Team psychological safety

The main factor that positively impacts team performance is “team psychological safety” (refer to “The Fearless Organization” by Amy Edmondson).

Behaviors that hinder pshychological safetely include:

• Sarcasm
• Public humiliation
• Negative tone of voice
• Inconsistency
• Unfairness
• Rigidity
• Favoritism
• Lecturing
• Put-downs
• Outbursts
• Endless rules & regulations
• Infantilizing treatment
• Blaming
• Shaming

Behaviors that show a team is psychologically safe include:

• Showing interest in each other as people
• Expressing emotions such as enthusiasm, openness, and joy
• Not being rejected for stating what they think
• Openly sharing information
• Believing that others have positive intentions
• Constructive disagreement with leaders
• Leaders promote "outside the box" thinking, without judgement

Do this as a leader:

• Instead of statements, ask questions, and provide context. This will prevent people from starting to make assumptions and ruminating.
• When reading or listening, assume that people have the best intentions and the company’s interest at heart.
• When writing or talking, assume the worst and course-correct. Assume people won’t feel well about the communication and try to make it right from the get-go.
• Show vulnerability. Admit your mistakes and foster a habit of doing the same.

Taking decisions as a remote team

Decisions need to be taken as close as possible to the ground, where full knowledge of the problem lies. Decisions taken by poorly informed top managers are hardly optimal.

Good practices include:

• Build your org to minimize the boundaries for decisions
• Set and align goals
• Use DACIs for decision making
• Make decisions in the open
• Make a habit of documenting decisions, big or small

DACI framework for decision-making

• Driver: One person responsible for corralling stakeholders, collating all the necessary information and getting a decision made by the agreed date.
• Approver: One person who makes the decision.
• Contributors: Have knowledge or expertise that may influence - i.e., they have a voice, but no vote.
• Informed: Need to be made aware of the final decision.

If you can’t find a single Approver, you need to look into your organization and fix it.

Contributors bring the ground knowledge to the decision maker. Contributors closer to making a decision should make a recommendation.

Consider using a “silent meeting” to make the decision.

• Driver and Contributors prepare a written document or wiki page describing the decision to be made, the options, recommendations, and comments.
• The Driver schedules a meeting, invite Approver and major Contributors
• Do NOT assume that everybody has read the document beforehand
• Start by muting and turning off video for everyone, and take time to review and comment
• This gives everyone the opportunity to contribute, even those who wouldn’t dare comment in a live discussion
• Then have a discussion in the meeting, like you would do in any regular meeting, and make the decision

Spread context everywhere

When someone doesn’t have full context on a topic, they will try to fill the gap. If information isn’t available or is hard to find, they will make it up. The brain makes up negative thoughts 5 times more frequently than positive thoughts.

Do:

• Repeat yourself. If something is important, repeat it multiple times.
• Promote viral sharing of the right messages by using the right channels, rather than information silos. Default to public communication. If you find yourself discussing a topic in a 1:1 that may be interesting to others, stop and make it broader by posting on the Wiki, group chat, etc.
• Encourage everyone to be conduits for information

Building human connections remotely

Bonding remotely is challenging. The human being is built to socially function in the physical world.

Strategies that can help create a personal connection remotely include:

• Run skip-level 1:1s, so people can meet their manager’s manager.
• Use first 5-10 minutes of meetings for smalltalk.
• Eat together (remotely). Without forcing it, but either do this on a 1:1 basis or create a virtual place where people can join while eating.
• Run “journey lines” exercises with the team. See journey lines - Google Search
• Organize virtual house tours, family history sessions, personality tests.
• Organize speed-dates (provide work-appropriate questions).

Note that, although the point of these exercises is to encourage exchanging and bonding outside of strictly professional topics, in no circumstances should someone feel forced to share private information.