Those working in the borderless digital workplace might be given some training on the tools they use, but not on how to make the experience rewarding. Paying attention to five principles (PRIME) makes a positive difference to the quality of the experience and the output.
1. People Principle: Keep developing your network
New communication and collaboration technologies give us the capability to build large networks. With some people we have strong ties—those we know well and interact with frequently. With others we have weak ties—we don’t know them very well and will rarely, if ever, interact. Both sets of ties are important to develop in the borderless workplace.
To apply this principle:
Think breadth as well as depth in relationships.
Social capital at its simplest refers to the benefits made possible by the cooperative connections in our social networks. We can expect our deeper strong ties to be cooperative, but it is often among the broader weak ties that cooperative benefits can be most fruitful. Our strong ties often will share our interests and information sources, while our weak ties can take us into unexpected, but highly beneficial places.
Give, don’t just take.
Good networks are built on mutual give and take—reciprocity. The law of reciprocity states that a positive action is most likely to be responded to with another positive action. One of the meanings of the apologetic Japanese word sumimasen (sometimes used for “thank you”) is “it does not end,” suggesting the cycle of reciprocity doesn’t end with this “thank you.” If we continually take, our network quickly will resist our requests.
2. Reality Principle: Determine what’s real from what’s imagined
Working in a borderless workplace, we often have many gaps in our knowledge of others. What is going on in their lives? What makes them feel comfortable or stressed? What is their working environment like? Our brains don’t like these gaps and fill them with assumptions and stories that may have little bearing on reality.
To apply this principle:
Beware the stories you tell yourself about others.
Your real colleague might not be the person you imagine online. If you have only been communicating by e-mail, for example, you may have mistaken someone’s gender (especially when working across cultures). We are all sense-making beings forming hypotheses and looking for validating information in the muddy conversations we often have in virtual communications.
Understand that you might be the problem.
What the research tells us is that when problems arise in virtual work and we ask, “Why did that happen?” we tend to attribute the blame to the internal dispositions and personalities of our distant colleagues rather than the external challenges of virtual working. Beware of this fundamental attribution error.
3. Inclusion Principle: Communicate to bridge differences
Working face to face with people, we typically make some adaptations to be inclusive of differences. In virtual space, we don’t feel the same urgency to adapt because the differences tend to be less obvious and, therefore, we assume similarity.
To apply this principle:
Keep assumptions of similarity in check.
We often make assumptions based on very little information. When we are working virtually and across cultures, we can easily be deceived if someone’s accent, for example, sounds like our own. From that one piece of information, we may project many unfounded similarities such as compatible worldviews or shared social background.
Understand the preferences of others.
People have preferred ways of doing things, e.g., communicating. We can wait for preferences to emerge, but it usually is more productive to have constructive learning conversations with colleagues early and often.
4. Momentum Principle: Keep the energy flowing
Distance doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder. It can reduce the richness of communications while increasing uncertainty, confusion, and conflict. Restricted and challenging human contact often drains personal and group energy and lowers personal engagement.
To apply this principle:
Minimize uncertainty.
Unclear purpose, fuzzy roles and reporting relationships, and vague performance measures—all of these faults are likely to generate confusion in virtual work where opportunities to gain clarification are fewer.
Deal with conflict sooner rather than later.
Given that we work across distances with reduced interaction, we might be tempted to ignore conflict. We have to bring virtual conflict into the open where it can be dealt with constructively. Small conflicts in virtual space can become disproportionally large if suppressed beneath the surface for too long.
5. Easy Principle: Make life easy for yourself and others
Working at a distance from others can be difficult and frustrating. Misspelled and ungrammatical e-mails, unclear and imprecise messages, too much or too little information, lack of responsiveness, and lengthy virtual meetings can make work a misery.
To apply this principle:
Take responsibility for the communication.
There is no communication without shared understanding between the sender and the receiver. Many times, the receiver is made to work too hard to accurately interpret what is meant. The sender should take responsibility for achieving shared understanding.
Help others connect the dots.
There can be a real problem with a lack of shared contextual understanding in the borderless workplace. Everyone is likely to be working on a small piece of a larger project, and in a different location. We cannot assume that our virtual colleagues know what we know or see what we see.
Use PRIME to identify three things you could do today to most improve your borderless working effectiveness.
Terence Brake is the director of Learning & Innovation, TMA World (http://www.tmaworld.com/training-solutions/), which provides blended learning solutions for developing talent with borderless working capabilities. Brake specializes in the globalization process and organizational design, cross-cultural management, global leadership, transnational teamwork, and the borderless workplace. He has designed, developed, and delivered training programmes for numerous Fortune 500 clients in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Brake is the author of six books on international management, including “Where in the World Is My Team?” (Wiley, 2009) and e-book “The Borderless Workplace.”
