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successful collaborative working

What 20 years of remote collaborating has taught me

  • min read
    • The future of work is partly or fully remote, especially for tech-led professions. According to McKinsey and Company, more than half of employees want more flexibility from their employers and want to work remotely more than from the office. The pace of attitude change has been fast, even if your usual way of working stayed the same. Effective collaboration is an ongoing challenge for many remote teams. Businesses of all sizes have been known to reach for the next new collaborative tool on the shelf, expecting it to bring minds together for a lightbulb moment continually. Thinking back over my career in cybersecurity, I believe it's not the tools that make or break collaboration. But I have a few ideas on what the critical cruxes of collaboration might be. Let your empathy drive how you work I first worked with others remotely at the beginning of the 2000s. The tech was basic back then: A mobile phone, laptop and dial-up internet. I was giving on-call technical support for an internet service provider's security team. Waking up in the middle of the night to giving out-of-hours support was an abrupt introduction to working with others online. Most people would wake me and launch into a description of an incident ticket, immediately asking questions while I juggled my mobile phone, laptop and coffee cup. But there was one person who'd thought about the person on the other end of the phone. They would call to wake me up, say they'd ring back in five minutes and hang up. It meant I was set up and awake when we started working on the problem together. It made a big difference to my ability to think about an issue in the right frame of mind and not make it worse by being half asleep. Shift the barriers to deep focus For over a decade, I worked as a penetration tester in different teams and companies, either onsite or remotely. I would mimic a cybercriminal and try to compromise a software implementation or do general technical audits, aiming to find as many issues as possible. Often this would be as part of a team. Some organizations I worked for insisted everyone work from the same location, while for others, everyone worked remotely. Penetration testing benefits from seeing someone else's screen and easily sharing ideas around a group. A chance comment by a colleague might give you a clue on your target. But it also benefits from long periods of concentration, learning on the fly and going down rabbit holes without being asked what you're doing. I usually preferred the work-from-home teams. It was easier to talk to a colleague over the phone and email screenshots remotely than to focus intently in a busy office. But for others, having team members close at hand and the feelings of camaraderie were most important. Wherever your team is and what type of people make it up, management must play a crucial role in making sure everyone has a chance for deep focus. University of California's Professor Gloria Mark is one academic asking the price of an interruption. Her paper, The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress, concludes that distracting someone from their work doesn't slow them down, but means they produce poorer quality work and feel more frustration and stress. Use face-to-face time for what it's best for My last full-time job showed me how the remote work approach is more important than tools or factors like how often staff meet. I was giving technical expertise for cybersecurity product sales. Our collaboration tools weren't great. There was the usual nightmare of email and calendar software, partly integrated with more software for phone calls and text chat. Collaboration was mainly over conference call rather than video. I usually worked remotely, but some of the team used offices shared with colleagues or the wider company full- or part-time (known as hybrid working.) Management also drove the team feeling by continually staying in touch and freely giving both praise and suggested improvements. Physical meetings were infrequent but scheduled. They were both practical and social, giving a chance to get to know colleagues outside text or phone interactions. Colleagues and associated teams made the most of face-to-face meetings. The sales team always made sure they spent time together before and after visits to customers and potential customers. Consider team skill mix and have a driving purpose Recently, I worked with a small team to organize the first game-based cybersecurity conference, Play Secure. It was hard establishing a new conference around a novel theme. And with the conference being entirely online, we needed to ensure it didn't feel like just another set of webinars. For fully remote working with a new team, it went especially well. I think the team's success secret was the right combination of interpersonal skills and a shared sense of mission. We didn't get so burnt out through increased online interaction and were motivated enough by purpose to overcome the limitations of the tools. Use your tools on a strong foundation Lockdowns led to my becoming a fully remote worker, which fits the needs of my customers spread across different time zones. My work is usually intensive with short periods of decision support for customers, then intervals for research and consideration. Projects can have different delivery speeds. You need to adapt to others' work demands and availability and establish rapport over a simple video call. In this case, I think tools make a difference. It's hard to find a positive aspect to the pandemic, but the mass adoption of video conferencing has helped my work. It lets me give timely advice to customers without being limited by travel time and cost. When deciding to go remote-first If you or your team want to go remote-first, think through what has worked for you and what hasn't. Take staff preferences into account. Meeting in person once a week, once a month, or once a quarter can greatly affect team wellbeing and cohesion. It's easier for a distributed team to come together than for an in-office team to work apart and avoid interruptions successfully. With the savings on the costs of office space and time spent commuting, opportunities abound for thoughtful organizations to enjoy the benefits of remote work by forging their own 'new normal.'
collaboration tool intrusion focus

Collaborative tools need your control to prevent employee overload

  • min read
    • In centuries past, scholars at England's older universities had a foolproof system to make sure they could work in peace. Offices had two sets of doors. If only the inner door was closed, visitors were welcome to knock, but shutting the outer oak door (known as sporting the oak) meant do not disturb – and everyone, no matter how senior, was expected to observe. In 2021 many remote workers would welcome the digital equivalent of that sturdy oak door. Conferencing and workflow platforms like Slack, Zoom and Teams have revolutionized remote working – without these, the COVID-19 pandemic may have seen knowledge-based businesses struggle. But now, some employees find themselves on a carousel of virtual meetings, instant messages and urgent emails with little time for unbroken concentration. It's called 'collaborative overload,' 'tyranny of the inbox' or 'the collaboration curse.' Among its most influential commentators is bestselling business author and Georgetown University Professor Cal Newport. He popularized the term 'deep work:' Giving a single task undivided attention for an extended time. The power of deep attention In Professor Newport's words, "Deep work makes you better at what you do and provides the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craft, yet most spend their days in a frantic blur of email and social media." Emma Birchall is co-managing director of HSM, a future of work research consultancy. She told us, "We all thought the move to remote working would give us time to reflect, and that not sitting next to colleagues would give us space for deep work. But we've found most diaries are back-to-back with online meetings and notifications go off all day." It's an issue unlikely to go away as the pandemic recedes. Research commissioned by Kaspersky suggests some remote working will be a permanent fact of life for many, and "hybrid working" will become the new normal. Most (74 percent) don't want to return to some pre-COVID work practices, with 37 percent hoping for a flexible mix of working at home and in the office. What collaboration is meant to be like To get a handle on the problem, it's useful to identify what collaboration is meant to achieve. Alison Coward founded Bracket, an agency that helps teams work together more effectively. She champions 'purposeful collaboration:' Bringing diverse minds and skillsets together to solve complex challenges, but with each person's contribution developed through deep work. The most productive teams have periods of individual work alternating with collaborative sessions. Just being on Slack or Zoom doesn't equal collaboration but can give the illusion of it. It's a misconception that the tools can solve communication problems. One task at a time Sophie Leroy, Associate Professor of Management at University of Washington studies how technology can foster unhelpful work habits. Central to her work is 'attention residue:' When you break off a task to see to something else, your thought process can't disengage immediately from the old task. It means employees constantly hijacked by online interactions will always work at reduced effectiveness. She told Secure Futures, "I study different types of interruptions. There are intrusions, like people requesting my attention and making me switch tasks even though I may not want to. Then there are distractions – things more in the background. An email may pop up, for example, and you wonder what's in it. It starts bothering you. "Since the pandemic changed how we work, I've seen a huge increase in intrusions and distractions, and – perhaps worst of all – in multitasking. You may be in a meeting with many other windows open on your screen and be tempted to check emails and search chats. These things would've been rude in face-to-face meetings, but now no one knows you're doing it. "Because communication is so much more informal using online platforms, you get into the habit of doing this all the time. It's a problem because multitasking harms productivity." It's not just a matter of workers being interrupted, but also interrupting others. Leroy says, "Let's assume you're working on something and you have a question. Your chat window is open, so it's easy to pipe up with, 'do you have any information on this?' The technology tempts you to do that. "In an office, you might've written down the question for later when you see your colleague, but you don't get that chance for informal contact when working remotely. And these little interruptions help you feel connected to colleagues, which may motivate more interruptions." Taking control of collaboration tech One way to overcome intrusion from collaboration tools and give employees more chance to work deeply is to set ground rules across the organization, says Harriet Molyneaux, co-managing director at HSM. "Have a communications charter that sets expectations about when people will be online and whether they're supposed to be checking various channels." A company communications charter may limit the number of channels, say which digital platforms are appropriate for which kinds of collaboration or recommend 'asynchronous' methods (that can be answered later, like email) be used in place of synchronous ones, like an instant message. It should also include policies for urgent communications. Molyneaux says, "In our organization, outside normal working hours, we're not expected to be on instant messaging channels or answer email. Any messages there are picked up the next day. If you need someone urgently, you must use WhatsApp or call them. "We can all be smart in our use of tools. Most platforms let you set your status. If you're out for an hour or taking some time for deep thinking, make it 'please only contact me if urgent and do so by phone.' It's about getting team members to take control of tech rather than just thinking, 'we can contact everyone all day, every day.'" Sticking to the rules For a communications protocol to work, everyone must follow it. If some managers start arranging interactions outside the agreed framework, a digital presenteeism culture – employees feeling pressure to be always available online – can creep back. Sophie Leroy says, "You may say we're going to limit online meetings to 10 to 11 am and 1 to 2 pm each day, and the rest of the time is for focused work. But people may still think, am I going to be monitored and punished if I'm not visible? Will I be considered non-productive? Will I miss out on information if others are online? The organization must be clear about all this." It can be difficult to wean people off the habit of always checking messages on different channels. Leroy suggests a gradual approach. "You have to retrain your focus. Start with not checking for 10 minutes, then 15, up to an hour. It's hard, but people realize it's good for them and want to do it." Technology can help. Time-management methods like the Pomodoro Technique rely on breaking the working day into short, indivisible intervals, each for a single task. There are apps and browser plug-ins to help with this. "They're useful, but it must be individual choice," says Alison Coward. "Managers shouldn't mandate them. Everyone is different. It's about giving people time and space to find their own productivity techniques." Employees need the chance to give their work deep focus, free from interruptions and distractions that unbridled digital collaboration tools can bring. As these tools are suddenly everywhere thanks to the COVID-19 work-from-home shift, leaders must ensure their organization has policies to support deep work and prevent unnecessary intrusion. Most importantly, everyone must follow the protocols, from the newest intern to the C-suite. When we face high-tech problems, we should step back and remember we'll always need low-tech human values, like establishing and sticking to boundaries based on mutual respect and understanding.
great collaborations

Despite all the cool tools, tech collaboration is still missing something

  • min read
    • Since the pandemic began, organizations have been working hard on how they collaborate. But something's still missing, and it's to do with people. Looking at successful tech and creative collaborations of the past, common trends emerge. Any organization can use these to kickstart better collaboration within and between their teams. 1.   Make partnerships bigger than their parts Perhaps the most impactful partnership right now involves big pharmaceutical companies working together to create COVID-19 vaccines. Harvard Business Review also looked at lessons learned from thousands of Chinese companies adopting more open data architecture to help scale up medical supplies production. There are other examples too. Rival payment vendors Alipay and WeChat worked with the Shanghai government to develop a QR-code based tracking system adopted by 10 million users in just six weeks. 2.   Look for driven and imaginative leadership The Unabomber was a terrorist who bombed some 16 targets across the US from the 1970s until his capture in 1996. The recent Netflix series on the hunt for the Unabomber shows how driven and imaginative leadership allowed the FBI to organize the huge investigation that ultimately identified and caught the perpetrator. A crucial piece in the puzzle was the decision to use a little-known investigative tool at the time, forensic linguistics, to profile the killer and link a suspect to the bomber's messages through his writing. 3.   Combine people with complementary skills A remarkable feature of the collaboration of the UK's famous Bletchley Park World War II code-breaking group is they worked together without knowing what each other did. The set of computers known as Colossus flawlessly executed a complex and precise series of steps. And while the Enigma machines get much publicity, the real challenge was a more complex German High Command code called Lorenz. The innovative team was assembled by recruiting civilians through difficult crossword puzzles placed in newspapers. Another great example is the team that created the Ford Mustang, as chronicled in 2015 documentary A Faster Horse. It's all about a group of engineers and designers working together to solve a specific problem. 4.   Involve everyone in generating and executing ideas Member of surreal British comedy group Monty Python, Eric Idle, says the whole Monty Python team wrote their skits before they cast them. It meant no one would be personally invested in an idea before the group could fine-tune it. Many collaborative efforts depend on a solid process of idea creation and development. Real-time online writing and editing tools like Google Docs can facilitate these efforts when you're not working face-to-face. 5.   Use active learning and group training The US Army now recognizes soldiers must protect their digital networks and repel cyber invasions. They recently created a cyber workspace near Augusta, Georgia, called Tatooine. The name refers to the planet where Star Wars' Luke Skywalker spent time in the early movies. Initially, it will focus on drone detection, active hunting of cyber threats on Department of Defense networks and designing better training systems for cyber soldiers. They're also building great partnerships between military and civilian resources, for example, the successful Hack the Army bug bounty program. 6.   Use communication and collaboration tools effectively Many of these teams worked together before the digital age, using basic communication tools. We're now blessed with email, real-time messaging apps, video chats and more. But these blessings are also a curse if misused. I've previously written about the signs you're not using communication tools effectively. The history of collaboration has been one of fits and starts. While we keep making the same mistakes, there are signs of hope as new digital collaboration tools help us over some of the hurdles. I hope you'll find these examples an inspiration for your future collaborations.
collaborative tech

Make sure your collaborative tech really makes minds meet

  • min read
    • Remember Google Wave? I'm guessing that's a "no." In 2009, a friend working at Google gave me an early invitation to try out their groundbreaking collaborative tool about to change the world. I was then leading a large team of collaborating remote workers. Immediately, I realized it didn't solve the problem it set out to: Keeping track of long conversation threads involving multiple people. Its essential feature was bringing conversations into one long string that would otherwise happen over email. This adds little clarity while encouraging people to add more information that others must wade through. Evidently, the wider world had the same, "Yes, but no" response. Three months after Wave's official launch, Google pulled the plug, citing lack of interest. Disappointing if Wave suited your needs, but not unusual in the life of a collaborative tech tool. Since then, the collaborative software industry has grown fast. Fortune Business Insights valued the collaborative digital tools industry at 8.5 billion US dollars in 2018, predicting a near doubling to 18 billion by 2026. That was before the global COVID-19 crisis meant a deluge of businesses suddenly needed to facilitate employee collaboration from home. Why can good collaboration boost business success? Workplace psychologists and productivity researchers highlight the pivotal place of creativity in business innovation and ultimately, success. One tool in creativity's belt is collaboration – employees working together toward a common goal. Collaboration has other benefits on top of creativity – experiments find working with others stimulates motivation, persistence and enjoyment. Finding new ways to support and encourage collaboration for those working from home may involve using collaborative software. Breathe a sigh of relief: I'm not about to list the top ten best collaborative tools. Starting the conversation about collaborative tech with questions like, "Is Slack or Microsoft Teams better?" is to start in the wrong place. Instead, take two steps back and consider these four considerations that make the difference between whether a collaborative tool becomes a productivity supercharger or time-zapper. 1.  Align your workplace values with collaboration Fast-growing collaborative tool maker Slack recently reported on what kinds of work environments and values give rise to the most effective collaboration. Autonomy – when employees have time to pursue their ideas and can take ownership – features highly. Employees also highlight shared goals, clear communication and defined roles as making good collaboration easier. The mental wellbeing of remote working teams must also be a foundation before individuals can collaborate most effectively. Leaders often have more power to make a difference here than they realize. 2.  Throw out your assumptions and find out what kind of collaboration your business needs most We've all had times when someone in the office becomes fixated on the supposed need to implement 'the latest shiny thing' in software. When these time-consuming and sometimes expensive adoptions fail, it comes with an important lesson: What your business needs might not be what you think. There are many ways to collaborate online. Some broad areas are project management, communication and development, such as communal document editing. There are also many niches, like online tools for facilitating skill-sharing (Skillhive,) creating diagrams (Gliffy) and collaborative coding. It's a good idea to go through a process of finding out where your business could benefit from more collaboration. Make a list of who to talk to, and make sure you're communicating with people at all levels. After you've had these wide conversations, you'll have a better picture of what kind of collaborative online tools could make the most difference to your business. 3.  Look for a tool that's not trying to be everything Collaborative tech is sometimes marketed on what it can do beyond its primary function. Take care here. If those extras don't match up to other products that do the same thing, your team probably won't use them. Take, for example, the collaborative document editor launched by popular file-sharing platform Dropbox, Dropbox Paper, which isn't getting the best reviews yet. Meanwhile, there are plenty of excellent collaborative document editors out there. Slack is a good example of collaborative business tech that's expanded its usefulness and connectivity while staying focused on what it does best. Slack repurposed the early internet phenomenon of the chatroom for business, providing an alternative to the informal business emails that annoy and distract some but are great productive food for others. Taking these conversations into opt-in channels for discussion means it's become part of everyday life in more than 100,000 companies. Many companies, particularly in creative and tech, use it exclusively for managing projects that need high levels of information sharing and collaboration. But Slack isn't coffee and roses for every business either. Some find it ends up being a disorganized and addictive productivity sink, needing constant attention while not quite facilitating the depth of communication fruitful collaboration needs. Meanwhile, the growth of Microsoft Teams seems set to outpace Slack. Being bundled with other Microsoft software gives it a larger starting user base. Although it brings similar downsides to Slack, and a wide range of collaborative features, businesses may struggle to make it fit with their workflow. Both examples show the need to understand what your business needs before choosing to use any specific tool or certain features. 4.  Consider the tool's security and privacy features, and consider yours Whether your collaboration tool is cloud-based or on your servers, put security first in your consideration. Look for software providers who are up-front about security, how they meet data privacy regulations, and who have built-in security from the beginning, rather than making it an afterthought. Oleg Gorobets, security evangelist at Kaspersky, points to common problems to look out for. "It pays to avoid assumptions. The vendor's size or reach doesn't mean their product is secure. Even Microsoft's default, built-in security controls are only basic. "One concerning vulnerability we often see in collaborative tools is lack of proper security checking for shared files and URLs. Next most concerning is inadequate access policies, usually a shared failing between IT's configuration and the vendor not offering convenient tools." In choosing a collaborative platform, Gorobets suggests answering three questions. "Will your team need to share content coming from outside, including files and external URLs? Will they use the platform from personal devices? Will they share sensitive information? If the answer to two or more of these questions is "Yes," the vendor must be able to show the security they provide comes from a leading cybersecurity provider. If it doesn't, look elsewhere." He also reminds us breaches happen most often for non-technical reasons. "Even when you choose a tool with excellent security and privacy features, your biggest vulnerability is always employee behavior. When you launch your chosen tool, give employees plain-language tips on how to protect their privacy and security while using it, like these top ten security tips for using Zoom." With the possibility of online collaboration comes its challenges, but in the end, everyone wins. With careful selection of the right collaborative tools for your business, you can bring your organizations' great minds together in ways that realize the potential you seek.
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Secure Futures magazine is your go-to business guide for opinions, trends and insight into the world of technology and cybersecurity. We help your business to bring on the future. Brought to you by Kaspersky, the global cybersecurity experts.

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