Category: Leadership

The Moses and Aaron Trick

This is written for remote mid-level managers (those that have both bosses and direct reports, so they are in the middle) that face problems where the bosses want problems solved but they do not want to involve your direct reports in the problem-solving.

Said another way, the bosses do not want to be honest that they are human, don’t know all the answers, and struggle like all of us with image, reputation, and honesty.

So here are the characters in our trick. Pay attention to who is who.

Your bosses will be the people seeking enlightenment. They need to solve a problem and look amazing doing it. They need the heavens to open and for the solution (so obvious!) to come beaming down to them. They will receive all of the sunshine and glory in this model. Thus bosses = ancient people of Israel, they seek direction or answers.

You are mid-level management. I only define that as someone who has a boss or bosses of your own that you answer to AND you have people who answer to you. There can be many middle levels–it doesn’t matter how many levels for this trick to work.

You are Aaron, you are the speaker, you talk.

The direct reports or the hoi polli are your front-line workers that have direct hands-on with the problem. They report to you. Because they are front-line, they know the problem the best and thus, they are Moses.

Your direct reports are Moses, they hold the knowledge or enlightenment.

Got that? It’s a bit inverted in terms of “power” but it’s correct in terms of “enlightenment” or “who knows what.”

So, pre-pandemic, web conferencing or conference calls were not very common as they are post-pandemic with Zoom being now a noun and verb in addition to a brand name. In my situation we primarily used phone-in conference calls but at the end of this article, I’ll give some suggestions on how to do the Moses and Aaron Trick with Zoom.

Here is the scenario: your institution faces a problem. The front line workers know the most about it, but the bosses have been tasked with finding a solution. The bosses, however, do not want the hoi polloi in meetings with them, so front line direct reports are excluded from problem-solving meetings. Thus, only mid-level managers will be there to represent the front line. So that is a key characteristic cluing you into this situation. You have to be the lowest ranking person in the remote room to successfully use the Moses and Aaron trick.

We used a phone conference calling system for meetings (a 1-800 number plus a passcode). If you were invited to the meeting, you received the passcode in the meeting invitation. What I knew about this system is that attendance WAS tracked and could be traced (this is an example of the tech back doors that I often detect at my workplaces). But I also knew that almost no one ever looked at attendance logs of internal-only meetings. There were “beeps” on the line when someone entered or left the line but again, few presenters were nimble enough to remember what codes to press on a keypad to get the number of current attendees.

So, you could sneak someone in.

I sneak in my Moses.

When the meeting conditions were just right, I prepared my Moses to join the call. We staged it so that they would dial in just at the same time I would and in case there was any question as to “who just joined us” I would make some excuse about hanging up accidentally instead of hitting mute and that I had entered twice. In truth, the second beep was my Moses entering and staying on mute. I also had my Moses especially situate themselves in a quiet situation just in case the mute broke (yes, mutes can break.) Final set up item: Moses would be on instant messenger with me.

Ha! You really need to pick up these remote tips, people!

In my cases, I was not on camera but you can be (I’ll explain how later). So I could tip-tap away on my keyboard during the meeting and even if the sound of the keyboard came through the call, typing during calls was very normal for my bosses.

They were somewhat famous for instant messaging back and forth all day to each other to the point of obvious distraction during our supposed 1:1 phone call check-ins, but whatever. My point is that typing was not considered rude or out of bounds. I generally observe now that it is even MORE true now.

I knew I was going to be asked detailed questions about the problem during this problem-solving meeting (how many? Did we try…? What shade of blue was it?) so my Moses would IM me the answers that I would then talk (I’m the Aaron, the talker.)

This trick worked brilliantly!

When it came time to leave, I would just do a “pretend fumble” again so that they would not notice 2 departing beeps (if they noticed at all).

Before I tell you the next story, you might be thinking “Oh but, this seems dishonest!” You are right! It is! I’m using a tech loophole–they are not checking that 6 people are on a 5 person call. But I would like to point out that the solution is for the bosses to be OK with hoi polloi being in the room helping problem solve in the first place!

It is about bosses not wanting those direct reports to see or hear them that represents the true problem here. I’d point out that some organizations don’t have this problem. Disney is famous for asking their front line employees for proposed solutions when they face a problem. It is possible to ask for help and NOT lose face as organizational leaders.

And my next story starts right there. My workplace was facing a problem and the problem-solving meetings were being drawn up. My direct reports knew that they were not being invited and they wondered–why? What’s the big deal? What is discussed in these secret meetings that they cannot be witness to?

It was about to be revealed to them.

Now, I have to take you on a very short side story where karma comes to visit:

One day, my boss was unhappy with a team metric and instructed me word-for-word to bring the hammer down on my team. I did so. One of the team members went to HR and said “Our boss is creating a climate of fear.” HR called my boss and said “We have complaints about your underling creating a climate of fear.” In an evil genius move, my boss said “I’ll handle this.” He raked me over the coals. I reminded him that this ‘climate of fear’ was instigated and approved of by him. He kicked that away, saying it was all my fault. He then returned to my team and reassured them “I’ve warned her. You can trust me.”
Meanwhile, I went to HR and explained my side of the story. When I said “Yes, I created a climate of fear–because my boss told me to.” HR said “Oh well, he must have been having a bad day that day.” I said “Yes, but he has the power to target my bonuses and pay raise with his bad day– that would be highly unfair.” (Not to mention the damage done to my team by said fear climate). HR was unconcerned. And my boss did use this as an excuse to target my pay. I received no manager bonus and no pay raise that year. Boss 1, me 0.

But what ho! Here arrived a need to do the Moses & Aaron Trick with this exact team and with the team leader who went to HR about me. Even though my team was wrong about me, I knew they had been misled, so I harbored no ill will towards them.

So here we go: I prep for Moses and Aaron Trick because I needed it for a separate work problem.

I prepped this new specific Moses to join the call. The call was cantankerous. Multiple departments were casting blame. It’s your fault! No, it’s your fault! At one point, a different department lobbed a particularly tough accusation at me and my Moses/team “They are lazy. They are not doing their work! They should all be written up for not doing their jobs!”

My Moses heard this. It was about HER.

And my boss heard it too. Before I could get a word out, he immediately kow-towed to the accusation “You know, you could be right. Maybe they are not doing their jobs. Maybe I should have them written up. Hmm.”

My Moses had a FIT on instant messenger with me.

“How dare he? We are working 60 hour work weeks on this problem!…” and further protests.

I sat there aghast and covered my mouth to stop my giggling. I had just seen the boss that had so happily driven the bus over me a few months prior now drive the bus over my Moses.

Karma, Fate, Call It What You Will.

My Moses was devastated. I still laugh about the entire incident with tears in my eyes (it was ridiculous and terrible) because I snuck her in. I could have witnessed my boss drive the bus over her on my own, but instead, she heard it directly from him. He never knew that she heard.

After the meeting ended, I kept working on the problem and life continued but I have not forgotten that my Moses really got an earful that day.

How would you do a Moses and Aaron trick now with Zoom and cameras? If the meeting is in a non-Zoom platform, there are still plenty of ways to be anonymous or conceal your identity online.

If you are at a workplace, of course, you MUST assume that all keyboards have keyloggers (they probably do) and all internet traffic is watched (it probably is) and use a different internet connection but I hope you are wise enough to figure that out.

Just yesterday, video dropped of the Better.com Zoom call layoffs. From the video, it’s clear it was captured from a phone that was watching a laptop. Basically, a well-backed up smartphone is a good alternative access system for meetings.

What about typing your IMs during the call? I recently observed that it seems to be acceptable now, without question, that people will be typing during meetings. I’m happy to see this– as kinesthetic actions during meetings can really help some of us that need to move to stay mentally active. It might be assumed that you are typing notes. Just be nimble with explaining your typing. 🙂

If you made it to the end of this, bravo! Remember that the Moses and Aaron Trick is about problem-solving for mid-level managers. Sometimes you are stuck between the folks that know the answers (but can’t enact the power) and the power holders (who don’t have a clue what to do). It has been done and I encourage you to use this trick if you need to.

I hope, truly, that you never do.

(more…)

December 9, 2021
The Trip and Fall

“Trip And Fall” is used here in my case to mean accidental or unforeseen happenstance. Other similar phrases might be “clumsy” “bumbling” or “fat fingering it” implying that someone has made a mistake with no harmful intent and yet, they’ve arrived at that place or set of circumstances. In remote team environments, this would be dialing someone’s phone number by accident or messaging the wrong person. I would use this remote team leadership method in a very specific set of circumstances.

There are times as a leader when you know something is going on with a direct report that is pulling down their productivity but you are not at liberty to share the information nor it is really not at the threshold point of some sort of company intervention. You might know your employee needs help, but your options are limited because in this set of circumstances, stepping in would be highly inappropriate. Here are some examples of situations to use a Trip and Fall:

Employee Adam’s uncle has died. Adam has disclosed this to you, his boss, and says that while he was not raised by his uncle, he’s taking the loss hard and it’s hard for him to concentrate on his work at hand. By this disclosure, you know you cannot grant bereavement leave to Adam, but this also seems like information that you’ll leave up to Adam to disclose to his workmates; it is not your information to share.You are detecting that Adam is struggling at work.

Employee Betty recently sat in a company-wide meeting and heard an announcement that she took very hard; she yelled in the hallway outside the meeting afterwards, stating how badly this was going to go for everyone. Betty seems frustrated and disillusioned. You depend on Betty for some of your toughest work problems and you start to detect that if Betty doesn’t find a way through her frustration, she will contemplate leaving this job.

In both of these scenarios, I’ve shown that you have detected an impact on the employee’s performance and a heartless boss would simply calculate the productivity has dropped. A thoughtful boss would realize that the situation has impacted the employee BUT it has not reached the level– at all- of a negative mark on a performance evaluation. Said another way, the employee has done nothing wrong. The employee is just having a bad moment.

So there are things you can do as a boss covertly that will not bring attention to this employee, like shuffle easier duties in their direction, give them an afternoon off with no pull on their vacation hours (I phrase that as “Take the afternoon off. Go get a cup of coffee…2 hours away.” Hence, I’m showing that I want them REALLY out of the office, not thinking about work under the guise of being off) or stop any really bad work situations from rolling their way for a little while.

But the key characteristic of the situation where you would use a Trip And Fall is that it is a situation where it would be INAPPROPRIATE for a boss to step in and directly try to fix something. Said another way, the boss is not the fix.

Here is an example of that:

Let’s say there is a terrible boss. He’s demanding, micromanaging, and threatening. Friday at the end of work, a small group of employees walk out and the boss overhears the Happy Hour at Smokies Bar phrase. So the terrible boss decides that in order to do some back slapping, joke-telling, ha-yuck type of encouragement of his team, he’ll drop at the Bar. He does. What happens next? The employees are immediately uncomfortable– they went there to vent–in this case, specifically about him– and their privacy is invaded. It’s weird. So they try their best to finish their drinks and get out of there. Happy Hour was ruined and the boss was way out of line.

So let’s go back to Employee Adam and his grieving. You know it is impacting Adam and you are doing what you can for a few days to shuffle hard work away from him. But to do a Trip And Fall, you find someone at Adam’s same power level. You do not want Adam’s Best Friend At Work, but you still want a Friend.

Same power level is very important. A Trip And Fall won’t work if there is any power discrepancy. Remember that power level does not necessarily mean the same team or same job title. It just means someone who has NO direct power tie to Adam, it is a true co-worker (or equal worker) to Adam.

So you call Dave. You need to make this request BRIEF and NON-Qualifying. That means, don’t “infect” Dave with what you specifically want to happen, just set up the conditions.

“Hi Dave, I need a Trip and Fall with Adam. A family member passed away 2 days ago and Adam’s having a hard time. Could you call him and just be his friend for a few minutes? Yes? OK. Thanks. Oh, and no need to tell me how it goes. Thank you.”

See that was VERY quick and I already preloaded this much– to “be his friend.” But the point is that Adam needs to —at least initially— think that Dave has honestly just tripped and fell into contacting Adam so while he’s there…they might as well chat.

Now, now. I can hear you accusers saying right here “I knew it! This is a method of deception! You are asking your employees to lie! You are asking them to “pretend” to reach out to Adam by a “pretend mistake” and then “buddy up” with them. You are doing this to get more information or worse, to simply increase productivity!!”

OK, yup, I am doing this to increase productivity. But it’s Adam’s welfare that I’m worried about and his productivity WILL increase when he feels better at work. And much larger than that, these little problems can stack up and become bigger problems–that lead to things like Adam not having a job and Adam not working on my team. These are “bigger” than the problem of how I got Dave to call Adam.

Besides, my team started to learn that I would call for “Trip And Falls” so much that they knew I did it. I never hid the fact that engineered interactions around my team. So it’s not deception if it’s wide open to see.

What happens next is that a same-power-level employee like Dave can give Adam the space he needs to talk about whatever he wants–indeed, they might not talk about the uncle at all and that’s fine. The point is that Adam needs a friend and Dave is there for him with NO STRINGS ATTACHED. Nothing is on the line.

It’s the digital equivalent of taking a coworker out for a beer. It’s a safe space where they can talk, free of judgment from someone who has the power of a job or no-job over them. That’s why bosses cannot do this. They have too much power. And all the time, bosses use employee weak spots to manipulate employees into joblessness.

So when you want to keep your team and when you want to help them recover, try a Trip And Fall.

December 9, 2021
Measuring Remote Team Productivity or When It All Goes Wrong Part 5 of 5 Keeping work in its place
This is the fifth and final article in a series about keeping work in its place.
As a reminder: emails are equivalent to messaging and I’m specifically
referring to work situations involving remote teachers and students in
educational contexts.

This last article is a grab bag of smaller stories to wrap up my topic of Keeping Work In Its Place. I’ll prime you where we are going so that you can keep up.

Measuring Remote Team Productivity is about using spreadsheets to discover the chilling truth that remote workers tend to over work, not under work.

Take a Chill Pill is about directing students to be responsible unto themselves. It’s not a sin.

Slow Down Responding To Students
is about supporting and backing up remote teachers so that if they do
not answer a message, there is a support system filling in the whys and
hows.

What Happens When It All Goes Wrong is
Heather’s own story of checking email during a vacation, that lead to
the direst of consequences. What was lost was more important than a job.

Education Is An Insatiable Monster –
I’ve been tagging these articles with this phrase all along. It’s the
unpleasant underbelly of the education profession. I’ll explain what the
problem is. Spoiler alert: I don’t have a tidy solution.

Measuring Remote Team Productivity

For this story, I have to go backwards in time quite a bit and then forward in time.

Many
years ago, when I was within my first few years of working full time
remotely, the university I worked for started a data collection effort.
We had to fill in spreadsheets of every work activity we did down to
the 5-minute increment. To which, smarmy Heather asked her boss if she
could create a category for her time called Filling in the Damn
Spreadsheet. My good-hearted boss said yes.

What predicated this
census of remote activity was a long-standing belief (that has NEVER
GONE AWAY) that remote workers are lazy and don’t actually work if they
can help it. Human Resources had reported that remote workers were not
taking time off. Bosses put their suspicions and the HR data together
and said “Ah ha! Everyone is out there relaxing. They are not working
at all! They are eating bon-bons, sitting in the sunshine and answering
an email or two once in a while! That explains why our success rate
never rises!”

So we filled out the spreadsheets for weeks and sent them in.

The results chilled our bosses to their bones. It didn’t surprise us remote workers at all.

Folks were actually overworking.

Anyone who was scheduled for an 8 hour day was actually working 10 hours.

Anyone who was scheduled for a 10 hour day was actually working closer to 12 hours.

The reason no one was taking leave was because we felt like we could not take leave.
The punishment, in terms of catching up on or worse, student loss, was
too devastating to risk. So folks worked all the time; we worked
through holidays, sicknesses, everything. There were many times when
folks were ON WORK TRIPS doing work right in front of the university and
folks would have their laptop open, typing away on emails during
training sessions. When asked why, the answer was “If I don’t answer
these emails now, I’ll never catch up.”

Take a chill pill

One
time when I was on one of these work trips, I was caught by one of my
colleagues walking down the street, literally with my hands in my
pockets looking like the embodiment of relaxation. She said “Why do you
look so different to everyone else here, who is basically panicking?” I
said “Because I told my students to shut up.”

Now…I actually did
say that to her, my colleague, because that language was acceptable with
her. But I didn’t say “shut up” to my students. I professionally
informed them that I would be traveling for work and that for a few
days, they would have to make do on their own. Translation: Find your
own ISBN number for the Chemistry textbook!

And I lived.

Did I mention I earned a 100% satisfaction rating from my students?

The
end of that story is that 3 hours a day of emails was, in my experience
for that job, normal. I was not going to budge on that. And I was NOT
going to suspect my faculty, once I became a manager, of being lazy.

Slow Down Responding to Students

We
had an expectation to answer student emails within 4 working hours of
receiving the email. Most of the time, we hit that metric ‘with bells
on’ but I never cracked down on my team on that metric. I would hold
them back when an email was from an –ahem– upset (that’s a very kind
word) student. I told them, “If anyone asks, I’m taking responsibility
for you not answering that email today. I’m specifically asking you to
NOT answer that email today.”

Why?

I have learned from personal experience that

the email you write tomorrow will always be better than the email you write today.

Why is that?

Forgiveness.
I had learned that with time (an overnight, often) I could be much
kinder and forgiving of my students. I could answer better. I might
have thought of more solutions.

So as a boss, I’d ask my faculty
to put on forgiveness “like a shirt.” I said “You don’t have to mean it,
but I want you to truly try this. You have to be authentically looking
at this problem from the student’s perspective” (aka remember the days
YOU struggled in college). Many times, a student was simply being
difficult because they felt that they were hurt by us first. It was a tit-for-tat war breaking out. But we could stop it.

Even
if a student was wrong in every possible way, we could find forgiveness
for them. My favorite line was “No one wanted this to happen to you”
because it was true! We didn’t want our students to have difficulties!
Starting with that acknowledgement and pouring forgiveness on the
student solved many problems. (To be clear, you can forgive a student
even if the student is totally in the wrong. This isn’t about being
dumb, it’s about being hyper-aware of their perspective. This is active
listening, in other words, in action. You listen, but you don’t necessarily agree.)

The
most common response after we had composed a kind, understanding email
was “Oh thank you! I was so upset! I’m sorry. It’s just been so hard to
go to college with…” and you’d get the backstory. I was amazed at the
backstories that had nothing to do with the problem at hand but you’d
learn that the student was facing some unimaginable obstacles.

Adding
in time and forgiveness meant that a great deal of student issues never
had to go past me and go to my bosses. Problem solved.

(P.S. If
you’d like more tips on what to say to slow down to responding to
students or how to craft off-hours email coverage – ask me!)

What Happens When It All Goes Wrong

OK,
what happens when Heather doesn’t follow her own advice? What happens
when she checks email on her day off, in the middle of a vacation? She
worked when she should not have been working.

Oh, it got ugly fast.

I
can’t remember the impetus but I checked my email on a Monday in the
middle of my annual birthday week off. I must have been thinking “Oh, I
need to check on this other issue something-or-other.”

To my
horror, there in my inbox was notification that a major accreditor of
our coursework was pulling accreditation because they didn’t find one of
my courses to be rigorous enough. If we lost that accreditation, I’d
lose faculty immediately because about ¼ of the university would close. I
sat there, tears welling in my eyes thinking “Oh my God, what are we
going to do?” I saw others on the email thread. So somehow, I shut down
my computer, gulped back my tears, and hoped that if it was necessary
for me to come into work from vacation, my boss would let me know. But
it was Monday and I would not be back at work for 8 more days. There was
plenty of time for the worst to happen. With me out, around 4 of my
faculty could be unceremoniously fired before I came back.

I worried every minute of the next 8 days. Vacation destroyed.

When
I came back into work and started reading through my emails, I found
out what happened. One person on the thread had replied, “Hey, I know
the chief accreditor. I’ll give them a call.” So the accreditor was
called. The rigor of my course was explained. A little back room “Hey,
it’s all good, whatcha gettin worked up about” conversation and problem
solved.

No one was fired.

No one was dumped.

But I lost my vacation. All because I checked my email when I wasn’t supposed to.

So
I share this story because I know plenty of folks are going to counter
this Keep Work In Its Place series with comments like “It’s all fine and
good to say, but in real life…..[dire situation/consequences]” or
“These actions put people’s jobs on the line!” or “You will be accused
of not helping students!” I wanted to show you that I’ve walked the line
of ‘everything being on the table’….everything… my job, others’ jobs,
students’ success and students’ failures. Through it all, the better
decision was to preserve myself to fight another day. Work when you are
at work. Don’t work when you are not at work.

It can be considered
a numbers game and I hope you’ve seen that through my stories. When one
teacher or instructor or faculty member is saved from burnout or
overworking, they go on to help 10, 100, or thousands of students in
their teaching lifetime. But when I lose one student, I have thousands
to replace that one. Sorry!! I know that’s REALLY hard to read,
really. But you have to know where to invest if you have limited
resources and unlimited demand, which is what online education is.

Education is an Insatiable Monster

I
used to subscribe to the idea that I had joined a noble profession,
education. Education is ‘the gift that cannot be ungiven’. Oo, that
was my favorite.

But then one day I read that Education is an Insatiable Monster
and I paused to really think. The article is about building buildings
and then recruiting students. Then building buildings and recruiting
more students. It’s a geographical, place-based problem that puts
universities in a cycle that never stops eating; it is insatiable. No
one stops it.

Philosophically,
education is a field in humanity where we never argue that one has had
‘enough.’ When does one have enough? I’ve heard medical suicide
patients claim on their last day of life that they learned something
new! When do you reach ‘enough’ learning?? No one ever argues AGAINST
learning.

Translated to online learning, how can teachers, then, argue against:
- answering that parent’s text question?
- answering that student email before the assignment deadline?
- being offline for a few hours or a few days? (ahem, we called those weeknights and weekends but teachers don’t get them)
When
can teachers disconnect? As I think of some major problems I know of in
education (e.g. grade inflation, rising tuition, unfair & cruel
teachers, institutionalized racism), they point back to this central
force; education never gets enough. Even today, people on both sides of
the COVID-19 vaccination debate think that the other side simply has not learned enough!

That
is not to say that Education is wrong and we need to stop it. It just
means that we need to be vigilant and watch out for problems. Overworking –now, in this remote teaching world– is one of those significant problems.

Keep work in its place.

This was the article that started this series: Defending a Teacher’s Right To Disconnect.

Article 1 I am the woman who did not check her email and lived.

Article 2: You replied too quickly!

Article 3: I’m going camping!

Article 4: 6 Days A Week

Now turn off LinkedIn for awhile. Go look at some nature. We’ll be here when you get back.

#KeepWorkInItsPlace #RemoteWork #TimeManagement #SelfControl #EducationIsAnInsatiableMonster

This article was originally posted to LinkedIn on October 7, 2021.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/measuring-remote-team-productivity-when-all-goes-wrong-heather-dodds/
November 12, 2021
6 Days A Week – Part 4 of 5 Keeping work in its place
This is the fourth article in a series about keeping work in its place.
As a reminder: emails are equivalent to messaging and I’m specifically
referring to work situations involving remote teachers and students in
educational contexts.

I wish this story had a happy ending. But it
doesn’t. This was a direct report of mine that did spectacular work.
She was a gem of an instructor; I’ll call her Gem for this story. She
gave me great feedback that I implemented with other hires.

But I lost her. I lost her to burnout.

Very
early on in the hiring process, I made sure that I emphasized that I
was hiring for 5-days-a-week schedules. I would say specifically “5
days, not 6, not 7.” Sometimes I’d meet a traditional faculty candidate
transitioning to online who would tell me that they provided their
mobile phone number to their students because —and they would always say this like they were a saint—
that way they could help the student anytime. I didn’t advance them in
the hiring process. What they thought was excellent customer service
actually told me that they didn’t have self control. Further,
they couldn’t see themselves as part of team, relinquishing control to
others, trusting others, and the environment that they were applying to
was about to go so fast and so intense, that it would eat them up.

(True
story: Once I sat in a focus group of new online faculty hires and they
reported how surprised they were with how much they felt tied to their laptops.
“Tied” was the actual word they used. The Vice President running that
focus group knew I was sitting in the group. He turned to me and asked
“Have you ever felt tied to your laptop?” “Never” I said a bit
breathlessly because I was wondering what the new hires were doing so
wrong to be “tied.” But that was because I knew how to keep work in its
place.)

So this faculty member Gem was leaving a few clues
around. First, I had hired her for a 5 days a week Monday – Friday
schedule (within those 5 days, we also asked faculty to work 10 hours that were “student-facing”
which meant that they had to be hours where students could reasonably
meet with the faculty member…this usually meant 2 evenings per week.
The other 30 hours could be at more faculty convenient times.) I saw
emails from her to her others with time stamps of Saturday or Sunday.
Later on, I became famous for my checking of time stamps…my direct
reports actually learned to use “delayed send” if they didn’t want to
get caught overworking.

I asked her about those time stamps. “Why did you feel the need to answer So-And-So on Saturday?”

“Oh, I have my laptop open on the kitchen table. So I saw the email come in and I wanted to help her.”

‘Laptop on the kitchen table’ told me that:

She
wasn’t always working from a space that encouraged professional
behavior. We firmly asked employees to provide “dedicated home office
space” that reflected a professional atmosphere with our students.
#NoBedsInTheBackgroundPlease Even though she obviously was not on
camera to answer an email, she didn’t separate work from home.

Working
from a non-ergonomically planned space could bring on problems like
carpal tunnel syndrome or back pain. When you don’t work at a desk, I
worry about a compensation claim.

I was already worried.

“I’d
prefer if you don’t check email when you are not at work. While I
appreciate your dedication to our students, this probably could have
waited.”

A few more months went by. I see the timestamp problem
again and it is discussed around the team. I had another private
conversation with her.

“I need you to work when you are supposed to be working. I need you to not work when you are not supposed to be working.
It’s very important that you get rest and get away from work because
then, when you come back to work, you are happier, more productive, and
can help more students.”

Her response– a peel of laughter–the ‘mad scientist’ kind. She said:

“You don’t understand!

I like helping students!”

Uh-oh. I was up against the “what could ever be wrong with helping a student?” argument. It was the #EducationIsAnInsatiableMonster rearing its head.

I
said “I’m very serious. When you work on your days off, I get very
concerned. The next stop on this train is burnout. At burnout, you help no students.”

She
ignored me and kept going. I started trying to figure out how to word
this problem for her written performance review. I’d given her two
verbal warnings so it was time to up my rhetoric.

It ends up, I didn’t have to.

She called me one day. She said “I’m resigning.”

Stunned, I said “Why?”

She answered, “Because I want to spend more time with my daughters.”

I screamed into the phone, “That’s funny, because I wanted you to spend more time with your daughters too. Only, I wanted to PAY you to do that. And I wanted you to be able to tell your daughters that Mommy is a Full Professor. Now you won’t!”

No, I didn’t scream that into the phone.

I
accepted her resignation and wished her well. But ever since that day,
I’ve known…she never learned the lesson I was trying to teach. She
burned herself out. She’ll do it to herself again in other jobs.

If you like my article series, you might want to check this out: You are not your job: Writer Arthur Brooks on why careers shouldn’t dictate your identity

This was the article that started this series: Defending a Teacher’s Right To Disconnect.

Article 1 I am the woman who did not check her email and lived.

Article 2: You replied too quickly!

Article 3: I’m going camping!

Article 5 will be: Measuring Remote Team Productivity or What Happens When It All Goes Wrong

#KeepWorkInItsPlace
#RemoteWork #TimeManagement #SelfControl
#EducationIsAnInsatiableMonster #Working6DaysAWeek #Leadership #Success
#Failure #Management #Email #Burnout
This article originally posted to LinkedIn on October 7, 2021
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/6-days-week-heather-dodds/
November 12, 2021
I’m going camping! Part 3 of 5 Keeping work in its place
This is the third article in a series about keeping work in its place. As a reminder: emails are equivalent to messaging and I’m specifically referring to work situations involving remote teachers and students in educational contexts.

My first story about overworking starts with a colleague; she was not a direct report of mine when this story started. She was a brand new employee and loved the idea of remote full time work! I was tasked with talking with her about her planned schedule. What was she going to be her work schedule?

“I’m going camping!” she said excitedly. She proceeded to tell me her planned schedule.

She was going to work Monday through Friday but leave by noon on Fridays. It was going to be great because she loved to go camping with her husband. She was going to stop work at 12 p.m. (noon) on Friday, pack up the gear, and head out to the wilderness ahead of the Friday rush-hour traffic and be sitting at the campsite sipping a cold beer when the rest of the world was stuck in bumper to bumper traffic.

“Oh, that does sound fun” I said.

Then she’s going to relax and probably hike on Saturdays, have another great big camping dinner. On Sunday morning, it will be a sleep-in and then slowly break camp for the afternoon drive back home, throw a load of laundry in the washing machine, and she’ll boot up her work laptop that evening “Just to clear some emails.”

Uh-oh. I could see it coming.

I can do the math. That was 6 days a week of work. Well, 6 days of the week containing work. I knew that would not be enough time off.

I tried to talk her out of the Sunday evening email check. “Just plan to spent an extra hour on Monday or Tuesday catching up…don’t open that laptop on Sunday.” I advised as her teammate.

“No,” she said, “I’ll be fine, this will be great!”

She lasted 3 weeks.

Then she burnt out.

Tearfully, she told me she could not keep that schedule anymore.

I asked her, “What happened?”

Well, it ended up that she’d work on Friday morning–all morning. Then noon would come…and go…and she’s still be working because emails she was sending out or work she was getting done was coming back in to her in the form of counter-questions or just…more emails. It wouldn’t stop! She felt bad for not helping the next email…and the next…and the next. 1 p.m. would come and go. Then 2 p.m. Then at 3 p.m. her husband who had managed to get out of work early for a Friday walked in the door to her home office and said “Why isn’t the packing done? We need to leave now or there will be traffic!” and they wouldn’t leave because it was hard for her to shut that laptop down. Finally, in a fit, she’d slam the laptop lid shut and they’d get the campsite late, after having been stuck in traffic, have an unhappy dinner and try to “relax.”

So much for leaving work early.

By Sunday morning, she’d start thinking about those emails again. They were at home, waiting for her on that laptop. Even though the morning was supposed to be leisurely, she’d have that work in the back of her mind. Gotta get home. Gotta get on the Internet. Gotta answer emails.
She’d get home, open the laptop and sure enough, there was a bunch of emails and she’d work at them. 2 planned hours might creep up to 3 or 4 hours but finally at some point, her Inbox would grow quiet, she’d caught up on everything and she’d go to bed knowing that, at least, there would not be a mountain of emails on Monday morning.

But then Monday morning would come. And she was wrong. This was the part of the story that I can personally attest to. Because, while she was working in Pacific time zone as my colleague, I was working in Eastern time zone and no matter how much she “worked ahead” on Sunday night, I had a 3 hour head start on her on Monday and I’d start going through my emails –which meant I was pumping emails into her Inbox for 3 hours before she even booted up. That meant, she’d open her laptop at 8 a.m. Pacific and there would be more emails…piled up…demanding her attention. These emails didn’t exist until the east coast came online. But now they do.

No such thing as “clear her emails.”

Three straight weeks of this had pummeled her mental attention. She couldn’t keep up. She was getting no true rest and the work just kept coming.

True story: I measured my own Inbox in this job. It averaged over 1 email per hour for every hour. EVERY HOUR. EVERY HOUR EVER. So a weekend that is 64 hours of not working between 4 p.m. Friday and 8 a.m. Monday meant a normal inbox after a weekend of 100+ unread emails (adding in occasional replies, newsletters, and automated receipt emails).

I became her boss later after this story. I remembered her struggles. And as her boss, I worked on 3 things to help her:

1) Turn on the Out of Office (OOO) Message the night before leaving work. This made her planned 4 hours of work on Friday morning much easier on her because she knew that anyone emailing her after she went offline on Thursday evening was getting warned that she might not respond. So this trick looks like it helped her students, but truly, it helped her mindset. She had a backup plan now.

Later on, this would become a standing rule on my team:
- Turn on your Out of Office Message 4 working hours BEFORE you go out of the office.
- Vacation or Holiday Reminders (blurbs at the bottom of emails) go up as early as 2 weeks before the event.
Let’s be real folks. Readers don’t read or necessarily follow these OOOs. These are tricks that help the sender, not the reader.

2) I asked her to bundle up any remaining emails that she could not address by 11:45 a.m. on Friday morning and send them to me. I would answer them or re-allocate them. Period. Said another way, I’d do her work to help get her out of the office. Now this is not a “I’ll fall on the sword for you!” behavior. I was literally working LONGER on Friday than her with my Eastern US hours. If she had any, I was getting them at 2:45 p.m. Eastern. Easy peasy to incorporate into my remaining day. I could pick up the slack. I had the ability so it was easy for me to step in and take this.

3) I begged her to NOT check those emails on Sunday night. I showed her my stats: the emails come in whether you read them or not. So don’t read them. Make all of Sunday a day off. (It’s really hard for people to understand that true rest brings on GREATER productivity when at work. She could literally answer more emails and answer better on Monday if she didn’t read any emails on Sunday.) This took work for her to implement and I was never quite sure she engaged this tip. Later on, the team built a robust weekend coverage system and she shuttled her clients to the weekend coverage team rather than just pop in to check email.

One more time for those in the back:

You do better work at 40 hours per week than at 45, 50, 60, or 80 hours per week.

Got a problem with that? Talk with your boss. They are responsible for you hitting 40 hours. If you can’t hit that, the boss needs to change things. If they can’t change things for you (and you’ve tried yourself), find another job.

Lessons of this story:

If you do work on a day, it’s a work day.

Yes, I feel like this is a line from a children’s book. Why do I have to go back to children’s book language to make my point? Because we have bastardized work to the point that doing work from your smartphone is not only considered OK, it’s cool.

I’m telling you, it’s not. To me, you look like a person with low self-control.

Just yesterday, I heard an interviewee on a radio show encourage listeners to Keep the Sabbath, regardless of your faith or day of the week. The idea was take a day off. Even better take 2, they’re small.

Email and messaging for work is work.

Remote working blurs the lines between what and where messaging is “for work.” But just like drunk Facebooking is a thing that we discourage friends from doing, so is emailing or messaging for work purposes from a non-work-as-defined location/device/time.

Remember that work messages sent via your smartphone gives your workplace the rights to examine, load apps on, and monitor your phone.

Doubt me? Read your university’s tech policy. I used to edit these policies. I guarantee it has fine print that says that any device “accessing” educational systems is reached out and encompassed by the educational technology security policy.

That means your smartphone.

Load on a keylogger without your permission? Yup.

Screen capture what you see? Yup.

Search through your photos and files. Yup.

Value your privacy? Don’t do work outside of work devices/locations/times. (P.S. Not to weird you out more, but the same policy exists at libraries and commercial locations that loan out “free wi-fi!”)

Humans are not robots.

We are not allocated a certain number of work hours and life and then we deserve retirement. Some of the most successful, happily retired CEOs report that they ‘figured out’ work once they knew how to hit 40 hours a week. That’s successful people. They don’t say “Hey, I worked 60 hours a week for a couple of decades and then I earned early retirement, wahoo!” Nope. They arrived at happiness when they knew how to keep work in its place.

Keep work in its place.

Since OOOs are for you and not for them, write one you like.

This is Heather’s top favorite:

I meant to do my work today—
   But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,
And a butterfly flitted across the field,
   And all the leaves were calling me.

And the wind went sighing over the land,
   Tossing the grasses to and fro,
And a rainbow held out its shining hand—
   So what could I do but laugh and go?

~Richard Le Gallienne

Needs some creative OOOs? Try 18 Funny Out-of-Office Messages to Inspire Your Own [+ Templates] I like this one.

This was the article that started this series: Defending a Teacher’s Right To Disconnect.

Article 1 I am the woman who did not check her email and lived.

Article 2: You replied too quickly!

Article 4: 6 Days A Week

Article 5: Measuring Remote Team Productivity or When It All Goes Wrong

#KeepWorkInItsPlace #RemoteWork #TimeManagement #SelfControl #EducationIsAnInsatiableMonster #Working6DaysAWeek #Leadership #Success #Failure #Management #Email #OutOfOffice #LeavingWorkEarly

This article originally posted on LinkedIn on October 6, 2021.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/im-going-camping-heather-dodds/
November 12, 2021
You replied too quickly! Part 2 of 5 Keeping work in its place
This is the second article in a series about keeping work in its place.

I
distinctly remember crossing the point in my life where a boss answered
an email of mine in less than 5 minutes. I had sent a difficult
question.

I stepped back from my computer.

Uh-oh. Hallmark of a bad decision.

I’ve
seen them before; bosses who give you the quick, flippant answer and
act annoyed that you asked such a simple question. I’ve found myself 6
months later with that same flippant boss, after massive problems, with
him looking at me and pleadingly “Why did we decide to do it that way?”

Heather learned that day to note why a boss decided what they did.

Difficult
decisions made quickly is the recipe for a bad decision. When I had my
uh-oh moment, I was mid-level management. So that means that I had
individual contributors/direct reports that worked on my team and then I
worked on a team of managers with my boss. As such, I was a filter. I passed communication both ways but not all of the communication.

I
stop problems that do not need to be escalated. The system is designed
that each level stops 90% of the problems and only the toughest 10% of
problems that are escalated to the next higher level.

For example,
my Individual Contributors were faculty (READ: teachers) and they
stopped 90% of the problems with students (unfair grading, exams too
difficult, extension of deadlines). But the toughest 10% of their
problems should be passed to me as their boss. I go to work on those
problems. The toughest 10% of my problems go to my boss. As such, the
upper echelons of an organization should be tasked with working on the
very toughest of problems. They should not be “in the weeds” with
trivial problems. If leadership is too caught up with small issues,
something is wrong with their focus.

OK, back to the story. I actually wrote him back. “How dare you answer me so quickly? You haven’t thought about this long enough. You can’t handle the truth!”*

(*Not my actual email, but for sure my thoughts.)

It
sounds trite but I don’t ask my bosses easy questions. If it was easy,
I’d have figured it out myself. I send my bosses hard questions. They
need to take time to think about it, to consider, to weigh the pros and
cons to the decision. If I’m going to put their decision into play, I
need to defend it. I need to know that the strengths and weaknesses
have been acknowledged and a decision was still made. (Side note: FYI:
that’s the hallmark of a good judicial decision. There needs to be
evidence of a consideration of multiple opposing viewpoints. There is a
reason that we listen to “dissenting opinions”. Judges WILL TOSS OUT
decisions that appear frivolous and flippant.)

I would go on to
use email response time to judge every boss I’ve had since. Too fast
equals bad. If you are slow with communication, I could be impressed. But I’m not done observing.

I have 1,000 unread emails in my inbox

What
if you are a boss that takes so long to reply that you have 1,000
unread emails in your inbox? You might want to stop reading now because
I’m about to get rough. But if you are a leader-wannabe, read on.

First,
if you have any email inbox with 1,000 unread messages, you should be
immediately removed from any position of leadership and demoted to Individual Contributor.

WHOA!

Why?

Because when we see people hurting others, we first isolate them to stop the damage.

If there are that many unread emails and people depend on you, you are hurting them.

You are hurting your direct reports/individual contributors who have emails in that pile that:
- update you on projects,
- ask for you opinion on what to do in a situation,
- ask for you to escalate some feedback.
You probably have emails from your bosses that:
- Point to the organizational vision,
- Ask for your response by a (now past) deadline,
- Update you on an expected project.
Here is the problem, though. It’s not the content inside those 1,000 emails now that bothers me. It is that you didn’t care to manage your email better.

At work, we use a nice term, time management. But time management is, essentially, self-control.

Get some. Use it.

Role up your sleeves and make some hard decisions. Every time I have found someone with this many unread messages, there is a self-control problem. Yes, even you Miss But I’m So Important That I Must Read Every Email.

Newsletters/Auto senders

Unsubscribe.

Oh, but Heather, I route those into a junk email, so it’s OK.

No it’s not. Because…on whose time are you checking your junk email?

Work time? Nope. I will not support that. I’ve looked at the content and that newsletter is not that important.

On
your time? No. Not a good idea. You are seriously going to peel off
some dedicated down time to do “quasi-work”. That indicates a problem
with priorities. You cannot figure out the difference between work and
non-work. You cannot decide what is important so you are making all of
it all important. It is not all important. What is important is so
narrow, you should be relieved to find it.

No one ever states that reading their own junk email account is satisfying. Stop it. Unsubscribe.

But I found that one piece so information, so I can’t read/sort/delete!

Wrong.

Treating your email inbox like buried treasure is wrong.

Emails
and messengers are communication devices, not libraries or vaults.
Communication is meant to eventually cause action within a brief period
of time. So each incoming email is asking you to do something. When you
haven’t read or deleted the email, you have not done any action.

Those actions can be:
1. Think about it and give them an answer.
2. Delete.
3. Re-route information to another location (calendar, files, etc.)
Email
& messaging software is cluing into this and starting to link your
email’s information to its proper place. For example: Notice how your
flight itinerary becomes a calendar item within the Google ecosystem?
That’s good. It should go there. The moral of the story here is that the
correct data goes into the correct channel.

Still
think that email newsletter is “too precious” because some little
nugget comes along once in a great while? Go to the source. If that
information is so precious, the source should be archiving it in a
searchable way. If the information is not archived, the information is
not so precious. Get it OUT of your email.

But wait, I really do get 1,000 emails a day

What
if you are a boss that has an email account publicly advertised (like a
company president) and you get TONS of legitimate emails so there
actually are this many unread emails in your inbox?

Please. Hire
someone to read and answer emails for you. No company president worth
their salt thinks that ignoring their internal and external clients is
good business.

I don’t trust someone else to be in my work email inbox

Puh-lease.
It’s work email. Don’t you know every boss and IT person is in there?
Sit up straight with your work messaging. Don’t want me to see it?
Don’t do it. Easy peasy.

Leaders: What you say and how fast you
say it reflects on you as a leader. Take more time to answer an email.
More time = allowing wisdom to kick in.

It is always OK to respond initially with:
- I need to think about this some more.
- I’m asking someone else for advice what to do.
- I have to search the Jedi Archives.
Managing your messaging is part of your self-control.

Next article will be: I’m Going Camping!

Article 1 was I am the woman who did not check her email and lived.

Article 3: I’m Going Camping

Article 4: 6 Days A Week

Article 5: Measuring Remote Team Productivity or When It All Goes Wrong

And this was the article that started this series: Defending a Teacher’s Right To Disconnect.

#KeepWorkInItsPlace #RemoteWork #TimeManagement #SelfControl #EducationIsAnInsatiableMonster

This article originally posted to LinkedIn on September 30, 2021.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-replied-too-quickly-heather-dodds
November 11, 2021
I am the woman who did not check her email…and lived. Part 1 of 5 Keeping Work In Its Place
I remember my first job with a company-assigned email
account. I was working as a research librarian. One day, I was in the
book stacks of the library and I heard bing!

“Oh! Email! I’ll go see!”

I
climbed down the ladder. I thought to myself “Oh how exciting! I have
an email account and something must be important. My workplace values
me!” I went over to my computer to read the email.

“The back parking lot will be paved Friday. Park somewhere else.”

Oh, well, OK, I’ll try to remember that.

Back to the stacks.

A few minutes later, I’m moving around these huge scientific journal volumes, breaking a sweat, and I hear…bing!

“Oh! Email! I’ll go see!”

Down the ladder again and over to my computer.

“Fridge cleaning is tomorrow for the second floor. Any food still there is getting thrown out.”

Oh. I don’t use the 2nd floor fridges.

I went back to the stacks.

The 3rd bing I didn’t leave the ladder.

And I lived.

I am the woman who did not check her email and lived.

This article prompted me to write this, Defending a Teacher’s Right To Disconnect,
but I’m writing much more broadly…to everyone tethered to our digital
realities and everywhere I talk about email, I do include messengers,
WhatsApps, Discord 1:1s, and all forms of push notifications. I’m also
going to write stories as I get much more interaction with stories than
facts.

After that refusing-to-climb-down-the-ladder again moment, I have had a few more moments to shape my philosophy about keeping work in its proper place.
So these series of articles will cover emails, working 5 days a week,
trust, and forgiveness. We’ll talk about fear, worst case scenarios,
and the dread of education. Lots to cover! Here we go!

When I had my first job with an assigned laptop,
I saw the little pop-up when a new email arrived. I also heard that
bing again…my old nemesis. Given that I had witnessed how personally
embarrassing it is to read someone else’s email when they are
screen sharing, I realized that those notifications were distractions,
not helpers. Those notifications and that bing were the first things
that I turned OFF on that laptop.

Lesson 1: Urgent Does Not Equal Important

Around
this time, I also started reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective
People. True disclosure: I only got to Habit 4. I’ll admit that I’m
not that highly effective.

But I remember the huge impact of
learning to separate urgent from important. The Navy actually taught
this tip in a very literal way to naval families. Before we went through
our first deployment (families with a the service member out to sea for
6 months), the Navy offered personal safety training. One tip they gave
us was:

When the doorbell rings, don’t open the door. Talk through it.

They explained that generations of Americans were taught by our parents to open to the door to
people on the other side. Counter to that, the Navy taught that you
don’t have to open the door…and actually don’t open the door. That’s
where your problems will begin. No salesperson or attacker can do a thing to you from the other side of a locked door. Think it’s impolite? It will be perceived that way, yes. Too bad. The good guys won’t mind, they’ll get over it. You have to get over the feeling of not opening the door. It’s better to be perceived as impolite than to explain to the State Trooper how you opened the door to your attacker.

So
all kinds of signals that we take as urgent: ringing phone, doorbell,
ding of email, etc. need to be re-assessed. Incoming signals can be
re-categorized. Urgent is not the same thing as important. Many urgent things can be completely put off to a later time, a different format, or re-categorized as not important at all.
- Ringing phones become voice mails.
- Doorbells become ‘they’ll come back later’.
- Email dings keep the email as unread in your inbox.
You reallocate them from Category 1 (Urgent/Important) to Category 3 (Urgent/Not Important) where those items belong.
Kitchen fires and crying babies, should, of course, be addressed.

By
the way, I have worked with many parents who at this moment have pushed
back on my leadership where I have encouraged them to turn the ringer
down or off or to not answer a ringing phone because “It might be my
kid.” I respect this concern but I realize it comes with 2 caveats:

1)
It is assumed that the child does have a way of communicating via phone
back to the parent (not all children have access to a phone and some
children are too young to use one).

2) It assumes that the message
from the child to the parent is of a dire nature. Not all
child-to-parent messages are of this type. Actually, very few are.

So I have a response for you!

#1.
Caller ID. You are free to glance at your phone and see who is calling
you. Caller ID lets you allocate the incoming “urgent” information
where it belongs. If you’d like to stop work to tend to your children,
you won’t get any complaints from me. Actually, if you work to
distraction and don’t pay attention to your kids, you will get in
trouble with me, but that conversation is for another time.

#2
Children did and have survived generations without phones. Sorry, it’s
just true. Just because we have phones doesn’t mean they dominate our
lives. I once witnessed a 70 year old father hustle to pick up the phone
because he thought his 40 year old son might be calling.

Yeah.

That father needs a break. Seriously.

So
the moral of the story is to remember that data does not arrive without
meaning. We ascribe it meaning. If you treat your messenger, email,
ringing phone, or ringing doorbell as all-important in your life, it
will be. It has become your god.

If you re-ascribe it to a place of “I will pay attention to you when I choose to do so”, you will have started to tame to monster.

My next 4 articles in this series that I will come back and link here will be:

Article 2: You Replied Too Quickly!

Article 3: I’m Going Camping

Article 4: 6 Days A Week

Article 5: Measuring Remote Team Productivity or When It All Goes Wrong

#KeepWorkInItsPlace
#RemoteWork #TimeManagement #SelfControl
#UrgentIsNotTheSameAsImportant #7Habits #StephenCovey
#TurnOffYourEmailNotifications #TeachersAreNotAlwaysOn
#EducationIsAMonster

This article originally posted to LinkedIn on September 27, 2021
November 11, 2021
How to Lead a Remote Team in Crisis
Photo by Joshua Balsamo on Unsplash
It occurs to me that many managers, team leaders, and
administrators have not only been thrust into remote team management for
their first time ever in the past two weeks, but it is starting to
occur to everyone that our teams are in crisis.

Indeed,
how could they not be? Unemployment claims have skyrocketed. Companies
are about to pull back hard on budgets and that means that even employed
people are starting to fear for their jobs. Our colleagues in both the
medical and remote education fields find themselves with a
now-never-ending onslaught of work in a war zone.

More than ever
before, leaders are going to be without the body language cues that they
used to gauge how well the team is doing. Due to social distancing and
mandatory work restriction orders, leaders cannot sail into the office
with bagels on Fridays and hope that that will lift the spirits of a
struggling team; same no-go for beer-stocked fridges, snacks, or bean
bag chairs. Actually, ANYTHING physical is pointless right now.

So how do you lead teams when everyone on the team is experiencing crisis…remotely?

I have a simple, fast model for you. Here goes:

Use your standard all-team meeting time slot.

Changing the time or setting an “urgent” meeting ramps up too much stress. Don’t do it.

Make sure NO ONE ELSE but team members are present.
This is not the time to impress the boss by inviting him or her; no
visits from other teams either. Don’t worry about a few team members
that don’t attend, believe me, what happens will get out to them. This
rule of making sure no one but your direct reports are present is
inviolate. Do not break it. It is the most important one to follow.

Rehearse your talking points.

Clear the agenda…delete at least 50% of what you “need” to cover. No, you don’t.

Speak first.

Thank your team for attending.

State “I am closing the door behind us” and “This is a private space only for us.” You will be amazed what verbalizing physical actions can do to to positively impact group behavior.

Acknowledge what the current events are; what we know. Be brief.

State: “I thought it would be important to reaffirm what we believe about ourselves and what we believe about ourselves as a team.“

If you feel as though your team’s mission ties in to your company’s mission, fine. Say so. “We make masks so that our health care workers are safe.” or “As
teachers, we agreed that our first priority was taking care of our
students, nothing is more important than them. Quality, volume, and
process are secondary now.“

If you feel as though your team
mission does NOT necessarily align with the current crisis, reaffirm
your commitment to each other. TO EACH OTHER.

Give an example of when the team pulled together to help a member of the team: “Remember
when Bob needed an extra week off due to the birth of little Joey? All
of us gave an extra 4 hours that week and with that, Bob was able to
focus on Joey and not worry about the big project due. We are that same
team. We will be here for each other now and through this. “

Take
a short breath and let other members reaffirm that they can contribute
X, Y, or Z to the team. ANY contribution is a good contribution. Cut
naysayers off at the pass: this is not their day. “John, I’ll talk with you about where to get more resources right after this meeting.“

After the meeting

You cannot control what is going to happen. Team members may get sick. Family members may die. Don’t verbally avoid that possibility. You can talk gently in 1:1s about what members would need if that happened. (“Sarah’s mother is very sick. If Sarah needs to be not at work for awhile, can you run her projects?” or “I understand your Mom is sick. If you need to be out, don’t worry. We can cover everything here.“) It is more important to be real, direct, and human with your team members now than to toe the company line.

When needed, revisit the team meeting vibe with individual members saying, “When
we met as a team, we discussed our commitment to X. We agreed that we
would help each other. Also, we acknowledged that not everyone will feel
up to the job on every day. When that happens, we agreed to use the
ghost emoji in Slack and that would signal that we could use some help.
Can I post the emoji and then send over the first helper?“

Three analogies come to mind about this leadership technique and they all work:
- This is the digital version of Circling the Wagons.
- Individual soldiers that reject a war or a battle will fight for their fellow soldier.
- ‘Lashing to the mast’ signals that we will persevere through this together.
Listen to some inspirational music as you gather your thoughts.

Stay safe leaders. This too, shall pass.

#CircleTheWagons
#LashToTheMast #FightForYourFriend #Leadership #RemoteTeams
#RemoteTeamManagement #TeamsInCrisis #TeamCrisis #TeamMeeting
#WordsToSay #LeadFirst #HeartFirst #DoNotBeAfraidToSay
#WeAreAllInThisTogether #Lead #RemoteTeam #NewManagers

Updated font and removed unliked decorative photos on February 23, 2026
November 10, 2021
Grief…At A Distance

On remote teams, hold space for sadness.

I published my How to connect in remote teams post one month ago. But this post is about something ten times
more important. It’s not about celebrating and having good times with
your fellow remote workers. It is about the opposite. Of all of the twelve months of the year to pick from to really dwell on this topic, October is it; no better month than the one directly preceding Dia del Muertos or All Saints Day. We’re
decorating with black cats, skeletons, and coffins. This is the month
to acknowledge death as part of the circle of life. Depending on your
spiritual beliefs, death and loss are absolutely necessary in our
understanding of life. This article is for remote managers and it is
about the importance of holding space for grief.

(more…)

November 8, 2021
How to Connect in Remote Teams
Photo by Rémi Walle on Unsplash
In a remote job interview, I was asked, “How do you stay connected within remote teams?” I thought “How do I? Just watch me.“

I
shared two ideas in the interview*, but immediately I realized that
I’ve kept this good info inside, waiting to give it to a new remote
employer. Silly me. I’ve got to give this good stuff away. I’m like the
Grinch whose heart grew three sizes that day.

Why should I keep reading this?

First,
my credentials, because adults want to know why they should keep
reading this. What do I know about this remote online stuff anyway? I
have 15 years experience working full time online which means I was
working full time online 3 years before the iPhone existed. I’ve built
and rebuilt fully online virtual teams. I have two advanced degrees in
online work. I feel passionately about the positive future of working
remotely. Within this amazing digital nether, how do we stay connected, as humans?

As Mario says, here we go!

General ideas

Group doodle –aka Incomplete Figures (and an idea I had from Erik Wahl):
5 minutes before a meeting starts, I open a whiteboard to share. I draw
just part of basic shape (i.e. half a star, half a circle, 2/3 of a
triangle) and then invite everyone to add to the doodle while we just
chatted. I took care of scientists so invariably, every doodle ended up
with the Starship Enterprise in it somewhere.

MadLibs
– these are easy to make and most folks know the premise. Ask them for a
series of nouns, adjectives, verbs, exclamations, etc. and fill those
words into a pre-made short story. Giggles and hilarity will ensue.

Get a running joke and keep it running
– My team decided that at every point when we wondered whose “fault”
something was, we’d blame the San Andreas Fault. We had geologists, so
that joke always worked. Other jokes: I used to play Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al”
every time our network went down because it was the one song I had on
my hard drive. Secretly, I always wanted to incorporate a llama or volcano into project specs. Just to see what my team would do.

Add a llama to your next project

Crazy hat day – which is really any hat. This one is good in a pinch because everyone can find a hat.

Within Reach – Pick up an object within arms reach (being on webcam keeps this honest) and explain what it means to you.

Favorite superhero or villain and why?
Mine is The Rhino from Spiderman 1960. So what that it’s basically a
man in gray snuggie? When he is mad, he runs into things. I love the simplicity.

Old English Day.
Everyone who makes an appropriate comment using Old English can leave
the meeting 10 minutes early. It can be interesting to go 40 minutes
into an online meeting when your quiet team member appropriately uses
“thither” and you think “Wow, how long have you been holding that in?” The comments must work in context like “Let us parlay by the glowing embers of thou’st certain demise.”

Bizarro World Project.
When assigned a project that you know is truly ridiculous (and no one
else is checking), do the opposite project. My team was assigned some
training on customer service. We were spectacular at customer service.
So I had them do the opposite: create fake recordings on giving the
worst customer service possible. The recordings became the best training
videos because they showed what not to do, and why!

Calendar ideas

September 19: Talk Like A Pirate Day. Everyone signs into a meeting with their pirate name instead of their real name and we have to figure out who is who.

October: Since the theme of October is Halloween, play up “scary.”
Make a “most scary question” matching game having your team submit
their scariest work question and create a matching game. Whose scary
question is that? Add on: Photoshop their standard work photo into a
scary photo.

November: The Thanksgiving table. Remotely, this one is brilliant because the virtual table expands
to fit everyone. Invite everyone to share something for which they are
thankful. This works well synchronously or asynchronously.

December: Obviously, ugly sweater contests completely work online.

January: Haiku time. Deep
quiet winter. Contemplation. Minimum words for minimum temperatures.
Run a Haiku contest but downplay ‘contest’. Instead, just make it about
singular voices piercing the cold.

March: Limericks.
Run a limerick contest. Set a theme (mine were always science
limericks). Keep it clean! Have a Guest Judge’s Award and a People’s
Choice Award.

March 14th, Pi Day. Get your numbers-can-be-lines…err…pies groove going. At the very least, everyone picks their favorite pie.

April: Earth Month! Working remotely is a very green action!!
Do you know how many mayors of major cities would love to take 50,000
commuters off their highways everyday to ease congestion? That’s already you, remote worker!
But don’t stop there. Share one new green commitment you are going to
make this year. You could also host a panel of contributors. I used to
host a “State of the Earth” presentation.

The Point

The
point is to use the strengths of working online to your advantage to
connect. If it is important to you to have more connected workers for
better communication and productivity (Zappala, 2007), it only makes sense to go for your strengths when working remotely. Strengths I’ve included:
- Creativity
- Equal contributions from all
- Offline/offstage meeting prep
- No schlepping a crock pot through the parking lot.
Yeah,
I didn’t add “working in your pajamas” because remote workers get
tossed a lot of shade for that. We also have cats that sit on our
keyboards and dogs that bark at amazingly inappropriate times. I believe
we are more productive and I just like it.

Sure, I’ve missed 15 years of office trick or treating, but then again, the entire bag of Reese Peanut Butter Cups is for me. Sorry, not sorry. Remote on, workforce, remote on.

*The
best interview answer here is ‘communication’, followed by ‘keeping set
meetings.’

#connect
#happy #howtoconnectonline #teamwork #inspiration #management #wfh
#workingfromhome #remotework #remoteworking #onlinework #onlineworkers
#virtualteam #asktheonlinemanager #llama #volcano #PiDay #Limericks
#TalkLikeAPirateDay #OldEnglishDay #EarthDay #haiku #bizarroworld
#madlibsatwork #groupdoodle #incompletefigures #FetchwithRuffRuffman

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn pre-pandemic on September 2, 2019

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-connect-remote-teams-heather-dodds This post was updated on April 3, 2026 with improved font and replaced a missing image.
November 8, 2021