With the world still mostly working from home, some interesting things have happened in the world of workplace learning, including the rapid switch to virtual learning. This has been great from a pure individual learning perspective, and many people in organisations have taken the opportunity to reflect and take ownership for their personal individual growth.
BUT, there’s a brewing problem in the space of team performance and collective impact with teams not coming together informally or formally to develop together, to deliver business goals together – to work “on the team” not just “in the team”. “Let’s just wait until we are all back in the office” – has been the holding pattern for so many. In reality that’s going to mean that some teams will not have been together properly for well over a year and we are seeing some worrying consequences:
- There are no more ‘coffee machine’, deskside chats or breaks between meetings where important relationship forming conversations happen, ideas are generated and debates evolve
- Team meetings are transactional – a focus getting through the agenda in as quick a time as possible on zoom / teams / webex
- Leader relationships with team members are typically focused in the 1:1 conversation, rather than the collective conversation. ‘Hub and spoke’ leadership has become the norm.
- Bigger picture strategic thinking both about the team itself and how it operates and about the future focus / business strategy is minimised – teams are in ‘head-down’ operational fire-fighting mode.
Occasionally leaders have been able to physically meet with direct reports (in a park or an office), but usually only 1:1 and rarely with the whole team together. In my own leadership team, we remarkably managed two strategy meetings over the summer – socially distanced in my back-garden (see photo taken above, before it rained!). It felt so different to our routine zoom calls, we bounced off one another – worked creatively and the outputs were so much better than if we had been in a ‘standard virtual meeting’. We worked at a deeper level – both on our ways of working and relationships as a team but also with the deeper conversation about our future strategic direction. This works really well but only if you have the physical space outside, if everyone feels comfortable doing so (no-one is excluded), it complies with the local restrictions in place (which change week by week), if your team aren’t half-way around the world from one another. Oh, and if it doesn’t rain (which of course it did, because that’s what a British summer is all about).
Zoom (or Teams/Webex) sessions for teams are fine, but they lack the real ‘hands on’ experience that you get when you are in a room physically. There’s something quite two-dimensional about a webinar, it lacks the sense of building something concrete together. Participants can be passive and it’s easy to slip into multi-tasking mode.
We know there is a different way. We believe there’s a way for teams to develop deeply AND stay virtual. And that’s where HIIT for teams comes in. We all know that if you want to grow a muscle, you have to exercise it, regularly, often in short intense bursts. As part of our creative thinking in my back garden, we created the concept of High Intensity Interval Training for Teams Experience.
It’s a way for teams to come together in regular (e.g. monthly) short bursts (e.g. 2 hours) of intensive high performance team development work, remotely enabled using talented team coaching in addition to two types of technology platform working in sync to ensure that the experience is not only audio, and visual but also feels truly “hands-on” for the team members. All still robustly connected to the core high performance team attributes that we know are so crucial for any team performing to their full collective potential.
We are convinced that this will change the way we think about team development, and so we are looking to offer a free trial HIIT4team session for two virtual teams in the next 6 weeks to really show you what we mean.
If you would like to take advantage of a pilot session (and give us feedback in the process, because this approach is new, and we are learning too), and if you have a senior leadership team in a medium-large organisation that would like to start their HIIT4team journey, then please do get in touch, and we can talk more about what it entails.
There’s no time to waste here, your remote teams are probably already starting to lose their deep cohesion, and winter is coming.