How many meetings have you attended this week where the only decision made was to schedule another meeting? More than you’d like to admit?

Unfortunately, we’ve found this is the predominant outcome of most meetings. In our recent survey of 5,000 knowledge workers, 77% of respondents say they frequently attend meetings that end in a decision to schedule a follow-up meeting. Even worse, 54% of workers frequently leave meetings without a clear idea of next steps or who owns which task.

Meetings that end without clear outcomes are not only ineffective – they are demotivating and waste valuable time that could be put toward priority work. It’s time we stop meeting like this.

I lead the Team Anywhere Lab at Atlassian, a group of behavioral scientists dedicated to designing and validating the best ways to work for modern teams. We conducted an experiment to help teams run more productive, less frustrating meetings.

Why don’t traditional meetings work?

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Traditional meetings rely on slides or a few people talking to set the context of why the meeting is taking place and the decisions that need to be made. These ways of meeting don’t work because:

• Meetings don’t get to the point fast enough. Too much of the meeting time is spent setting the stage. Participants are stuck waiting to understand specific meeting goals and what is needed from their participation. Once discussion is underway, participants are often rushed for time.
• Slides are not created with the audience (or objective) in mind. Slides often fail to clarify the main message, discussion points, and intended outcomes for participants. As a result, slides are more of an info dump than a helpful tool for making decisions in real time.
• Presenters and participants aren’t on the same page. Attendees can no longer refer to information once a presenter has moved forward, or are distracted clicking around slides while the presenter talks.
• Decisions made in meetings aren’t documented. There is rarely a record of the meeting for anyone who wasn’t there. If someone does take notes or record the call, they may be buried in someone’s computer. More often than not, the context that led to the outcome usually gets lost.

The page-led meeting experiment

We (and many others at Atlassian) have adopted a different way to meet we call “page-led meetings.” My team designed an experiment to validate through research whether the use of a high-quality written page, in fact, facilitates more effective meetings.

Thirty-four Atlassians from across the company were split into two groups. The control group facilitated a meeting as they typically would. The second group took a course on how to facilitate a meeting with a page. They were asked to use what they learned to write a page and facilitate a meeting with it.

After their meetings, we surveyed the meeting attendees and facilitators (104 Atlassians in total) about their experience. We also analyzed the pages used to facilitate the meetings.

Our experiment shows that page-led meetings are:

1. Less frustrating and more energizing
2. Rated as a better use of time
3. More likely to accomplish team goals

Reduce meeting friction to achieve your goals

Our data shows that Atlassians who attended page-led meetings were 29% more likely to feel energized after the meeting and 23% less likely to feel frustrated. Making meetings a more positive experience removes the friction that can come when participants are confused, frustrated, or disengaged.

To this point, our model indicates that page-led meetings led to higher attendee energy and lower attendee frustration, which in turn led to higher goal accomplishment. In fact, 85% of page-led meetings accomplished their goals (versus 69% of control meetings).

Engage meeting participants through a crisp, clear page

Our data shows that those who attended a page-led meeting by a facilitator who had received training consistently rated it as a better use of time than those in the control group. Pages created by those in the training group were on average shorter (3-minute read on average) than those in the control group who chose to use a page, but had not received training (5.7-minute read).

The results show that the approach is valuable for both meeting participants and facilitators. 14 out of 16 meeting facilitators would recommend the approach they learned in the training to a colleague.

Ready for better meetings? Learn how to run a page-led meeting in the Atlassian Team Playbook.

The post New research: better meetings start with a page appeared first on Work Life by Atlassian.

You know those days at work when there are a million things on your to-do list, but somehow, you’re not getting the important stuff done? 

It’s the opposite of the “flow state” – you can feel your cortisol spiking out of control. At the end of the day, you’re left feeling depleted, because you didn’t have the mental space to focus on what truly matters. 

That feeling doesn’t mean you’re lazy or unqualified. According to Stanford Professor Huggy Rao, it could mean the wrong things are demanding too much of your time and attention. Rao calls these blockers “friction,” and they make work less fulfilling and less productive. 

In a new book, The Friction Project, co-authored by Robert I. Sutton, Rao investigates where this kind of friction comes from, how it holds us back, and what we can do about it. 

Friction 101

“Bad friction is the workplace obstacles that overwhelm, infuriate, and de-energize people,” explains Rao. “It holds people back from becoming the most curious, generous versions of their professional selves.”

The infamous “meeting that could have been an email” is a classic example of friction – but it’s not always so easy to spot. Friction hides in sneaky places, from the way you talk to the software you use. 

“There’s one young woman I spoke to whom I’ll never forget,” Rao shares. “She said, I do too much inconsequential work and it takes a toll on me. When I go home, all I’ve got left are the scraps of myself for me and my family.”

There are also good kinds of friction – situations where too much ease is a bad thing, and slowing down helps us do better work. Keep reading, or pick up The Friction Project, for the lowdown on those.

7 sneaky ways friction is holding you back at work

Many sources of friction are intended to make your life easier. But they’re actually harming your productivity, if not your mental health. Here are seven stealthy sources of friction that are making your work life harder. 

1. Paying (too much) attention to your boss

We all feel pressure to be seen as go-getters and self-starters – someone the boss can rely on. It’s tempting to hang onto your boss or manager’s every word, and immediately leap into action. Rao calls this “executive magnification,” and it can lead to massive amounts of wasted resources. 

A classic example from The Friction Project? After the CEO complained about a rude clerk he’d encountered, 7-Eleven launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to improve cashier friendliness. 

But the CEO was just venting – he actually thought fast service was more important than excessive politeness. 7-Eleven’s research backed him up, but resources had already been poured into the hasty campaign. 

Fix the friction: 

We’re not suggesting you ignore your boss, or tell them to go take a hike. The fix is simple – clarify your understanding before taking action. Otherwise, you risk jumping the gun, and sinking too much time into the wrong things. 

This doesn’t just apply to high-stakes situations – executive magnification can distort small daily workflows, too. For example, you may not need to rush a response to that off-hours Slack message. Why not just ask your boss how quickly they expect to hear back? 

2. Double-, triple-, and quadruple-checking every decision

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Most commonly, leadership is to blame for this one. Too many executives and managers insist on re-evaluating their teams’ decisions – sometimes, multiple times over!

Rao calls this “decision amnesia.” Not only does this behavior waste time and energy, it erodes trust and damages relationships. When people have worked hard to reach a decision, it’s demoralizing when their leaders restart the process, going back to the drawing board because they don’t trust their team.

Decision amnesia can happen among colleagues as well. If your team struggles with making a final decision and moving forward, you’ll need to cultivate shared confidence. 

Fix the friction: 

“To beat decision amnesia, you want to set clear rules for revisiting an issue,” says Rao. “A team could agree that once they’ve reached a decision, you won’t revisit it for two months, barring specific, predetermined extenuating circumstances.”

In The Friction Project, Rao also shares Patty McCord’s, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, tactic to beat decision amnesia. Every time she wrapped up an executive meeting, she’d ask the room, “have we made any decisions here today, and if we have, how are we going to communicate them?” If anyone at the meeting didn’t see their decisions as final, those questions would make it immediately clear. 

3. Reinventing processes that are working just fine 

It’s tempting to keep looking for the magic ritual, method, or tool that will fix everything. And obviously, continuous improvement is a great goal. 

But often, our lives don’t get easier when parts of our job keep being upgraded. In fact, you might feel like you’re on a hamster wheel –constantly introducing new systems that add complexity, take time to implement, and deliver marginal returns at best. 

“One of our biggest findings from The Friction Project was that nearly everyone suffers from addition sickness,” explains Rao. “It doesn’t matter which company you work for; we’re all constantly adding things.”

Instead, Rao offers some surprising advice: “not everything worth doing is worth doing well.” In many cases, it’s okay (and inevitable) for some things to be merely “good enough.” 

Fix the friction: 

A super-common culprit in distributed workplaces? Software. For example, a newly hired project manager may push for team-wide migration to her tool of choice. But that creates friction for her teammates, who are forced to re-learn their workflows from scratch.

“If you only think of how tools, systems, and processes affect you, ignoring spillover effects on other people, then you’re barking up the wrong tree,” explains Rao.

Instead, companies should carefully vet whether every single new addition is worthwhile – and make sure everyone has a voice. Before adopting that new PM tool, the company in our example above could have everyone complete a quick survey, asking how satisfied they are with the current system and how critical it is to their work. 

4. Conversely, being afraid to change the way you’ve always done it

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But on the flip side, there’s a balance here. Sometimes, good enough is fine. But teams should also be comfortable pointing out when a tool or process actually is slowing people down and making life harder. 

At those times, a change is well warranted – and the people who advocate for it are heroes! 

In The Friction Project, Rao explains how management consulting firm Bain discovered a single weekly executive sync was costing their client three hundred thousand hours per year in prep time . Dropbox had a similar goal with “Armeetingeddon,” an initiative that removed all meetings from employee calendars and made it impossible to add new ones for two weeks. 

Fix the friction: 

Watch out for that stressful, frazzled feeling of your time and energy being stolen. “If you feel spread too thin, like peanut butter on toast, you have a problem,” says Rao. “You need to narrow your focus, and identify where you can make a distinct impact.”

That means it’s time for G.R.O.S.S. – Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff! In The Friction Project, Huggy suggests leading teams in group games or brainstorming sessions to identify “stupid stuff,” such as excessive meetings, emails, and performance reviews. 

Even if you’re not in a position to lead a company-wide G.R.O.S.S. campaign, you can remove stupid stuff in your own sphere of influence – or at the very least, let your manager know it’s there. 

5. Over-focusing on your own department or team 

It’s important for your team to be strong as a unit. But it’s equally important, if not more so, to integrate well with the rest of your organization. 

When teams over-focus on their day-to-day, it’s like they’ve got blinders on. They lose touch with their work’s greater purpose – and in the worst-case scenario, impair their ability to accomplish it. Rao calls this issue “component focus,” and it can be especially pervasive on highly specialized teams.

In The Friction Project, Rao explains how a woman being treated for cancer couldn’t get two departments at the same hospital to share information about her appointments. She had to walk her medical files over to the other department herself, still dressed in her hospital gown.

Fix the friction:

One powerful way to help people see themselves as part of something bigger? Storytelling. 

“Stories are a way to create common understanding,” says Rao. “Some studies show that when we share stories in a group setting, oxytocin, or the trust molecule, actually goes up.”

Leaders, managers, and teams can use storytelling to help people connect with the greater purpose of their work. At the hospital mentioned above, the oncology team lead could frame their work as “supporting patients’ healing,” not “applying advanced treatments for specific types of cancer.”

This strategy can be especially helpful as part of the onboarding process, so new hires see themselves as part of one unified organization, not just one team.  

6. Communicating too much while saying too little 

Words are powerful, and communication is the building block of collaboration. But words also have the power to confuse and distract us, or to obscure real and serious problems.

This is what Huggy calls “jargon monoxide,” and it’s rampant in the contemporary business world. If you’ve ever felt your eyes glaze over as you struggled to keep up with an onslaught of corporate buzzwords, you’ve experienced jargon monoxide poisoning. 

Here are a few sneaky ways jargon monoxide sneaks into our workplace language:

• Using too many words, or overly complicated words
• Vague or meaningless language, like “leverage core competencies towards key goals”
• Using specialized terms with people outside your team or discipline 
• Using words that mean different things to different people, like “pipeline” or “agile”

Fix the friction:

“You don’t need an arsenal of tactics to beat jargon monoxide,” says Rao. “Every time you say something, ask yourself: can a 10-year-old understand this easily? If the answer is yes, it will scale across a company of 10,000 people.”

Another crucial tip? Use concrete, descriptive language. “Say one boss told you to ‘deliver superior customer service,’ and another said ‘your job is to put a smile on the customer’s face,’” says Rao. “Which phrase is easier to understand?”

7. Aiming too high, too fast

Dreaming big is great. But as Rao puts it, “too much speed at the wrong time kills people.” Pushing people to work too fast, or achieve unrealistic outcomes, can yield genuinely harmful results long-term. 

This is where “constructive friction” comes into play. Put simply, sometimes great work can’t be rushed – especially creativity, or high-stakes work. If organizations attempt otherwise, they risk burnout, poor decision-making, and even selfishness, as people feel too overwhelmed by their own overloaded plates to help one another. 

Fix the friction: 

The fix here is simple, though not necessarily easy. Slow things down, and add some good friction!

“In Massachusetts, Blue Cross found that physicians may have been overprescribing opioids,” says Rao. “So, they told physicians to write a one-page memo explaining their reasoning for every prescription. The memo took only 8-10 minutes per patient. But by adding this positive friction, they lowered opioid prescriptions by 21 million across the state.”

The Friction Project book, eBook, and audio book are available now from Macmillan Publishers. Learn more and connect with Huggy Rao at his website.

The post 7 sneaky ways friction is making your work life harder appeared first on Work Life by Atlassian.

What if three-day weekends were the default? That’s a “new normal” many of us would actually welcome! 

Switching to a four-day work schedule, often referred to as a “compressed workweek,” is one way to do it. Four-day workweeks are still a hot topic as companies continue to contend with employee burnout. According to one survey, 59% of US companies are open to implementing a four-day workweek, and a number of international governments have pioneered compressed-workweek initiatives, with promising success.

But a compressed workweek isn’t a great fit for everyone. To succeed with this schedule, you’ll need to start with a little soul-searching, follow up with a persuasive proposal to your boss, and then work like you’ve never worked before – a combination of working smarter and working harder.

Is a compressed workweek right for you?

Working four 10-hour days each week, resulting in an extra day off, is the most common approach. (This is known as a “4×10 schedule.”) Determining whether it can work for you is partly about your job role, partly about who you are and your lifestyle.

For starters, how do you plan to use the additional day off? For my colleague Lisa, a member of the finance team at Atlassian, the answer was easy: “More time with my kids before they started kindergarten. But now that they’re in school, it’s a day for ‘life admin tasks’ so I can fully enjoy Saturday and Sunday.” Or maybe your goal is to create space for travel, a passion project, or that side-hustle you’ve been pondering. That’s a good sign. Without a strong sense of purpose, it may be hard to muster the stamina required for working 10-hour days week in, week out. 

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Your job role matters, too. Customer service and similar queue-based roles can be tricky (though not impossible) to re-shape around a compressed work schedule because service level agreements assume consistent staffing levels throughout the week.  Similarly, a director or VP who touches practically every project in flight may find it difficult to shift to a four-day week without becoming a bottleneck for the entire organization. 

Then there are your personal commitments and lifestyle outside of the office. Will you still be able to juggle childcare pick-ups and drop-offs? Commute home in time for family dinner (assuming you’re commuting at all)? Stay sane with fewer hours to recharge after those long days? You owe it to yourself to be brutally honest as you consider questions like these. 

Pros and cons associated with a 4-day schedule

Some things to consider before making the pitch

If you plan on seriously pursuing a compressed workweek, it’s important to show that you’ve really thought through the following things:

• Which days you will work what your working hours will be
• Whether and how you can be reached on your off-day if there’s an emergency (also, what qualifies as an “emergency” in your mind)
• How you envision shuffling and sharing responsibilities with your teammates
• How this change can have a positive impact on the team

That last point is important. Will this arrangement boost your focus, energy, and/or creativity? Will you take fewer ad-hoc days off? Will teammates have the opportunity to learn a new skill by sharing a responsibility that is now exclusively yours? Your proposal will be better received if it’s not all about you. 

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Another colleague, Jenny, a product manager, proposed switching as an experiment, which helped ease her manager’s concerns. “We did it on a trial basis and it went really well, so I was allowed to continue with it permanently,” she says. “For me, it’s totally worth it.”

Whatever you propose, send it in writing so your manager has time to give it some real thought. Approaching them with a verbal proposal puts them on the spot and will probably result in a knee-jerk “no.” 

Tips for succeeding with a compressed workweek

In practice, pulling off a compressed workweek means working smarter, and, yes, working harder – getting through those two additional hours is no joke. You’ll need the right combination of prioritization, time management, and pacing. 

Start by setting goals for yourself on a monthly or quarterly basis using OKRs or a similar method. Then, ruthlessly prioritize your planned work with those goals in mind, and be mindful of how many unplanned requests you say yes to.

“I’ll stay off of Slack for periods of time while I’m working so I don’t get distracted by all the little shoulder-taps that come in,” Jenny tells me. Turns out, people usually find a solution on their own when she doesn’t respond immediately. (Bonus points for not being an “accidental diminisher.”) And when you say yes to a request, be clear about when you’ll deliver on it – this prevents the “just checking in…” pings. 

Next, practice good calendar hygiene. You’ll probably need to move a meeting or two, so use this opportunity to stack your recurring meetings back-to-back as much as possible. This will open up space for long stretches of deep work. You may even want to block 90-120 minutes in the mornings or afternoons (depending on when you do your best thinking) so your deep work time isn’t fragmented by ad-hoc meetings. 

Regardless of how you structure your daily schedule, be mindful of how much time you spend on casual chats, lunches, etc. You’re working the same number of hours as before, but that additional day off pulls your deadlines forward. “When I’m at work, I’m really just working,” says Lisa. “But I’m conscious of the social side of work and keeping up those relationships. It’s not like I’m so snowed under that I can’t even poke my head up for a chat or go for a coffee.”

Do poke your head up occasionally, though. Working non-stop for long stretches actually decreases your productivity in those last hours. Pace yourself. Take a short break every hour or two, and make sure it’s truly a rest – checking your email doesn’t help your brain recharge. But a walk around the block is fast and surprisingly restorative. 

Reflect, review, and adapt

Every few months, set aside some time during your 1-on-1 meeting with your manager to discuss how the arrangement is going, especially at the outset. Listen with an open mind and try to mentally frame any issues they raise as challenges to overcome together, rather than indictments of your character or work ethic. If you’re the first person in your organization to try a compressed workweek, there are bound to be some growing pains. 

Self-reflection is important, too. Ask yourself whether you’re delivering work that is as good or better than before. Is the longer weekend worth the longer hours during the week? Are your social and family lives holding up alright? 

If a compressed workweek doesn’t turn out to be the schedule of your dreams, give yourself permission to honor that and go back to a standard workweek. Better to try, fail, and learn something than to never step out of your comfort zone. 

The post The truth about compressed workweeks, according to people who’ve done it appeared first on Work Life by Atlassian.

Flipping a coin. Throwing a dart at a board. Pulling a slip of paper out of a hat.

Sure, they’re all ways to make a choice. But they all hinge on random chance rather than analysis, reflection, and strategy — you know, the things you actually need to make the big, meaty decisions that have major impacts.

So, set down that Magic 8 Ball and back away slowly. Let’s walk through the standard framework for decision-making that will help you and your team pinpoint the problem, consider your options, and make your most informed selection. Here’s a closer look at each of the seven steps of the decision-making process, and how to approach each one. 

Step 1: Identify the decision

Most of us are eager to tie on our superhero capes and jump into problem-solving mode — especially if our team is depending on a solution. But you can’t solve a problem until you have a full grasp on what it actually is.

This first step focuses on getting the lay of the land when it comes to your decision. What specific problem are you trying to solve? What goal are you trying to achieve? 

How to do it: 

• Use the 5 whys analysis to go beyond surface-level symptoms and understand the root cause of a problem.
  
• Try problem framing to dig deep on the ins and outs of whatever problem your team is fixing. The point is to define the problem, not solve it. 

Watch out for: Decision fatigue, which is the tendency to make worse decisions as a result of needing to make too many of them. Making choices is mentally taxing, which is why it’s helpful to pinpoint one decision at a time. 

2. Gather information

Your team probably has a few hunches and best guesses, but those can lead to knee-jerk reactions. Take care to invest adequate time and research into your decision.

This step is when you build your case, so to speak. Collect relevant information — that could be data, customer stories, information about past projects, feedback, or whatever else seems pertinent. You’ll use that to make decisions that are informed, rather than impulsive.

How to do it: 

• Host a team mindmapping session to freely explore ideas and make connections between them. It can help you identify what information will best support the process.
  
• Create a project poster to define your goals and also determine what information you already know and what you still need to find out. 

Watch out for: Information bias, or the tendency to seek out information even if it won’t impact your action. We have the tendency to think more information is always better, but pulling together a bunch of facts and insights that aren’t applicable may cloud your judgment rather than offer clarity. 

3. Identify alternatives

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Blame the popularity of the coin toss, but making a decision often feels like choosing between only two options. Do you want heads or tails? Door number one or door number two?

In reality, your options aren’t usually so cut and dried. Take advantage of this opportunity to get creative and brainstorm all sorts of routes or solutions. There’s no need to box yourselves in. 

How to do it: 

• Use the Six Thinking Hats technique to explore the problem or goal from all sides: information, emotions and instinct, risks, benefits, and creativity. It can help you and your team break away from your typical roles or mindsets and think more freely.
  
• Try brainwriting so team members can write down their ideas independently before sharing with the group. Research shows that this quiet, lone thinking time can boost psychological safety and generate more creative suggestions.
  

Watch out for: Groupthink, which is the tendency of a group to make non-optimal decisions in the interest of conformity. People don’t want to rock the boat, so they don’t speak up. 

4. Consider the evidence

Armed with your list of alternatives, it’s time to take a closer look and determine which ones could be worth pursuing. You and your team should ask questions like “How will this solution address the problem or achieve the goal?” and “What are the pros and cons of this option?” 

Be honest with your answers (and back them up with the information you already collected when you can). Remind the team that this isn’t about advocating for their own suggestions to “win” — it’s about whittling your options down to the best decision. 

How to do it:

• Use a SWOT analysis to dig into the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the options you’re seriously considering.
  
• Run a project trade-off analysis to understand what constraints (such as time, scope, or cost) the team is most willing to compromise on if needed. 

Watch out for: Extinction by instinct, which is the urge to make a decision just to get it over with. You didn’t come this far to settle for a “good enough” option! 

5. Choose among the alternatives

This is it — it’s the big moment when you and the team actually make the decision. You’ve identified all possible options, considered the supporting evidence, and are ready to choose how you’ll move forward.

However, bear in mind that there’s still a surprising amount of room for flexibility here. Maybe you’ll modify an alternative or combine a few suggested solutions together to land on the best fit for your problem and your team. 

How to do it: 

• Use the DACI framework (that stands for “driver, approver, contributor, informed”) to understand who ultimately has the final say in decisions. The decision-making process can be collaborative, but eventually someone needs to be empowered to make the final call.
  
• Try a simple voting method for decisions that are more democratized. You’ll simply tally your team’s votes and go with the majority. 

Watch out for: Analysis paralysis, which is when you overthink something to such a great degree that you feel overwhelmed and freeze when it’s time to actually make a choice. 

6. Take action

Making a big decision takes a hefty amount of work, but it’s only the first part of the process — now you need to actually implement it. 

It’s tempting to think that decisions will work themselves out once they’re made. But particularly in a team setting, it’s crucial to invest just as much thought and planning into communicating the decision and successfully rolling it out. 

How to do it:

• Create a stakeholder communications plan to determine how you’ll keep various people — direct team members, company leaders, customers, or whoever else has an active interest in your decision — in the loop on your progress.
  
• Define the goals, signals, and measures of your decision so you’ll have an easier time aligning the team around the next steps and determining whether or not they’re successful. 

Watch out for: Self-doubt, or the tendency to question whether or not you’re making the right move. While we’re hardwired for doubt, now isn’t the time to be a skeptic about your decision. You and the team have done the work, so trust the process. 

7. Review your decision

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As the decision itself starts to shake out, it’s time to take a look in the rearview mirror and reflect on how things went.

Did your decision work out the way you and the team hoped? What happened? Examine both the good and the bad. What should you keep in mind if and when you need to make this sort of decision again? 

How to do it: 

• Do a 4 L’s retrospective to talk through what you and the team loved, loathed, learned, and longed for as a result of that decision.
  
• Celebrate any wins (yes, even the small ones) related to that decision. It gives morale a good kick in the pants and can also help make future decisions feel a little less intimidating.
  

Watch out for: Hindsight bias, or the tendency to look back on events with the knowledge you have now and beat yourself up for not knowing better at the time. Even with careful thought and planning, some decisions don’t work out — but you can only operate with the information you have at the time. 

Making smart decisions about the decision-making process

You’re probably picking up on the fact that the decision-making process is fairly comprehensive. And the truth is that the model is likely overkill for the small and inconsequential decisions you or your team members need to make.

Deciding whether you should order tacos or sandwiches for your team offsite doesn’t warrant this much discussion and elbow grease. But figuring out which major project to prioritize next? That requires some careful and collaborative thought. 

It all comes back to the concept of satisficing versus maximizing, which are two different perspectives on decision making. Here’s the gist:

• Maximizers aim to get the very best out of every single decision.
  
• Satisficers are willing to settle for “good enough” rather than obsessing over achieving the best outcome.

One of those isn’t necessarily better than the other — and, in fact, they both have their time and place.

A major decision with far-reaching impacts deserves some fixation and perfectionism. However, hemming and hawing over trivial choices (“Should we start our team meeting with casual small talk or a structured icebreaker?”) will only cause added stress, frustration, and slowdowns. 

As with anything else, it’s worth thinking about the potential impacts to determine just how much deliberation and precision a decision actually requires. 

Decision-making is one of those things that’s part art and part science. You’ll likely have some gut feelings and instincts that are worth taking into account. But those should also be complemented with plenty of evidence, evaluation, and collaboration.

The decision-making process is a framework that helps you strike that balance. Follow the seven steps and you and your team can feel confident in the decisions you make — while leaving the darts and coins where they belong.

The post This is how effective teams navigate the decision-making process appeared first on Work Life by Atlassian.

5-second summary

Another day, another shift in workplace dynamics. As more employers mandate time in the office in an attempt to address flagging productivity and weakened company cultures, we started to wonder if the option to work remotely is really to blame. Spoiler alert: it’s not.

At least, that’s what our latest round of research says. As part of our ongoing State of Teams initiative, we surveyed over 2,200 knowledge workers in the US, Australia, Germany, and India to dig deeper into the ways flexible work – specifically, the option to choose where you work on any given day – affects outcomes for individuals and teams.

If you’ve been following State of Teams from the start, you’ll recall that our first wave of data showed teams can be equally successful whether colocated in an office or distributed – it’s more about how you work than where you work. Then our 2022 report identified specific benefits of flexibility: higher wellbeing, increased innovation, and more favorable perceptions of company culture. The data also revealed downsides, like difficulty keeping teams aligned and a greater risk of impostor syndrome.

This latest data corroborate our previous findings and provide more texture regarding which teams stand to benefit from flexibility. Turns out, flexibility can make healthy organizations even stronger – but it can’t make weak organizations strong. And when certain negative factors are present, introducing flexibility might make things worse.

Who benefits from flexibility (and who doesn’t)

When employers don’t force their workers to show up to the office, workers tend to exercise the full range of options available to them. 53% of respondents say they can work from whatever location they prefer. Within that group, 97% opt to work from home (or similar) at least some of the time, and 15% work remotely all of the time.

Our analysis showed the freedom to choose where you work leads to several advantages in addition to those mentioned above, such as higher employee engagement, increased psychological safety, and the perception of managers as inclusive. In addition, people with flexible options were more likely to describe their teams as “thriving.”

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To be clear, the benefits aren’t derived from working outside the office. It’s the fact of having a choice that matters. But choice alone isn’t enough to keep employees engaged and performing at their best. We found that strong team coordination, inclusive leadership, support for innovation, and baseline levels of psychological safety must also be present in order for organizations to realize the benefits of flexibility.

What does that look like in practice? Let’s break it down.

• Team coordination – Roles and responsibilities are clear. Team members communicate about who is doing what, as well as problems and ideas. Teams have a shared understanding of their goals and track progress toward them.
• Inclusive leadership – Leaders proactively share information affecting their team. Everyone’s ideas for improving the organization are given consideration. A belief that input from different roles and ranks makes for better problem-solving. Leaders acknowledge the existence of biases and do their best to counteract them.
• Support for innovation – Calculated risks are accepted, regardless of the outcome. Teams have enough time and space to generate new ideas. There’s a culture of recognizing good ideas, no matter who they come from.
• Psychological safety – People are allowed to be themselves at work. If someone makes a mistake, it isn’t held against them. Differences are respected. People feel their perspectives are considered in decision-making.

Given that inclusivity and psychological safety are both a benefit and a prerequisite, this might seem like a chicken-or-the-egg situation. It’s not. Flexibility makes it more likely leaders will be seen as inclusive, but only if they’re already demonstrating inclusivity to some degree. Similarly, flexibility is associated with higher levels of psychological safety, but having flexibility won’t make psychological safety magically materialize out of nowhere. Think of flexibility as an amplifier, not a catalyst.

For organizations that don’t have the right conditions in place, flexibility doesn’t make things any better or any worse – with one notable exception. In cases where the culture is viewed unfavorably, flexibility appears to reduce employee wellbeing slightly. More research is needed to uncover the reasons behind this. For the moment, however, it’s not hard to imagine poor communication or workplace politics becoming more acute, and therefore more stressful, in a distributed context.

What this means for leaders

If your organization already offers location flexibility and you’re struggling to maintain high team performance and a great culture, resist the temptation to call folks back to the office. Most workers want the freedom to choose. When it’s available, most respondents opt to work flexibly. (A 2022 study from McKinsey reported findings similar to ours.) Taking away something workers desire is definitely not the way to improve engagement or perceptions of company culture.

Instead, start by changing up your organization’s collaboration practices so you’re set up to reap the benefits of your flexible work policy. Atlassian’s Team Playbook offers a few suggestions.

Team coordination

• Working Agreements – Discuss and document how you’ll communicate (email, chat, etc), ground rules around feedback and learning from mistakes, and how you’ll celebrate successes.
• Stand-ups – In 10 minutes or less, share your progress since yesterday, your plan for today, and anything blocking your progress.
• Roles and Responsibilities – Clarify and document each team member’s job role and what they’re responsible for. This helps avoid stepping on each other’s toes, as well as gaps in coverage.

Inclusive leadership

• DACI Framework – Make decisions more transparent by clarifying who is contributing input, who will ultimately make the call, and who will be informed of the outcome.
• Inclusive Meetings – Tips for ensuring everyone has a chance to contribute.

Support for innovation

• Blameless Retrospectives – Like regular retrospectives, but with an agreement that mistakes and failures will be treated as system failures for the whole team to address – no scapegoating or finger-pointing allowed. 
• 5 Whys – Get to the heart of an issue by digging into the reasons it exists. This practice is great for revealing the root cause of failures, as well as uncovering insights into customer problems that point to novel solutions.

Psychological safety

• Disruptive Brainstorming – Build muscle around fearlessly sharing ideas and respectfully narrowing them down in a structured format.
• My User Manual – Foster a sense of belonging by helping teammates get to know each other on a deeper level: how you like to work, what you need to succeed, and what brings you joy outside of work.

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Conversely, if your organization is poised to benefit from more flexibility, try letting employees choose where they work, as Atlassian has. (Within reason – timezones and reliable internet are obviously factors here.) It hasn’t been perfect, but we’re determined to figure out how to smooth out the rough edges because we’ve experienced the benefits of flexible work and believe this is ultimately the future of knowledge work.

One thing we’ve found helpful is to have each team run a Work-Life Impact workshop, designed to help teams adjust to remote or hybrid work. Each person shares a little bit about their home working environment, their support network, and the requirements of their role. From there, the group discusses how they can tweak workflows, rituals, and expectations to better support each other. Even if you’ve been working flexibly for ages, this technique always uncovers ways to improve.

Yes, there are logistical challenges to flexibility. And yes, you should still bring everyone together in person occasionally to create and cement those all-important personal connections between teammates. But for healthy organizations, our research suggests the upsides to flexibility outweigh the downsides.

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