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Being There When You’re Not
You might think that working with other people is a cinch compared to collaborating with machines. We’re all human beings, after all. In reality, working in a virtual environment changes how we interact with one another. When you’re out of sight of your coworkers, managers, or clients, you can easily become out of mind and out of touch. Developing a digital mindset means learning to stay in sync with remote collaborators.
No doubt you can recall a time when you were perplexed by a remote colleague’s behavior. Are they not answering your email because they are busy? Uninterested? Both? Maybe they didn’t get your email? When we are not collocated with our collaborators, we make up our own accounts for their behavior and infer what their motives might be. We engage in this kind of behavior because the digital tools that make our physical separation possible lead to what Catherine Cramton, Professor Emerita of Management at George Mason University who has spent her career studying digitally enabled collaboration, calls the “mutual knowledge problem.”1 Mutual knowledge is the information that we need to achieve mutual understanding. It is the common ground that people need to reach. Perhaps your colleague has not answered your email because they have taken the day off. Or perhaps they had to attend to a pressing project or your email landed in their spam folder. Remote workers struggle to achieve common ground because even the slightest physical separation between people threatens their ability to establish shared understanding. Without mutual knowledge, collaboration suffers and teams begin to fall apart.
Establishing the close, collaborative working relationships that we all need to thrive in the digital age means developing a mindset that anticipates the mutual knowledge problem and learns strategies to compensate. We call these strategies digital presence. Here, you’ll learn how to establish an effective digital presence. We identified these best practices by studying remote workers across different industries, doing different kinds of work, in companies that included Adobe, AT&T, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cisco, FleishmanHillard, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, LogMeIn, Verizon Wireless, Tyco, and Wells Fargo.
When we compared people in the companies we studied who had excellent digital presence with those who didn’t, we found that the primary way they cultivated that presence was by maintaining continuity in their relationship with others. These successful individuals made sure that there weren’t long gaps in communication or big absences in how others experienced them. Although the schedules and numbers of hours they worked varied, the people who they worked with had the sense that they were sufficiently accessible. How do you keep people aware of you and thinking about you regularly? In three ways:
· Send updates; don’t wait
· Create a sense of curiosity
· Communicate on their timeline, not yours
Send Updates; Don’t Wait
After four years working as a software engineer for a large network hardware company, Jenna was asked to join an elite team of developers working on the flagship product. The team manager and a quarter of the team worked out of the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters, but the team also included subject matter experts from all over the world. Jenna was the sole member from the company’s North Carolina outpost. She loved the work, but she struggled collaborating at a distance. She remembers the difficult first few months of being 100 percent virtual. “It was the first time I’d worked in a scenario like this. Doing the work was easy, but I kept getting this feeling that things were going on without me, that my manager wasn’t sharing everything with me.”
Some of our work with Fortune 50 companies has shown that these feelings of being forgotten or overlooked are not uncommon in remote work situations because of the mutual knowledge problem. Although Jenna’s company provided her and everyone else with multiple channels for communication—email, IM, internal social media, and other digital collaboration tools—Jenna still felt that her team often forgot she was there. The problem was compounded, and this is also typical, by the hybrid nature of the team, in which some people were collocated while others like Jenna worked remotely. The problem is exacerbated when the collocated people are working alongside the manager or if one person on the team is in a “solo” location. In Jenna’s situation, both factors were in play.
At her performance review, Jenna was shocked to get the worst set of evaluations she’d ever received. When she told her manager that she had met or exceeded all her goals during the evaluation period, her manager told her that she was technically fine, but he just didn’t have the sense that she was really excelling at her overall job. Jenna was upset by this vague answer. Upon reflection she understood him to mean that her absence might be misinterpreted when she was offline.
Jenna made one simple switch: “I decided to give updates about my progress and to be very forward about where things were going even when I wasn’t asked.” In practice, that meant that Jenna would copy her manager on emails to their consultants; she would mention him in the collaboration tool when she reached a particular product milestone; and she would write short direct messages to her manager and other teammates providing them with updates on her tasks. All these mini-updates helped to establish a sustained digital presence with her manager and teammates. At her next review, Jenna received her best evaluation. She remembered only one comment from her manager: “Jenna. You’re everywhere!” Notice, though, that Jenna hadn’t made substantive changes to her work. She only changed when and how people knew about her work, and that alone changed her evaluation from worst to first.
Like Jenna, professionals who excel in digital collaboration don’t wait for managers or teammates to ask them what they’re doing, how things are going, or what their thoughts are about certain matters. Instead, they’re proactive in reaching out to others in order to establish and remain digitally present—even when insight into their projects and their performance is unsolicited. Those who are successful at digital collaboration tend to find it odd, at first, to constantly broadcast their work status and activities to others. It feels unnatural to provide small updates all the time. But over time, they learn to take proactive steps to describe what they were doing, without making specific requests of their teammates. As a result, their work participation is top of mind to their collaborators and managers.
Another common fear is that overcommunication becomes a nuisance to the receiver. But we were surprised to learn that none of the managers and collaborators who were receiving more communication had seemed to notice the increase in communication. In one case, we showed the manager of a large team the volume of communication he’d received from one of his individual contributors over the past two weeks and he was blown away: “I had no idea he sent me so many updates. No idea at all! But I’ll tell you what, I knew he was working hard.” Crucially, these extra, unsolicited messages didn’t add to receivers’ cognitive loads because the sender didn’t ask anything of them. There was no call to action, and no need for the recipient to invest their time. The only purpose was to manage and maintain digital presence. But managers who learned, as part of the process, how team members were progressing on projects knew when to intervene if necessary. What’s more, they could fully appreciate the work that team members were putting in. Everyone had learned to work in sync.
Create a Sense of Curiosity
“Are you around?” “I need to talk about something important.” “You need to hear this. Message me ASAP.” “I’ve got some news to share.” “Can you call me as soon as you’re available? We need to talk.”
What do these message openers all have in common? Damon, a senior-level manager at a large telecommunications company, explains, “When someone reaches out to me like this—a little ambiguously—I can’t get them out of my mind. It just makes me curious.” Damon and other leaders, and colleagues react similarly to messages that pique their curiosity: they focus their thoughts and attention on the sender. Messages that begin this way don’t always encourage people to respond more quickly, but they are another practice to remain digitally present to remote colleagues.
You’ve probably had it drilled into your head that clear and concise communication is the best form of communication, especially in work settings. That advice is undoubtedly correct when your goal is to update someone, provide timely insights, or make sure that your audience understands your message.
But if your goal is simply to be present, ambiguity—as opposed to clarity—has virtues that can be integral to relating to others with a digital mindset. University of South Florida professor Eric Eisenberg has spent the better part of his career studying how people can use ambiguity strategically when communicating.2 He’s found that when a message—whether an interpersonal message like email or formal communication such as a company’s mission statement—is phrased purposefully ambiguously, two simultaneous effects occur. First, people think about the message more, trying to intuit meaning from it, and they focus their attention on the sender. Second, they begin making their own interpretations, forming opinions about what it means and what the important parts of the message are. In both ways, ambiguity captures people’s attention and focuses it exactly where digitally minded strategic communicators want them to: on them.
Likewise, we find that these ambiguous messages create a sense of curiosity that amplifies attention in remote work.3 Alena, a sales rep at a large bank who worked remotely from her team, described how she did this: “If I haven’t had a lot of face time with someone and I want them to remember me, I might wait until I’ve got something I need to talk to them about and then just send them a message like, ‘I’ve got something important to tell you.’ You know, leave it at that. Without the details they get curious. When they get back to me they say, ‘I’ve been thinking about you all day,’ which is exactly what I wanted to happen.” Alena is exhibiting a digital mindset. She is intentional about developing and using strategies for maintaining digital presence.
Of course, if every message was designed to provoke curiosity, your audience would begin to tune them out quickly. You may have experienced that tuned-out response to advertising that promises to give you the best and most amazing solution to some intractable problem—often, once you pay a substantial fee. So in addition to strategic ambiguity, it is important to be restrained in your promises and strategic about timing. Strategically ambiguous messages are most effective when they meet three conditions:
· Payoff. Messages designed to provoke curiosity have to come with some payoff for the recipient. If the buildup was for nothing, your recipient will be put off.
· Timing. Filling the recipient in too soon can undermine the establishment of your presence. If the goal of inciting curiosity is to make sure that people are thinking about you and focusing on you for an extended period every so often, relieving the tension too soon obviates the goal.
· Frequency. Don’t send to the same person more than once every four to six months.
The takeaway here in developing your digital mindset is that when interacting primarily through mediated communication, thinking about someone and focusing attention on them in intense bursts, even if periodically, has the positive effect of making that person feel more immediately present.
Communicate on Their Timeline, Not Yours
One of the key reasons establishing presence is so important in the digital realm is because people’s attention is being commanded by many other people and information sources. When you’re out of sight, it’s easy for all those other distractions to fill the space someone might have devoted to thinking about you. Advertisers and marketing professionals have contended with this challenge for decades.4 Digital advertising has offered one solution to overcoming this problem from which we can all learn: timing influences when people are likely to be more or less receptive. Advertisers, who find it easy to track when someone engages in certain behaviors on their digital platform, routinely run data analysis on what’s called digital behavior data to find out when people are most receptive to seeing an ad.
Mark Vadon, founder of the online jewelry retailer Blue Nile and Zulily, which began as a flash sale site for kids clothing, used digital behavior data to determine consumer buying patterns at his two companies. He found that most sales take place on Mondays and the fewest sales occur over the weekend. Claudia Lombana, a shopping specialist at eBay and PayPal, found a similar pattern when crunching the numbers on her site. Not only did she find that Mondays were the days that people bought the most, but they did so between noon and 1:00 p.m. in their time zone. It turns out people were quite fond of using their lunch breaks on Mondays—when they were already sitting in front of a computer—to buy all of the things they were thinking about over the weekend. These insights spurred a flurry of advertising during the lunch hour to catch people when they were most likely to be in the mood to shop.5 Google AdWords cost more during the noon–1:00 p.m. time frame as advertisers jockeyed to be in front of people who were primed to buy. With the explosion of mobile purchasing in recent years, those consumer behavior patterns have changed and advertisers are subsequently having to perform ever more intricate data analysis to find the right time to serve ads to people, but the fact remains that timing makes a difference when it comes to receptivity.
People’s receptivity to your messages is also time dependent. If you want to reach someone whose attention is under assault from many other sources, you have the highest odds of doing so when they are primed to listen to your digital communication. Our work has shown, however, that most people do just the opposite—they communicate with others when it’s easiest for themselves, not when it’s best for others.
Chances are that some of the people you work with are in different time zones. Even slight differences in when you begin and end your day can create opportunities for what we call attention misalignment across work sites. Take for example, Syneca, an analyst at a large health-care insurer. Her office was located on the West Coast, but she regularly worked with her team in Chicago, New York, and Boston. It was typical for Syneca to start her day by messaging her team about issues still pending from the previous day when she arrived at work at 9:00 a.m. But by this time, her East Coast colleagues were on their lunch break. They would typically respond once they returned, but by that time, Syneca had moved on to other tasks. By contrast, when Syneca worked with people in the same time zone, she had lively back-and-forth communication in near–real time with her colleagues. Not surprisingly, her West Coast colleagues felt that Syneca was present to them while her East Coast colleagues did not. As one of her colleagues in Boston commented, “Syneca is fine to work with. I don’t get to interact with her live much, but she’s solid.” In other words, Syneca had not established a strong presence with her colleagues in a different time zone.
Disappointed that she was not able to build strong connections with her team on the other side of the country, Syneca decided to make a change in the timing of her messages. As she recounted, “I started holding some of our action items for an hour or so after the start of my day so the folks on the East Coast would be back from lunch. Things changed fast when I did that. Instead of me sending a message and waiting, they responded right away and we really got that back-and-forth going that makes things happen.” Small adjustments, such as waiting an hour or so to send an email, can make a big difference in how your digital communications do or do not establish presence with your remote coworkers.
Like Syneca, people we’ve worked with who shifted their mode of communicating to consider when their messages would be best received by their intended audiences were able to establish their presence despite the fact that their communication partners were inundated. A senior VP at a major computer manufacturer put it plainly: “You just get a feeling that someone is there for you or not. I guess part of that feeling comes from the fact that you know if you reach out they’re there. If you have lots of experiences where you just seem to be missing each other, it’s hard to really feel like you’re connected and you sort of stop trying.”
Social Lubrication for Digital Tools
Productively and intentionally interacting with collaborators and managers through internal social media tools that have radically reshaped interactions in the workplace is another key part of developing a digital mindset. Daily workflows can include participating in multiple chat messaging threads with several different groups, clicking on links a team member has sent to you, getting pinged about new activity in a group to which you belong, jumping on a brief screen-sharing session, co-editing documents, and reading a companywide posting alerting you to a change in, for example, parking policy. These communication methods have developed recently and rapidly. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, internal social tools became ubiquitous, replacing email and phone communication in many cases.6
But the meteoric rise of internal social tools in the workplace does not necessarily mean that companies and their employees know how to use them optimally. When organizations attempt to go digital, they often reach straight for the technology and then try to figure out how it can fit into their organization. Michael Kanaan, director of AI and machine learning for the US Air Force, calls this thinking “techno-solutionism.” He asserts that the logic is inverted. Companies instead need to determine what their specific goals are first, and then think about how specific digital tools can help them achieve these goals.7 And this doesn’t go just for executives, of course, but for managers and employees as well. As part of a six-month study at a large financial services firm, we talked to people and leaders of both large and small organizations about how they used internal social media platforms. We identified three best practices that maximize their use to meet company goals:
· Articulate the purpose
· Look to learn
· Get personal
Articulate the purpose
You, your colleagues, and your employees need to be aware of the purpose and potential of the internal social media tools in the workplace. You need to know that when used productively, internal social media tools can strengthen relationships and increase knowledge sharing.8 This feature of digital collaboration tools may be less intuitive than their obvious usefulness for fast and accessible online communication, but it’s what makes digital collaboration tools so powerful for organizations. More specifically, internal social media tools serve a crucial purpose because in addition to the actual information you receive you also learn who sent it and where the information came from. We call that contextual information metaknowledge, and it’s the prequel to people’s ability to connect with one another.9 Connecting in turn leads to more information sharing and collaboration for problem-solving or innovation.
Leaders must demonstrate the power of enterprise social networks to employees. They must explicitly state that the purpose is to strengthen employee relationships in order to improve communication and collaboration. Otherwise, employees assume that online social activity that is non-work related is an impediment to productivity instead of a boost. It’s an understandable assumption to make when “socializing” at work—especially online—is traditionally characterized as a distraction. For this reason leaders can model the behavior they would like to see. When they notice a good idea streaming on the company’s social tool, they should publicly engage the person who posted it. And when employees share information that’s not related to work, leaders should chime in with interest. It takes a critical mass to make internal digital collaboration tools useful, and this is difficult to achieve when people disengage from the site for fear of reprisal. Thus, leaders need to clearly model and explain what employees—and the organization as a whole—stand to gain through these new technologies.
Look to learn
Reagan, an IT technician at a large atmospheric research lab, was quietly surfing her group’s social site one morning. She often started her day by perusing chats that might have taken place here and there. One exchange caught her attention. Her colleague Jamie had sent a message to another technician, Brett, asking about how to fix a semantic key encryption issue. When she read Brett’s response, her eyes widened with excitement. She had been struggling with the exact same issue that Jamie had asked about, and now she had an answer. “I’m so happy I saw that message,” she said. “Jamie explained it so well that I was able to learn how to do it.” Perhaps you have shared or learned this kind of information with coworkers in hallway conversations or emails. Social media tools make such information sharing possible for remote workers, but equally important, also allow the exchange to become visible to a larger group rather than remaining trapped in one-to-one exchanges. Because Jamie and Brett’s chat was visible to others in the lab, Reagan was able to find an answer to an ongoing problem without even explicitly looking for it. All three people had made productive use of the social site.
Social tools also can increase innovation if you borrow ideas and solutions from other parts of the organization and combine them in fresh ways for your own purposes.10 Tim, an employee in the consumer finance division of a financial services firm, was working out the details of a new loan program. He couldn’t quite figure out how to make his idea work. But then inspiration struck: “I suddenly remembered that I’d seen a communication exchanged between these two guys.… One of them who’s in the pricing department mentioned something about rate variation depending upon risk factors. That caught my eye, so I read the history of the conversation he had, and it included some key ideas about risk that helped me. I sent him an email to see if I could learn more about it, and it made sense. So I developed the program around it, and it’s been pretty successful so far—really innovative, so it made me proud.” Tim not only monitored a previous conversation to access the information he needed but as a result of using his company’s digital collaboration tool learned “who knows what”—the person he could email to find out more of what he needed to know. Tim’s director was happy, too. The product came in on time and under budget and carved out a new niche for the company in a crowded market.
Developing a digital mindset means becoming aware that social media networks can facilitate knowledge even when the information isn’t in clear sight. Consider Amanda, a marketing coordinator at the same financial firm as Tim. Her manager asked her to analyze trends in an enormous data set, but Amanda was unsure how to do it. She tried to figure it out herself, but to no avail. So she hopped on to the company’s social platform, and still couldn’t find an answer. But she did see an exchange between two employees in marketing—Rick and Alicia—who were discussing the same issue. Rick recommended that Alicia contact Mark, in the analytics department, who could write the script. Amanda eagerly left Mark a voice mail. When she didn’t get a response, she tried again the next day. Still nothing. Fortunately, by observing the conversation between Rick and Alicia, Amanda had learned not only “who knows what” but also “who knows whom”—a crucial form of metaknowledge. So she asked Rick if he would broker an introduction. Minutes later, she was on the phone with Mark, who wrote the script and saved Amanda nearly a week’s worth of time on her project.
The lesson here is that it’s to your advantage to keep an eye out for information that may be useful.11 Developing a digital mindset means understanding that social tools can be used not only to uncover necessary information but also to prevent duplication of work by allowing everyone in an organization to learn about existing projects and initiatives, thus freeing up time and money to generate new knowledge.
Like Reagan, Tim, and Amanda, employees who observe others’ communications pick up bits and pieces of seemingly unimportant information over time. Eventually, they begin to form a picture of who knows what and whom. Tech writer Clive Thompson compares using digital collaboration tools to staring at a pointillist painting.12 No dot by itself makes much sense. But when you step back to see all the dots together, you comprehend a rich image. That’s also a rich metaphor for what it’s like to develop a digital mindset. The slow process whereby people see the individual dots makes it difficult for them to realize they are learning. That’s why it’s crucial for managers to explicitly highlight the potential for knowledge sharing and skill building when rolling out digital collaboration tools—and have developmental conversations with employees—otherwise people may underutilize or even abandon them.
Get personal
Millennials “breathe” social media, as one senior executive at a large insurance company puts it. They are digital natives who grew up on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit. Online dating is not an oddity for them; it’s the norm.13 Unsurprisingly then, managers often look to millennial employees to set an example with technology, expecting that they will be pioneering users of digital collaboration tools at work.
But that’s a mistake. In our research, we’ve found the opposite to be true: about 85 percent of young professionals said they struggle with digital collaboration tools at work. Ironically, about 90 percent of older professionals viewed these tools simply as new and useful modes of communication.
Developing a digital mindset around social media tools can present different challenges depending on your previous experiences. This can play out in how the digital collaboration tools are presented. In too many rollouts senior executives—trying to provide a cognitive link to a familiar technology—have referred to digital collaboration tools as “Facebook for the company” or “Twitter for the company.” But after hearing that from a manager, a twenty-two-year-old data analyst at the insurance company asked, “Why would I want to use Facebook at work? I don’t think I necessarily want my manager knowing that I went to a party last night.” Therefore, leaders need to think carefully about how to frame digital collaboration tools—they need to signal that the casual tone of social media chats and activity are welcome and encouraged, while clear lines between professional life and personal life should be maintained. Social media interactions at the workplace can be casual—and often non-work related—while still being productive and also distinct from personal life. Chats about sports, Netflix, and cooking are good examples of such a balance.
No matter which generation you belong to, developing a digital mindset means understanding that friendly, non-work interactions on digital collaboration tools are productive because they will increase your networks for knowledge sharing.14 That’s what happened when Jose, a marketing manager at a telecom firm, parlayed his coworker Alex’s love of soccer into a productive partnership. Their initial chats about the Euro Cup sparked other conversations about shared work issues in their respective departments. They hatched an idea to apply Jose’s marketing expertise to develop a new branding campaign for one of Alex’s projects in the e-commerce division. Their collaboration ended up increasing customer retention by more than 200 percent. Alex said, “No one from my department had ever worked with marketing before. Who knew we could complement each other so well?”
A key motivator to engage with your company’s digital collaboration tools should be shared interests and hobbies outside of work. That’s true for people of all ages and ranks. It’s hard to strike up a conversation with someone you don’t know well. It’s even more difficult to ask that person for help or a favor. You will feel better equipped for such exchanges when you have gained personal insight about your coworkers by watching them communicate on internal digital collaboration tools.15 Our analysis of the telecommunications company where Jose works, for example, revealed that employees who do so are three times as likely as others to get pertinent work information from colleagues.
By watching colleagues talk about hobbies and pastimes on internal digital collaboration tools, you can also assess whether coworkers are likable. An engineer at a large e-commerce company told us that he often did this to “size people up” and determine how “safe” they were to approach. Others made similar comments. How coworkers responded to people’s queries or joked around suggested how accessible they were; it helped gauge what we call passable trust—whether somebody is trustworthy enough to share information with. Trust is crucial because asking people to help solve a problem is an implicit admission that you can’t do it alone; it can make you feel vulnerable, especially if you’re afraid of developing a reputation for lacking certain knowledge (true for in-person as well as digital interactions!). Sometimes developing a digital mindset is a matter of knowing that it doesn’t have to change how you feel and behave.
Digital collaboration tools bring the greatest benefits when you are exposed to ideas and insights from people across the organization—particularly people you wouldn’t normally encounter. The challenge, however, is that focusing attention on content coming from multiple departments—many of which have different goals and may seem unrelated to your own work—is difficult and time-consuming. For this reason, organizations tend to deploy digital collaboration tools within departments. But if patterns of communication are too insular, the expanded network that digital collaboration tools promise won’t materialize. Just as organizations must be sensitive to both sides of the equation when implementing digital collaboration tools, it’s helpful if you can balance your attention between your immediate coworkers and others with whom you might want or need to interact. Internal marketing campaigns, one-on-one sessions, and group trainings are effective ways that managers can help users navigate these dimensions and develop a digital mindset that can get the most out of online interactions with colleagues.
Focus on the Right Data
Despite the vast amount of information digital collaboration tools expose to users, not all that is visible is important or useful. Sometimes social content leads people to focus—and act—on the wrong data. To illustrate, let’s return to the atmospheric research lab. A reorganization brought together IT technicians who had never collaborated before. At first, they relied on seniority as a proxy for expertise. But when they implemented a digital collaboration tool for the department and people began reading messages between coworkers about solutions for IT problems across the lab, it became clear that Jill—the most junior technician—was also the most knowledgeable. People started turning to Jill with questions. Digital tools’ inherent ability to flatten an organization’s hierarchy to allow the best ideas and information to surface is often a positive force for collaboration and innovation. However, in this case, one outcome was not so positive: Peggy, the group’s most senior technician, quit after several months. She was frustrated that her coworkers no longer seemed interested in her input. Her colleagues were very clear about why they had shifted from Peggy to Jill: Jill’s messages and posts were chock-full of useful technical details. One coworker noted, “Jill just seems to really know a lot about the issues I face.” Jill, we might add, had done a fine job of achieving virtual presence.
The IT director was not sad to see Peggy leave. He reasoned that the digital collaboration tool had exposed the fact that she was not as knowledgeable as everyone had thought, and he was pleased that his employees were now going to the “smartest” and most virtually present person for help. Yet, barely two months after Peggy’s departure, the IT department’s evaluations from scientists across the organization plummeted. Peggy might not have been the most technically sophisticated employee in the department, but she had the most cultural and political knowledge. She knew which scientists’ problems should be highest priority, and she knew what preferences various scientists had for technology in their labs.
Although the group had embraced online information sharing, they’d overlooked the low-tech relational skills and cultural knowledge that Peggy offered. They had not valued the presence she’d achieved among the department scientists. Sometimes, a digital mindset can mean knowing when to integrate low-tech with high-tech. Because the technicians were thinking of expertise solely in terms of technical knowledge, Peggy’s value to the group was hidden. To salvage the department’s customer satisfaction scores, the IT manager hired Peggy back at a 30 percent premium and began to encourage her and others in the department to diversify the types of knowledge they shared on the site.
Across all the companies we studied, the most visible information and knowledge were perceived as most important. You need to understand that if your contributions and strengths are not showing up in your posts or messages, they are likely to be overlooked. Not only does that put you at a disadvantage, but the organization is unable to benefit. Our findings support the old adage that what gets recorded gets remembered. Whether in one-to-one emails or postings to social media sites, establishing a digital presence requires what may at first seem like extra or awkward efforts, but know that over time you will become more comfortable with a digital “self” that can communicate intentionally and collaborate productively.
Remain “In Mind” When “Out of Sight”
Working remotely, as so many of us have now experienced, it’s easy to fall out of sync as well as out of sight.16 We lose many of the benefits related to face-to-face interaction that we rely upon for social bonding, such as nonverbal communication and the ability to have spontaneous communication. Such interactions create a shared experience, represent commitment to the interaction through physical presence, and allow both parties to focus their attention on the interaction. In the absence of collocation, developing a digital mindset means learning to employ new practices to successfully achieve virtual presence with both your immediate coworkers and, if possible, the larger organization.
A digital mindset means recognizing that teams relying heavily on digital technologies to collaborate will inevitably face the mutual knowledge problem, make wild attributions about each other’s behavior and, eventually become out of sync. If you are a manager of a remote or distributed team you need to think about your role as working to actively be present to your team and to make sure that they are present to each other. We define presence as the state of being noticeable to others such that focal actors are salient. When you are present to somebody, they think about you and their actions are affected by you. Even though you are out of sight, you are very much “in mind.” Thus, managing presence and building social lubrication is about making sure that you are making yourself more or less noticeable to others depending on the nature of your relationship and learning about them in ways that can help you to ask the right questions and get the information that you need.
GETTING TO 30 PERCENT
Establishing Digital Presence
Digital technologies that enable virtual work change how people collaborate. In remote work, you lose the benefits of nonverbal communication and spontaneous communication that create shared experiences and understanding crucial to social bonding. This is called the mutual knowledge problem.
Developing a digital mindset means learning new practices for achieving digital presence with your collaborators, managers, clients, and the broader organization.
Best practices to lay the foundation for digital presence:
· Send updates; don’t wait. Let your team know you’re making progress, whether or not you might need course correction, and that you’re engaged.
· Create a sense of curiosity. Don’t be afraid to use ambiguity to pique your teammates’ interest when necessary, but don’t overdo it.
· Communicate on their timeline, not yours. Keep your teammates’ schedules and time zones in mind when you reach out to them.
Best strategies to use internal social media for digital presence:
· Articulate the purpose. Interactions on social media help you see how your teammates fit into the organization, what roles they play, and how they contribute.
· Look to learn. Keep a lookout for helpful information. Social media platforms open up dialogues that would otherwise remain trapped in private email exchanges.
· Get personal or social. Don’t be afraid to socialize with people on social media platforms, even when the subjects aren’t work-related. Casual chats with team members build natural rapport that leads to better collaboration.
· Focus on the right data. Keep a lookout for less visible forms of knowledge—for instance, knowledge of the organization’s politics and processes.
· Remain “in mind” when “out of sight.” Stay active on the platform! Let others know you’re out there.
Establishing the close, collaborative working relationships that we all need to thrive in the digital age means developing a mindset that expects the mutual knowledge problem and learns strategies to compensate. Establishing a digital presence is key!