This morning all of Google and their Workplace tools – like Gmail – seemed to be off-line. A quick look at Twitter and you would think it was the apocalypse.
In this issue, we are going to talk about giving your team permission to go offline.
Snow days
I remember back in grade school (or even in high school) here in Texas when it would be the slightest chance of ice or snow. Everything was shut down.
Living in Texas is not like living in the Northeast or somewhere where snow or ice is likely to happen often. We aren’t prepared for it here. We don’t have the right infrastructure. There are not very many ice trucks. There are not huge reservoirs of salt. Just mostly weather forecasters telling us which schools won’t be in session.
It’s just one of those trade-offs we have made in this area. We’ve accepted that during the couple of times a year when it actually gets too bad to drive, we simply won’t.
Up until this year, that has pretty much meant that there was no work or school on those days.
Think for a minute if that happened today. Would the work stop? Would staying at home mean that there was no productivity at all?
Back to work
Think for a minute if that happened today. Would the work stop? Would staying at home mean that there was no productivity at all?
Probably not. Because we now all work at the “cloud campus”. The place people “go to work” is by opening up Slack or Teams & checking their email.
But is this the right direction? The last time I worked in an office, I had to go and hide to get any actual work done. Sometimes it feels like that now with these work chat tools.
Have you ever seen what happens to productivity when Google or Slack actually go down?
Often times we end up in a state of complete disarray. So much of today’s work is communicating and working in the cloud.
It’s a culture-specific mindset. But one that can matter a lot in the long run. When you are “on”, you aren’t likely focused on deep work.
What you can do
Have you given your employees the leeway to log off, be offline, and not be on chat while they all get their actual work done?
Leaders at your company can set the right example by practicing this, and letting the team know that getting the work done doesn’t always mean being “online”.
Let’s get out there this week and give the team permission to work. You may just find that your team is better prepared for life to go on the next time it “snows” (or the internet goes down!).
Do you have a story about rallying your team? I’d love to hear it. We may even feature it in a future post.
😉 Until next time!
