WLP266 Higher Education and Being Social in Remote Organisations

Brought to you by Virtual Not Distant in London, where we help teams work together better online, https://virtualnotdistant.com

In today’s episode Pilar and Maya take their regular look at what’s going on in the remote work and collaboration space (which goes beyond work to include education and other spheres now using the same technology), and then explore the theme of social connection in remote teams.

04.00 What’s Going On - a focus on education

Pilar took part in a panel at PA2021 for Project Access International with Bernie Mitchell (Episode 158), and Niklas Huppmann from Human Aid and Covid Africa. 

It’s so interesting how the tech is changing the way we learn, hopefully leading to greater opportunity for everyone. 

Despite technical challenges ( likeSingle Sign-on for Programmable Video), the panel predicted that a hybrid approach blending online and face-to-face is what to expect in future, with interesting implications for building professional networks.

Pilar has also been working with BeNext on virtual leadership, and exploring the strengths of cohort based learning  - a great strength of the online space, as People Matters agrees: Article: Ten reasons why cohort-based programs are the future of skilling — People Matters. 

 

21.57 Socialisation in the online space

 

People talk about missing social interaction when forced to work from home, and often the solution seems to be to arrange specific out-of-work opportunities for this. But this is to imply that social interaction at work only takes place in the pub afterwards! Which isn’t how it works in the colocated workspace - so why should it be online? 

 Recent episodes with Chris Coladonato (262) and Goncalo Silva (264) have some great ideas of how to do this well, and there’s also episode 170 with Jochen Lillich on the DIRECTT framework (Decision, Insight, Result, Emotion, Contact, Troubles, Thanks) for working out loud - all ways to weave engagement and sociability throughout your day to day interactions.

How are you making space for sharing and connecting in your organisation? Don’t forget to let us know, and maybe our in-house podcasting service could help, if you want a new way to relate to one another in your online team.

43.51 Our community

With everything segueing beautifully today, this takes us into our LinkedIn question of the month, Now that you're not working in an office together, how are you capturing the learning in your team that happens away from each other? generating fantastic and insightful responses from friends like Bart Van Roey (episode 261) - we’d love to know what you think too.