You may also like...
I often get asked: “What do you mean when you say ‘you have to design a digital workplace’ that enables effective anywhere-working?”
Often the best way to answer this is to show an example of what a workplace looks like that is attempting anywhere working without designing it.
Here is a classic example. Read and weep as this new employee gets to experience what working in such an unstructured environment is like first-hand:
“Even on Day 1, people forgot I was there. I went to [a virtual] onboarding meeting in the morning and then no one said anything the rest of the day.”
“But it was always this feeling of ‘Do people know I am here?’”
“‘This isn’t normal. People should be helping us more. They need to answer questions now, not in three days.’”
“From the start, I had questions like ‘What am I supposed to be doing all day?’ People keep forgetting I am here.”
“People were busy so I could never get questions answered. There was not a culture of responding quickly.”
“When you are a new employee, you have so many questions. Like ‘What are the rules for saving document names?’ That’s a type of question you need answered immediately. In an office, if you see someone not busy, you can just ask them. When you’re [remote], you can’t tell. So I would just sit there with the document open, unsure what to do, waiting for someone to tell me what to name it. I felt so stupid.”
The above folks is what a workplace is like that has spent zero time DESIGNING a work-from-anywhere digital workplace.
Now that you have read this horror story contrast it with this first-hand experience of stepping into a well designed digital workplace as a new employee — Welcome to Automattic: The Onboarding Experience