Morale Matters (especially in a virtual world)
How often have you read that your team / people are the most important aspect of your business?
Jim Collins wrote about the concept in the book Good to Great. I’ve always sort of dismissed this as obvious advice and moved on to the next set of business tips.
Lately, I’m feeling like I’ve underappreciated this advice.
As a quick primer — our team is mostly virtual with clusters of the team in Indianapolis, Indiana, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. I’ve long admired remote businesses such as Automattic — the company behind Wordpress — which has over 1000 employees scattered throughout the world and all working from home on a full-time basis.
The virtual setup is a great work benefit but we’re left working harder to bring the team closer together and keep everyone from feeling “out on an island.
My team and I recently took a trip to Garner, North Carolina where we closed on an acquisition of a local tax and bookkeeping practice and boy did this change my tune on the importance of dedicated in-person time.
We regularly meet for video calls, we use instant messaging apps, we have phone calls, we use email, etc. But nothing is quite like a dedicated in-person session. We carved off time for goofing around and getting to know each other. We had brainstorming / spitballing sessions where tons of great ideas came to the surface. And we got work done too!
I noticed that most everyone tends to speak up more when in-person vs on a video call. A lot more! And I was able to ramble on about the company, my vision and strategy a heck of lot more as well. We all came away from the trip feeling energized and excited about the future.
COVID has made it difficult for teams to get together in-person and most companies have responded with more video calls (i.e. Zoom). This is fine to an extent. But when the time comes, I urge you to not settle for Zoom calls and instant messenger. There is likely a lot of great information, ideas, and morale that you’re missing out on!
Whether you operate in an office setting or virtually like us, my advice here:
- Block off time for brainstorming or idea-generating sessions — allow the opinions to air, you might be missing out on good ideas.
- Dedicate some regular informal “get to know each other” sessions — there are plenty of icebreaker games out there to better meet your team… this will surely benefit the energy and collaboration coming from your team.
- If your team is scatted across the country — invest in bringing everyone together at least once each year… there is plenty to do from group training, team-building, strategy/planning, technical work, etc. and it will have hard to quantify benefits on your people.
- Experiment and tinker with team-building — we regularly try new things… one concept we’ve tested is playing games: picking a metric that we want to improve internally, publicly tracking the results over a defined period, and then rewarding the group… this has the dual benefit of focusing on improving an important company-wide metric and getting the entire company to buy-in to making it better.
Resist the urge to limit brainstorming / strategy sessions to just those at the top…
Allow for participation from all levels of the organization. You may have someone in the trenches dealing with day-to-day customer or service issues and that’s precisely the person you want to hear from when coming up with ideas to improve your business!
You never know where a good idea is going to come from. All you can do is ask everyone in the organization to chime in and then sit back and listen…
