A number of arts organizations are embracing employees’ desire to work from home on either a full or hybrid basis. Making the switch to this sort of work environment, even for some employees, can impact the organizational culture and requires a change in expectations among co-workers.
Arts Midwest recently provided some tips for Asynchronous Work and Project Management on their website which can help create the structure and expectations for these types of work arrangements. They provide a couple templates that can be used to create and evaluate plans for both one-time projects and ongoing work arrangements.
The first tip is to create a team charter that acts as a living document that addresses
“… the sometimes-unspoken expectations and boundaries of a team’s practices and processes. A team charter helps remove assumptions and replaces them with clarity and intentional guidance, which is integral to building trust and successful asynchronous work.”
The second tip is to create a project brief which includes many of the details surrounding the project. Ellen Mueller, the author of the Arts Midwest piece, lists about a dozen different elements which may or may not appear in the brief including a summary of the project, objectives, budget, stakeholders, links to files, project timeline, etc.
The third tip is to have some process by which different teams members can share status updates between meetings. Since people will be working somewhat out of phase with other team members, it is helpful for each to have a way to see where things stand as they start or continue their work period for the day. As Mueller notes, a robust update sharing process can shorten meetings by eliminating the need to recite what each member has been up to.
The last tip is to conduct an evaluation/retrospective on the process in order to improve the experience for the team moving forward. It is an opportunity to talk about what happened, how to communicate and deliver content and information in a way that best suits each team member, identify areas of (in)efficiency, propose tools that may facilitate the process in the future, etc.
Some of the tips provided may feel overly structured for the informal work environment of arts and cultural organizations, but there are likely some situations in which a strong framework is useful. It is easier to discard what isn’t useful than to try to fabricate guidelines whole cloth.
On the other hand, if it feels like things are being accomplished, but in a very much seat of your pants manner, implementing a structure can be helpful. It may feel like you have artificially imposed constraints on the work environment, but once people are able to internalize the process and begin to employ an effective shared shorthand the boundaries may dissolve into the background.
