key: cord-0060639-ufh35h5m authors: Deschamps-Sonsino, Alexandra title: Communication date: 2020-12-05 journal: Creating a Culture of Innovation DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4842-6291-7_3 sha: 60cef0151f6fbaba8785e63ed8a695257bba8647 doc_id: 60639 cord_uid: ufh35h5m When you collaborate with colleagues in today’s workplace, and especially in corporate settings, communication is a minefield. From choosing the level of formality to the tools you use, communication helps make allies and get your ideas supported. But an informal communication culture helps loosen up people's perceptions of what they're allowed to do, to say, and by extension the ideas they're allowed to have and communicate. The combination of smart phones and messaging apps has created informal communication channels that create "safe" contexts for colleagues to share their thoughts around a project, a manager, or their employer. Relationship building is no longer done around the water cooler, but in the WhatsApp group. It's out of sight unless drastic surveillance-like policies are adopted and enforced. If that's the case, it becomes a question of whether a business believes those tactics create an atmosphere of trust and creativity. When e-scooter company Bird laid off 406 employees who had been working remotely during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, this had to be done remotely. The managers did this, not with an individual call, but by inviting all of them to a conference call set as a webinar. This prevented any immediate feedback. The reaction to the invitation was covered in dot.LA: 2 […]some grew suspicious when they noticed the guest list and host were hidden and they learned only some colleagues were included. It was also unusual they were being invited to a Zoom webinar, allowing no participation, rather than the free-flowing meeting function the company normally uses. Over the next hour, employees traded frantic messages on Slack and searched coworkers' calendars to see who was unfortunate enough to be invited. These digital corporations are different, culturally, than many of their peers in other sectors of the economy, but their communication strategies influence others around them and are often adopted without question. In such environments, digital communication is part and parcel of the work, and traditional relationship building can be overtaken by task-centric communication. Then just as there is information overload in most workplaces, communication overload is also a risk. One way in which this comes to life is in the reporting habits of corporations. From 360 feedback (where employees report on their managers 3 ) to Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), a quarterly reporting structure developed in 1971 by Andrew Grove 4 in the early days of Intel, the options for letting a manager know you're doing your job can take a significant amount of time. The focus on reporting is a byproduct of digital communication structures which make it virtually impossible to walk past someone's desk and be able to tell exactly how busy they are. They're just tapping away at a keyboard, and in many paperless offices, their physical environment no longer illustrates their level of activities. In light of that "invisibility of work," reporting increases year on year. In 2011, the Boston Consulting Group even developed a "Complicatedness Survey" in light of their research 5,6 into the dynamics of work: the amount of procedures, vertical layers, interface structures, coordination bodies, and decision approvals within organizations had increased by anywhere from 50% to 350% over a 15-year period, in response to growing external complexity. If reporting on what work is being done takes more time than doing the work, chances are the environment won't allow anyone to "stray" from their set objectives into thinking about other things. As described in the excellent The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller, metrics-based work environments and by extension communication practices affect the likelihood of new ideas: When people are judged by performance metrics, they are incentivized to do what the metrics measure, and what the metrics measure will be some established goal. But that impedes innovation, which means doing something that is not yet established, indeed hasn't been tried out. […] When performance metrics discourage risk, they inadvertently promote stagnation. […] One result is to motivate those with greater initiative and enterprise to move out of mainstream, large-scale organizations where the culture of accountable performance prevails. 7 Gary Pisano and Willy C. Shih, at the Harvard Business School, argued 8 that metrics in business also prevented long-term innovation from happening because it led managers to only measure what they could immediately predict. […] it remains enormously hard to assess long-term R&D programs with quantitative techniques […] Usually, the data, or even reasonable estimates, are simply not available. Nonetheless, all too often these tools become the ultimate arbiter of what gets funded and what does not. So short-term projects with more predictable outcomes beat out the long-term investments needed to replenish technical and operating capabilities. Managers would serve their companies more wisely by recognizing that informed judgment is a better guide to making such decisions than an analytical model loaded with arbitrary assumptions. There is no way to take the guesswork out of the process. Our first chapter focused on the spatial conditions of innovation and our second looked at the contextualization of people's work; here we will highlight ways in which communication can contribute to creating space-space for new ideas to be voiced, space for these ideas to find champions, space for these champions to carve out some time and find internal support for an idea. Ignoring the effect of how communication is led, how meetings are conducted, how collaboration efforts are framed is to ignore the space where ideas can grow. Just like some people attend conferences for the "corridor track" where unplanned conversations take place, communication does offer opportunities for flowers to grow in the cracks of the concrete pavement of work tasks. If anything, this chapter should give managers the opportunity to reflect on what happy accidents a deeper understanding of communication might foster. Written communication strategies are varied and the shape they take contributes to the cognitive load of workers. If a business wants to think about how it enables innovation, divergent thinking, and make space for new ideas, I might be useful to take a closer look at the everyday instances of corporate communication. From the notice board near the bathrooms to the company-wide email, an opportunity is always hiding in plain sight to invite feedback or new ideas. Every element of internal corporate communication should consider whether: -The author asks for new ideas clearly. Not unlike office feedback, ideas should be positively promoted. From a dedicated email address, a physical or digital ideas box or a dedicated period of time someone is willing to take time to discuss new ideas, ideas should be actively identified and encouraged. -The process of selection and discussion should be made clear, just like for suggestions or job applicants. If management has no intention to comment on every single idea, that should be clear. -Ideas can be shared anonymously. Like negative feedback, some might feel that an idea may not be received positively because of internal politics or perceived ownership of activities. Letting people share ideas in a format where they can do so anonymously can help people muster up the courage, no matter where they sit in the hierarchy of a business. -The more diverse the audience for the ideas, the more likely they are to be understood and their implications discussed and explored. This is so that feedback about the business is differentiated from new ideas and both are equally valued. If a new idea is read by the right person in a business, its potential can have a big impact. Earlier, we shared Nike's internal memo stating its values in the 1970s, but the culture of internal memos doesn't have to be mundane. The Los Angeles LACMA residency matched artists and corporations for collaborative work. James Lee Byars's television broadcast World Question Centre 9 was the result of his work with The Houston Institute. The sculptor and filmmaker Robert Chamberlain became an "artist in residence" at the RAND Corporation and inspired by Byars's work sent every employee the memo in Figure 3 -1. 9 The art of perfection: James Lee Byars at MOMA PS1, Artslant Archive, www.artslant. com/ny/articles/show/40633-the-art-of-perfection-james-lee-byarsat-moma-ps1 (accessed June 2020) Similar to the long broadcast of Byars's 100 questions to thought leaders, Chamberlain collected the irritated, lyrical, and amusing responses from employees. Somewhat of a provocative way to get people out of their shell, not all of the responses invited a connection but the one from Ralph Lewis did. Every business makes choices to make their employee's life creative. It's where that creativity comes in and whether it is wasted in surviving in the workplace that can make all the difference. Email is the communication tool everyone loves to hate. About 3.9 billion 10 people have email accounts, yet the quantity, uncertain quality, and distracting effect create a kind of corporate "spuddle" 11 we all have to live with. Email has also become part of the performance of modern public life. In a yearly review of the use of email at work, Adobe 12 found that American employees spent 209 minutes a day checking their work email, 53% of which will be done outside of work hours. Furthermore, 43% of all email is checked on a mobile phone. In 2019, researchers at the University of the West of England conducted a survey of 5000 passengers commuting to London from the Midlands. Fiftythree percent of them used Wi-Fi to "catch up" on work, thus, essentially, working. Email is the thin end of a wedge of work activities. Email allows someone to start engaging with their tasks, boss, and colleagues before they even physically set foot in the office, preparing themselves psychologically for the role they need to play. In his 2019 paper "Between Home and Work: Commuting as an Opportunity for Role Transitions," 13 Jon Jachimowicz, from Harvard Business School, found that commuting offered an opportunity to conduct "work-related prospection" and "boundary management strategies," a process of planning ahead that helps busy parents and executives get the most out of their day and feel more satisfied. When someone applies makeup on a busy early morning train into work, or in their car, they are literally putting their "game face" on. Checking email complements this psychological preparation for work, giving someone a liminal zone before they are actually obligated to respond. Many, however, will feel pressured to respond to email at all hours of the day, contributing to a recent call to consider this unpaid labor. This no man's land in someone's day has also become especially contentious in the age of the "gig economy." In France, where the statutory work week is 35 hours, sending email to employees out of hours was seen as equivalent to unpaid labor and contributing to stress, burnout, sleep problems, and relationship problems. Passed in 2017, the El Khomri Law 14,15 (also known as the "right to disconnect") requires medium-sized businesses to state clearly the hours when employees are not expected to read or respond to email. Even if they are difficult to police in practice, they do offer protection for abusive practices that will sap someone's motivation at work and are slowly being adopted around the world. Beyond attention, there is an emotional dimension to email which is important to consider. In a study conducted on 1000 American office workers in 2019, 16 three-quarters said they felt important (76%), happy (81%), and satisfied (85%) when someone responded instantly to an email they had sent. When they didn't receive an immediate response, they feel frustrated (50%), unimportant (46%), and unsatisfied (47%). The study also went on to describe "bad netiquette" or what they deemed socially unacceptable behavior in email composition. The top three included copying in too many people, using curse words, and using capitalization too often. Even when we highlight these bad behaviors, there are no norms around how emails are written. 17 This lack of universal experience has created a strange subgenre in the world of management. Instead of letting employees deal with their tasks as they see fit, pressure to manage one's inbox in a particular way started to emerge out of early web culture. Some will limit their emails to five sentences, 18 in a bid to appear more effective; others create complex systems of attention management. Originally published in 2001, David Allen's book Getting Things Done had a huge impact on the corporate definition of "personal productivity" in the Internet age. It moved it away from promoting supposedly more effective and therefore more virtuous behavior in chief executives with PDAs to every kind of office worker who was suffering from information overload or what Dr. Sherry Turkle called "email bankruptcy." 19 It also created its own genre of software development: By the time Merlin Mann, a blogger and journalist, spoke at a 2009 Google Tech Talk, 22 productivity software built to support the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology was already a growing market. He'd also contributed to the development of OmniFocus, 23 a task management application entirely dedicated to support Allen's work. In his talk, he shared his idea of Inbox Zero 24 -an email management strategy he borrowed from Allen's concept of responding to email within 2 minutes. He then added elements like classifying a message according to actionability and checking an inbox only once an hour or once a day. Perhaps because of its unattainability, Inbox Zero generated its own wave of email-focused productivity software like Flow-E, Boomerang, ManyMe, and others. None of these applications or concepts have led to anymore clarity around email culture. In his talk, Merlin Mann captures exactly why in the Q&A section: There are some problems that can't be fixed by email. There are some problems where email is just the canary in the coalmine. You feel the pain in that place. What do you do with someone who keeps sending you junk? […] You've got to talk to them. Self-improvement techniques have always permeated the world of middle management, and email has given employees something else to feel guilty about-another Bogeyman to keep employees both uncertain about the best way to contribute to teamwork and at an individual level. This tendency in corporate culture is clearly captured in Melissa Gregg's book Counterproductive. She highlights some of the social dynamics at play: Productivity apps are a way to order work that avoids discussing work limits, job content, or questions of power that ultimately determine ownership of tasks that require action. In this way, time-management tools obscure the politics of labor and its delegation in the quest to maximize efficiency. 25 Policing people's inboxes or even the way in which they choose to respond to email is bound to be counterproductive, simply because there are no universal rules that will work for everyone. In 2020, a constant flow of articles are still being written about Inbox Zero and how to achieve it. Some have even strayed away from Mann's initial concept to simply aim for an empty inbox at any cost. 26 The reduction of his principle to its simplest expression is still an unattainable, largely pointless goal. Of all the aspects of email communication, how people manage an inbox isn't the most crucial. Email communication is about teamwork and whether that teamwork is being done. No amount of focus on the work will prevent an inbox from overflowing with meaningless junk. So taking the foot off the pedal and letting people communicate at their pace, without guilt, should be a priority. It will also leave people the freedom to respond when they really have something to share back or respond with a one line "let me get back to you." A 2015 study by Yahoo Labs and the University of Southern California 27 showed people's response rate to email varied depending on gender, age, and the time of day they chose to respond. The more emails people received, the more likely the response would vary in quality and in speed. users increased their activity as they received more emails, but not enough to compensate for the higher load. This means that as users became more overloaded, they replied to a smaller fraction of incoming emails and with shorter replies. However, their responsiveness remained intact and may even be faster. Demographic factors affected information overload, too. Older users generally replied to a smaller fraction of incoming emails, but their reply time and length were not impacted by overload as much as younger users. In contrast, younger users replied faster, but with shorter replies and to a higher fraction of emails. Employees can join and subscribe to notifications about the conversations taking place in themed chat rooms (known as "channels"). The theme of these channels can align with different business units, common business problems, or miscellaneous ones. There is always a "general" channel which everyone in the company can see, replacing the age-old company-wide email. The difference is the "all hands" email wasn't necessarily sent every single day, nor multiple times a day. But not unlike email, which it claims to replace, there are no norms of use around Slack. Initially targeted at software developers who thought email was too distracting, it is now used by over 10 million users every day who work in a variety of industries and business functions. 28 Slack's attempt to create a universal pipe for most communication needs has also led to the same proliferation of "how to" guides as GTD and Inbox Zero. A Google search for "how to use Slack effectively" generates 15 million results. From tutorials to tips and tricks, the fact that Slack is a mashup of multiple tools, in turn, multiples its possible use and misuses. Slack, in principle, could be used to enable the kind of cross-team interactions that we've discussed in the other chapters. However, this requires management to accept that one of the important byproducts of the tool is this free and open way to interact with others no matter their location in an office building or in a department. A mistake would be to interpret communication based on gifs being sent around as an "unproductive" use of the tool. The Metaplan method we mentioned in Chapter 1 also recognized people would need to be trained to wield this great power. The German visual artist Telse Schnelle-Cölln coined the idea of "optical rhetoric" and coauthored a number of Metaplan publications 34 with her husband, then Metaplan founder Eberhard Schnelle. Concerned about the overall rhythm of the presentation, their books aimed to help people understand the power of visuals when moderating group work. Today, this approach is slowly coming back. Microsoft PowerPoint, which set the standard for other presentation software (Keynote, Google Slides, etc.), was developed in 1987 35 and has been actively maintained ever since. The linear format (a skeuomorph of carousel slide projectors of the 1960s) as well as the assumption someone might be telling you a story, one slide at a time, remains unchanged. PowerPoint is both a tool that will make anything silly look serious, or bring credibility to the worst lies. Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos famously forbids 36 its use, opting instead for a six-page memo. As such, it is a tool of persuasion, entertainment as well much as it can be about communicating the quarterly results. This has worked well for British comedian Dave Gorman whose 2011 stand-up routine specifically used a PowerPoint presentation, a projection screen, and a handheld clicker. As he explains to the audience how coffee killed tea, 39 he clicks through a series of slides that used a variety of sound effects and transitions, making fun of making this kind of point, with that kind of tool. Finally, others focus on the style of presentation, the physical performance. TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) was originally a multidisciplinary conference started by another creative duo: graphic designers Harry Marks and Richard Saul Wurman who organized the first TED conference in 1984. The second edition, 44,45 in 1990, was filmed and archived online. But the TED we know today is the result of the sale of the format to Chris Anderson in 2000. A British-American entrepreneur who had worked in publishing, he turned TED Talks into a repeatable format of communicating complex ideas by putting the audience through a simple but effective storytelling process that lasts on average 18 minutes. All of the presentations are now made to be delivered online and the conference setting is secondary. The TED style of delivery (presenters are trained when they are selected to give a talk) has even become so recognizable as to be satirized. 46 Here the use of presentation software is secondary to the performance itself. The focus is on the theatricality of communicating complexity. Regardless of all these different attempts at making presentations better, there is no exact scientific way to make your presentations more impactful. So that famous "personal story" at the beginning of a TED Talk is one of the many ways to distract audiences into paying attention for those first 10 minutes. Knowing how to communicate effectively is one thing, knowing how to entertain in a meeting is another entirely. But that cocktail of clear, enticing visual communication coupled with a 10-minute loop in content should make some teams think more laterally about how they use their presentation time. There are also times when slides are not needed, because the person presenting feels confident enough not to have to use them as crutches. Politicians don't use slide presentations. This may require an extreme degree of personal confidence, but it will get an audience to focus completely differently. Some people will also enjoy the lack of visual distraction which allows them to gaze down, in order to concentrate on what is being said, not unlike what happens when you listen to a radio program. This in turns requires letting people take in what you have to say without worrying about the visual entertainment. A totally different approach. Buzzwords, in-jokes, and office language One unusual and often forgotten barrier to collaboration is the accidental coded language used in innovation work. From code words for projects to acronyms or in-jokes, language is one way to create a barrier to entry for anyone not "au fait." The more obfuscation, the more tension there is likely to be with other departments and the harder it gets for someone to contribute or give feedback on the fly. Secrecy is one thing, but making it harder for your own people to tell you why your idea won't work is another one entirely. One of the reasons for this choice of language is world building. Every innovation department is trying to build a narrative about themselves as an extension or in opposition to the rest of its business. Language is an easy way to create that world when the office space doesn't. It's also a way of embracing military ideologies or artistic ones, both potent sources of imagery and visual inspiration for innovation work. There's something more interesting at play than merely trying to make yourself sound interesting. Every innovation function is, in fact, trying to emulate either a smaller entity than its own or a more artistically inclined department. This desire to emulate an artist collective, an art movement, or any other form of artistic practice can lead to a group of people behaving in a cult-like manner to both build a heightened sense of belonging, increased expectations around performance, and a nifty way to keep others out of the loop. Within the confines of acceptable corporate behavior, naming things in a creative way is also the lowest hanging fruit, even when what is being built isn't particularly noteworthy. Coming up with code names also helps lighten the mood around a particularly stressful activity. They're often used in the finance sector to refer to speculative mergers and acquisition plans. It's a chance to have some fun. 48 But it itself, it is part of the performance of being at work and working in an innovation department. Some want it to feel as critical as military research so that employees take it seriously. Some, on the other hand, publicly acknowledge the performative aspect to internal language. Apple's naming convention for its operating systems is a typical example. After running out of big cats, they chose extreme geographic locations. 49 If Apple products can be named after their internal code names (OS 10.2 was marketed using its code name Jaguar), then anyone can. Short of actually doing anything innovative, or having very much to protect in terms of intellectual property, there are now ways to describe everyday work activities in innovative ways. 54 in one place. Weeknotes is the process and jargon of everyday work turned into high art, another form of grandiosity. Weeknotes is also responsible for organizations sharing their processes even if they don't make sense to others. This is a kind of performative radical transparency that has extended to Trello boards being shared online. Trello, an online platform to make, keep, and share lists of tasks, has been very popular with businesses adopting Agile methodologies and a "to do / doing / done" form of collaborative project planning. As of July 2020, we can peruse the Trello board of Smart London, 55 a group within London's City Hall, which tells us they are running late on a task titled "Develop a new cybersecurity strategy." Showing off someone's internal process eventually becomes as much of a story and public relations effort as a weeknote. It also puts pressure on employees to perform in a way that is partly public, instead of being allowed to fail and for projects to fold quietly. This partly explains why weeknotes and open roadmaps are popular in smaller businesses and government-led innovation work. They complement already existing public reporting structures, for example, in London's borough of Hackney: 56 Weeknotes are a way for us to keep people informed about progress on the project. Given the technical nature of the re-platforming work we will use them to explain technical choices that we are making, including the benefit and impact of these choices. The communication tools we've talked about so far exist to pad the time between meetings. But then it makes you think about meetings in a different way. When half of your time is spent replying to email, answering Slack messages, or adding emojis to a gif, do you really need a meeting at all? Even GoToMeeting, a conference software provider, recognizes this conundrum and warns there are seven warning signs your meeting should be an email. 57 From badly prepared meetings to needing direct answers from a small group of people who might need to think about it, or no one leaving with any "actions" to take, bad meetings are a waste of time and money. But a good meeting, especially in innovation work, is a meeting where as many voices and perspectives are heard. In some companies, every meeting starts with a sort of icebreaker, a daily discussion topic set for each meeting room, or a round-the-table welcome. This matters especially in more diverse and neurodiverse teams which should ideally make up an innovation team. Research has proven that women are interrupted more often in meetings 58 no matter the gender of the people doing the interrupting. They will also contribute less 59 if they are outnumbered in gender terms. This obviously creates an environment where a woman will feel defensive and may retreat, taking her ideas back to her desk, and possibly on to the next job. Women are not the only ones who can suffer from poorly run meetings. Employees from ethnic minorities, neurodivergent, disabled team members, and anyone dialing in remotely are bound to have a bad time in meetings where contributing creative ideas is the name of the game. Renée Cullinan, 60 a San Franciscobased consultant, runs "Stop Meeting Like This" which helps businesses identify flaws in their group processes. In an article for the Harvard Business Review in 2016, she describes the crux of the problem: In the ideal meeting, all attendees participate, contributing diverse points of view and thinking together to reach new insights. But few meetings live up to this ideal, in large part because not everyone is able to effectively contribute. We recently asked employees at a large global bank a question: "When you have a contribution to make in a meeting, how often are you able to do so?" Only 35% said they felt able to make a contribution all the time. Hilary Dubin, a product manager at enterprise software company, Atlassian, describes in a 2019 blog post 61 some more advanced meeting techniques. These included the following: -Making the entire meeting remote if even one participant is dialing in remotely -Asking the group to write down their thoughts when a big question arises and then giving everyone a voice -Actively interrupting the interrupters or giving them the job of whiteboard scribe which naturally puts them in a more passive role Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, also shares free resources for teams that include introverts. Her checklist 62 includes recommendations for introverts themselves to help them get what they want. This includes speaking early. A cognitive bias known as "anchoring" is being amenable to the first idea that someone puts on the table. By getting their voice heard early, instead of waiting too long, what an introvert has to say might even influence the decisions made by the end of the meeting. 63 There are no guarantees offered of course because every single group of people is different and so are their political dynamics, but making sure you give a voice to everyone is bound to both be good for ideas but also avoid people building up frustrations because their voice isn't actually heard. We've talked about the format of meetings in terms of how they are run, but this section explores some of the more physical aspects of meetings and meeting rooms especially as well as their impact on communication. If a meeting is being held in person, some people get excited by the soft power dynamics at play. Not unlike the conundrum of where to sit people at a wedding, people like to talk about the impact of where someone will sit in a meeting room. 64 But more often than not, most people will find themselves facing a screen with a colleague being dialed in remotely. Just like the television tends to dictate the furniture placement, most meeting rooms now face an audio visual tool of some sort. So what really does matter isn't in fact position, but personal space and comfort. An invasion of personal space can start to trigger stress, anxiety, and a range of negative emotions you want to keep out of your meeting room. But meeting rooms, and real estate in general, has been contracting for years. There is, in fact, such a thing as a meeting room that is too small for a group of people and understanding that quickly allows you to transition to an alternative space. A 2017 cross-cultural study of proxemics 65 published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology shows that in the United Kingdom, the acceptable social distance between acquaintances is around 80 cm and with a stranger (someone they might have a meeting with) that increases to 1 meter. Women and older participants also preferred increased measures. 66 These distances are easy to apply to work colleagues and meetings with visitors. If these measures are ignored, the discomfort someone might feel would distract them from the task at hand, especially if the work is meant to be creative. The image of the hothouse Post-it brainstorming session with people squeezed into a room sounds exciting but turns out to trigger all sorts of emotions and is likely to keep people's best ideas out of the meeting. Standing up, walking, treadmills, and movement at work As large corporations try to keep their employees happy, this has extended keeping an eye on their bodies. Productivity, sick days, and sick pay are all tied in some way to an employee's body. We talked about the effects of access to free canteen food earlier, but exercise in general has been increasingly promoted in mundane work interactions. An employee's body has become a corporate concern even when the work isn't itself strenuous or requires any particular level of stamina. And if this isn't pushed directly by the corporate environment, employees themselves create situations where physical ability is a requirement. From lunchtime jogging to taking part in international sporting events as a team, physical performance can both help reinforce team spirit and create a clique that is hard to break into. Offering a sit/standing desk, for example, is a popular (if expensive) starting point. Researchers have shown 67 that it improves outcomes in work engagement, occupational fatigue, sickness presenteeism, daily anxiety, and more. But others have not found any effect on creativity, 68 and it will have less of an impact on weight loss than going for a walk. 69 Transitioning to standing all day also requires training to avoid unwanted side effects. A walking meeting is also a meeting which doesn't require note-taking, which one could argue shouldn't be a meeting at all then. If a real group discussion is desired, it's worth noting whether walking makes the meeting inadvertently inaccessible or inconvenient. The US National Center on Health, Physical activity and Disability published a set of recommendations for walking meetings: 71 -Arrange the meeting in advance allowing individuals to bring proper footwear or assistive devices. -Set the path ahead of time ensuring the same start and finish. -Ensure that the path is accessible to all persons. Terrain should be a smooth, firm surface with no steep slopes. It should be free of obstacles and include curb cuts at all transfers. -The meeting should move at the pace of the slowest person. -Consider the impact of ambient noise. When it comes to actual exercise, then research is clear that anything that requires motor skills (like typing on a keyboard) might not be worth doing while on a treadmill. 72 It might look interesting, but it's probably a poor replacement for a good session at the gym over lunch. At the end of the day, the physical health of employees working on new ideas should be secondary to their interaction with others, openness, and curiosity. Some businesses have built gyms and other exercise facilities as part of their building, gently nudging employees to look after themselves. Others offer health insurance policies that vary according to an employee's level of activity. This subtle policing of the body at work can shame more mature and experienced employees, adding stress and anxiety to activities that really don't need them. So avoiding ageism and ableism should be a priority for most innovation teams, especially team leaders who may not have direct experience of mobility issues or may be younger than their team members. without proper wheelchair access, so it's likely the perception of ability is skewed in the average office and so in the average team. Effective leaders should be attentive to needs that might not be immediately voiced and take action without shaming anyone into a conversation about their limitations. This also applies to the stand-up meetings, 74 a tradition in software development and Agile project planning. From making sure everyone's height doesn't turn into a bias against shorter colleagues to a variety of health conditions and stamina in a group, a more lateral reading of a group means there's no little need to actually be standing when sitting would put everyone at ease. This is especially relevant when these kinds of meetings are meant to be short, so everyone's minds should be focused on the discussion rather than a colleague's height. When Jack Nilles coined the term "teleworking" in 1973, 75 he might not have anticipated how many opinions would now exist on this method of collaborative work. With the rise of telecommuting, telework, flexiwork, or just "working from home," the need to "check in" has increased exponentially. As a result, a person's bandwidth, or phone line, starts to play an active role in their ability to work well with others. In 2014, researchers found 76 that delays in communication, which were due to poor connectivity, led to negative perception of the person at the other end. But ultimately, the same rules apply to conference calls as any meeting. Like email, video "netiquette" is also not entirely clear. The default use of video cameras can be stressful for many who are taking the calls from a closet or don't enjoy staring at their own reflection while speaking with others. This also leads to more eye strain than a normal conversation as our eyes move from watching ourselves to watching everyone else. That is, if we're even paying attention. A much referenced 2014 report by conference software provider InterCall 77 (now Intrado) pointed out how fragmented our attention can be when video conferencing takes up a fraction of our screen experiences. Out of the 500 people interviewed, 82% admitted to working on other things when on a conference call. In a sense, multitasking is part and parcel of a phone call, compared to a face-to-face meeting. Everyone has picked up their mobile phone and used it in ways they wouldn't for an office landline. From eating (55% of respondents), taking it into the bathroom (47%), or sending emails (63%), people's attention tends to be fragmented because the experience isn't physically limited and the social obligations are entirely different. The imposition of a "video on" policy doesn't guarantee focus either, especially if the person is working at home with other, more immediate obligations as a parent or carer. This was judged such a big opportunity for improvement that Zoom, the video conference software provider, developed an "attention tracking" feature which looked at whether their software was "spotlighted" (in the foreground) in the last 30 seconds. Following accusations of privacy breaches, the feature was removed 78 in April 2020. So at best, a conference call which absolutely needs to take place should obey the same rules as a good meeting, and this applies to remote idea generation as well. 79 Respecting people's attention, no matter how fragmented, is respecting the limitations and freedom of working remotely for many. The main advantage of remote work is the ability to get together and create an "invisible college" of participants who might be working for the first time together as their physical locations might make it difficult to work on creative or open added activities. Making sure that group becomes a more coherent group over time might create conversations that wouldn't have taken place during the remote meeting. A group mailing list, dedicated Slack channel, or any other digital mechanism to keep that group together will eventually reap benefits especially after people have met face to face at a later date. Without this social glue over time, the effort put into a session really relies on very strong documentation skills. Sometimes described as "enforced fun," corporations organize yearly gettogethers for all or part of their staff in order to revisit, expand on, or rethink their collective goals and actions. What is unique about them is they tend to happen out of the office and involve hands-on group activities (physical or creative). These generally are 78 A Message to Our Users, E. Yuan, Zoom Blog, April 2020, https://blog.zoom.us/amessage-to-our-users/ (accessed July 2020) 79 How to Hold a Successful Virtual Brainstorm, R. Corliss, Owl Labs, May 2020, www. owllabs.com/blog/virtual-brainstorm (accessed July 2020) curated to encourage people to interact with others outside of their department and without the constraints of everyday office life. Its origins are unclear, but off-site training sessions are common in professional sports. Unlike a small intimate sports team of say 10-15 players, most corporate away days can involve hundreds of employees. Mozilla's "All Hands 80 " meetings involve almost all of their employees (around 1100) meeting in a different location every year. Empirical research into the effectiveness of this format is limited, but what is there points to some interesting avenues for consideration. In their 2010 paper "The Ritualization of Strategy Workshops," 81 researchers look at the impact of this "calendar-driven ritual" and its effectiveness back at the office. They studied how removed the events were from everyday activities, who ran them, how they were run, and how often they took place in the business calendar. They found that the liminal state of getting everyone onto a different location and using an external facilitator didn't improve the effectiveness of the workshop. What did lead to change was a clearly set purpose. Just like any other meeting! The 2013 research paper "Off to Plan or Out to Lunch?" 82 looked at the design characteristics and outcomes of over 650 away days. Their effectiveness was described in terms of organizational, interpersonal, and cognitive outcomes which implied that away days might be effective in ways you can't measure directly. What proved more operationally effective was increasing the number of events every year and not displacing people so much. Increasing the types of people involved also helped with interpersonal outcomes, something that is bound to improve their ability to work together in the future. Finally, working on scenario planning which relied on creative conversations was more effective than just pouring over the usual SWOT analysis. workshops designed to stimulate higher levels of cognitive effort -as indicated by the amount of preparation, time dedicated to the focal event, and the use of cognitively challenging analytical techniques -were associated with perceived improvements in the understanding of strategic issues. So if the best way to run these away days is to run them as a set series of well-structured meetings that are closer to home, a business is likely to save money and time. It will also become more accessible to women who might not have been able to attend an away day because of family obligations or a disabled colleague not sure about the likelihood of accessible travel conditions. Other downsides of away days can be more depressing. Bringing people together wasn't a guarantee of "communitas" but did create a temporary "social limbo" which we could assume is not only responsible for ideas that don't translate into organizational change but actions that would be unthinkable in the workplace. Instances of sexual harassment at corporate events have increased over the last ten years, a sad reality documented by the website Geek Feminism. 83 This has led to event-based Codes of Conduct 84 that attendees read and sign on arrival. The culture of away days has led some to revisit fraternity-inspired office perks such as free alcohol. Salesforce banned it in their offices in 2016. 85 Walmart have asked their country managers to approve the presence of alcohol at corporate events, 86 and WeWork stopped offering it in their locations in early 2020. 87 Because away days are part of the corporate "water," it's important for an innovation department to approach them differently and in a radically inclusive way, focusing on the variety of attendees, clear agenda, and ditching the exotic location. This is likely to keep people on their best, most respectful behavior and get people to work with others with genuine enthusiasm instead of trying to live up to their surroundings. Adobe Email Usage Study Between Home and Work: Commuting as an Opportunity for Role Transitions Warning Signs Your Meeting Should Be an Email, A. Tiffany, GoToMeeting blog Influence of Communication Partner's Gender on Language A Gender Inequality in Deliberative Participation 60 Run Meetings That Are Fair to Introverts, Women, and Remote Workers, R. Cullinan How to counteract 3 types of bias and run inclusive meetings The Quiet Rev website Where you sit at a meeting may say something about your role, D, York, Quartz at work Don't stand so close to me: why personal space matters in the workplace Walking outside also improves creativity, 70 but unless this is built into a preestablished meeting structure, it's not as accessible to a wide variety of people. 67 Effectiveness of the Stand More AT (SMArT) Work intervention: cluster randomised controlled trial The Effects of Standing Desks on Task Performance and Engagement The truth behind standing desks, R. Shmerling Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking Why are you so slow? -Misattribution of transmission delay to attributes of the conversation partner at the far-end, K. Schoenenberg & A. Raake Mobile Conferencing is Changing How We Work, D. Collins, InterCall Blog The Ritualization of Strategy Workshops 82 Off to Plan or Out to Lunch? Relationships between Design Characteristics and Outcomes of Strategy Workshops Timeline of incidents Benioff reminds employees of workplace drinking ban Are WeWorks in Revolt Now That the Company Is Taking Away Free Beer?, A. Mark, Slate Want to host a prototype in the cloud? Sorry, you've got to host it on our internal systems for privacy purposes, so the risk, time and cost to get this done will go up dramatically. Still want to proceed? 88 A relatively new source of tension when it comes to innovation is the IT department. The larger the corporate environment, the more a variety of security practices affect the ability for a business to innovate. This can start with how guests are treated when they walk into a corporate office.From identifying themselves (this might require a passport) to having their photograph taken and bags scanned (this is common in offices located in historic buildings or at risk of terrorist attacks or protests), a guest isn't exactly experiencing the same degree of freedom as other work contexts.Access control policies might even restrict their ability to go to the bathroom unassisted. This conjures an image of being in primary school and asking for a hall pass.Then there is the ability for someone to work using their own suite of communication or collaborative tools. A corporation's purchasing decisions may impose the use of software tools that are deemed "safe" mostly because they are understood, well supported, and come with different levels of 24h support. From corporate environments who have bought computers for all their employees from a particular vendor to social media and voice conferencing vendors being banned, IT restrictions can act on many levels and at different points in a project. This has two possible repercussions: frustration or group frustration. Just like bad food, ham-fisted IT practices do create opportunities for communal grumblings.From the executives that share documents using LinkedIn messaging because they disliked using their own intranet tools to people blocking out portions of time in their calendar so their colleagues couldn't invite them to meetings without their consent, the digitization of work has led to many avoidance strategies. These strategies sometimes expose a business to cybersecurity risks but the cost to innovation is real too. Being able to create "sandboxes" for a team to work outside of the constraints is useful but also equates to the "liminal state" of away days. Eventually, the corporate restrictions will need to be dealt with.