Guest speaker at the Non-profit Productivity Summit 2022

Tomorrow my friend Mike St. Pierre is organizing a very cool virtual conference: Non-profit Productivity Summit where yours truly (that’s me!) will be speaking again about hybrid work, explaining the Pyramid of Communication and more. Below you’ll find some spoilers from my talk and an invitation to sign up for the summit! It’s free and there are many other cool speakers lined up!

Notes from my talk for this year’s Summit:

1. Remote work after the pandemic: what do you hope nonprofits and companies have learned?

• Remember: Work is not a place to go, it’s a thing to do.
• People have discovered that you can work from home - both bosses and employees.
• People thrive when they have the flexibility to work from anywhere and can decide when and how they use the office.
• People want to be treated as adults - it’d be great if adults hiring other adults would treat them as adults.

1. What is the Pyramid of Communication and how is it a sort of backbone for remote work?

Pyramid of Communication has 5 layers that describe communication in a company:

• Deep Work - work on what you’re paid for
• Feedback in a written form
• Chat - quick back-and-forth
• Call one-on-one to discuss an issue
• Meetings where more people meet at the same time to discuss things

This should be a pyramid, where meetings are on top - meaning you hardly have any! Because the foundation is deep work!

1. You have a process for meetings (optional, etc.)- how might nonprofits copy this process?

Meetings are: regular, optional and well prepared!

• Regular - to make the barrier of entry easy.
• Well prepared - we only discuss things we’ve prepared beforehand - and everyone will have read them by the time the meeting starts
• Optional - there’s no agenda or people are not prepared, there’s no meeting.

We’ve gotten so good at this that we changed some regular weekly meetings to monthly, because we usually discuss everything in [the comments of tasks](/tasks/.

1. When Nozbe uses the phrase “one source of truth”, what does that mean? How might nonprofits use a project management software tool to do the same?

When not everyone is in the office at the same time, and even if they are, it’s really good to have one source of truth that’s online and accessible from anywhere in the world - one place where all the projects reside and all the tasks are.

This way if you want to know about something - you can just open that project and check out what’s going on there!

Example of a feature in Nozbe

Nozbe is a software product. Every new feature has a project. As CEO I don’t follow these projects - I but I have access to them. Only every now and then I get an overall update from the programmer responsible for this feature how things are going.

If I want to know, I don’t have to ask around:

However, I can always access this project and check out the design decisions there, bugs, issues, and also give my feedback. If I want to. So all the source of truth about this feature is in the project. I don’t have to “ask around” for it.

I suggest all companies do that - let their people create projects, write down the tasks and iron out the details in the comments and ask specific people for feedback. They can do it from an office computer, home computer or a mobile phone!

Sign up free for the Non-profit Productivity Summit

If you want to listen to the entire conversation and check out other great speakers, the Summit starts tomorrow!