Leading From A Distance: Pt. I

Like many organizations, Jayway has had to adapt to a new working environment. We decided to pick Lisa’s brain on how she and the leadership team in Jayway manage to keep the engine running. The intention is to share our thoughts and process with You. Hopefully, we will inspire and spark conversation on the subject of leadership.

The content of this interview in three parts reflects on the situation from 11th of March 2020 till today.

Week 1: Increasing Communication

What was the first thing You did, when the crisis became a reality?

 “As a global company, it was important for us to keep our employees and clients updated on the impacts of COVID-19. Both in regards to each entity and client projects.

The first thing we did was to build an information structure on our intranet. In that way, our employees had one place to find updated information. This was complemented by a daily update via email. The content was about how COVID-19 affects our daily operations. We also added how the latest country-specific news and regulations affected us locally.

In times like these, it’s more important than ever to keep everyone calm and feel safe.”

How did you organize your tasks within the leadership team?

“We wanted to ensure frequent communication with everyone in the organization. This required the leadership team to increase meetings to two daily interactions. One in the morning and one in the afternoon. After local press conferences, we discuss how it relates to our organization.  Everyone in the leadership team was following different sources of information. We got very good support from the rest of the organization.”

How was the response to the daily communication?

 “I knew beforehand that it was important with frequent communication. But, I haven’t truly felt how much difference it can make, till now. We have received a great deal of positive feedback from colleagues. They feel safer because of the increased communication from management. Daily communication kept us all on the same page. It ensured that we all were working against the same vision. The vision is to continue working and delivering to our clients. Even if we have new circumstances.

I do recognize that some people might find the communication too excessive. Yet, we would rather communicate a bit too much than too little at this stage. It is important for us to be as transparent as possible. Our daily communication was a good tool to ensure this. We are all in this crisis together!

Our job is to make sure everyone have the right tools and information to keep working as normal as possible”

Week 2: Ensuring Strong Teams

How did you approach keeping the engine going for local project teams?

“In the leadership team, we more or less extended our responsibilities. Our CTO is responsible for our project teams. He made sure to involve all Studio Leads (Local Managers) and Project Managers (Team Managers) in weekly meetings. In those meetings, they discussed how to stay motivated. They also did knowledge sharing on how best to work from home and how to keep the team spirit up. On this management level, we found it better with one meeting every week. In that way, Studio Leads and Project Managers also had time and space to take care of their local teams.

The knowledge and information were also added to the internal platform. Thereby we could spread “best practices” on remote setups. This includes bringing home office equipment for comfortable work setups.”

How did you try and support motivation?

“We encouraged all our entities to keep socializing frequently. A lot of initiatives have already been realized. Through virtual video chats, our colleagues hang out together. Either it’s coffee breaks, quiz nights, Friday bars, or similar.

One of our major focus areas has really been to ensure motivation. We want those living without family to still feel part of a team and get social stimulation. At the same time, we also saw a need to make sure that those with kids at home felt motivated. We try to make sure that daily tasks are at a level that can be performed from home – with kids running around.”

How about the collaboration with clients?

“In regards to communication with our clients, we are lucky. We are not completely new at working remotely. During the first week, we sent out information on how to set up stable environments. We don’t want the situation to affect projects too much.”

Do you feel that you made the right decisions during these two weeks?

“I always feel that we could do better. I think that some of the things we have done during the first two weeks have been very reactive. Our goal is to become more proactive. We had to make very fast decisions for our organization. Of course, you can always look back and think about “what could we have done differently?” But what I have learned so far is that it truly has made a difference to stay close to our teams. Most of all, having direct communication and availability towards individuals has been key.

The first two weeks were extremely hectic. I don’t think we actually had time to do much reflection about the situation. We didn’t think how to improve our efforts till we hit week three.”

Did you like this interview? Or do you have any experiences to add? Stay tuned for the next part of the article:
Leading From A Distance: Pt. II. We will go through ideas on how you can be more transparent as a leader and change in routines. Both for a professional and social work interaction.