Going Remote Is Forcing Us to Finally Talk About Work Boundaries
The conversations you need to have as you figure out how to work as a team
I once managed a very talented graphic designer who could never seem to hit deadlines without staying late and working weekends. She was miserable. And as her boss, I was worried.
The reason for the late work wasn’t because she was slow. Her output was fantastic. The problem was that most of the day, she would get pulled into “urgent” projects for our salespeople who needed custom pitch decks. She’d often work all day on those, and then have no time leftover during normal hours to do her marketing design work for me.
We didn’t have the budget to hire another designer to spread the load, so I suggested she tell the sales team to give her more warning for upcoming “urgent” projects. I told her that this would help her to manage her work, so that her work wouldn’t manage her.
Instead, my advice created its own problems. One salesperson was relentless about pushing the designer to get his sales designs done ASAP, no matter how long she said she’d need. In response, I told the sales team that they could no longer go directly to her with requests, and should instead come to me. Immediately, the sales team members started complaining about how slow the new process was and how I was creating needless silos in the company.
Morale and trust between the marketing and sales teams sunk. My designer was still overworked — only now she felt responsible for the unhappiness of her colleagues. A small mess had turned into a big one.
The reason for all of it? We had a boundaries problem.
If you’ve ever felt like all you do at work is respond to people’s messages all day long, or like you’re constantly fixing your teammates’ mistakes, or like you’re on the hook for things that you can’t control, you know how frustrating and unproductive a lack of boundaries can be. It’s a vicious cycle: Having poor boundaries often means you’re at the mercy of other people’s needs and expectations, which leads you to lose control over your own work and results, which, in turn, only increases people’s expectations that you will be available on-demand for them.
Having healthy boundaries means taking responsibility for your own work and results, not the work and results of others. It means you work in a way that helps others solve their own problems, instead of taking them on yourself. You understand that the point of your work is to help your team succeed, but if you don’t get your work done and hold yourself responsible for your results, your team will suffer. When someone wants something from you, you take a big-picture view, rather than the easy way out. Setting the right kinds of work boundaries can actually increase productivity, alleviate stress, and turn a vicious cycle into a virtuous one.
The good news is that it’s possible to create healthy boundaries — with relatively little pain. With so many people working remotely right now and trying to figure out how to optimize their teamwork, this is a great opportunity to set some boundaries that might be harder to implement out of nowhere at the office. Here are five steps:
1. Understand the difference between boundaries and barriers
The line that divides my home state of Idaho from the state of Wyoming looks like this:
It’s an imaginary line, but it separates things clearly. Cops on one side of the line know where they are responsible for serving and protecting people. Officials on the other side know where they are responsible for the same.
The line that divided Berlin into two sections during the Cold War, on the other hand, looked like this:
This isn’t a boundary. It’s a barrier.
The key difference between a boundary and a barrier is that a barrier cuts off communication and negotiation. It makes it clear that you are not on the same team.
People can stand on their own side of a boundary and have a conversation. They can shake hands over the line, or in a pinch, even offer to come over the line and help. Each party takes responsibility for what’s on their side of the boundary, and they respect the line. But it’s in the service of working together, not avoiding each other.
2. Figure out how you work best
You can’t set effective boundaries with others if you can’t articulate what you need and how you work best. So step back and identify the following:
- What’s the most important work you are responsible for?
- What challenges are you up against? What is most likely to get in the way of you doing your best work?
- What information do you need in order to do your best work?
- When do you need uninterrupted time in order to do your best work? When is it most disruptive to be interrupted?
- What’s your optimal work style? When do you do your clearest thinking? When are you best able to get into a flow?
This work style report tool can help you get clear on your optimal work style and think through the best ways for people to communicate with you. If you’re bombarded all day long with requests and questions, it’s important to decide the following:
- What’s the best way for people to communicate things that you prefer to get to on your own schedule? Is there a communication channel you can commit to checking a couple times a day (or less) when you have time?
- What’s the best way for people to ask quick things of you?
- What’s the right way for people to get a hold of you in an emergency? For instance, if something truly merits interrupting you, should people call you? Text you with the word “urgent”?
- Is it okay for someone to spring a real-time conversation on you? Or do you prefer for nonemergency conversations to be scheduled or come with prior warning?
Once you are clear on your optimal ways to communicate, you’re going to want to learn the same kinds of things about your teammates.
3. Put yourself in your teammates’ shoes, and figure out what they need to succeed
Making an effort to understand what your teammates are up against doesn’t just help you learn how to work with them. It also lets them know that you care. It pays to personally ask the people you work with:
- What’s the most important work you are responsible for?
- What challenges are you up against?
- What information do you need in order to do your best work?
- What are the best communication channels for you?
- When do you do your clearest thinking? When are you best able to get into a flow?
Only after you’ve shown your teammates that you truly want to understand them can you proceed in setting up some boundaries.
4. Communicate your boundaries in terms of agreements for the greater good
Setting boundaries is about making clear what you agree to be responsible for, and what you expect of others. When you communicate your boundaries with people, it’s helpful to frame them in terms of your desire for the greater good — the team’s overall success. It’s easier for colleagues to hear the word “no” when it comes with big-picture context.
It’s best to set boundaries as “if-then” agreements. In other words, boundaries are what you promise to do if the other party agrees to what you ask. For example: “If you see that my status on Slack is set to ‘do not disturb,’ it means I’m heads down working on something important. So if you send me a chat message, I promise I will pop in and get back to you within a couple of hours.”
If you want to be bold, you can actually say, “These are my boundaries.” But that can be awkward, and may sound too forceful or even defensive. It’s an especially difficult line to walk if the power dynamic isn’t in your favor (for instance, if you’re a junior partner or someone’s direct report). A better way to do it is to start a conversation about boundaries, framing it in terms of the greater good. A good boss will respect this type of dialogue.
Once you’ve established the best way to work with you, you’re going to need to be consistent about sticking to it. Otherwise, the boundaries mean nothing.
For example, say you’ve communicated that you’d prefer not to take unannounced calls unless there’s an emergency. When your colleague calls out of the blue about something that’s not an emergency, you must remind them of the boundary then and there. (“I’m working on something important, so please send me a message to schedule time to talk.”)
5. Caring means you “give” based on long-term benefit, not short-term fear
Social psychology research shows that “givers” in the workplace end up at both the top and the bottom of the food chain. Why? Because some people “give” to their colleagues in the short-term at the expense of the long-term. Successful givers are helpful in ways that contribute maximally in the long run.
One of the biggest ways we fall prey to short-term thinking when it comes to helping others? Fear. Fear of disappointing people. Fear of seeming selfish. Fear that the other person will fail if we don’t save them. But if you’re afraid of the consequences of not giving someone what they want right now, you’ll be more likely to cave on your healthy boundaries. You’ll cave to that pushy person, or that charming or persuasive colleague, or that person whose position of power makes everything they ask for feel urgent.
If you want to be helpful and maintain your healthy boundaries, continually ask yourself this question: What action will help the whole team the most in the long run?
What about people who don’t respect your boundaries?
In my story about the graphic designer, I made a bigger mess by attempting to set some boundaries and failing. I didn’t do a good job initially, because I set up barriers instead. I tried to push the sales team away instead of figuring out how to help the team get its best work done.
The people on the sales team didn’t respect my boundary, poor as it was. They were used to getting their needs met. I had not given them a good enough reason to change their behavior.
When that didn’t work, I went back to the drawing board. Why was the sales team bothering my poor designer so much? It was because her work was super helpful to them, and because they’d grown to expect custom work as part of how they could make sales. And why was my designer bothered by that? In part, because she didn’t know whether the salespeople’s requests were more important than my marketing requests. All she saw was increasing responsibility and decreasing control.
The solution began with sitting down with the designer and walking her through how our salespeople’s commissions worked. I helped her understand what their day-to-day job was like, and how her work affected how they put food on the table. This helped her to not only have more empathy for the formerly “pesky” salespeople, but also to come up with some ideas for how to scale design solutions, so they could have their needs met without her doing so much custom work. Instead of just taking orders, she became a partner in their success.
I then sat down with the salesperson who was the biggest problem, and walked him through what my designer was up against. We talked about the effect that all the interruptions and “urgent” requests were going to have on marketing leads down the line. Having this context, he became an outspoken advocate for the designer and worked to protect her time.
After a little empathy building, everyone involved had more intrinsic motivation to make and respect boundaries. We figured out what the salespeople needed to do if they needed something urgently, or nonurgently. We set expectations for what the designer would do if the sales team held up their end. And we agreed that if either party couldn’t keep up the agreement, then we would be sitting down again to figure out a new agreement until we got things right.
