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Strengthening Culture with a Remote Workforce

April 22, 2020 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

How do you retain your company culture when you have a remote workforce?

Retaining who you are and what is important to you as a company is more challenging when you aren’t in the same physical space on a regular basis.

Yet, many companies with international teams and other remote situations have been successfully enjoying solid culture throughout their organizations for years.

How do they do it?

Intentionality.

The best companies know that culture is what makes or breaks them. Culture defines who you are as a company – your corporate identity. It sets the standard and tone for the way your workforce works together. It’s what gives people a shared identity – team, a sense of belonging. And it’s the glue that holds people together when the going gets tough.

But when people aren’t in the same physical environment on a daily basis, adopting and sharing the same tone and standards in thoughts, behaviors and actions can be challenging.

A remote or hybrid environment calls for being more “on purpose.” And this is not a bad thing. Many companies have lost their culture because they have simply taken it for granted. Setting intentionality is what will revive this, whether there is a remote component to your workforce or not.

Here are some things to consider as you seek to reinforce culture with a remote workforce.

1. Add virtual ways to share the company story and tell it often.

As you revisit your values, norms, and priorities in light of considering a remote and hybrid workforce, realize that the way you do things may change, but it doesn’t change who you are and what you stand for. At the same time, you will want to seek to make your company story memorable in creative ways more frequently and in different ways to emphasize identity. Look for seminal touchpoints to share this, such as announcing company-wide changes, annual meetings, company marketing collateral, and key celebrations. Include virtual ways to strengthen this, such as online meetings, video interviews and story markers in communications and at the bottom of email messaging, shared drives, and chat mechanisms.

2. Define what it means to live company values.

Most companies outline their values, but they do not take the time to define what these look like in action. For example, if one of your company core values is creativity, what should that look like in behaviors, actions, work, relationships, outcomes, etc.? You and your executive team should be firm on what all of your core values look like in action. Further, take the time to discuss what these might mean and how they might show up in a virtual or remote setting. Test these thoughts with your employees for feedback and buy-in – this is key. Then decide how you can weave this into your communications, your meetings and other touchpoints, and how to integrate this into your performance standards.

3. Communicate with greater intention.

This means not only increasing your communication, but heightening the way that you connect, such as using video when touching base virtually. Be sure that you set expectations around your communication methods and protocols so that this becomes part of your shared “way of operating.” Place greater emphasis on culture during your onboarding of new employees and leave time for discussion around this. Consider building in an accountability component for the direct supervisor of a new employee, ensuring that they have discussions around what your cultural markers are and how they show up in and at work. Devote intentional time for listening to the employees as well, especially in virtual meetings. Take the pulse on what their challenges are, what they are learning, and opportunities they see for improvements and working better together.

4. Reinforce the importance of each employee’s part in the company community.

Help your employees feel known and part of the team and help them to see how they fit into the bigger picture. Systematize some teambuilding exercises that help everyone to get to know them personally and vice versa, and that identify gifts each brings to the table for greater outcomes. A sense of inclusion and contribution is paramount. Be sure to capitalize on ways to recognize employees in both face-to-face and virtual settings for visibility, appreciation, and teambuilding. Consider cross-training or mentoring with different people to get to know others more rapidly across teams.

In your planning and process to define, strengthen and reinforce culture, please also remember that including your workforce in discussions at key points in various ways will pay great benefits. Allowing the entire employee base to give input means that they will also feel ownership and responsibility for the outcomes.

© Patti Cotton and patticotton.com. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that attribution is made to Patti Cotton and patticotton.com, with links thereto.

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

5 Ways to Cut Your Meeting Time in Half

July 17, 2019 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

Ask anyone in management about how much they love meetings, and I can guarantee you will hear a loud groan. Chief complaints are that there are too many, they waste time, and little gets accomplished during these. A top upset is when meetings rehash the same agenda items without any move forward.

How can you minimize the time spent on your meetings, maximize the focus and outcomes, and get back to work quickly?

Here are 5 ways you can make sure your meetings are effective, stay on track, and keep the organization moving forward:

1. Prepare your attendees for the meeting.

Make sure your meeting has a clear purpose, an agenda, and any background information to brief people. Send this out ahead of time and alert attendees that they need to review the info before the meeting is held. This one move can eliminate a lot of time in your meeting wasted on bringing people up to speed and risking conversations around things that have already been decided.

2. Clarify what you want from your attendees.

Is this meeting informational, for consideration, or for action?

a. If the meeting is for information only, make it clear that you are sharing for awareness, and decide during your meeting what information from your time together needs to be shared with the larger employee base or select management.

b. If the meeting is for consideration, make sure you define what is up for consideration and what outcomes you would like for the meeting. This kind of meeting is most likely to be typed as a time-waster unless you facilitate for the outcomes you request, identify next steps with deadlines, and share this with all involved to pull things forward. It is important especially for this type of meeting that you as leader facilitate and allow other team members to speak and weigh in. Your job is to conduct the meeting and keep it on track to desired outcomes – not to dictate opinion by reason of your position.

c. If the meeting is for action, be sure that you have identified and have present all decision-makers who need to be in the room. This avoids having to chase down and reintegrate any new views or opinions coming from those who were absent (and which can often cause another new meeting on the same subject, rehashing the same agenda). As with the meeting for consideration, articulate clearly the decisions that were made, the actions you have determined, who will follow up on each, and a deadline for reporting back.

3. Go lean on your attendee list.

Do you have tourists in your meetings? People who have climbed “on the bus” by virtue of association, but who really don’t need to be in there? Review your agenda carefully and decide who from your regular attendee list no longer needs to be involved. This can be touchy as you may send the wrong message by simply disinviting them. Be sure to explain why – that the agenda isn’t something to which they need to devote time, and you are revamping in order to minimize meetings and time spent on these so that they can do the work at hand.

4. Avoid highjacking.

Three major ways this can happen to your meeting are when Parkinson’s Law of Triviality is activated, when side-barring occurs, and if you have a personality who tends grandstand or hold court.

a. Parkinson’s Law of Triviality is where people spend a relatively large amount of time, energy, and focus dealing with relatively minor issues. How does this work in a meeting? People will stay with trivia inside of a more major decision because they are more comfortable with that. They may not understand the larger issue at hand, or they may not be fully engaged with it. When this happens, and they begin to “major in minors,” the more important issue being neglected, and a whole team diverted to a side conversation. If you notice this happening, be quick to call people back to the larger focus at hand.

b. Stopping your own meeting to side-bar means that the rest of your team has to wait while you do take care of things that should be cared for in a 1:1 meeting or other forum. It sends a poor message about your own leadership abilities and causes people to lose their focus and engagement during your time together. That’s a hard thing to recapture – so don’t do it!

c. Do you have a grandstander? A personality who considers meetings the place where they can make sure everyone else is impressed with their opinion? This person tends to takes up all the air in the room so that others aren’t able or willing to participate, or interrupts loudly to show expertise. If so, you need to have a critical conversation with this person to help them to understand the behavior you are noticing, how it is adversely impacting the team, and the desired behaviors you want to see instead.

5. Recap of your meeting.

Send out a recap of your meeting notes with appropriate action steps, designated people in charge of them, and deadlines. These notes should be taken by someone other than you to allow you to focus on leading and facilitating. If you have an assistant, this is optimal. If you have a leaner team in attendance for this one, ask one of your members to capture what you want on the agenda so that you can have your assistant type these up later for distribution.

What are your pet-peeve time-wasters in meetings? I’d love to hear more about it.

For more about making your meetings more effective to promote better decisions and outcomes, see McKinsey’s May 2019 article “Want a Better Decision? Plan a Better Meeting” by Aaron De Smet, Gregor Jost, and Leigh Weiss.

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Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

How to Revitalize Your Team Meetings

February 13, 2019 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

Team meetings can be a source of frustration and an incredible waste of time. When I address execution with executives, needing more time is the biggest factor they cite.

Here’s what I hear:

“HUGE waste of time. We don’t get anything done!”

“We address things we could have taken care of by ourselves.”

“The same people always talk – and the same people always zone out. What am I here for?”

How do you make sure your meetings are productive and effective?

Here’s a quick checklist to set a firm foundation:

1. Determine the purpose for your meeting.

Are you meeting to keep your team informed of the trends in your industry? To problem-solve? To build rapport with one another? Be sure that you have this firmly in mind as you build your agenda. Take care that you do not turn team meetings into work sessions when this could be handled more efficiently outside the meeting.

2. Have an agenda with defined objectives.

Please select topics for your meeting that affect the entire team. Other issues should be held back for a time when you can meet with only those who are involved. Then, for each item listed on the agenda, list what you need from the group. Are you sharing information, seeking input for a decision, or needing to make a decision during the meeting? It’s challenging for team members to concentrate on the item at hand if they don’t know what you need from them as you address it.

3. Action items and accountability.

As you address the agenda items, make sure you bring each to a successful conclusion by listing any actions needing to be taken, the person/people taking those actions, and a deadline by which they will complete the action identified. Then, decide whether they need to report back to the group in a next team meeting, or if it is more effective simply to report back to you or the others involved in the issue.

4. Cut down on the attendee list.

Who really needs to attend? And if someone is invited because they are giving a spotlight presentation only, schedule this at the beginning or end of the meeting and let them know when to be present. Don’t have them wade through your entire meeting when it isn’t necessary. Take a quick sweep of your meeting agendas and check your attendee list. This needs to be done periodically so as to make sure that those who are invited really need to be there.

5. Prepare your attendees.

Send out your agenda at least 24 hours in advance and let them know to expect this as a rule of thumb. When you send this out, identify for them what you will be needing from them in the meeting. For example, do you want them to problem-solve a certain issue confronting the organization? Include some background beforehand.

6. Start on time.

This seems elementary, but I’m going to flag this as one of two biggest time-wasters with the world of meetings (the other one is found next, in #7). Waiting for one or two people sends the message that your time and the time of others is not valuable. It also reflects on you as being less than effective. Do you have someone who is chronically late? Address this with them privately. If they are allowed to arrive late on a regular basis, this also sends the message that your meeting is not of top priority.

7. Stick to the agenda.

Allowing team to stray from the agenda reduces effectiveness. If someone brings up an issue or problem that needs solving, but is not part of the agenda, place this in “the parking lot.” Have someone keep track of any parking lot issues by making a note of them. Then, if urgent and relevant to the team, address these at the end of your meeting if there is time or announce the plan to address these before you adjourn.

8. External check-in.

Ask your team to assess the meetings on a scale of 1-10. What will make them better? More relevant? More effective? If you are receiving feedback that your team meetings are a waste of time, you may discover that you seek to meet simply out of habit or out of a false sense of accomplishment from having met. Be honest with yourself – and go back to defining the purpose of your meeting.

Finally, as a team-building exercise, you may want to gather up the team and ask them what they would like to get out of these meetings. Such a session will no doubt surface ideas that will be helpful to you going forward.

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Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Five Tips for Taking Control of a Hijacked Meeting

June 22, 2016 By Patti Cotton 1 Comment

You have called the meeting to order, and you have much to review with your staff. You’ve promised to adjourn at the top of the hour, so you dive in at a fast clip.

As you introduce the first topic, one of the meeting participants interrupts you in mid-sentence, and dives into active monologue about an unrelated subject. Someone else chimes in about her remarks, and others begin to enter in.

How do you take back control?

Here are five tips for establishing control, and for taking it back when disruption occurs.

First, taking back control actually begins before the meeting starts. Craft a carefully planned agenda to set parameters. Pass out copies of the agenda at the beginning of the meeting.
Establish your meeting leadership from the start. Call the meeting to order on time, and announce that since the time allotted for the meeting is limited, you will be sticking closely to the agenda. Share that you will take questions at the end, and if the ensuing discussions during Q&A become too lengthy.
Nip subtle disruption in the bud. Do you have a distracted participant who is texting or otherwise multi-tasking? Is someone quietly holding his own conversation in the back? Pause immediately when you recognize this, to state that you need everyone’s participation, and ask people to put their cell phones in “meeting mode”, and to plan to catch up with colleagues on other issues at break time. Be sure your voice tone and body language convey your confidence, warmth, and engagement. Eye contact is important here – people cannot remain anonymous when their eyes meet yours, and it can draw people’s focus subtly back into the meeting.
Contain dangerous meeting personalities. Know the personalities of your meeting attendees, and recognize those who crave the spotlight. These dangerous meeting personalities are usually the hijackers that will follow their own agenda, regardless of yours. Have a task in the meeting such as taking notes, or assign them with a high-profile role, so that they are actively involved – and contained – through focused attention to their charge.
Request order quickly and boldly when things are clearly out of control. You’ve stopped talking, your eyes are fixed on the hijacker, and you are doing a “stare-down,” waiting for her to get the hint. She doesn’t, and keeps her monologue going. Call her by name calmly and repeatedly until she pauses, and ask her to please save her comments for the “bin list” – that list of topics that arise during the meeting, and which are not part of the agenda. Share that in the interest of making sure you get everyone out on time, you can meet with her post-meeting to discuss her issue. Also consider addressing items from your bin list regularly when you have a shorter meeting.

And a bonus tip: Just because you are leading the meeting doesn’t mean you are allowed to hijack airtime. You will need meeting participation by all involved. So, as you prepare your meeting agenda, also identify 1-3 talking points for each item. Shorten these to pithy sound bytes, making them impactful and effective to keep focus and attention.

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.