In today’s column, I examine an emerging trend encompassing people at work who are posting customized internal guides on how to best work with them. This seems to be particularly occurring at high-tech firms. Is this a momentary fad or will the approach spread far and wide? Time will tell.
I’ve got a twist for you.
These proverbial work-with-me guides are starting to incorporate the avid use of generative AI. The gist is that if someone earnestly undertakes this type of effort, which not everyone agrees is necessarily worthwhile, they might as well leap into the modern age and employ generative AI for maximum payoff.
Let’s talk about it.
This analysis of an innovative proposition is part of my ongoing Forbes.com column coverage on the latest in AI including identifying and explaining various impactful AI complexities (see the link here).
Making A Worthy Guide To Working With You
When you work with colleagues at your workplace, you sometimes start from scratch in the sense that maybe you’ve never worked directly with them before. You don’t know much about them, and they don’t know much about you. Besides knowing each other’s names and titles through the work grapevine and patchy workplace gossip, you are essentially strangers.
It can take weeks or possibly months of working with each other to gradually figure out a colleague’s work style.
The problem is that during the getting up-to-speed time, there might be inadvertent gotchas or hiccups that arise. For example, you discover that your coworker tends to prefer phone calls over emails. Meanwhile, you’ve been providing all manner of project updates via email. The colleague has routinely not looked at the emails and only paid attention during your periodic phone calls.
Had you known of this tendency at the get-go, you would have shifted into a phoning mode rather than an email communications mode.
What can be done to upfront prevent this calamitous situation?
One answer being pursued is the writing and posting of a guide about how to work with someone, as composed and posted by them. Business theory suggests that this is good and provides awareness for others about appropriate workplace boundaries, inspires transparency, promotes respect when working together, and reduces potential misunderstandings at work.
What A Work-With-Me Guide Might Contain
Firms generally seem to be doing this haphazardly or sporadically.
Some workers individually choose to go this route, others decide not to do so. Many of their coworkers don’t know of the practice at all. In some firms, the work-with-me guides are rare and rarely utilized, while at other times the endeavor is more widespread.
Those who opt to compose a work-with-me guide are often able to do whatever they like. Each guide is idiosyncratic in terms of the points made, the format used, the length of the guide, and other pertinent factors. It is entirely up to the individual to decide. Typically, management doesn’t yet require such guides. The overall movement is principally organic and informal.
I’m sure you are moderately intrigued about what a work-with-me guide might contain. The usual real-life guides that I’ve been seeing are around one to two pages in full size. I’ll show you a sampler with a brief semi-representative snippet. Envision that you and I are soon going to be working on a project together. Beforehand, you are encouraged to read my guide (this example is fictitious).
Here it is:
- The best way to reach me is via email or Slack, but not via texting or phone calls.
- Don’t contact me first thing in the morning since I reserve that strictly for catch-up time.
- Be to the point and always start with why you are making contact.
- Reminders are never needed because if I haven’t replied — I won’t.
- My plate is quite full so any added tasks must pass a very high bar.
- Feedback is always welcomed but only if constructive and without sappy emotional baggage.
- I welcome out-of-the-blue inquiries and suggestions that are especially insightful and rewarding.
Digest that for a moment.
What is your reaction to that sampler?
People seem to land in one of two camps.
The upbeat camp proclaims that this kind of work-with-me guide is the best thing since sliced bread. It greases the skids by directly laying out how to best work with someone. It overcomes the usual agony of trying to figure things out an inch at a time. Thank goodness for these work-with-me guides.
The downbeat camp decries these guides as a sure sign that the working world has gone awry. A work-with-me guide seems to be the preposterous out-of-touch words of a spoiled child who wants things only their way. For example, just because someone prefers email over phone calls does not grant them a reprieve from phone calls. The real-world demands that you adapt to the workplace and get your job accomplished. Stop making zany demands of others.
Whew, the topic can be extremely polarizing.
Which camp are you in?
I’ll let you mull that over for a moment or two.
Giving The Guides Their Due
The upbeat camp often insists that you should not judge the concept of work-with-me guides by branding them all via one particular example. Some guides are reasonable, some are unreasonable. My sampler might be deemed outstretched in that it tended to be a bit over-the-top. Not all work-with-me guides are necessarily that way.
When put together in a proper means, the belief is that strident business benefits accrue:
- (1) Streamlines the workplace by openly establishing the lay of the land.
- (2) Removes murky guesswork and avoids wasted energy.
- (3) Promotes working collaboratively and knowing how things will click.
- (4) Makes the workplace more sensible, logical, and known.
As with any workplace innovation, there are tradeoffs to be considered.
A pressing issue that can surface entails a rigid overpowering faith in these work-with-me guides. Consider this. A passionate believer who has devised their work-with-me guide might be so prideful of their guide that they lose their head in these ways:
- Shocked if others don’t adhere to the revered guide and get upset at coworkers for their sloppy transgressions in not conforming to it.
- Use up gobs of time on acrimonious debates about whether others are using their guides properly.
- Irked if colleagues don’t have a guide and berate them accordingly.
- Might opt to use their guide as a defensive shield for avoiding working with disliked people or taking on undesirable tasks.
- Etc.
In total, work-with-me guides have their ups and their downs. It is not a free lunch.
The Big Picture On Work-With-Me Guides
Okay, so those work-with-me guides are appearing here and there. A crucial question is what should companies do about it?
Firms can take one of these three approaches:
- (1) Allow randomness to persist. A company quietly allows the organic efforts to continue, taking no action to aid or inhibit the practice (notably, sometimes being utterly unaware of what is happening under their very noses).
- (2) Command a cease and desist. Stop the work-with-me guides right away, doing so until or if the firm later decides to officially adopt such an approach.
- (3) Go all in. Choose to fully embrace the work-with-me guides and go the extra mile by formalizing and expanding the entire kit-and-kaboodle.
Companies are often hesitant to outrightly ban such guides. They will instead look the other way and just let the guides arise as perchance a team or group might wish to do so. All in all, it seems like a no-harm no-foul situation. Furthermore, if it seems to aid workers, let it happen.
A harsh difficulty occurs once the organic growth gets larger. Since the work-with-me guides are individually derived, the odds are that each guide has some useful info, but likely inadvertently omits other equally useful info. They are a jumble. Another and more jeopardizing concern is that guides might contain unsavory or out-of-sorts indications. Those could create liabilities for the company.
A coworker might legally argue that someone’s guide reflects an undue bias or has discriminatory elements that adversely impact them. It is a mess ripe for an organizational dilemma.
To try and bolster and make safer the work-with-me endeavor, some firms will flatly standardize the approach. A globally accepted form is made available. Dos and don’ts are specified. The company’s talent management system is adjusted to incorporate work-with-me guides. Managers are expected to mentor their team members in creating and maintaining their guides. Company policies are updated to stipulate what the acceptable work-with-me guides can and cannot contain. And so on.
The go-big or go-home approach might initially be welcomed by those who favor the work-with-me guides. From their perspective, the rest of the firm is finally waking up to the immense power of the work-with-me guides. Happy face ensues.
Those devout believers might become disheartened once the company shifts into high gear on this. There can be blowback that the guides have become a bureaucratic nightmare, forcing workers to laboriously craft, polish, review, edit, and get approval for their guides. What was once a lighthearted and freely undertaken endeavor becomes weighed down by heavy-handed corporation rules and stipulations.
Generative AI Enters Into The Work-With-Me Realm
You are almost certainly aware of modern-times generative AI that can seemingly fluently interact with you and carry on conversations at the drop of a hat. Perhaps the most widely known generative AI app is ChatGPT by AI maker OpenAI which has approximately 200 million weekly active users. There are other major generative AI apps such as Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and many others.
In a work-with-me realm, you can use generative AI in these seven vital ways:
- (1) Crafting your work-with-me guide. Rather than laboriously handcrafting your work-with-me guide, you can tell generative AI to write the guide for you, which will be based on the AI interviewing you about your work-related preferences.
- (2) Allow interaction with your work-with-me guide. When coworkers want to find out about your working preferences, they can either read the guide produced by AI or actively interact with AI about the particulars of your guide.
- (3) Read and analyze a coworker’s guide for you. The AI can do the heavy lifting of reading a coworker’s work-with-me guide and tell you the key essentials.
- (4) Match and assess work-with-me guides. Generative AI can explore multiple work-with-me guides and try to ascertain how they match or have mismatches of potential significance.
- (5) Do upkeep of your work-with-me guide. AI can readily undertake the upkeep of your guide and possibly do so automatically by keeping track of your work activities and work patterns.
- (6) Ensure work-with-me abides by company policies. If you can provide generative AI with established company policies on work-with-me guides, the AI can aim to ensure that the guides each conform appropriately.
- (7) AI-to-AI work-with-me alignments. In the case of having more than one generative AI app being used for work-with-me guides, you can gain alignment with each other on behalf of the human workers.
Using generative AI for work-with-me guides can demonstrably streamline the process and reduce worker burdens that otherwise arise.
Example Of Generative AI Usage For Work-With-Me
A handy special capability of generative AI is the ability to simulate a persona, see my in-depth explanation at the link here. You can have generative AI pretend to be a famous person in history such as George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. The same goes for personas representing contemporary celebrities. The main ingredient is that the AI must have sufficient data about the person to suitably simulate their personality.
I bring this up because you can essentially tell generative AI to be your workplace personal assistant or screener, making use of your work-with-me guide to do so. It is easy-peasy to do. Any generic generative AI will be sufficient.
Here’s the deal. I went ahead and logged into ChatGPT and proceeded to indicate some instructions and an abbreviated version of my work-with-me circumstances. I asked the AI to produce my guide so that I could post it.
- My entered prompt: “I want you to pretend to be my assistant or screener and serve as a guide to my coworkers about how to best work with me. Overall, I don’t like phone calls that aren’t planned and only take urgent calls. In the evenings I do check emails, but people should not expect a fast response. During work, I rely heavily on Slack and email. Zoom is good for getting into details. Mornings and afternoons are my productive time, and I especially go into silent heads-down mode from mid-morning to noon. Create a set of guidelines that goes along with that outlined style and I’ll tell you what might need to be changed.”
- ChatGPT generated response:
“Here is a brief set of personal work guidelines that could be posted and that I could aid in letting others know about. Provide any needed corrections or changes.
“Best Communication Method: I prefer Slack or email for non-urgent matters and Zoom for discussions that require a deeper dive. Please avoid unexpected calls unless it’s urgent.”
“Working Hours: I’m most productive between 9 AM and 3 PM. I typically check emails after 5 PM, but responses may be slower in the evening.”
“Meeting Style: I like meetings with clear agendas sent in advance. If it’s a brainstorming session, I prefer to receive topics beforehand so I can prepare.”
“Feedback: I appreciate direct, constructive feedback. Feel free to message me or schedule a quick one-on-one.”
“Focus Time: I block off 10 AM to noon for deep work. During this time, I may not respond immediately unless it’s urgent.”
End of ChatGPT response
Voila, there you have my work-with-me guide.
That was easy, as promised.
Example Of Coworker Interacting With My Work-With-Me
Since I had opted to use generative AI to compose my guide, I can now also have the AI interact with coworkers who want to find out about my guide. The AI is doing double duty for me.
An example interaction looks like this.
- Coworker enters a prompt: “I want to work with Lance and hope to find out from you what his work-with-me guidelines are. How should I reach out to Lance to let him know about a new project that I think he would want to be involved in?”
- ChatGPT generated response: “Your best bet would be to first send Lance an email or a posting on Slack. Once he responds, and if the project interests him, you can anticipate that a Zoom for a deeper dive will be the best next course of action.”
- Coworker enters a prompt: “Thanks, that’s very helpful. What time of day would be the best for Lance to see and respond to an email or Slack posting?”
- ChatGPT generated response: “Late afternoon is probably the most likely time. Doing so after work hours is not recommended since Lance typically tries to maintain a work-life balance and prefers to only respond at night if the work matter is urgent.”
You can plainly see that ChatGPT did a reasonable job of interacting with my coworker.
One aspect that comes up when using generative AI is how far you want the AI to go as your work assistant.
Here’s a taste of what I am referring to.
- Coworker enters a prompt: “I will go ahead and send Lance an email later this afternoon as per your suggested mode and timing. I truly believe he will be keenly interested in this new project.”
- ChatGPT generated question: “You are welcome to tell me about the new project. I can give you a quick indication of whether it is likely or unlikely to be something Lance might find of interest. Of course, you are still welcome to reach out to him. My assessment or commentary will only be preliminary.”
- Coworker enters prompt: “Sure, that’s fine. The project is going to involve developing a new financial system and there will be a significant portion that will use AI. It seems to be a topic that fits Lance’s interests.”
- ChatGPT generated question: “You are right that the AI aspects would be of special interest to Lance. Right now, though, he is heavily involved in projects for the operations team and the marketing department. I would generally guess that he will be too busy to have much involvement in the new project. Maybe, he might be available to provide consultative guidance, but he is already stretched pretty thin.”
- Coworker entered prompt: “I appreciate the heads-up!”
Notice that the AI went a bit out on a limb and speculated about whether I would be interested in the new project.
The problem with this type of response is that it could give a false signal about what I might really have to say. Perhaps the wording by the AI of my being overly busy might cause this coworker to decide not to approach me. If I don’t find out about the new project, I won’t be able to decide on the merits and it could be a great opportunity that the AI inadvertently spurned, and I end up missing out accordingly.
Bottom Line On Work-With-Me
Henry Ford famously said that coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.
Do you think that work-with-me guides enable that proposition or undermine the wise adage?
Whether you like them or dislike them, I vote that if they are going to be used, please give due consideration to leaning into generative AI. I suppose that if AI gets more advanced and reaches the vaunted AGI or artificial general intelligence, we might ultimately be told by AI what its work-with-me guidelines are, whether we like it or not.
