Efficient Remote Working Teams - Visualization

Challenge

During these difficult times where COVID-19 pandemic has upturned lives making working from  office a health risk, my team and I like millions of others were forced to work from home. It has  been a year since we started working remotely and the team has been facing ongoing as well as  new challenges. For example, how can we maintain morale and high communication efficiency  with fully remote teams? Working remotely for over a year now, the team members feel  disconnected with each other. Added to this was the complexity of having different backgrounds,  unique cultural requirements, and different time zones. The team, being spread across three  continents, was tasked with addressing these challenges and come up with solutions that enable  them to seamlessly work from the safety of their homes.

Selection

Since this is a human centric problem, I chose to use visualization as a design thinking tool to help  us address these challenges. It allows participants to view the challenges from inside out rather  than from the outside viewpoint. The design thinking workshop, being a virtually conducted one,  choosing visualization was the tool of choice for the design thinking workshop. The tool is also a  great way to focus, capture ideas and see the connections that would later enable us to be more  creative. Almost immediately, the team saw the benefits of visualization. Moreover, during the  exploration phase finding the right questions to the answers is critical and visualization helped us  do just that.

With the help of visualization or simply visual thinking, team members extrapolated possibilities  that might not have been easy to think of otherwise. In the video lecture, Angela Myer rightly  mentions that when we draw, we activate a different part of the brain than when we speak. Thus,  we enhance creativity in ways we can’t use while having a discussion. This leads into more  generative ideas.

Application

Once the tool was selected, the team was divided into groups of 5 members each. Each group was  given a virtual dashboard. The team members were to visually describe their idea of an ideal  workstation, how they wish to do certain activities given the realistic challenges such as, the use of  different processes and tools, unique cultural requirements, and addressing different time zones.  with an image of a regular workstation to get started. Each member could then edit or append  objects or draw their thoughts into the dashboard. Additionally, we implemented photo images as a  part of visualization in the dashboard. These photo images of different team members and their  profile information provided a rich overview of the challenge each individual team member faces  and thus helped others empathize with them.

The Visualization tool helped the team create a deeper understanding of the underlying issues and  challenges while working remotely and explore member specific challenges and requirements. It  also gave team members a clear picture of the need for information, what value it creates and how  it effects the next phase. There was high level of engagement from team members to design a

better employee experience. The team members were designing solutions which they might be  using in the future. It created a sense of co-creation and confidence that when it will be eventually  implemented, there is already a certain level of employee buy-in on the initiatives that the team has  had a hand in designing. Keeping employees at the center of solving challenges with the goal of  building better workplace cultures paid off.

Insight

The understanding that comes with visualization of user information, such as user circumstances  and user specific needs, helps improve the overall performance of the design process and conveys  information to the entire group. To make this happen, the team members must understand each  other´s information needs. With the visualization tool, each individual creates maps of how a team  member will use a particular resource, connect with another team member and address a host of  challenges that appear in day to day tasks. The tool helped team members align other’s thoughts  with themselves. It was widely believed that the tool enabled synthesizing new solutions and  create pictures of something that doesn’t exist.

Approach

Visualization is a very responsive and compelling tool. It was instantly appreciated by team  members participating in the workshop for its efficiency and ease of use.

A key take-away for the team was to focus on identifying and understanding the problem to be  solved and keep an open mindset for future iterations. You’ll never be able to solve every problem  and overcome every data use barrier in one workshop. We need to work continuously as we  progress with the remote work culture to develop specific solutions for unique problems. It is critical  to thoroughly understand barriers and challenges from team member perspectives so that the  solutions can be tweaked, and the most pressing issues addressed.

Another important aspect that we learnt was the need to engage the right group of stakeholders.  We had representation from different parts of the team. However, as the workshop progressed, we  soon realized that some solutions might be incomplete without the involvement of certain SMEs.  The step of identifying the ideal set of stakeholders is as critical as the problem statement itself and  needs to be addressed early in the process.

