Addressing Pivotal Challenges in Organisational Working Practices

Recently, we surveyed technology leaders and engineers to explore the key difficulties organisations face regarding contemporary work arrangements. The study presented participants with a list of potential challenges and recorded the frequency with which each was identified. 

As you can see, sustaining creativity and innovation was most frequently selected, closely followed by fostering a sense of belonging. 

Maintaining effective collaboration, onboarding new talent, balancing flexibility with cohesion and preventing work culture fragmentation are also high up in the focus. 

In contrast, addressing overwork and optimising office space were noted far less often. Nonetheless, to some, they are pivotal. 

This article provides immediately applicable solutions to these challenges, offering technology leaders the practical tools to navigate workplace complexities effectively.

1. Sustaining Creativity and Innovation

Challenge: In a hybrid or remote environment, fostering creativity and innovation can be difficult due to reduced spontaneous interactions and isolated workflows.

In 1968, Dr. Spencer Silver, a chemist at 3M, was attempting to create a super-strong adhesive for use in aircraft construction. Instead, he accidentally created a weak, pressure-sensitive adhesive that could be peeled away easily without leaving a residue. At first, this invention seemed like a failure – after all, who would want a glue that doesn’t stick properly?

It wasn’t until 1974 that his colleague, Art Fry, came up with the idea of using the adhesive to create bookmarks that wouldn’t fall out of his hymnal. This spark of creativity led to the development of the Post-it Note.

Would Fry even find out about Silver’s invention if they worked remotely and had isolated workflows? 

Yes, the first action step is to synchronise workflows. In-house, hybrid or fully remote; it doesn’t matter as long as the workflows are synced. 

But there’s another problem – it’s not always people’s fault they are not creative and innovative. 

Get ready to face the hard truth about your leadership style and/or organisation’s culture in general. 

There was a study that explored the problems of lack of creativity and innovation conducted by Francesca Gino. Gino surveyed 3,000 employees across various industries and companies, revealing that:

• Only 24% of employees reported feeling curious in their jobs regularly.
• Approximately 70% said they face barriers to asking more questions at work.

In other words, leaders might believe they allow creativity and entice curiosity, but their team members certainly don’t feel that way. 

This leads us to the most interesting thing in the study and that’s the list of 3 key innovation/creativity blockers:

1. Leaders often believe that encouraging curiosity will lead to a costly mess and make the company harder to manage.
2. There’s a concern that allowing employees to explore their interests would lead to more disagreements and slow down decision-making processes.
3. Despite listing creativity as a goal, people frequently reject creative ideas when actually presented with them.

Hence, the

Immediate Solutions

There are a few important takeaways from this study and general practice that should mitigate the problem of lack of creativity and innovation:

1. Create an environment where employees feel safe to ask questions, explore and share new ideas without fear of ridicule or punishment. 
2. Understand that exploration doesn’t always produce immediately useful information but often yields better long-term solutions that require many mini-solutions in between to work. 
3. While some structure is necessary, allow for flexibility in exploring new ideas and approaches.
4. Implement recognition systems that reward not just successful outcomes, but also the process of exploration and learning.

However, not all people are creative (and innovative) by default. In fact, only a handful are. So what is the simplest method to entice creativity in otherwise uncreative individuals?

This may sound counterintuitive, but setting strict limits can be your ace in the hole. 

Constraints, when approached with the right mindset, can be a catalyst for creativity rather than an obstacle. 

In 1960, Bennett Cerf, the founder of Random House, bet the famous Dr. Seuss $50 that he couldn’t write an entertaining children’s book using only 50 unique words. This challenge came after Dr. Seuss had already successfully written “The Cat in the Hat” using a limited vocabulary of 236 words from a list of 348 words that first-graders should know.

The result?

Dr. Seuss accepted the challenge and produced “Green Eggs and Ham,” which became:

• His best-selling book
• The fourth best-selling children’s hardcover book of all time
• A book that has sold over 200 million copies worldwide

1. Creativity thrives under limitations: Rather than stifling creativity, the 50-word constraint forced Dr. Seuss to be more innovative in his storytelling.
2. Quality over quantity: Despite the limited vocabulary, the book became a masterpiece of children’s literature.
3. Problem-solving skills: The constraint required Dr. Seuss to approach the writing process differently, enhancing his problem-solving abilities.
4. Focus and efficiency: The word limit forced Dr. Seuss to be concise and focused in his storytelling.

In business, limited resources often lead to innovative solutions while time constraints can increase productivity and focus. 

2. Fostering a Strong Sense of Belonging

Challenge: Employees, especially those working remotely, often struggle with feeling disconnected from the company culture and their colleagues.

Take it from someone who’s been working remotely for the last 11 years – this is a tough nugget to break. It will take a hard personal investment to create a sense of belonging. Nonetheless, it is achievable. 

Now, the widely used solutions are:

• Virtual Team-building Activities
• Regular Check-ins
• Weekly Team Meetings
• Monthly Team Meetings
• Recognition Programs
• Company-wide Rituals

Make no mistake; all of them work, but only if you a) give a team member a true sense of purpose and b) hold them accountable.

Consider a complex, interconnected machine – a sophisticated network of gears, levers and circuits. This machine, let’s call it “Synergy”, represents a tech organisation operating in a remote environment. Its smooth functioning depends entirely on the coordinated effort of its individual components – the remote tech teams or members.

The organisation’s leaders, the “Master Engineers”, understand that simply providing the blueprints isn’t enough. They need to instil a sense of purpose and accountability within each team, each member, each cog in the Synergy machine. It is an eight-step process. 

Step 1: Ensuring Seamless Operation

To cultivate purpose, the Master Engineers ensure every team member understands their critical role in the machine’s overall operation. They explain how even the smallest line of code contributes to the larger function, and how each bug fix prevents a catastrophic system failure.

Step 2: Directing Personal Growth into Synergy’s Progress

They also work with each team to set “precision-engineered” goals – targets that align not only with Synergy’s overall performance metrics but also with individual career trajectories. A junior developer might aim to master a new coding language, while a senior architect might focus on designing a more efficient data flow.

Step 3: Reinforcing the Significance of Individual Contributions

Regularly, the Master Engineers showcase the impact of each team’s work – how a new feature improved user experience and how a security patch prevented a data breach. In other words, they demonstrate real-world consequences.

Step 4: Laying the Groundwork for Responsibility

To enhance accountability, the Master Engineers establish clear “performance parameters” – specific, measurable outcomes for each team and project. These defined expectations might include code quality metrics, sprint completion rates or client satisfaction scores.

Step 5: Encouraging Self-regulation and Peer Oversight

Synergy is equipped with a sophisticated “monitoring system” – a suite of project management tools and performance dashboards that provide real-time visibility into the machine’s operation.

Step 6: Ensuring Alignment

The Master Engineers also conduct regular “calibration sessions” – one-on-one and team meetings to discuss progress, address challenges and performance deviations and refine goals.

Step 7: Fostering a Culture of Ownership

They empower team members to take initiative in problem-solving and decision-making. 

(QUOTE)When individuals feel responsible for their part of the machine, they’re more likely to hold themselves accountable for the results.

Step 8: Reinforcing the Value of Accountability

Finally, the Master Engineers recognise and reward exceptional performance – publicly acknowledging teams and members that consistently exceed expectations and demonstrate strong ownership.

The outcome?

An environment where each team member feels deeply connected to their purpose and takes genuine ownership of their responsibilities. Such a combination not only drives performance but also ensures long-term stability and success. 

3. Maintaining Effective Collaboration

Challenge: Coordinating efforts across distributed teams can result in inefficiencies, miscommunications and delays.

The problem is that managers stick to the paradigm of the office environment, completely ignoring the fact that their teams operate from living rooms, bedrooms and basements of their homes. And homes have an opposite paradigm. 

Traditional office environments are structured for face-to-face interactions, spontaneous conversations and immediate feedback. Homes, on the other hand, are designed for personal life and privacy, creating a fundamental paradigm shift.

Moreover, office environments rely heavily on non-verbal cues, body language and spontaneous exchanges, which are largely absent in remote settings.

Immediate Solutions:

• When using collab platforms like Nifty, enforce ‘tasking’ instead of messaging for even the smallest and simplest of tasks – without exceptions. In other words, the “Can you check that update” message transforms into the “Check the XYZ Update” task. 
• Ensure clarity in task ownership and deadlines.
• Create and enforce the use of priority tags in tasks (eg, High Priority, Medium Priority, Low Priority)
• Maintain an immutable team meeting schedule (to create a sense of expectation and, eventually, a loop of habit).
• Set clear agendas and outcomes for every type of meeting.
• During meetings, entice transparency and proactive updates to avoid misunderstandings.
• Create a centralised knowledge base by developing and maintaining a repository of processes, procedures and frequently used resources.
• Whenever possible, use visual project roadmaps that detail timelines, milestones and responsibilities. 

4. Onboarding and Developing New Talent

Challenge: Remote and hybrid setups make it harder for new employees to integrate quickly and build meaningful workplace relationships.

In our experience — and we are a fully remote team — two practices stick out when onboarding a new team member: mentorship pairing and weekly touchpoints with the new hire. And we are certainly not the only company that finds these two methods crucial. 

If you can put together an extremely precise onboarding program, even better.

That’s basically all you can do besides providing access to the centralised knowledge base and training programs. If it sticks, fine. If not, repost the job ad. Some people are simply not a team material and there’s nothing you can do about it.  

Here’s the thing. Onboarding and developing a new talent is directly related to and dependent on a sense of belonging. So by focusing on #2 (Fostering a Sense of Belonging), you will effectively address #4 (Onboarding). 

Belonging is a key factor because a sense of belonging is crucial for new employees to feel engaged, confident and committed to their organisation.

5. Balancing Flexibility with Organisational Cohesion

Challenge: The push for flexible work arrangements can sometimes undermine organisational unity and alignment with company goals.

We are back to the shifting paradigm where an employee constantly changes between home and office. The first thing you need to do is to create a shared digital workspace – and use it. It doesn’t matter if a part of the team is in the office; they still must use that workspace as long as even a single member is remote.

What happens is that team members who work from the office, tend to disregard the fact that some of them are missing. In their minds, that person is on leave or has a day off. It’s simply part of that common office paradigm we mentioned earlier.

Additional Solutions:

• Define clear policies (guidelines) that balance autonomy with necessary in-office collaboration.
• Establish overlapping work hours for synchronous communication.
• If in any way possible, schedule physical meet-ups to reinforce team spirit.
• Create an internal knowledge base to ensure consistency in workflows and processes.
• Prioritise accountability by all means. 
• If you manage distributed teams, involve all team members in defining and refining the team’s vision and goals.

6. Preventing Fragmentation of Work Culture

Challenge: A dispersed workforce can lead to fragmented cultures, where different teams develop disconnected subcultures.

Immediate Solutions

Several experienced leaders have successfully addressed this issue through innovative approaches and strategic initiatives: 

Automatic Created a Unified Digital Culture

Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, provides an efficient example of maintaining a cohesive culture in a fully distributed workforce. Their leadership team adopted a “write early, write often” strategy to foster transparency and collaboration. 

By encouraging team members to share updates and feedback in shared documents, they created a virtual environment that mimics the organic interactions of a physical office. 

This approach proved highly effective, with 73% of Automattic employees reporting feeling more connected in their remote setting than in traditional office environments.

IBM Leveraged Technology for Team Building

IBM’s leadership team faced similar challenges when shifting to a remote-first strategy in 2020. Initially, they observed a major decrease in employee engagement compared to in-person work. To combat this, IBM’s leaders implemented three innovative solutions:

1. Regular virtual town halls to maintain open communication.
2. Social hours to foster informal connections.
3. Integration of virtual reality (VR) in leadership training programs.

The use of VR in particular yielded impressive results, with IBM reporting a 60% increase in the retention of leadership skills among participants. VR enables leaders to experience high-pressure decision-making scenarios in a safe simulated environment.

Tariq Implemented Cross-Cultural Understanding

Tariq, a young leader in a global firm, successfully addressed cultural fragmentation in his 68-person division spanning 27 countries and 18 languages. His approach included:

1. Introducing a unifying team motto: “We are different yet one”.
2. Creating opportunities for employees to share their cultures.
3. Implementing a zero-tolerance policy for cultural insensitivity.

These initiatives helped bridge cultural divides and rebuild team cohesion, demonstrating the importance of acknowledging and celebrating diversity while fostering unity.

We Emphasise Shared Purpose

CTO Academy leaders consistently remind team members of their common purpose and how their work contributes to overall company goals. During weekly team calls, for instance, a CEO reviews the group’s performance relative to company objectives. This practice helps maintain focus and unity, especially when team members are geographically dispersed like we are.

Personal Connection and Recognition

A manager based in Dallas, Texas, inherited a large team in India following an acquisition. To prevent cultural fragmentation, he:

1. Involved remote employees in important decisions.
2. Maintained frequent contact to discuss ongoing projects.
3. Personally called team members to give them their birthdays off.

These personal touches significantly improved team cohesion and morale, highlighting the importance of individual recognition in maintaining a unified culture.

The Key Takeaways:

• Leverage technology to improve communication and capitalise on diversity while emphasising unity.  
• Maintain personal connections across geographical boundaries.

7. Addressing Employee Overwork and Burnout

Challenge: The blurred boundaries between work and home life in remote and hybrid setups have led to increased burnout rates.

If this is the prevalent issue in your organisation, you need to take a big step back and reorganise your processes. There is something in your operations that disturbs the balance.

Immediate Solutions:

1. Set Boundaries on After-hours Communication

In Germany, for example, contacting employees after hours is generally prohibited, with exceptions for emergencies and specific roles. The aim of this measure is to:

• Protect employee health
• Ensure work-life balance
• Reduce stress
• Prevent burnout

The decision is based on extensive research that, among other things, clearly proved that:

1. Constant availability for work-related matters can lead to increased stress and mental health issues.
2. Genuine mental breaks from work improve overall productivity and employee well-being.
3. Limiting after-hours contact allows for better sleep patterns and recovery time, which are crucial for maintaining good health and job performance.
4. Prohibiting contact after hours reduces stress-induced mental illnesses.

2. Encourage Time-off

Actively promoting and tracking employee vacations to ensure they take breaks can be somewhat challenging when managing distributed teams. In our experience, the best approach is to utilise your central digital workspace. 

Our COO, for instance, has implemented a time-off calendar where team members easily schedule their time off in Nifty after manager approval. This provides immediate visibility for the entire team, showing who’s out and for how long. It simplifies tracking and helps with processes because a team member can’t receive a task with a deadline that doesn’t take the time off into account. 

3. Implement No-meeting Days

These are basically dedicated days for deep work without interruptions.

4. Provide Mental Health Resources

In a fast-paced environment, burnout is inevitable. One approach is to provide comprehensive mental health resources such as counselling services, webinars or self-help materials. They should be:

• Easily accessible
• Encouraged
• Utilised
• Confidential

This will enable you to identify and manage stress and burnout early on.

8. Optimising and Adapting Office Space

Challenge: With hybrid work models, many companies struggle to justify office expenses while ensuring the space remains functional.

It’s amazing how some technology companies underutilise technology, namely smart space management systems. For example:

• Real-time desk and room booking systems to prevent scheduling conflicts and maximize space usage.
• Occupancy sensors to provide data on space utilisation, helping manage office density and optimise layouts.
• All-in-one platforms like Microsoft Places and Gable for comprehensive workspace management, offering features such as AI-driven work schedule optimisation and access to flexible workspaces.

The point is to rethink the organisation of the office space because clearly something is off. Maybe you have collaboration hubs but no quiet thinking bunkers where an employee can retreat to contemplate the problem without distractions. Perhaps it’s overcrowded or oversaturated with unnecessary equipment and simple re-arrangement could go a long way. 

This is where technology or a good old professional interior designer helps. 

Now, you may have also heard of ‘hot desking’ otherwise known as ‘hoteling’. If you are thinking about implementing such an option, consider these factors:

• Loss of personalisation
• Psychological discomfort
• Reduced productivity
• Weakened social structures
• Decreased job satisfaction
• Sense of belonging

That’s the less discussed outcome of booking desks and spaces practice. As a species, we are wired to grow attached to our personal spaces and the office desk is no exception. Drop us anywhere and we’ll transform a hole in a rock into a cosy and warm place with a personal signature. 

Just for fun, imagine a bunch of kids storming into a room filled with cool toys – day after day.   

Conclusion

So to sum up:

1. Creativity and innovation can be fostered through synchronised workflows, a safe environment for exploration and perhaps setting strict limits to encourage creative problem-solving.
2. Giving team members a true sense of purpose and holding them accountable can help them feel strongly connected.
3. Effective collaboration can be maintained by enforcing tasking instead of messaging, ensuring clarity in task ownership and deadlines and creating a centralised knowledge base.
4. Onboarding and developing new talent can be effectively addressed by focusing on fostering a sense of belonging.
5. Balancing flexibility with organisational cohesion requires creating a shared digital workspace, defining clear policies and establishing overlapping work hours for synchronous communication.
6. Leveraging technology, maintaining personal connections across geographical boundaries, and emphasising shared purpose can prevent the fragmentation of work culture.
7. Addressing employee overwork and burnout requires setting boundaries on after-hours communication, encouraging time off, implementing no-meeting days and providing mental health resources.
8. Finally, optimising and adapting office space can be done by using smart space management systems and rethinking the organisation of the office space.