Tuesdays for me is an Office day – that is instead of working from home – which I generally do the other 6 days of the week I spend about 2 hours driving into & out of the office in the leafy upper north shore of Sydney.
This is where a lot of my Australian colleagues are based and it allows for the social, non-work interaction to take place which I find helps glue the work relationships together.
Simple idea, simple to execute your would think.
Actually it’s not that simple. Between the interminable meetings and the interruptions etc. it is a rare case these days where we actually sit down to eat lunch together, have a chat, etc.
Ah I hear you say, dear reader, book the time out, and that would make sure I get what I was looking for. That would work, if folks respected your diary, or as is by far the majority of the cases there isn’t some absolutely critical reason for the meeting which is a higher level interrupt to something as mundane as lunch – or more importantly social interaction.
As a consequence a simple idea – “ensure you have some social interaction with your colleagues” can require a major amount of calendar & meeting engineering to ensure that we have the space in our collective days to make it happen.
You have to persevere because the alternative is that you become a sort of teleconference wizard of oz where you project you voice globally without you being able to ever meet & interact in those non-verbal ways that can make a teleconference run so much more smoother than it would otherwise.
Thanks for reading.
