With the rise of remote work, many knowledge workers today have come to expect more autonomy. Fewer meetings. Less chitchat around the water cooler. Plenty of time to concentrate on projects at their own pace.

And yeah, I’ll be honest: that sounds pretty good to me, too. But this way of working can also lead to isolation—not just social isolation, but intellectual isolation, particularly in organizations where projects, tasks, or caseloads are handled largely by individuals.

“In a lot of situations, at the institutional level, everyone is basically an ‘individual contributor.’ That fosters a weaker sense of community,” says Kellogg’s Florian Zettelmeyer in an article recently published in Kellogg Insight.

His suggestion? Consider creating a “lab setting” for your individual contributors. This week, we’ll discuss his idea. Plus, where TikTok went wrong.

Game raised

Zettelmeyer argues that a lot of individual contributors, across a wide range of industries, could benefit from the social accountability and structured collaboration of a “lab,” where people with similar functions or responsibilities in an organization, like IT contractors or grant writers, regularly have a chance to offer each other feedback on their projects.

“When we all know what we’re working on, we can help raise everyone’s game,” says Zettelmeyer.

The idea of creating this kind of lab came from Zettelmeyer’s recent time at Amazon, where he led the Advertising Economics research team. Early on, Zettelmeyer noticed a strong sense of community among the group: every team member appeared invested in their colleagues’ work. Eventually, he concluded that a series of habits and protocols were responsible for fostering that sense of community. These included:

• Weekly meetings where each lab member contributes a two-minute update about their work the previous week. “People really enjoy this part,” Zettelmeyer says. “You create this situation where there are more opportunities to talk about stuff that matters. Then when you see your colleagues in the hallway, you have a good sense of where they are in their work. You’ve seen their progress and the challenges they’re dealing with. You might even have a ‘shower thought’ and share it with them the following week.”
• The “no-presentation meeting” where, instead of presenting their work, lab members instead draft a document of six to eight pages to share with the broader group. Critically, the group reads that document in the meeting—not beforehand—where they offer synchronous feedback via Google Docs’ comments feature. “At first, it can feel strange to sit in a meeting room and read in silence for half an hour,” Zettelmeyer says. “But what happens is that you end up receiving a ridiculous amount of feedback in a short period of time. And then you can focus on what really matters.”

Zettelmeyer argues that creating a lab for independent contributors working on separate projects allows for social accountability, investment in one another’s projects, and truly focused feedback that ultimately leads to better work. In fact, he’s so committed to the idea that he’s starting a new lab targeted at Kellogg faculty who might otherwise be working in relative isolation, the Ad-Tech Research Lab. Read more about starting a similar lab in your organization here in Kellogg Insight.

The path not taken

President Biden recently signed a law that will ban TikTok in the United States unless it is sold to a U.S.-based buyer. While it’s possible that this particular outcome was inevitable, says Kellogg’s Nancy Qian, writing in Project Syndicate, Tiktok did itself no favors—and perhaps it could have been otherwise.

[T]here was hope for a workable solution whereby US regulators would conduct detailed examinations of the company’s technology. Since data privacy is an industry-wide concern, TikTok could have played the issue to its advantage, such as by investing in data safeguards and supporting independent research of its own platform.

[…] Instead, TikTok adopted an aggressive stance, hired expensive lobbyists, and in a catastrophic misstep, even mobilized its (predominantly young) American users to call their representatives in Congress. Pop-up messages urged users to “Let Congress know what TikTok means to you and tell them to vote NO.” Some congressional offices received more than 1,000 calls in the space of a day.

This was a disastrous mistake, says Qian, because TikTok “brazenly demonstrated just how easy it is to manipulate its users to serve its own interests, confirming that it knew all along how much political influence it could exert. Suddenly, and understandably, the focus in the U.S. shifted from Russian voter manipulation to Chinese voter manipulation.”

She advises other non-U.S. firms to take the opposite approach: working proactively with lawmakers to address legitimate security concerns rather than fighting them—and hurting themselves in the process.

You can read more from Qian in Project Syndicate here.