If your organisation aspires to be great at hybrid (or fully distributed) working, develop the power of intervisibility.
With intervisibility, you’ll know:
- Who’s doing something interesting
- Who’s struggling and needing help
- Who’s about to make a big win – or a silly mistake
- Who’s got some spare time and/or energy
- Where there’s fun to be had…
And because you already know that async is a superpower for distributed teams you can have intervisibility without needing yet another meeting.
Intervisibility, whether within a whole organisation, a single team or an organisation is the product of Practices (aka Habits) and Tools.
When everyone worked in the same office, perhaps you could get all the intervisibility you needed just by wandering around, checking out the “information radiators”, chatting to people, overhearing things.
By contrast, if even some of the team still works remotely, you will need effective online tools, correctly configured, to make intervisibility happen.
And it’s just as important for everyone to develop the habit of using those tools. A daily status update. Marking tasks as “done”. Maybe tracking time in a shared tool. Async stand-ups. Commenting occasionally in a Slack channel – even if it’s the Recipes channel.
My friend Pilar Orti refers to these practices as Visible Teamwork, but they don’t have to be limited to the team.
When there’s a shared practice of making work visible, it benefits everybody – not just the bosses. Everybody feels more connected. Everyone can learn, hear about opportunities, and make valuable connections, regardless of whether they come into the office or not.
And what’s more, this kind of intervisibility can rekindle the creative synchronicity that drives problem-solving innovation – the kind that so many organisations claimed to have lost during compulsory WFH. Could that be useful for you?