Tell me, when was the last time you used the word 'thrive' to describe your situation or that of your team, your business?

This month (March 2015) I tiki-toured over to Belgium to attend the No Pants Festival, set up by a group of Dare Devils to discuss the future of work and pros and cons of having distributed workers, vs co-located and how to embrace such a model and create an environment where your team thrives.

No Pants Festival at Antwerp Management School

The line-up of speakers and topics discussed the edges of a few spectrums:

What you can do if you are able to get the most amazing people together no matter where they are in the world, and conversely, whether you need superstars, or just ordinary people, whose character strengths define their value to your business and whose skills you can grow to be amazing.
Why remote working allows for autonomy, creativity and passion, yet you need to provide better task management of the results required, whilst ensuring you don’t micromanage the person producing the results.
The tools that allow you to connect face to face from anywhere in the world, yet you need to in-source your distributed workers and make the effort to connect with them as human beings, and bring them together from time to time.
How trust, culture, connection and values are critical for an engaged thriving distributed team and how to go about creating them, yet how we are in fact addressing the exact same issues that non distributed teams face day to day sitting next to each other.

This last one stood out to me because my interest in the conference was multi-faceted; creating stronger connections with our globally distributed teams, ensuring a consistent level of engagement when being flexible with the hours and location of individuals in the team, and equally strengthening the connections between the people and teams we work with day to day in the same building.

Pilar Orti, in her talk, Virtual not Distant, phrased it “How can we not lose the humanness in virtual world teams, when we've already lost it in the traditional world?” and Lisette Sutherland defined remote as “Not in the same room with you” when telling her ‘Stories of Remote Teams Doing Great Things. She further went on to suggest, that “if one person is remote, everyone has to act if they are remote…‘If’ you want to ‘include’ your remote people.”

Consider that apathy, lack of engagement, lack of trust, poor communication, micro-management, command and control leadership styles are all problems we need to avoid and in my opinion are symptoms of culture failure. If you further consider the impact of this on individual performance and results, affecting your staff satisfaction, your customer satisfaction and your bottom line; perhaps the traditional co-located business world needs to sit up and take notice of how these mostly distributed businesses are operating. Sit up and notice how they are thriving, and not just as teams, but in the market also. What are they doing to tackle these issues of remoteness, from not in the same room, to working all over the world? They at least understand that “…complexity increases, the more remote the situation and you HAVE to PLAN for it.” – Lisette Sutherland. They are getting together to bring people, ideas, knowledge together, to learn from each other’s successes and failures and tackle these issues with passion.

Culture, trust, and values came up consistently throughout the conference. Matt Rogish (Reactive Ops, and Rails Machine), in his talk on OKR’s at scale, equally punctuated with his thoughts on leadership, put it clearly: “I believe, if you say something is important, you HAVE to find a way to make it happen.

Janis Janoskis from Passive Management Ltd, when describing How to set up a great team, referred to quotes from Herb Brooks: “You’re only as good as your values”.

Hanni Ross – from Slack told us: “You have to learn to trust. It sounds really, really basic, but it’s come up over and over, and you just REALLY DO.”

We were prompted during the various talks to think of the people we work with, do we know where they live, who they live with? What do we know about our people, how are we connecting with them as human beings. What matters to them? When’s the last time we made time to connect on a human level with people we rely on to deliver results? Do we care? What about making structured time to connect socially?

Lisette showed images of her distributed team meeting regularly online via video and doing a dance party. Extreme? Maybe. What’s important is that it works for them. In those images they’re happy, having fun, they’re connected, and the end result is that they ‘know’ each other. This translates into the working environment as trust, connection, respect, engagement and great team work and great results.

The No Pants Festival – coupled with Dave Gray’s workshop the day prior on Liminal Thinking about the human/people aspect of change management and why people resist or support change initiatives, provided great connections, thought ideas, and tools to work with. It also reinforced and reinvigorated my belief system around a people first, people centric culture, and the values at our company of being One Team. You can connect with the Dare Devils, who did a great job of providing speakers of relevance and you can find some references to some of the talks here on flipboard. Pilar Orti has a summary on her podcast here.

Fast forward yourself to the end of the year, when you look back on your business, your team, will you be able to say ‘and we just thrived’? If, with your current climate you are likely to answer no, what are you going to do about it?

Please note this is a reblog of a post from March 2015.