The Podcast and Blog about people at work, working together.
Brian Graczyk has worked remotely for 10 years of his 30 years at Mars working for m&ms, Snickers, Uncle Ben’s Rice, Dove Ice Cream, and now Mars Food. Since the pandemic shut offices down, he has switched jobs twice within Mars. Now his resilience is being tested by leading his global team in several time zones remotely, most of whom he has never met face-to-face. Here’s how he’s developing methods to remotely onboard new team members from his home office to around the world.
Read MoreBobby Parmar, U Va professor and team behavior researcher, discusses results from his escape room study. “Teams relate through behaviors, even micro-behaviors. How a team communicates is highly predictive of their success. For example, one of the things that we find is the amount of humor, laughter on a team is highly predictive of the number of hypotheses that a team throws out when they're solving these puzzles. Laughter is one potential way of getting to psychological safety, but there's lots of ways of getting it. Psychological safety, being inclusive, being trusting, having integrity: all of those things are mechanisms by which we can draw others out and say, "your ideas matter. And I want to hear from you how to make things better.
“We found that people who spoke with certainty, struggled in the escape room. Even a little bit of certainty from someone made it a lot harder for me to say, ‘Nope, that didn't work’ because it feels like I'm judging that individual or I'm going to cause a negative emotion in that individual. And that makes it harder for the team to provide that disconfirming data and makes it difficult for the team to be effective.”
Read MoreIf we think about transformations in companies or in societies or NGOs wherever, it's always a group of people that get together and make magic to change what exists today.
The second belief that I hold, and maybe this fits into the contrarian point of view, is that today I think we in companies are wasting a lot of money when we try to support and kind of generate team effectiveness. By and large, I would argue traditional team building exercises don't necessarily build a more effective team unless the team actually sits down and has a meaningful debrief about that experience.
Read MoreDana Wasson, MSOD, author and graphic facilitator: The reason we haven't moved the needle on engagement is surveys are a very flat document of a very three-dimensional thing that we're trying to measure. I think engagement is an outcome. I don't think it's the thing that we can go after to hunt down and make better. I think that employee engagement is something that happens at the end of having a really great experience. So that flips me over to employee experience which is, what are the experiences? What are the touchpoints that we have with employees in businesses small to large?
Read MoreI notice is the erosion between work and personal life, and the exhaustion people have by being promoted sometimes to school principal of their own home school that they never wanted, to being a teacher of their children, to just the ceaseless connectivity. managing energy for people and that human connection is so important. I think people not feeling part of a team, being distracted, distanced, not as much huddling around a coffee machine, no natural points of intersection. How do we proactively bring people together in a way of building the team where it's not just another Zoom meeting with more Zoom marathons and Zoom fatigue but it really creates a connection and clarity, so that we are tracking on what matters most while not burning ourselves out or getting two disconnected running or swimming in our own lanes?
It's that idea that we care about you as a human being not just a human doing.
Read More“Running towards the fire” is a willingness to see that there is no more going back to normal. We have to reinvent and reconfigure and rethink how we're going to operate. As Winston Churchill said, “Never waste a good crisis.”, which is the embracing the opportunity that this presents. [Having everyone work remotely] is less ideal, but we can take the opportunity to connect around the world. And we can see how that will reimagine the whole world of work. Running towards the fire is embracing the “Not Knowing.” And as FDR said, “Courage is not the absence of fear.” Courage is responding despite the fear.
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