"Management By Walking Around" Isn’t Dead – It Needs an Upgrade
The future of work is a customized blend of in-office and remote work
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In This Edition - The Future of Work Combines In-Office and Remote
This post wades deeper into remote work by looking at the the way that prior in-person experience between employees improves future understanding when using leaner communication media types such as text or email. Remote work limits in-person communication but that is not all bad. Some tasks are better suited for less interactive communication while others are best accomplished with everyone in the same room. And it all works better if there is an existing in-person experience base to draw from.
Have you heard of “Management by Walking Around?” I believe it was first popularized by Tom Peters in his influential book “In Search of Excellence” which was hot reading material for all managers in the 1980s.
The premise of “Management by Walking Around” was that for managers to really understand what was happening in their organizations they needed to get out from behind their desks and spend time with their employees. This didn’t mean formal presentations or corporate dog-and-pony shows, but informal interactions in the locations where folks worked. It involved unplanned interactions that would occur spontaneously as the manager stopped by the coffee machine, sat down in the lunchroom, or went on sales calls, etc. Sort of like “Undercover Boss” except it was not done in secret.
Image created by Ed Paulson using CoPilot in Windows.
From these interactions, managers got a chance to see how life felt on a day-to-day basis for their employees. This more personal interaction worked both ways. It not only informed the manager about what was happening in their organization, it also allowed the employees to get a personal feel for their leaders that was different from what they would obtain from a seat in a large audience. The concepts from the book took the management world by storm and folks talked about them for the next decade and a quick online search showed that they are still an active management topic.
In my own experience, I found it helped to spend time looking at my software training organization from the perspective of my employees. I would sometimes sit with my receptionist as customers checked in to take a class. Or I would go on calls with my sales manager to get a personal feel for the questions, concerns, etc. I often would sit in the back of the room while a training session was going on to monitor the questions, energy, and interactions. I think it also showed my employees and customers that I cared, which I believed meant a lot to them. Honestly, it meant a lot to me too! I felt like I had a better idea of what was happening at all levels of my organization when I took the time to make it personal.
Employees watch and make judgements about leaders based on what they see more than what they hear or read. I found this out firsthand in a good way, by accident, when I was working as a manufacturing support engineer at an early employer’s sister plant in Tijuana . Many American engineers before me had tried to gain the cooperation of management, and with little success. Now it was my turn, so I was going to give it my best shot. On my first day on the job, I didn’t want to take the time to go out for lunch, so I ate from the same hot food buffet bar as the hundred or so production line employees. The food smelled good, was tasty, fast, and it allowed me to quickly get back to work. The next day I felt the energy on the production floor toward me had shifted. They were more welcoming than before.
I asked one of the Mexican engineers about it and he told me, “You are the first Gringo engineer to eat from the employee hot bar. The others would go out for hours to eat at the fancier places and then come back to give us orders without trying to understand who we are and what we do. Everyone saw what you did, and now they trust you. So do we.”
Even the plant manager called me to his office to welcome me to his plant. I found out later that this was a rare occurrence. All because I ate a burrito from the employee hot bar and sat with others at an employee cafeteria table, even though I spoke little to no Spanish at the time. It didn’t matter. Human to human interaction was happening without a word spoken.
It may sound like I am making the case for the return to office, and in some ways I am. But, and this is critical, in-person interaction is not right for all situations. Much communication is most effectively and efficiently done using leaner media such as text, email, telephone, or video conference which opens the door for remote work opportunities.
My entire “Getting Through” book is about explaining these differences and how they affect communication in ways that either promote or interfere with understanding. Media selection is a critically important communication topic that I believe is not considered as often as it should be, and that is a huge mistake. Information about the book is at the end of this post. I hope you check it out and read the book. It will change how you communicate long into the future.
Face-to-face communication is a rich form of communication that is appropriate (and recommended) for certain types of communication situations, but not for most. The remaining situations can be accomplished using email, telephone or video conference, etc. This is where we can start to look at where remote work fits into all of this.
In “Getting Through” I talk about the ways in which a prior personal relationship can help with accurate message understanding. This is because the experienced brain has context from which it can fill in the message gaps that email and text cannot fill. Prior experiences give the receiver a sense of what the message sender would mean from a given written message which improves the likelihood of accurate understanding. The more experience that the message sender and receiver have with each other, the more likely they are to accurately understand each other when using email or text.
Face-to-face experience is a terrific way to create neural pathways that offer this higher level of understanding for later communication. (You can learn more about the fascinating topic of neuroplasticity by checking out my December 4, 2023 post.) I lament the demise of the old-fashioned Friday “beer bust” because they were a wonderful way to enable folks at all levels of the company to informally interact, forming social bonds that could be beneficial to all later on. The earlier informal in-person experience often offered a foundation for more productive later interaction by telephone or email that would have been far less likely without having shared a brew.
Take a moment to think about how different it is to communicate through email with a well-trusted colleague versus someone new to you, your company, and/or their job. A message conveyed in a few words to your trusted colleague would require paragraphs for the new person. Why? Because the trusted colleague has the experience base to more fully understand your intent where the new person simply does not have the experience base needed to fill in the blanks and can only draw from what is in the message. If the message does not fully answer their questions, then things can get complicated and disappointing for all involved. For this reason, a richer form of communication such as in-person, or telephone, or a video conference is often needed to ensure accurate understanding when dealing with less experienced people.
Back to remote work versus back to the office. Some jobs require an in-person presence such as an auto mechanic or waiter. Heck. Even Door Dash requires a person to drive the food to your house. It is not feasible to try to move these jobs remote. But many jobs that do not require a physical level of interaction lend themselves to a blend of in-person and remote. The percentage of time required for each is dependent upon factors such as task complexity, employee experience with their employer, their team members, the technology involved, the industry, and the typical customer.
When a task is straight forward, with easy-to-understand information and well-established procedures, then it is a viable candidate for remote work. I call these routine tasks. But, when the information, procedures, or expectations are unclear, then richer media such as telephone, video conference, or in-person meetings are best. I call these non-routine situations. Important: Almost everything is non-routine to the new employee.
Some companies have already figured this out. I have a friend who works as an engineer for Facebook. He mentioned recently that Facebook had implemented a policy whereby a person must have at least six months in-person on the job before they were eligible to work remotely.
Considering what we talked about earlier, this makes a lot of sense. The six months working in a rich communication media environment such as face-to-face with other engineers, team members, and Facebook employees, offers an experience base that becomes the foundation for communication understanding when they start to work remotely. They are more likely to properly understand received communications, others are more likely to understand them, and the remote employee will have a better sense of when they should reach out for assistance, and to whom.
Image created by Ed Paulson using CoPilot in Windows.
Notice that this policy is not an either-or/in-office or remote approach. It blends the two, which is the future of work.
#managementbywalkingaround, #mediarichness, #communication, #experience, #remotework
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LEARN MORE ABOUT BUSINESS COMMUNICATION FROM MY “GETTING THROUGH” BOOK
New! Listen to Ed Paulson explain his latest book “Getting Through.”
(Short 3 minute YouTube Video)
To become a better communicator, check out my recently published book “Getting Through: A Systematic Approach To Being Understood” (ISBN: 9798987950807) available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other retailers. It is only 130 pages long and can be read in just a few hours. Those few hours will change the way you communicate long into the future.
Getting Through: A Systematic Approach To Being Understood (ISBN: 9798987950807)
From the “Getting Through” book description on Amazon:
“Have you ever wondered why you are misunderstood? Would it shock you to know that it could be HOW you delivered the message? Did you know that the media you use to deliver a message affects the way it is interpreted by others? That’s right! Texting, email, video conference, telephone, and in-person meetings are not interchangeable, but nobody explains that to us, so we are forced to learn the best way to use them by trial and error. Until now!”
It has been shown time and again that those who are perceived as better communicators are more likely to get ahead within an organization. “Getting Through” makes a great gift to a person who is new to working within a larger company and required to use their communication infrastructure. By applying the methods detailed in this short book, employees can increase their communication effectiveness and decrease the likelihood of making communication errors that can negatively affect their careers.
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Thanks for the comment Ron! Yes. HP was key and I believe they adapted it from a Japanese company back when Japan was the model for manufacturing. I hope readers start to think about all this in a different way. It was fun writing for the HP Chronicle.
Way to get us thinking. I covered HP in the eighties through 2014. Origin of the term has been traced to executives at the company Hewlett-Packard for management practices in the 1970s. HP manager offices were designed to make this easy; just another cubicle on the floor.