Issue 54: Pivoting Towards Teams
Welcome to Backstory, a weekly newsletter turning global technology shifts into a three-minute read. This week, we’re thinking about how team dynamics are helping businesses get through the covid-19 storm. – Mary Ames, Director of Strategy
THE BIG TAKE
Pivoting Towards Teams
Now more than ever, the strength of teams is coming into sharp focus. When it comes to business, team dynamics are key to how companies will weather this economic storm. We have all been called upon to work from home and many of us are ramping up work to ensure the health of our companies. This has forced team members to band together and support each other in new ways. The burning question is how can we prepare ourselves and our companies for this type of black swan event. There’s no easy answer.
Empathy: For the past three weeks, Xische has been sharing tips for remote work drawn from years of experience. Empathy has always been key to our business approach. During this time of isolation, we’ve found that empathy is critical to creating a vibrant “digital” workplace culture that encourages team members to actively support each other. Empathy is the glue that keeps teams together.
Perspective: We need to think deeply about the long-term lessons we can learn from this upheaval. While it might sound counterintuitive, this is the right time to refine how you approach building teams. Take time to notice how team members are rising to the challenge or struggling with the uncertainty. The positive traits you see now will become building blocks in the future.
The role of experience: We’ve been putting our experience in building teams to the test in the face of the covid-19 crisis. Ahmad Alsultan, the experience design director at SquadX, recently published an article outlining the critical role that experience plays in the hiring process. Choosing the right candidate based on how they gained their experience and not just their skills is vital insurance for a crisis like this one. The combination of empathy and experience is critical for fluid team dynamics. With the right dynamics, a team can get through any challenge together.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"When I became an artist, I threw away my watch."
Picasso
COVID-19 STORIES
We are passionate about telling human stories. Now more than ever, those stories involve you. Covid19 Stories is a showcase of words, photos, and videos of our global community designed to celebrate shared experiences from this time of isolation. Powered by Empowering through, this exhibition is a dynamic and living testament to the historic moment we’re living through. Visit Covid19 Stories to share your story today.
OUR VIEWS THIS WEEK
A new digital home: Since we last built xische.com a few years ago, our company has grown into a collective of multiple firms across several verticals in different countries. Our network of new ventures and partners now extends across time zones and continents. Rooted in our philosophy of hybrid thinking, we engage across eight disciplines to solve modern-day government, business, and social challenges. To properly share our story, we needed a fresh overhaul of our digital home. The result is bold but classic, beautiful but spare, and respectful of the reader. Visit the new xische.com today to see the results. As always, we would love to hear your thoughts and feedback.
Pandemic privacy: Used efficiently, our smartphones can track the spread of covid-19 and inform critical decisions about resource allocation to save lives. Writing in Gulf News, Xische’s senior editor, Joseph Dana, argued that we need to harness the power of our technology to curb the spread of covid-19. “While it might sound frightening to grant governments more power over the intimate details of our lives, the world is facing an unprecedented situation,” Dana wrote. “We have the tools to curb the spread of this virus dramatically.”
Resilience is key: Writing in The National, Mary Ames, our director of strategy, considered the role of urban resilience in countering the covid-19 crisis in the UAE. Urban resilience is a city’s ability to maintain continuity during crises and adapt to the future. The keys to urban resilience are great infrastructure, cohesive communities, and good governance. Moreover, Ames noted in the piece, the greater number of vital functions that move online now, the easier these services will be to administer after the covid-19 crisis. Head on over to The National to read more of this critical perspective.
A MESSAGE FROM EMPOWERING SQUADX
The way we work is changing. Innovators must think outside the box and find solutions to the rapid production cycles of the digital age. Sometimes that means hitting the ground running with an expert team ready to deliver. Augmented, not outsourced, teams share knowledge across the organization, delivering dual benefits of speed and know-how while leadership stays focused on the larger issues at play. Discover what we’re doing at SquadX, a Xische company, to unlock results with the power of teams.
SPOTTED ELSEWHERE
The power of ritual: We’ve stayed away from an overload of remote work discussion in this week’s newsletter. We’re all working from home now and adjusting to the challenges that covid-19 has brought. That being said, we found this piece in the Harvard Business Reviewextolling the virtues of ritual to be exceptionally powerful. The author’s advice is as simple as it is profound. He notes, “[p]eople who are right now feeling anxious and grieving should consider inventing a ritual, or to notice the ones they’ve added to their lives – at work, with their families, and with their partners.” Sage advice for uncertain times.
Dreams in times of crisis: Given the dramatic changes to humanity over the last month, researchers and scientists are trying to make sense of the toll they’re taking on society. One group of researchers is now studying people’s dreams about the pandemic. The goal of the research is to understand how people are processing the events. When the pandemic slows, there’ll be a wealth of fascinating experiences to process.