With my heart pounding out of my chest and feeling an urge to vomit, I raised my hand and then watched as the microphone was tossed across the cavernous room towards me. There I was, shakily holding one of those foam box microphones and standing in a room of some of the most recognized CEOs and companies in the U.S. I then opened my mouth hoping audible words would form as I nervously said that I didn’t think the Conscious Capitalism movement would be sustainable if it didn’t confront capitalism’s role in perpetuating racism and oppression.

Last October, I had the privilege of attending the Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit. And I do mean privilege, as I was in a room with the leaders of well-known organizations that I had studied, visited, and admired for years; that I looked up to in the way that they approached building workplaces where people could thrive. As I sat there, I was struck with a stark realization that has been nearly impossible for me to shake even a year on. …

Someone recently asked me, “When do you think we can start pushing our teams to achieve pre-pandemic performance levels again, I mean, it’s been five months?”

This past March in North America a giant remote work experiment began for many as an Adrenaline-fueled sprint. Organizations raced to get workers set up with home offices, stores sold out of computer monitors and tablets, and internet providers were inundated with rush requests to set up new or upgraded access. Coworkers helped each other learn how to use Zoom, access files on the physical server still located in their office, and move money without the ability to access check stock. The thought for many was, “let’s hunker down for a bit until this blows over. We’ll see each other back in the office in a few weeks, maybe a month or two, tops.” …

Questions, Tools, and Approaches to Consider

As a companion piece to our “How to Transition to a Virtual Workplace Overnight,” we recorded a Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. podcast episode with people who work in, and manage, entirely virtual teams and organizations. We asked them: If you had to transition to this kind of workplace quickly, how would they approach it? [Full episode transcript is below.]

We covered a wealth of topics from VPNs to video meetings; going “virtual first” to balancing life and work when they both are happening in the same space; isolation and loneliness to how exactly *can* people work when no one is watching them. Our guests’ advice in a nutshell: It’s OK to be wrong, we only learn by trying to new things. …

The question that I’m increasingly asked nowadays (and something the team at Fractured Atlas who helped manage our own transition have been discussing) is: now that we’re an entirely virtual organization, having evolved into it over 4–5 years, what if we had to do again, overnight?

Our planning and transition to an entirely virtual organization evolved over years. We went through multiple stages that lead us almost naturally from one iteration to the next. I’ve detailed that journey here.

However, with the global spread of COVID-19, many organizations no longer have the advantage of time on their sides. They need to transition to a virtual organization now. Below are suggestions to do this quickly (even if not “overnight”), recognizing that this piece itself came together quickly; every organization’s specific needs and requirements differ slightly to wildly; and some organizations have employees who quite simply must work in a physical space and possibly risk not being compensated if they don’t. We’ll be adding to this piece and have more resources dedicated to crafting virtual workplaces on our website Work. Shouldn’t. …

An Interview with its Designers

by Tim Cynova, Co-CEO & Chief Operating Officer at Fractured Atlas; Principal, Work. Shouldn’t. Suck.

A few years ago, the Fractured Atlas People team began an ambitious project lead by Jillian Wright and Pallavi Sharma, and greatly aided by our colleague Nicola Carpenter. They set out to workshop a concept for something that we hoped would help us be able to make more objective performance assessment decisions, particularly when it came to promotion decisions. …

[This piece was co-written by Russell Willis Taylor, Chair of the Fractured Atlas Board, and Tim Cynova, Chief Operating Officer at Fractured Atlas]

Challenge

How does a Board of Directors (re)craft its annual assessment of the CEO when that role is filled by a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team? This was precisely the challenge the Fractured Atlas Board faced in early 2019. Below, in detail, we describe the process we crafted to answer this question.

Quick recap

Fractured Atlas has officially been operating with a shared, non-hierarchical leadership team since January 2018. Functionally, we’ve been doing it for about a year longer than that. In advance of Fractured Atlas founder Adam Huttler leaving the organization to become CEO of Exponential Creativity Ventures, staff and board leadership engaged in lengthy conversations about what succession plans might look like. Ultimately, we decided that instead of replacing the CEO “one-for-one,” we would explore a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team structure. There were multiple reasons why we landed on this model. …

Virtual Realities and a Fully Distributed Workplace

by Tim Cynova, Chief Operating Officer at Fractured Atlas; Principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck.

Fractured Atlas “Fun” Fact

Of the eight staff members currently at the Senior Director and C-level tiers, none live and work in the same state (Colorado, Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Vermont). And more than half of our Fractured Atlas team now live in 11 U.S. states and 6 countries, with fewer than half spending any time in our sole physical office on 35th Street in New York City.

Why do I mention this here? Because this is all part of our effort to create a thriving workplace — that’s entirely virtual (or distributed) — without any physical office by January 1, 2020. [Note: Our Programs and External Relations teams will be communicating more specifics about how this transition will change some of our processes. …

Applying a Lovingkindness Lens

by Tim Cynova, Chief Operating Officer at Fractured Atlas

Remember when it seemed like everyone was trying to achieve “work-life” balance? More recently, perhaps in a nod to the challenges of balancing “work” and “life” in an always-connected world, or maybe because for those searching for meaning and purpose in their activities there’s not always a bright line distinction between “work” and “life,” the phrase has shifted to “bringing our whole selves to work.”

Well, with my HR hat on, it’s typically people who bring their whole selves to work who are the ones the HR folks need to have meetings with, or about. So, I’d like to propose a slight reframing: let’s aim to bring our whole(ish) selves to work. …