Don't let your virtual workplace become toxic
A remote, async-first workplace is not immune to toxicity. There are three major anti-patterns leaders and teams need to guard against as they transition to a remote native way of working.
- Celebrating long hours and unsustainable pace sets the wrong example amongst people and will eventually burn people out. This benefits no one.
- Proximity and visibility bias can force an always on culture where people feel obliged to be in every meeting, every chat and every email exchange. This leaves little time for work, and erodes the efficiency of our communication systems.
- Going async doesn't mean being insensitive and not talking to people when there's a good reason to do so. If anything, when we neglect time sensitive work with a slow, asynchronous back and forth, it can shake people's faith in this way of working.
Every work model has its pitfalls. While the office, particularly the open office, had its interruptions, monocultures, and cliques, it’s not as if a remote workplace can’t go south. An async-first remote culture looks to foster a calm, respectful, flexible, fun, and inclusive workplace that values deep work. Those are great intentions. Both leaders and team members need to preserve those characteristics of the workplace.
In today’s post I want to explore some anti-patterns I’ve seen in remote-first and “hybrid” organisations that can make your workplace toxic. Some of these are by products of old habits that die hard. Others are unintended, but not uncommon consequences of a remote workplace. When you know of these possibilities ahead of time, you’ll be able to pre-empt them and put the right guardrails in place for your team. Let’s explore some of these anti-patterns.
Celebrating the hard worker
The other day I saw a team at a company I really admire celebrate a few of their superstars. You might know by now that I’m a sucker for celebrating awesome colleagues. But there was something about that celebration that bothered me. One of the leaders at that event celebrated an individual for “going above and beyond their regular workday and for straddling opposing time zones to deliver results”.
The problem with a celebration of this nature is that it sets the wrong precedent. When a leader celebrates long work hours or an unsustainable work pattern, it lays down unwritten norms. Before you know it, everyone believes they must work long hours, so their company values them. It may be tempting in the short term, to even encourage your employees to give it a good, hard crack; or as some of us like to say, “hustle”. The truth is, that an unsustainable work environment hurts you eventually. Research from Clockwise confirms many of our fears, but there are two I want to point out.
The impact on diversity. Women are twice as likely as men to feel that their work culture is unsustainable.
The likelihood of attrition. Workers at companies with unsustainable cultures are more than nine times as likely to say they don't see themselves at their company in the next 12 months.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t recognise people’s efforts. Do that, but instead of focusing on how long someone worked, celebrate the results they drove. Coach and encourage your colleagues to keep a work-life balance and celebrate the people who help others have a sustainable pace at work. This preserves the culture of appreciation, while avoiding the toxicity of long work hours.
Digital presenteeism
Right at the start of this journey, I explained the impact of proximity bias and visibility bias on work relationships. Think of these as twin phenomena.
Those who are physically closer to company leaders enjoy a greater influence on them and have a better chance at advancing their careers.
Only when people can “see you” working, do they believe that you’re being useful.
Of course, that isn’t fair. The whole premise of asynchronous work is that hours and locations don’t matter. Then again, we’re human. All our actions aren’t rational, and our biases come with their corresponding blind spots. Despite our best intentions, we may end up recognising our “visible” colleagues more than the ones that are just quietly hammering away at their work.
Abby Peel, co-lead, mental health network at the UK government’s digital service
“[Digital presenteeism happens] when you feel under pressure to always be available online, via video calls, phone, email, chat, or Slack. It’s when you’ve done a full day’s work but feel pressure to log on or reply later than your normal or preferred working patterns, even if you feel exhausted or unwell.”
In the remote workplace, this can lead to a bunch of toxic behaviours and responses.
Some colleagues appreciate other colleagues who’re always active on Slack or other communication platforms. Soon, everyone feels the need to be present and responsive on Slack.
The boss appreciates people who respond to emails after hours. Before you know it, everyone’s monitoring email if they’re awake.
People who attend meetings are the only people who get access to certain information. This breeds a culture where everyone wants to be in every meeting for the fear of missing out (FOMO).
Even our tools don’t make it easy on us. Read receipts and presence indicators on digital collaboration tools add to the phenomenon of digital presenteeism.
Like in the case of celebration, it helps to keep a focus on results and to de-emphasise the notion of presence. By instituting communication protocols, moving most task-based communication to your task board, and making meetings the last resort and not the first option you’d have already taken systemic steps to avoid this toxicity.
If you’re a leader at any level, then you also have a key role to play here. Don’t send messages or emails after hours. The more you do it, the more others will follow. In fact, at the time of writing this article, some countries, including but not limited to Belgium, Portugal and Italy have gone so far as to ban employers from contacting staff out of hours. Also be sure to rate people fairly on their work and not based on how visible they seem. When people have the confidence that their results matter more than digital schmoozing, you have a greater chance of avoiding the digital presenteeism trap.
Talk to the document
When you work asynchronously, the design of the team’s workflow prioritises written communication and time for deep work. Writing has its benefits, of course, but there’s always too much of a good thing. When things go off balance, we risk veering into toxic territory.
We want to avoid a false sense of urgency for obvious reasons. Not everything needs an immediate response, and everyone wants uninterrupted time to work. Urgent is overrated. ASAP is toxic. Keeping someone blocked, though, is insensitive. When someone can’t move forward with their work even though they have a bias for action; or if they need some time sensitive input, we can’t ask them to “talk to the document”. In such cases a short conversation is much better than an endless asynchronous back and forth in a document or worse, over email or IM. The toxic aftertaste of such inefficient communication can erode people’s faith in an async way of working. It does more harm than good to the culture you’re trying to create.
The ConveRel quadrants give you a simple rubric to decide whether you should go sync or async. As you’ll remember, most communication about “convergence” is best suited for a synchronous medium. This also utilises what synchronous communication is good for - speed and connectedness. It doesn’t matter how experienced the team is at working remotely. It helps to revisit these fundamentals and course correct if we notice each other pushing too far in either direction.
In his book, “A world without email”, Cal Newport mentions a term called “collaborative pacing”. Douglas Rushkoff defined this term first in his book Present shock: when everything happens now. The idea is that “groups of humans may converge toward strict patterns of behaviour without ever actually explicitly deciding that the new behaviours make sense.” One person behaves a certain way, another follows and before you know it, a pattern appears.
Toxic anti-patterns at work appear in a similar fashion. For organisations and teams in transition, you already need to battle the status quo bias of naysayers. Since remote work is newer in comparison to office bound ways of working, every anti-pattern in a remote workplace will face a disproportionate amount of scrutiny as compared to the office. So, teams and leaders that want to protect their new work culture will need to be vigilant and pre-empt the toxic anti-patterns we’ve discussed in this article. This is as important to the success of your transition as employing the right practices.
Further reading
Jeffrey Gangemi of Toptal has put together a comprehensive insight on toxic communication in online workspaces. It addresses a few perspectives that I don’t cover in this article. I learned a fair bit about workplace incivility when reading through Toptal’s research.