Can we turn kids into grown-ups in just two months?

Yesterday my 14-year-old son missed a meeting with a teacher about some work he was having trouble with. I know this, because the teacher sent him an email expressing her disappointment that he was a no-show and she copied me. It’s not the first time this has happened. And my youngest son is no angel on this front either.

“Google Classroom is not the only thing to stay on top of,” I say to my boys. “You have to check your email regularly. Multiple times a day, otherwise you might miss something.”

As an advocate for a more social way of working, instructing my kids to pay more attention to their email is a bitter pill to swallow. And my kids look at me as if I’m crazy.

Two years of digital transformation in two months

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during the company’s most recent quarterly earnings report that the company had experienced “two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” Many of us working from home would agree. We’ve shifted our office desk to home and we’re trying to get on with work in a different way in the middle of a pandemic. It’s not easy.

Knowing the business rules

Even though our kids are digital natives, after watching mine ‘work from home’ for 30 days or so, I know they’re struggling too. We’re watching them try to adhere to all sorts of business rules and we’re disappointed when they can’t.

Truth be told, we’re asking our kids to operate like grown-ups who have been in the workforce for years, when the reality is, we can’t do a Microsoft and transform them in just two months.

We're asking our kids to operate like grown-ups who have been in the workforce for years.

Here are the capabilities and habits kids need to work on if they are to succeed in today’s distributed world of school. Parents, feel free to add to this list.

Kids, sort out these things:

1. Time management. There are no school bells to tell you when recess is over and Math class is about to begin. Learn to watch the clock and set alarms if necessary.

2. Outcomes. Learn to swallow the frog and focus on the ‘right’ work. Putting off challenging school work will inevitably lead to no meaningful outcomes. That’s bad news for your end of term report.

3. Deadlines. Make a note of what assignments and projects are due and when. Hand in work on time. Check in to see if any deadlines have shifted for whatever reason.

4. Dress. This is a tricky one right now, as I’m in gym gear almost 24/7. But kids, at least get out of your pyjamas, brush your hair and look presentable for that early morning Google Classroom session.

5. Dealing with others. When in meetings, look engaged. Your teachers and fellow students won’t love it if you look bored and they’ve love it even less if you fall asleep at your desk. Pay attention, look interested and get involved.

6. Playground politics. When I coach adults in building their digital capability, I say don’t ‘Twitter when you’re bitter’. Same rules apply here. If your little friends are driving you crazy in the virtual playground, don’t feed the trolls. Put your devices down and go do something else.

7. Work-life balance. If you can get your school work done during ‘office hours’ that’s less you have to do after hours to catch up. When it’s finished, switch off and go have fun. Engage in physical activity, since team sport is still out of bounds.

Educators are super heroes

In highlighting these areas for improvement, I’m not targeting schools. My husband and I have only got two kids to manage. Just as the world of work has changed, education has had to transform overnight. Class teachers are herding 25 kids or more every single day from their laptops. They are super heroes as far as I’m concerned, doing a fantastic job.

There is good news

It’s not all hopeless, though. As a fan of working in a more open and social way, here’s where I think many of our kids have the edge on us working adults.

Adults, learn this stuff from your kids:

1. Share your work. Whether it’s presenting to the class or posting a project in progress in the school enterprise social network, our kids are building a habit of working visibly and getting input from others along the way. It’s not weird to them. It’s a natural way of working.

2. Be curious. When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail. We do things the same way, even if it’s dysfunctional at times, because we’re too busy to re-engineer a process. Kids aren’t wired that way. I marvel (sometimes) at the ingenuity of my two boys who see the world as a place where you can be curious and experiment over and over again.

3. Be honest. How many times have you sat in a meeting, disagreeing with something being discussed, but not speaking up? Kids aren’t afraid of telling it like it is. Sure, we’d like our kids to apply some filters at times, but it’s refreshing to engage in conversations where we feel safe to be ourselves.

4. Be vulnerable. Too many adults think they need to have all the answers at work. We’re already bearing our souls by letting our colleagues peer into our messy living rooms and look at our isolation dress, hair and beards. It’s OK to be imperfect. Keeping things real at work engenders more trust than trying to maintain high production values.

It’s OK to be imperfect. Keeping things real at work engenders more trust than trying to maintain high production values.

Taking good habits into the future of work

As we continue to work shoulder to shoulder with our kids, let’s remember that changing behaviour and habits won’t come about in two months. Your kids are still learning how to navigate this and it will take a while.

At the same time, let’s look to our children for lessons in how we can be more effective in our work. Our kids are going to be the leaders of tomorrow and they will bring into the workplace more open and visible ways of collaborating and doing things. In the meantime, they can teach us a great deal about sharing what we know, asking for help, being curious and telling it like it is. 

When you share what you know

It’s International Working Out Loud Week (18-24 November 2019) and a good time to reflect on the things that can happen when you open up and share the things you know.

I should know! Just a little over two years ago, I got out of the corporate world and began my own communication and social media practice. Back then, I spent time travelling and deepening my connections with people who were interested in the same things as me.

Today, I’m still a big believer in ‘working out loud’ and sharing what you know. In fact, I get a little anxious when I don’t feel like I’m lifting my weight here, which can happen when things get busy.  Here’s why I’m a big fan of working in a visible way and why I think you might benefit too.

When you share what you know, you will:

1. Expand your connections – Powered by social media, sharing what I know has enabled me to make connections and meet people I might otherwise have not had the opportunity to meet. The icing on the cake is I’ve been able to connect with many of these amazing people ‘in real life’ too.

2. Add value to your network – Something that’s common-sense to you could be a revelation for someone else. Digital workplace futurist Dion Hinchliffe once told me: “As far as we think we’ve come in the digital age, there’s always someone who’s cave painting.” Don’t discount sharing the simplest of your lessons.

3. Build your credibility – Another great advocate of sharing what you know, Euan Semple, wrote in his book Organisations Don’t Tweet, People Do that “sharing what you know doesn’t diminish its worth but instead increases its value”. The more you share, the better your chances of building your impact and influence.

4. Get asked to do things – When you take the time to share what you know and care about and reflect that in your ‘digital footprint’, people get to know what you can offer and ask you to contribute to all sorts of interesting projects. One opportunity begets another and another and so it goes. There’s no better fun than that.

5. Help solve problems – A problem shared is a problem halved. Whether you’re contributing knowledge to help someone else, or you’re seeking answers, sharing what you know in a visible way helps people and communities get answers faster than they could trying to do the job via email or asking the usual suspects.

6. Get back as much as you give – You may believe it’s safer to keep your insights and opinions to yourself. That way no one gets hurt. The reality is, when you share what you know on a regular basis and are genuinely helpful, over time the benefit tends to come back to you in spades. Don’t be afraid to give.

“If you don’t share what you know, how does anyone know that you know it?”

I coach executives on why it pays to be socially engaged. I find myself saying to many of them: “If you don’t share what you know, how does anyone know that you know it?” It causes many of them to stop and think about whether they are investing enough time in building mutually beneficial networks and relationships for the long term. I am particularly passionate about women finding their voice via social too – many of us still listen to the voice in our head that says we don’t have anything valuable to share. Stop it, ladies!

Sharing what you know need not be impolite when it comes from a good place. So this week, during Working Out Loud Week, let go. Be a little vulnerable. Ask the Twittersphere a question. Offer advice to stop someone else’s train from crashing. Share some work in progress and ask how it could be improved. You may be surprised at the response you get.

International Working Out Loud Week promotes the practice of working out loud. The goal of a week dedicated to working out loud is to create the circumstances where individuals and organisations are prepared to experiment with working out loud. This is achieved by celebrating working out loud and creating opportunities to connect individuals and organisations with others practicing and learning ways to work out loud.

Make good technology choices. But put people first in the digital workplace

I was catching up with some Twitter buddies at Digital Workplace Experience 2018 in Chicago early last week when I was grabbed to go and record a video on my thoughts about the conference.

Besides the conference hosting a great group of digital workplace experts in one place, the thing I loved most was the overwhelming focus on people and change. Not technology.

Yet shiny new tools are difficult to resist and there are more of them every day. For example, the social business application market alone is expected to grow to be a $37 billion industry by next year, according to tech analyst firm 451 Research. Just like an all-you-can-eat dessert bar, tech vendors are tempting us with the alluring promise we’ll enjoy eating their sweet treats. Without thinking, we rush in for the sugar fix. Feels good in the short term, but how do we feel about our choice later?

Just like an all-you-can-eat dessert bar, tech vendors are tempting us with the alluring promise we’ll enjoy eating their sweet treats.

The irony of the march into the digital age is the further we go, the more we realise being ‘digital’ isn’t about teaching people how to use tools. Instead, the main game is helping people get into the right headspace to want to try new ways of working.

Why does this make sense? Because traditional adoption methods focused on technology won’t work to rally people around digital tools in a modern workplace. As digital workplace futurist Dion Hinchcliffe pointed out at #DWX18: “Adoption of new technology is not automatic, because participation in the digital workplace is optional.”

People choose whether they want to come along for the ride in the digital workplace. So, we need to focus on people and provide them with clear value in order to have them try something new. 

Catastrophe hit earlier this week when Slack, the messaging platform went down. The tweets about the outage were hilarious, but the undercurrent serious. Slack users had embedded the chat tool so deeply into the flow of their day that suddenly life was a disaster without it. Apparently.

There were loads of vendors at #DWX18 and I talked to many of them about their tools and how they were convincing customers of their business value.

Between the content of the conference and the insights from vendors, it’s clear we need to have better conversations about digital workplace tools that are centred on people and enabling real work.

We need to have better conversations about digital workplace tools that are centred on people and enabling real work.

The problem with starting the conversation from a ‘tool first’ perspective is we end up focusing on checklists of functional features, rather than working to a clear and compelling business purpose.

As Tony Byrne and Jarrod Gingras point out in The Right Way to Select Technology, “If you don’t have a solid business rationale for what you’re doing, you will never achieve business value”.

No one will use digital workplace tools if they don’t understand why they should or how the tools will add value. Worse still, an ill-prepared workforce will try new tools and then blame them when value isn’t delivered. Vendors may run a real risk of becoming the nearest throat to choke.

No one will use digital workplace tools if they don’t understand why they should or how the tools will add value.

Here’s a way for us to think about this:

• Start with people. Get in their heads to understand their personal fears or the excitement of trying a new way of working. Could they be champions for you, or are they resistors? How will you address their concerns or harness their enthusiasm?

• Identify a compelling purpose. Help different audience groups appreciate how a new tool will enable their specific type of work. Address the What’s In It For Me to make it meaningful. Create a link to real goals and work to be done.

• Explain how people can get into different ways of working. Focus on behaviour. With enterprise social, for example, explain what it means to listen and contribute value. Simply asking people to do those things doesn’t mean they’ll know how.

• Tools next. A balance of functional training and building digital capability is essential. Build confidence by helping users make the most of new tools. Jump straight to this step and skip over people’s concerns and a clear purpose at your peril.

• Better business outcomes. When people are clear about the purpose of a new tool and feel confident in using it to get real work done, you’ll achieve meaningful adoption.

Of course, rallying people around new technology may happen in an organisation where leadership may not be engaged or where a culture is not ready to take the plunge. We should take more interest in organisational preparedness to welcome change, so we don’t waste time spinning our wheels and ensure the success of new digital technology deployments.

Making good technology choices is important, but is only part of the success equation. For new digital technology to stick, put people at the centre of the action. Solve a problem for them and then you really are giving them something they’ll value.

Weight training and finding your enterprise social muscles

I’d participated in Bodypump classes for years and years before finally getting up the guts to go and train to become an instructor. It was a big deal for me. Ask me to get up in front of a crowd and make a presentation about communications or social and I’m at ease. But when it came time to certify as an instructor, the thought of submitting a video of me coaching a class in how to execute deadlifts, squats and lunges was terrifying. The road of certification was very different to anything I’d ever navigated before.

I wish I’d taken the leap sooner because it’s so much fun! I look forward to every class I teach. My participants and I sweat bucket loads and our muscles burn. Over time, our weights have become heavier, our limbs leaner and more toned. We return for more again and again. We’ve found ourselves part of a wonderful virtuous cycle, spurred on by the great things resistance training was doing for our bodies.

"Building your enterprise social muscle plays out in the same way as it does with weight training in the gym."

McKinsey talks about the evolution of social technologies occurring in three stages, taking companies from trial and error use, to collaboration and managing knowledge and on to the Nirvana of harnessing social to democratise strategy. 

In my experience, building your enterprise social muscle plays out in the same way as it does with weight training in the gym. As McKinsey points out, once you make the leap and use social at work in more purposeful ways, you’ll get a bigger benefit from it. You have the opportunity to get into what I’m calling a virtuous social business cycle.

Here’s how:

• Connect – We make a conscious decision to move out of our silos. We listen. We post, without having an expectation of where a response may come from. We may be excited or anxious about what people will think about our post.

• Collaborate – The social habit forms as we feel the love from colleagues who engage with us. We make our work visible. We share what we know to help others kick business goals. We're adding value.

• Act – We embed social in the flow of our work, making the most of it to solve business problems and tap into new ideas. We’re action-oriented, not passive by-standers.

• Achieve – With the right people doing the right things in enterprise social, organisations committed to getting real work done in open and transparent ways will achieve better business results. The virtuous social business cycle is at work and we return to it again and again. 

Just like my Bodypump experience, getting into a virtuous social business cycle will help organisations find enterprise social muscles they never knew existed. And who doesn’t want great muscles, really?