Engaging people working remotely with empathy

Since the growth of remote working, many employers have begun to raise concerns about employee engagement. Well, unfortunately, both employers and employees have a different definition of employee engagement.

From the employer’s perspective, employee engagement means how well their employees are fully engaged in performing their tasks remotely. Employers wonder if the employees have clocked in their time at work effectively. Somehow, at this juncture, most employers do not think their employees are productive working from home. Several studies have revealed that the majority of employees of senior-level executives were more productive than expected. Maybe only a smaller percentage of unproductive senior-level executives has resulted in the C-suite's concerns about the productivity of everyone working from home.

C-suite also had the impression that the junior employees are disengaged. Those who do not have direct supervision of junior employees will wonder about the productivity of the junior employees working from home. Lack of regular interaction across multiple levels of employees would have resulted in C-suite and senior-level executives' lack of information about junior employees in general.

From the employees’ perspective, especially junior employees expect to have more regular employee engagement as they see engagement as their opportunities to learn from their direct reports. Based on the same studies above, the majority of the junior employees felt disengaged in terms of lack of mentorship and guidance. They did not feel that they have adequate support and guidance working from home. They did not have the opportunities to interact and network with their direct reports and C-suite regularly.

Similar to junior employees, the senior-level executives would expect their immediate supervisors to support and coach them working from home. The C-suite should not have concerns about their productivity working from home because they would have set specific targets for their direct reports.

Therefore, most employers are emphasizing finding ways to monitor and measure employee productivity. Although some are finding ways to improve employee engagement, the engagement tends to be interpreted as a way to meet virtually (preferably in-person meeting) for work only. Very few non-work-related engagement activities are being planned in most remote working arrangements.

Furthermore, organizational culture will be diminishing if organizations are not paying attention to sustain organizational values. Employers are developing remote working policies that tend to focus on work ethics, discipline, and productivity. Trust between employers and employees is steadily disappearing. Of course, such challenges do not arise in organizations that have already implemented flexible work arrangements (e.g. remote working) long before the current shift from the physical workplace to the virtual workplace.

I am of the view that company leaders must continue to live the organizational values in engaging their employees at all times although their employees are working from home. For example, convert your weekly huddle into a weekly virtual huddle, make unscheduled check-in with your team virtually (the check-in is intended to understand the team’s state of mind and emotion), allocate time to check-in with your team during a scheduled virtual meeting, convert your scheduled town-hall meeting into a virtual town-hall meeting.

Company leaders must continue to lead people working remotely with empathy. Greater empathy is needed to manage the emotional adjustments of people moving to remote working. Company leaders must consciously allocate time to check-in with their people whenever there are scheduled and unscheduled virtual sessions. The check-in routines should focus on asking the right questions with active and empathetic listening. This will also provide company leaders to continue to coach their people in making emotional adjustments and unleashing their potential in making effective contributions albeit working from home.

In conclusion, employee engagement is not about engaging for productivity. It is really about getting employees of all levels engaged in their passion for work excellence, personal growth, and career development. Employers must transition their organizational values from physical environment to virtual environment at all times. Everyone must continue to live the organizational values in the virtual environment. Let’s begin now with your organizational values to make employee engagement goes beyond productivity measurement.

Conducting virtual empathy fieldwork

Empathy fieldwork is the cornerstone of Design Thinking. Empathy fieldwork is also the cornerstone of the Customer Discovery phase.

We can learn about a person’s preferences by immersing ourselves in the person’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations. We can learn about the person’s behavioral traits to establish the trigger points of emotional needs. We can then innovate, and create products or services for that person.

Empathy fieldwork involves having a beginner’s mindset and getting outside the building to:

• Learn the unknowns and unpredictable through spontaneous questions

• Identify extreme users to learn their workarounds

• Experience what users experience in the real world situation

• Observe how users behave in the comfort or discomfort of their life context

• Engage and interview users through unscheduled encounters

• Pivot questions on the fly based on body language, facial expression, tone of voice, or mannerism of the users

• Continually improve empathy interviews when moving from one user to another user

Unfortunately, given the new norms of working (as a result of the global pandemic), it will be indeed a challenge and risk for us to conduct face-to-face empathy interviews with users not known to us. Although we can conduct interviews by wearing our mask with adequate physical distancing, we may not be able to make the users comfortable to engage with us. The users may be concerns about the close conversation with us not known or familiar to them for a prolonged duration.

We, therefore, require to conduct empathy fieldwork virtually in the new norms. We need to create the virtual environment as though we are conducting empathy fieldwork in a physical environment. I faced this challenge when I held my first Design Thinking Online Course last year during the limited lockdown period. My course participants conducted several empathy interviews. The majority of them only managed to interview one interviewee.

While some of my course participants conducted scheduled virtual empathy interviews with friends, acquaintances, and business associates, the majority of them were able to conduct the face-to-face empathy fieldwork with:

• A limited number of interviewees at their office lobby

• A limited number of interviewees at their veterinary clinic

I learned that virtual empathy fieldwork was limited to having an online conversation only. We may observe the facial expression or hear the tone of voice of the interviewees during the conversation, we cannot see their full-body language. We are not able to experience what they are experiencing in their environment. We are not able to observe them in the context of their lives.

Furthermore, all virtual empathy interviews need to be pre-scheduled with people most likely known to us. Scheduling calls or online meetings with strangers will be difficult, and hence we require our friends or business associates to make the introduction in arranging such calls or online meetings.

My course participants met or virtual met with the same interviewees during the second round of empathy fieldwork in the testing phase. Such an approach is not ideal because learnings from testing will be limited. The testing phase should be conducted with another group of interviewees or users for another round of empathy interviews. Furthermore, Design Thinking requires us to run several iterations to refine our hypotheses and ideas.

In conclusion, conducting virtual empathy fieldwork has a lot of limitations. To learn Design Thinking online, we must recognize the limitations of virtual empathy fieldwork. We must continuously improve our empathy fieldwork by getting outside the building from moving online interviews to face-to-face empathy interviews. Such a bold step is necessary to iterate our new products or services as part of our Customer Development phase. However, it remains a challenge for now…

Think exponentially to drive exponential mindsets

Technology is fundamentally different. Technology grows exponentially. Computing power is escalating dramatically by a power of 10, is progressing more each hour than it did in its entire first 100 years. Computing power is forecasted to surpass all 7 billion human brain power by 2045.

According to Albert Allen Bartlett, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA, the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. Our cognitive brain is wired linear as we grow up in a natural world of linear; i.e. one day is 24 hours, one week is 7 days, and one year is 365 days. Very few nature is exponential and visible to us. Humans cannot grasp exponentials.

The acceleration of the scope, scale, and impact of technology is making the world evolving exponentially. We will need to think, plan, or predict exponentially. However, it is not easy to detect exponential trends as the initially slow growth could be deceptive. Experts often fail at predicting the future of their fields because they tend to make a linear correlation from the past to the future. They tend to mistakenly assume that straight-line growth, rather than exponential growth, will continue.

In conclusion, let us begin with understanding the implications of exponential technologies. In the future, we will be in the world of IR 5.0 where human intelligence works in harmony with cognitive computing power enabling mass personalization. It means what we used to think impossible is now made possible by leveraging exponential technologies.

Although it is not easy to predict exponential growth, we must have the right exponential mindset to think about the technology implications. We must be prepared to go through a phase of disappointment due to exponential returns is slow. We need to continuously embrace an exponential mindset to think exponentially about exponential technologies' implications.