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Our pandemic lockdown appears to be beginning to end and that means that we need to re-launch our teams and that is what I will cover in this segment. So sit back and listen in.

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Craig Peterson: Hey everybody, welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online, of course, at CraigPeterson.com. Do you have any questions? You can always email me, ME at CraigPeterson.com. Always glad to help out

[00:00:19] Craig Peterson: Plus, if you get on my email list, you'll find out about what I'm doing this week, what the pros and cons of everything are, and I will be sure to keep you up.

[00:00:29] To date and we've got some very cool stuff coming up. We're making some, I think fantastic changes that are all for the better for you guys. Get more information out and doing it in a timely fashion. I mentioned before the break your remote team and I told you to kind of brace yourselves here. There is a great article that was in the Harvard business review this last week.

[00:00:54] And it's talking about relaunching your remote team. Many of us have remote teams and the remote teams are good and they're bad, right? But in just a few short weeks meeting tools like zoom, Microsoft teams, we've got WebEx teams, Google chat, Slack, they've gone from. Kind of a supplement where we might use them for remote workers.

[00:01:21] We might use them for the team to just keep, some notes to each other. It's moved from that point to where it is really. The primary way of doing business internally, those new goals, new tools to us, right? Many of us are really replacing the bubbler, the meetings, the emails, even frankly, you know, our, our workspaces in our offices before sometimes we had open plans, which are.

[00:01:51] Many of us are really replacing the bubbler, the meetings, the emails, even frankly, you know, our, our workspaces in our offices before sometimes we had open plans, which are are now being pretty heavily frowned upon. cubes, which a lot of places are going back to. So people have individual spaces or offices, which the latest studies are showing. Having an office actually increases your productivity pretty substantially. And we've now gone to our bedrooms, the kid's old bedroom before they moved out, home offices, kitchen tables.

[00:02:19] I'm on every week with Jim Polito. He is the morning drive host on two of the biggest stations in Massachusetts and Jim is running the show from his kitchen table with his dog occasionally barking there in the background. It has changed for everyone, and I was at a webinar, well, yeah, I guess it was a webinar.

[00:02:45] It was a. Three-day conference. It was held on the web, last weekend, and they're calling this the great reset and it's a term I've heard other people use as well. But the great reset means a whole different world when it comes to working from home. As we're trying to relaunch our teams reorient based on the new realities that are out there.

[00:03:09] There. So let's go through what Harvard has to say that we really need to be paying attention to. Number one, they say, revisit your shared purpose. When we have all of these team members and they're all different, a little, hopefully, they are, and different people with different. Ways of thinking, bring different things to the business, and it's all of these different interaction styles, like the NBTI styles that really help to make our organization strong.

[00:03:43] But now that we're all kinda at home, and many of us will continue to be at home, do the team members understand what they're supposed to be doing? I mean, clear and specific goals. Does everybody on a team understand what that team is supposed to be able to accomplish? What the goals are for the team?

[00:04:08] Because again, we pulled the trigger so fast on this. Many of us just didn't get it all together, right? So, well, we're relaunching. Management has to discuss how we can get these teams going here. Let them know clearly what the business goals are. Let them know clearly what the strategy is. Because most businesses have changed because of the pandemic.

[00:04:34] You know, small businesses like mine, when something like this happens to tend to go out of business. But they come back in a completely different way. You know, some of the same people, the same owners, but now a much different angle than what they had before. Big businesses. They can't pivot that quickly, and so they're struggling trying to figure out what they should do.

[00:04:56] So they go for cost-cutting measures. That's usually the first thing that they end up doing. Does your team, do your teams. No, what they should be doing and have the team members themselves express their perspectives here on how the organization and the team's purpose might have changed. Second, here, reassess your available resources.

[00:05:23] In the last segment we talked about VPNs, the pros and cons of VPNs. What's really going on here while this relaunch here is the time to reexamine. In the resource column, that means what information or data do you have? What kind of budgets do have, what kind of equipment, software networks do you have that's going to help the teams advance their goals?

[00:05:52] You don't really have to have a detailed list of everything that's necessary, but. We need to reach a general consensus about what the team needs, what are the resources, and how do we access them? And everybody needs to be on the same page about, how the pandemic has affected the team's budget and also the partnerships.

[00:06:13] Because you remember, we all have vendors we buy from and we all have customers or clients that we work with and we're selling to do. We understand how their organizations have changed because of the pandemic. We have to next understand our team members' constraints. Many of us are working from home with our family around for the very first time.

[00:06:40] Our kids are not in school and most school districts are not reopening until the fall of 2020 how do you deal with that? You know it, it was one thing when the kids stayed with grandma and grandpa during the summer. But we're talking about a lot of months now. Does that make sense? Can we even handle that?

[00:06:59] So some of our team members may need a little bit of assistance here in figuring out how can they juggle their family responsibilities, new family responsibilities they haven't had before. With their new work responsibility and the need to be available at certain times of the day, and in many cases, the answer to that from businesses is we're going to be flexible.

[00:07:27] We're going to allow flex hours, kind of like who used to talk about mother's hours, but now the kids are home all day long, so we've got to help them with this manage deadline expectations, and also maybe rebalance some of the workloads between all of the people. Within the workgroups, we've got to reestablish norms.

[00:07:50] We're talking about how people conduct themselves in meetings, et cetera. You know, it's really easy to be on something like Slack and make some snarky comment or in email or on a conference call that can really be hurtful and that can really cause disharmony within a team. So we've got to figure out what the norms are.

[00:08:14] It's okay to wear pajama bottoms, but you gotta be dressed, professional, head pop cause that's what the game was going to get. Right. If that's what you want. That's great. Do that. We should also be discussing how often team members should connect virtually during the week and what digital tools they should be using.

[00:08:33] Things like email can be great for delayed communication, but many people just drop everything into WebEx teams and expect other people too, you know, snap to, whether it's WebEx teams or Slack or whatever it might be. Okay. So when you're choosing which tools are best for discussion, we need to be very sensitive to the fact that real-time video chat.

[00:08:59] It Is not the same as face to face interaction because if you were to walk by their cubicle or their workspace, you'd see they were busy and you're not going to interrupt them right there. They're in a flow or the, maybe they're in a meeting. Dropping in on him, I'm going to be very, very bad when now you disrupted them because you've popped up a zoom meeting in front of them.

[00:09:24] And this zoom fatigue is real. So think about all of these tips and tricks and techniques. You'll find more about it on my website@craigpetersohn.com Harvard business school had this article. It is great, and if you're trying to manage some teams, make sure you read it. Craig peterson.com. I'm right here on WGAN and I'll be back also Wednesday morning at seven 34 with Matt.

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Welcome! Post COVID-19 steps to Re-launch your team and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN