TRENDS
tive way, and sometimes embrace disagreements in the moment. In the last two years, working “relationships have shifted and changed to feel thinner and weaker,” Mortensen says. “That affects how much time and effort we put into resolving these conflicts, and how well we are able to do that.” You’ll head off an eruption of emotion, or be more equipped to have productive conflict, if you’re consistently letting teams talk through what’s working or not. These kinds of regular check-ins are often described as “pulse checks.”
make it difficult to talk those things through, from connection glitches interrupting conversations, to not having a full sense of what another person is working on or their context, and not being able to process the full richness of their reactions, as you would face-to-face. Problems can also fester due to under-communication and in the absence of trust (something that is often generated over multiple in-person interactions, and has to be built intentionally amongst remote teams). “When it comes to working remote and hybrid, you have to pay for the stuff that used to come for free,” says Mortensen, describing how critical it is that companies work to replicate the casual, real-life interactions that help employees connect, commune, or vent. Managers of remote teams need to have a heightened sense of awareness, says Massimiliano Tirocchi, the Uruguay-based co-founder and CMO of e-commerce group Trafilea, which at only seven years old has 400 employees in more than two dozen countries. The company has been largely remote since it began. He’s heard peers say, “since we are not in the office, we are having less drama. [But] that is not really what is happening,” he says. Rather, the drama is just “translating to a different tool,” like Slack or email. ERR ON THE SIDE OF OVER-COMMUNICATING Remote and hybrid work needs to be very specifically designed to reduce friction—such as creating work handovers over time zones—but you also have to create an environment for letting off steam in a produc-
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Don’t air this as an opportunity for people to moan about something—or somebody—they’re angry with, Mortensen says. Rather “frame it as, ‘Here’s how I need your help.’” You’ll get a more positive (and probably useful) response. Being intentional about workflow, giving space for people to talk—these acts are all in the service of creating a work environment where employees don’t have to wait for a meeting to discuss something. They feel empowered to talk to their managers about an issue, because they’ve created the space to allow them to do so. When complaints began to surface between Trafilea’s marketing and product teams that changes were not being made fast enough on the company’s website, an investigation unveiled a conflict over resource allocation that had been lingering for months. CMO Tirocchi was taken aback. As a wholly distributed firm, Trafilea has a hiring and onboarding process that specifically highlights to employees how much the company values radical transparency and feedback. “We coach our managers and leaders to make sure that they are open to having conversations with talent, and really understand and deep dive into what is the real truth,” he says. Each department has “people business partners” who are on hand to mediate conversations and come up with solutions. That worked within teams, but in the case of the cross-departmental conflict, Trafliea discovered that managers were not talking to each other, people were working at cross-purposes, and the problem had begun to impact the company more broadly. It took an extensive process of bringing together the project managers and people business partners of the affected departments, and pairing them with process analysts to walk through the perspectives and workflows that were at
