Virtual Whisperer 9 — Improv
I’m not sure if this is about working virtually or working in general, but I do know that over the last 10 weeks, COVID-19 has not only pushed the reset button but forced us all to improvise.
In my book, Magic in the Mundane: Making Life’s Ordinary Extraordinary, I write about improvisation and what it teaches us. Moons ago, a young sales talent joined our firm. He was a pro at improv and regularly performed in Boston. His wish during his interview was to work for a company and teach them the benefits of improv. He picked us, and we picked him.
At an all-hands meeting, he set us up in teams and taught us how to improvise; we then had to perform in front of each other. Later, at a conference, he and I did improv for our attendees, all in the spirit of teaching agility, thinking on one’s feet, supporting team members for success, and having fun along the way. Improv means having to perform without a script, making everything up as you go, supporting your fellow artists so they look good, and getting it done in a set amount of time. It really forces you to be comfortable with ambiguity and to build trust while hanging out on a limb.
If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it is how to improvise. We:
Scrambled to get our teams to safety and realized that we could actually work
Learned to hire people without the ability to meet them F2F
Figured out new ways of getting work done and improved processes that had atrophied
Learned to trust people and rely more on output than on physical presence
Adapted our sick and vacation policies
Gained our humanity
There have been so many gifts from our ability to work from home. We learned the art of flex and made work more humane by understanding that no one is meant to sit at a screen all day — that we are meant to exercise, take walks, be with our kids, and blend our days.
We’ve gotten accustomed to our colleagues working from home, seeing a bit of their personal lives peek through, offering a smidge of intimacy, an imprint and reflection of who they are, which binds us and keeps it real. We’ve seen each other’s kids barge into rooms unexpectedly or have listened to someone’s young sons rough and tumble, tired of waiting for Dad outside his closed doors. We’ve seen our pets and laughed when our dogs bark at the doorbells announcing packages on our doorsteps.
And while the days have blurred into weeks and the weeks into months, we have been able to give our commutes a break, spending time that matters with our family, friends, or colleagues rather than wasting it with strangers crammed into trains, planes, and buses or stuck in cars idling on crowded highways spewing CO2 and devouring our precious time. Facebook and Shopify got the memo and decided, finally, that working from home might not be that bad. Google buses can take a rest, and people can work from places that are less crowded, surrounded by nature, and with costs of living that are manageable.
Yes, we had to improvise, and my sense is that we’ll never go back. We’ve learned that there’s a new way to work that is “both/and” — and if that isn’t an improv moment to live by, I don’t know what is.
To the employers out there: Please create flexible work plans for the future. Your colleagues want options, and improv-ing our way through new physical/virtual routines is now forever in our future.