WARP Speed Leadership

EP06 | Remote Work Killed the Hallway Chat. Here's What To Replace It With.

• Richard Parton

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Mastering remote work, and why ‘ok’ might not be ok on slack

Remember those spontaneous office conversations? They're gone. Digital body language has become the new make-or-break skill for leaders—and most of us are speaking it with a thick accent.

Richard Parton, Nikki Tugano (Founder & CEO, SeenCulture), and Sarah Kirkby (Learning & Org Development Consultant) decode the hidden rules of remote work. From emoji dictionaries to all-day Zoom rooms, discover the practices that separate thriving teams from struggling ones.

What You'll Learn:

  • Why 70% of communication is still non-verbal (even on Zoom)
  • How Hofstede's framework explains why some teammates never speak up
  • The "virtual room" technique that creates real connection
  • Why emoji are the fastest-growing language globally
  • The team agreement canvas that prevents 80% of frustrations
  • How to recognize people when you can't see the work

Key Moments:

[00:08:22] Digital body language: "OK." vs "okay?"

[00:13:42] Cultural dimensions and global teams

[00:16:42] Virtual rooms and recognition practices

[00:22:50] Top tools from each host

Resources:

Digital Communication

Cultural Intelligence

Team Frameworks

Tools

Data

Episode Duration: 24 min

[00:00:00] Richard: Hi, and welcome to WARP Speed Leadership, a podcast about everything you need to know to be an incredible leader and enable your team to thrive in this hyper fast new world of work.

I'm your host, Richard Parton. in this episode we are going to be talking about how to master remote working. It's become the new normal, but many teams are still finding it challenging.

We are coming to you today from Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia,

[00:00:23] Richard: I'm joined by two amazing co-hosts. We have Nikki Tugano, founder and CEO of SeenCulture, which is the Moneyball for Work teams and a new member of our team. Sarah, who has been a co-conspirator and friend of mine for many years. One of my go-to people on understanding organizations and making product work in organizations, although she's doing a bit of a swap with Nikki. Sarah, a learning and organization development consultant. Welcome Sarah. Tell us a little bit about yourself And what you do.

[00:00:57] Sarah: Sure. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here with both of you as you mentioned, I've been making a switch. Originally my background is in product development and technology building and managing digital products and solving complex problems.

over time I realized that. It wasn't so much product that was lighting me up, it was actually the people behind them and the teams behind them. So I've made a switch and I now work more on the people side of the business and yeah, really curious about culture and wellbeing and performance and how all those things

and conditions shape how people do their best work.

[00:01:35] Richard: absolutely. I, feel like I already refer to you sometimes on those things. So the fact that you're diving into that even deeper, is awesome. Remote working came out as the thing we thought we'd focus on, in part because it's so much everybody's day to day now, we've all been seeing different pieces of research and experiencing with different teams how challenging that can be. there was a report recently by an organization called Neat.

They did a study globallyand they found that around 22% of the US workforce reported working remotely. And then when they looked more broadly worldwide, that was, there was similar numbers. 83% of employees worldwide said they preferred hybrid working arrangements. another study by team Flex. They looked at a thousand global organizations they found that teams who were investing intentionally in communication development were the ones who were actually doing well.

And so this kind of plays back this one of the themes. I feel like we've seen there's a different way leaders need to help their teams. But it isn't always obvious, what they need to do. There's a large proportion of leaders who are reporting that they find they're not quite sure how to go about it. 29% of remote workers say they're having communication struggles, 22% say they're feeling more lonely. And leaders are often finding that they want to lean in more to helping the team, the team culture and worrying about keeping everybody aligned.

Yeah. So I guess we'll start off with just. What have you guys noticed out there? We will work.

with quite a few different organizations and leaders. What have you seen, good, bad things that we could learn from, et cetera. Nikki, do you want to kick us off?

[00:03:27] Nikki Tugano: Sure. We've probably seen a spread across both good and bad. What might be interesting though is just to reflect a little bit on I've recently gone through a bit of a change in that I used to work,

In an office with a team. In fairness, we were working in a hybrid manner, but we did catch up on a regular basis.

[00:03:46] Richard: And,

[00:03:47] Nikki Tugano: In doing so, we would also go for lunch and there would be many incidental interactions that don't happen now that we are working in Pure remote format. And I guess the key things that I've noticed is that so much of the focus of any interaction that happens, whether it be through a meeting or a Slack message or an email, is very focused on a specific task or outcome or work objective. And what that doesn't necessarily leave so much room for is to build those. connections and relationships. And yeah, I guess that's something that I've certainly noticed. And that I personally would, love to hear from both of you. What you've seen work really well from a connection and culture perspective.

[00:04:36] Richard: Yeah, absolutely. that description totally mirrors a bunch of different teams I've worked with remotely, when you go online, things just do get a lot more focused.

Sarah what are the kinds of things that you've been seeing out there?

[00:04:51] Sarah: Personally, we've been working completely remotely for a number of years now. But more recently it's been pure remote. I'm finding, working with the teams that some of the challenges, I think the themes coming through that are quite persistent is really this desire for more connection.

And it's a consistent thread that keeps popping up. how can we use digital and remote tools to not only be more productive, but actually to enable more connection and to, stimulate some of those kind of conversations that would just happen in the hallway and in an office that you were talking about Nikki.

And use the tools to recreate that and not just to make the tools all about the work. So yes, remotely, we can be much more productive. We can get through a lot more, and the tools help us do that. We're communicating in a different way. We're seeing the work in new ways. And it's also not all about the work.

So how can we find that balance between, getting the work done and being productive and also having meaning in what we're doing and genuine connection with the people we're working with, and building out our new skills and flexing to really bring that energy into the work.

[00:06:03] Richard: Let's say a client comes to you and says, we've got this challenge of the team is not as well connected and I feel like we've lost something in our culture. What would you say? What would be your advice to them?

[00:06:15] Sarah:

[00:06:15] Richard: Yeah.

[00:06:16] Sarah: All teams experience different tensions at different points in their lifecycle, whether they're starting out or whether they've been working together for a little while and experiencing that they've moved past that initial excitement of being a new team.

And the reality sets in, of needing to actually work with these people to get something done. And then moving past that into a state of feeling like we are more high performing as a team.

what I would say is that it's not all about the work. making sure there's time in that capacity bucket for all the things that we're putting into our capacity bucket. Yes, we need to focus on those big strategic goals, BAU or technical debt to fix, and we also need to focus on how we work together as a team people don't just come together and magically work well together.

It's a deliberate and intentional act that sees that happen. So I'd ask how much time and how do they focus on having those conversations to understand more about each other and agree those ways of working. What are they doing about that currently?

that helps reveal how much capacity they're putting in their bucket for team development.

[00:07:26] Richard: Do you get teams to formally allocate a proportion of time or is it more about having certain practices in place?

[00:07:35] Sarah: I think it depends on what is the tension or what is the challenge that they're trying to work through, if they haven't got protocols or, haven't spent much time on aligning around how they're gonna work together, then that might be something a little bit more structured and intentional to kick that off.

Yet building those muscles around continuous improvement and reflection and getting the team to self sustain those activities, is really important. they can take that forward themselves

And spot when something's not working well, Then have that conversation together and go, Hey, this isn't feeling right.

What's working well, what's not, and how can we improve together? Is something that works well.

[00:08:14] Richard: Nikki, clients often come to you. to help them understand their culture and how to be better connected. what would be your take?

[00:08:22] Nikki Tugano: what I like to do is understand for each person on the team what is the thing that gives them energy that they consider to be their unique stake, that they can contribute. if we can understand what they can uniquely contribute to the team, that enables us to better, understand how others can, play their role in that interdependency

[00:08:42] Richard: Yeah,

[00:08:44] Nikki Tugano: beyond that, one of the growing areas of interest I've personally been looking at is this notion of digital body language. typically when we, see and interact with people in person, there are lots of nonverbal cues that we can pick up on.

something like 70% of communication is actually delivered through nonverbal. Communication in queues. Now, obviously that is different in a remote working world. now what we need to understand is this digital body language that we need to be more aware of.

this can look like how quickly someone responds.

Can look like sometimes for instance. There are different variations of how someone says, okay, can have completely different meanings. And so if you see a slack message, for instance, and it just says. O and then the letter K with a full stop.

That means something very different to lowercase OKAY question mark. Like same word, completely different meaning, and it's these, nonverbal, cues that we need to know and understand what is the meaning behind that? What is the impact of that and what does that mean for how we need to respond to it

[00:09:56] Richard: Yeah. I found myself recently, I was working with a team where I found myself having to actually look up different emojis. 'cause like I was working with folk who were a little bit younger and there was this whole vocabulary of emojis I did some research online. It told me some things, but it wasn't useful. The thing that actually helped was me asking I just went up to asked somebody, Hey what is the difference between a Silver heart and a Purple Heart? it turned out that the team had evolved this sort of language

Emojis are the fastest growing language in the world, apparently, if you're not in the know with it yet, then you've gotta learn.

[00:10:36] Sarah: I think bringing that back to making time for coming together as a team and understanding how we communicate and what things mean. And agreeing and aligning and understanding some of that is so important, particularly when there's new team members and we're expecting them to integrate into the team.

But we already have this predefined language about how we communicate with each other. So making space for those conversations, I think is so important.

[00:11:01] Richard: there are certain things that you just have to make sure are in place.

So understanding what the team's objectives are, you've actually made that really clear. I know you should do that anyway, but it's extra important when people are not as connected in space because it's easier for, misunderstandings to proliferate. Making sure there's a good understanding of your cadence working out across, a two week, four week, three month cycle, when exactly different things are gonna happen.

So there's a really clear understanding, actually documenting what channels you're gonna use. What do we use Slack for? What do we use teams for? And even. little things like how we use them. So we always try and make sure that we're in this particular channel for our group conversations is something that somebody said to me when I was onboarding with a team recently, it made a massive difference because it gave me the permission to be verbose and chat a whole bunch. More in that shared channel than I might otherwise have felt, okay to do. And then also time zones, because we're often working across time zones, actually mapping out what are the okay hours, what are the not okay hours. there's some online tools and things you can use for those.

But I find those things are like, if you do all of that. They're quite simple really, but they actually take away a lot of the ambiguity that crops up out of that sort of online working, and particularly working across time zones.

[00:12:25] Sarah: Richard, if I may just build on that when you were talking about the time zones another dimension is decision making and how the leader is delegating decision making to the team and agreeing on, what decisions we need to make?

Particularly if people are in different time zones that are difficult to cross over what is okay to progress and not, and how do we hand off work around to each other when we're all in different time zones. I think it's just such an interesting area that often skip over, I find, is how they make decisions and the leader's role in enabling that.

[00:13:00] Richard: Yeah. actually making that explicit is really important because people often, either the two things I've noticed happen either if you don't think about it, end up making decisions in a way that actually excludes people. you might not necessarily mean to but. Time zones is a key one there, but then also if you understand how the process works, you can actually engage with it.

And that feeling of I wasn't consulted on this. doesn't grow so much. that can be something that festers away without you realizing as a leader that people haven't felt that they've been involved

You have some strong thoughts on how to help people understand cultural dimensions as well. Do you wanna talk us through that.

[00:13:42] Sarah: Sure. There's another area that we've noticed with moving to virtual working is it's a fantastic opportunity to bring people into the team who we might not have been able to in the past, And that means working with people in different countries, different cultures.

So there's a lot more of a cultural mix, in the team. And, there's so many different layers that leaders are trying to balance their mind to think about, setting direction helping to enable delegate decisions like we're just talking about

And also thinking about, who is in the team and what is their cultural background. And experiences that they have grown up with and how might that be influencing how they're showing up in either one-on-ones or in that group setting. Jarring and difficult to understand. I find that Hofstede's cultural dimensions which you can find online is a fantastic tool. You can look up and compare the different cultures around the world, and it has different dimensions that talks about the Difference between high and low power distance in cultures.

Short and long-term thinking and the orientation of how people approach their work. More collective thinking versus individualism is another dimension and that can really influence how people respond in group and one-on-one setting. there's some great tools out there that can really help with that.

[00:15:04] Nikki Tugano: Absolutely. what's really important is that, we often, make a judgment of some people that we work with. Obviously purely based through our own perspective and our frame of reference based on our own cultural background If you are accustomed to a Western culture and you show up in a meeting, it is normal for you to speak up and share views or your opinion on a certain matter. for someone that might be from a more collectivist culture that is considered rude, and so you might not hear from them so much to speak up in a meeting. it's not that they aren't. As willing to contribute or be a team player, it's just that they've been culturally conditioned in a different way. I think it's the responsibility of the leaders to really know and acknowledge what those differences are and how people show up, contribute, and what that means for how it's communicated or signaled to properly be fair in our assessment of Who is working productively, performing well, or contributing to team goals?

[00:16:10] Richard: Totally. It makes such a big difference and it's so easy to not notice, to not realize that you've put your foot in it. I've done that many times. So one of the things that I wonder about as well is we've spoken a lot about teams that are distributed and how it can be difficult to create connection. What are ways that you guys have seen of. Improving that and helping teams to feel more connected and together. Sarah, do you wanna kick us off?

[00:16:42] Sarah: there is one technique that I keep coming back to and get really good feedback from people who potentially resisted initially and find it a bit weird. Let me share.

So for a few years now since around 2014, I've been using this idea of spinning up video rooms. So where there's been a team working in different locations, or the one team spread across different locations opening up a Zoom or a team's room for the day. people can drop in and out as they like, or maybe it's just open for the day, but everyone's on mute.

But it's an opportunity to feel like you're in the same room. it might sound a bit weird, and sometimes people are like why would I sit in a room on mute for the day? That's weird. then when they try it after a couple of days. In a week or two's time, I've noticed that those people have said, Hey Sarah, can we open up a zoom for the day?

it feels like you're more connected, even though you might be individually working you know that you can come off mute and go, Hey Nikki, I've got a quick question.

When you're ready, we can have a quick chat and then go back on mute or Richard, you might choose to share your music for the day, That technique I've found to be really effective.

[00:17:50] Richard: Yeah. I've done that before, but only at times when a team's had really intensive collaboration that they needed to do. I have to say that it worked really well then, and I love the idea of doing it as part of the routine way that the team operates. Nikki what have you seen?

[00:18:10] Nikki Tugano: What have I seen that's worked well on a Connection as a remote team? Honestly, I feel like I'm working it out and it's always something new each time. I personally see that there's a lot of value in being intentional about recognizing. Someone's efforts because that can often be harder to see in a remote setting until something is, shipped or delivered.

And that's not to say that there isn't a great deal of effort and positive intention and deep thought that's gone into something.

I think in the nature of how we work today in this remote setting, a lot of that stuff can be overlooked. we're always working to an outcome and shipping deliverables and all of that. I think when people feel seen for something that they aren't typically recognized for, it makes people feel valued and acknowledged despite what outcome might exist, which is often out of their hands as well.

[00:19:10] Richard: Yeah. And I have to say Nikki is not mentioning SeenCulture. So if you wanted to look at a tool that's really good at helping people feel seen and helping people to understand each other's strengths and skills, et cetera. SeenCulture is definitely. In fact, probably the best place that there is available out there, I would definitely recommend that.

[00:19:31] Sarah: Richard and Nikki, I just wanna add onto that 'cause I absolutely agree. That recognition piece and being intentional about that can make such a big difference because it really does start to tap into that person's intrinsic motivation. It's not about a financial reward or holding that prize at the end.

It's actually about recognizing that effort which I think can be overlooked. it's so powerful for the person to receive that.

[00:19:55] Richard: One of the other things that I do as well is that I have a bunch of different things I use at different times, like randomly, so it stays fresh with teams. trying to make sure that we put the time aside as you were mentioning before, Sarah, for things that are not entirely serious.

If we get to a good milestone or if it's just been a couple of weeks, maybe having a bit of a games night or games afternoon or whatever, just having a bit of time to do that. Try to make sure that beginning of daily standups and meetings I actually deliberately make a bit of time for chat.

it's such a simple thing, but it does make such a big difference. One of the other things I like to do is whenever a team gets to a meaningful milestone. We do a bit of a collective reflection session. if I'm the leader of that team, I'll probably kick off by describing, isn't it cool? where we've got to, and I'll try and recognize individuals and how they've contributed. But I'll then do a little sticky note circle.

So everybody gets their name on the circle, and then everybody in the team goes around and put little things that they appreciate or that person has done that they particularly appreciated. And then we go round as a team. Each person reads out somebody else's sticky notes. Talking about the things that their team has appreciated about their work has never failed for me to help them to feel really special. Because people don't necessarily put random stuff. It's generally things that are quite meaningful to them. And yeah it often does mean a lot to the people on the receiving end.

[00:21:35] Sarah: I love that

[00:21:35] Richard: Yeah, it always gives me chills. Uh, We've covered a lot of ground. I'm gonna invite you guys to give us one tool if somebody was struggling with their team to improve. The team's culture and how they're working in a remote team, I'll do one first and give you a moment to reflect, for me, I think going back to that hygiene thing, I would say that my number one thing would be to do a team agreement with the team. There's a bunch of team agreement canvases out there are good. maybe have a look and see one that suits you. management 3.0 team agreement canvas that actually covers quite a few of the different dimensions we've spoken about today. It's a really good starting point to go, either we're starting a team and it would be, let's get together and have a bit of a think about how we're gonna operate, it's been a little while since we've talked about this. Let's revisit. It makes a big difference. Often, not immediately. Often, it's like a month or two later, you start to realize that, communication has improved because we've all agreed that, there's this particular channel that we're gonna use or whatever. would be my number one top tip. Who'd like to go next?

[00:22:50] Nikki Tugano: I'll jump in. for me, probably unsurprisingly but my hot tip would be. in a remote setting, we don't physically see each other as often as in an in-person setting. Being intentional about recognizing,

Someone's, unique strengths that they contribute or leaving other team members feeling appreciated for what they've contributed on a recent. work, project what I feel that really helps amplify is not only camaraderie, but also connection and culture.

[00:23:32] Richard: I love it. Yeah, just having that deliberate way of making sure that people have connected around that. That's nice. So Sarah, it turns out we're giving you the final word.

[00:23:42] Sarah: my top tip for leaders working in a virtual environment with their teams is to make space for the human side of things. the work is really important and the humans are too 'cause they're the ones doing the work. So how can we make space for real conversation, real connection and some of that uncomfortableness that comes when we come together to work on something.

[00:24:10] Richard: we couldn't have ended on a better note. Thank you, Sarah. that brings us to the end of the show today. Thanks so much everybody for joining us for another episode of WARP Speed Leadership. We make the show to help leaders create incredible workplaces and world, but increasingly feels like it's moving at warp speed. We hope you found it useful. Please subscribe, leave us a review and share us with your network. And also check out the show notes. I will put all of the tools and things that we've spoken about today.

thanks again and until next time, cheers.