Emerson

In a corporate setting, every meeting can be a competition for resources, recognition or rewards.

If a senior interrupts you, it would not be counted against you, but it is a peer who has interrupted you to dominate and boost their own presence, it can negatively impact your status.

Some people try to use meetings to achieve things that meetings won't work for. That can turn an intelligent group into a dull and mean monster.

Types of meetings to avoid:

• Daily standups or status updates.
• Anything without an agenda.
• A meeting with too many people.
• Brainstorming from scratch.

It's not that all meetings are bad, just that there are better tools to accomplish the job.

A growing company is in essence a team of individuals of varying skills who come from different cultures, creating a unique company culture by working together.

This beehive of individuals shapes the assumptions, beliefs and values of the organization, apart from the surface-level elements like branding, company benefits, hierarchy and the various HR policies.

• In a remote setting, you have to critically think and plan ahead, and communicate a query with complete information and context.
• You can refer to previous solutions to the problem in order to save the time of others, who might try the same thing.
• While answering a query, you have to be well-researched, contextual, and thorough, even going to the extent of providing references and documentation to support the suggested solution.

A sense of connection and belonging are sentiments that are helpful for building “affective trust” – a form of trust based on emotional bond and interpersonal relatedness.

It varies from the “cognitive trust” – which springs from reliability and competence. Both are influential to performance, but affective trust tends to be more salient for a team at the beginning of a relationship, according to studies.

After a project ends, team members often reflect on what worked, and what did not, something known as post-mortem documentation.

What is often overlooked is a pre-mortem exercise where a team uses visualization and second-level thinking to imagine the various scenarios which could lead to failure and then work backwards, using prospective hindsight.

• Earlier a privilege for a few, work from home became a norm for most office-goers due to the ongoing pandemic and is likely to remain for the rest of the year.
• The shift towards work from home, which became necessary for most companies, was thought to be blissful in the minds of employees, while the bosses viewed it with suspicion.
• Employees are slowly finding out that it is lonely sitting in front of the screen at home and are missing the office culture, the sharing of ideas and socializing with fellow employees.

.. .is defined as working with tools that don’t demand an immediate response.

Remote work has its own set of challenges (like different time zones) and is filled with distractions. In order to keep productivity up within a working team while providing them the flexibility they need to take care of their families (and themselves), there is a need to increase the use of asynchronous communication.

Practice looking into your camera during video conferences when you speak, even for brief moments.
It's challenging to focus on your camera for an entire meeting, but know that you increase the impact of your points when you look deep into it.

Working remotely, especially when your team is distributed across the globe, means working asynchronously, that is, across time zones. This is a skill.