For some, these are certainly perks. But a low-touch, asynchronous method of working has its drawbacks. A major issue is that it can lead to feelings of personal and professional isolation.
Isolation can be a particular challenge in organizations where projects, tasks or caseloads are largely handled by individuals.
“In many cases, at the institutional level, everyone is basically an ‘individual contributor.’ This encourages a weaker sense of community,” he says Florian Zettelmeyer, professor of marketing at the Kellogg School. For workers, “this can create a dynamic where your closest professional relationships are with people you don’t see very often.”
His suggestion? Consider creating a “workshop setting” for these employees.
Zettelmeyer recently founded the Ad-Tech Research Lab, a research group designed to overcome natural workplace silos for a specific type of worker: university researchers working on independent projects in the digital advertising space. The Ad-Tech Research Lab asks researchers to agree to certain protocols, including regular meetings where they share and offer feedback on each other’s work.
The idea came out of Zettelmeyer’s two-year leave of absence from Kellogg, which he spent creating the “Advertising Economics” organization at Amazon. In the process, he found that bringing together largely autonomous workers in a structured environment had positive effects on the creative and collaborative outcomes of those involved.
Of course, laboratories are not uncommon in many universities, hospitals and companies, especially given the rise of group science. But unlike most, the Ad Tech Lab is aimed at researchers who aren’t part of large teams, meaning they’d otherwise be working on their own projects in relative isolation.
Indeed, Zettelmeyer argues, many individual contributors, across a wide range of industries, could benefit from the social responsibility and structured collaboration of a ‘lab’. Often, what these contributors need—in addition to social bonding events like happy hours and corporate vacations—are genuine, supportive thought partners. If people with similar functions or responsibilities in an organization, such as IT contractors or grant writers, have the opportunity to offer each other feedback on their projects, it may be worth adding that extra meeting to the calendar.
“When we all know what we’re working on, we can help raise everyone’s game,” says Zettelmeyer.
Here are two ways that designing a “stage workshop” can help individual collaborators avoid intellectual isolation and do better, more creative work.
Developing a sense of community
The first thing Zettelmeyer noticed while leading the research team at Amazon was the strong sense of community among the team: every team member seemed invested in the work of their colleagues. Ultimately, he concluded that a series of customs and protocols were responsible for cultivating this sense of community.
For example, at Amazon, teams would provide regular status updates — sometimes monthly, sometimes biweekly — about the progress they were making on their various projects. Zettelmeyer makes this part of the shared culture at Ad-Tech Research Lab, inviting members to gather for weekly meetings — in person, whenever possible. At these weekly meetings, each lab member contributes a two-minute update on their work the previous week. Members may mention that they found a new data set, for example, or that they worked on a revision of a paper, or that they attended an industry conference.
“People really enjoy that part,” says Zettelmeyer. “You create this situation where there are more opportunities to talk about things that matter. Then, when you see your colleagues down the hall, you get a good sense of where they are in their work. You have seen their progress and the challenges they face. You might even come up with a ‘shower thought’ and share it with them next week.”
The power of modern feedback
In addition to regular updates, individual contributors can also benefit from deep dives into a specific project or problem. Traditionally, this often resembled a “brown bag” presentation, where one of the workshop members presents their work to the others to solicit feedback.
But another key protocol for Zettelmeyer’s Ad Tech Lab is the “no-presentation meeting,” also borrowed from Amazon, where PowerPoint has prohibited by executive fiat since 2004.
Instead of presenting their work, workshop members write a six- to eight-page paper to share with the larger group. Essentially, the team reads this document in the meeting—not in advance—where they offer real-time feedback through the Google Docs feedback feature.
“At first, it might feel weird to sit in a meeting room and read silently for half an hour,” says Zettelmeyer. “But what happens is you end up getting a ridiculous amount of feedback in a short amount of time. And then you can focus on what really matters.”
This efficiency is due to both the synchronous nature of feedback and the social dynamic of being in the same room together, with everyone focused on the same task. Once the others have typed their comments, the person whose paper is under review decides what would be most useful to bring up in the discussion, having already seen the big picture.
“It’s a nice combination of the meeting format and the kind of work we’re used to doing remotely,” says Zettelmeyer. “It makes it almost impossible to withhold ideas or derail the purpose of the meeting because all we’re doing is helping that person make significant progress in their research, and the document is right in front of us. And when you commit to doing it regularly, you get that repetition effect.”
The importance of “useful social pressure”
The bet here is that regular, high-quality feedback (in person, where possible) will result in more productive work that leads to better results—in this case, stronger research. After all, in academia, as in so many disciplines where intellectual isolation can occur, it’s not always easy to add value to a colleague’s work when you see it so rarely.
“Usually when people present, you have an hour to cover a year’s worth of research, and most people aren’t great at seeing something for the first time and offering revelatory feedback,” says Zettelmeyer. “But when you see the work over and over again in a focused environment with others, you can really contribute. And you feel that sense of investment.”
This arrangement also sets everyone up for periodic liability. After all, if you know you need to give an update, you’ll want to be able to show off the progress you’ve made.
“We keep each other honest not through clear control mechanisms but through a kind of helpful social pressure,” says Zettelmeyer.
Ideally, the kind of workshop Zettelmeyer has in mind would preserve worker autonomy while offering them the benefits of community engagement—both emotionally and in terms of improving the quality of their work.
“It’s important to come together,” says Zettelmeyer. “We all learned this coming back from the pandemic. But we also want to create the kind of community where everyone can push each other to raise their game.”
To ensure that people get value from this kind of lab setting, it’s important to choose the scope carefully, Zettelmeyer says. Go too broad and state all marketing topics within boundaries and you risk having too many deep dives that won’t interest workshop members. Narrow your topics too much, for example “ad auctions” and you risk having only one or two members getting value from the workshop.
“That’s why we’re looking for a field like ‘digital advertising,’ which is broad enough to attract a dozen faculty members but narrow enough to make sure everyone’s interested in the deep dive.”
