21st Century Work Life

Brought to you by Virtual Not Distant, where we help managers and teams transition to an office-optional approach. For full show notes please see https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/learning-and-sharing What's Going On This topical segment was recorded on April 6th 2020 Maya experienced a meeting that was 'Zoom-bombed' - one of those new words 2020 will add to the lexicon. This phenomenon has attracted a lot of media coverage, and Zoom has taken steps to secure their own networks - so make sure you're running the most up to date version of the app. A good example of why transitioning shouldn't, in normal circumstances, happen without learning and planning… And Zoom is not the only meeting app out there! Google has rolled out free access to advanced Hangouts Meet video-conferencing capabilities to all G Suite customers globally, and we found this list of hundreds of other possibilities to choose from as well, with different properties and integrations for different industries. Among the plethora of remote work content, don't overlook these fine words by Prof Dr. Emerita Gloria Ramsbottom-Lemieux. Surreality meets satire - but we need humour wherever we can find it these days. Pilar heard about a new co-working space which gives people black beads you can wear, if you want to signify you don't want to be disturbed. A way to physically manifest an attention status in a visible way… A Slack emoji come to life? Interesting how these shared signals and vocabulary emerge. Research from HBR's Idea Watch suggests that people would rather have their job taken by a robot than another human - maybe because we couldn't be expected tocompete? But we'd rather work alongside a human replacement for any of our co-workers, if they get laid off. An article in The StartUp on Medium caught Maya's eye, The Five Levels of Remote Work — and why you're probably at Level 2 - an insightful look at how to get beyond the meetings and chat and replication of the office, to an asynchronous nirvana. A good aspiratiomn for many teams who can work in this way and well worth a read. Remote Work Tree Rowena Hennigan and Robert Kropp in Spain have compiled Remote Work Tree: As Robert explained, they wanted to ease the transition by bringing together the best events and resources to help people new to remote working and leadership. They've tried to predict a learning path and what users might need, to step through the rich resources they have curated, put together at top speed - to help you avoid content overload.

To counterpoint the wave of content to support people new to working from home, here at Virtual Not Distant we wanted to take time to reflect on the current state of knowledge work in the age of corona and the way things have changed already, and might continue to change in the future. (If you are new to this and looking for support in suddenly working from home, then we'd advise you to check out this short bonus episode in the first instance, as well as episode 60 of My Pocket Psych podcast. And contact us if we can help with anything specific to keep you going). While we'll always advocate for working from home as an option in the mix, the world is short on options right now. Even for Pilar, doing voiceover work in studios is presently on complete hiatus, and work is changing at Virtual Not Distant with a surge in requests from work with Spanish companies - not traditionally keen to embrace 'teletrabajo' (see episode 214 for more on this) who are now looking towards long-term shifts in how they collaborate for the future). And today we talk in depth to 3 experts in remote work and long-term home-based working, all of whom will be familiar voices to regular listeners, and can help us think about the trends and shifts we're identifying in the way we work together - wherever we are: Marcus Wermuth from Buffer - connect on Twitter and via his website. Teresa Douglas, author and long-term remote employee - connection on Twitter and also her website. Maya Middlemiss - regular show co-host and Virtual Not Distant associate, connect on Twitter and LinkedIn. You'll find full shownotes at https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/not-business-as-usual

Welcome back to our special series in association with ShieldGEO on connection and disconnection in remote teams, which is receiving fascinating feedback. Today we examine the critical question of whose responsibility is it, to maintain connection and ensure people don't drift and become demotivated? Please see full shownotes at: https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/connection-disconnection-responsibilities

In today's episode, we cover the concepts of Visible Teamwork, essential to working as a remote team, after Maya and Pilar talk about what's going on; and feedback from listeners. For full show notes, visit https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/technostress-and-visible-teamwork 03.10 mins What's going on… Coronavirus is going on 15.10mins In Non-Corona Related News… 35.10mins Listener feedback, and what's coming up at Virtual Not Distant 43.26 mins Visible Teamwork

This podcast is brought to you by Virtual Not Distant, helping businesses transition to successful remote working. Today we interview 6.07 Caitlin McDonald Dr Caitlin McDonald is a digital anthropologist at the Leading Edge Forum, an organisation which works with senior leaders to help them reconsider decisions and outcomes, through research, events, and advisory services. Pilar participated in recent research for the Forum on Reconfiguring the collaborative workspace, which took a deep anthropological dive into workplace organisational structures and digital tools - in particular the ways we interact differently on and offline. Recent policy shifts in remote working and travel restrictions will affect many organisations for the first time, and Caitlin was keen to point out that 'remote under duress' is not a recipe for success, as we have discussed in this podcast previously. And in urban areas particularly, not everyone has a home environment suitable for work - it could be noisy, shared, unheated, etc. Asking employees to set up their own space doesn't always work, people need support and resources from the organisation. We strongly recommend checking out the executive summary of Caitlin's research here, and you can connect with her on twitter to continue the conversation. And do keep your feedback coming, we really enjoy it - please contact us, or you can tweet Virtual Not Distant, or Pilar and Maya directly, with any of your thoughts and ideas.

A short impromptu conversation between Pilar and guest Jacqui Walpole, on some of the issues knowledge workers might face from suddenly having to work from home. You can connect with today's guest over on https://twitter.com/JacquiWalpole and https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacquiwalpole/ For help to make your online collaboration work, and lead your team from a distance, visit www.virtualnotdistant.com

This is Virtual Not Distant's third podcast episode in our special series with ShieldGEO, and you can catch the first and second one if you missed them (and subscribe to them in our main feed wherever you get your podcast). We're thrilled with the feedback received on this series from our listeners, including from many of our previous guests (and Pilar's mum :-) ). We love the way it's helping us think about the way podcasts themselves build connection, so we'll return to that theme very soon. But today, our guest host Bree Caggiati explores what happens when we find ourselves disconnected, from the people we work with and the work we're doing? Dr Julianne Hold-Lunstad reminded us that humans have evolved to be social animals, and that kind of collectiveness has helped us survive - so loneliness is a similar biological drive to hunger or pain, we crave its resolution. But we don't always follow our best biological imperatives, and Brian Rhea talks about how easy it is as an introvert to avoid meetings and encounters when inconvenient, and therefore to avoid investing in the networks that can support you when you really need it. And Marcus Wermuth reminds us that we all need different levels of interaction with others anyway, especially when it competes head to head with focused working time. Collaboration promotes creativity, Julianne points out, so it's worth all of us being aware of its value in terms of our output as well as our mood and well-being. And Richard MacKinnon agrees, that we should not see social contact as subtracting from productivity in a zero-sum game - instead, it's an important investment in the success and performance of the team as a whole. He reminds us that feelings of loneliness have very little to do with actually being alone - instead it's all about the perceptions of the quality of relationships and the social connections we have, and it has a direct impact on the engagement of the whole team. ShieldGEO's Tim Burgess agrees, and has that employee engagement builds commitment which helps overcome the inevitable bad days and bumps in the road that we all experience at work. And when you work from home in particular, bad days and bad moods can do more extended psychological damage, with the absence of the decompression buffer zone a commute represents. Emotional contagion can impact on your household and community too, spreading ripples outward in unexpected directions. Julianne's research has added to the growing evidence that our relationships influence our emotional well-being, but also affect our physical health - a connection which is often poorly recognised and understood. More socially connected people actually live longer, on average, and loneliness has similar mortality risk factors to obesity and air pollution. ONS data suggests that 2.4m UK adults suffer from chronic loneliness, so we need to deal with this on a societal level, not least as it has measurable economic costs. So, the next episode in this series (21st Century Work Life episode 227, releasing on 19th March 2020), will start exploring some of the remedies and strategies to try and fix this problem, which goes way beyond the remote work sphere. But we'd love to know what you think about these vital issues, and anything else. Please contact us, or you can tweet Virtual Not Distant, or Pilar and Maya directly, with any of your thoughts and ideas.

This podcast is brought to you by Virtual Not Distant Ltd. For full shownotes, and details of Pilar Orti's new book Online Meetings That Matter, please see https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/online-meetings-connections. And here's What's Going On: Coronavirus Forces World's Largest Work-From-Home Experiment - This article reflects a moving target in a fast-moving situation, as it was published 2nd February, but it indicates an ongoing phenomenon. Virtual Not Distant do not advise waiting for a global health crisis as a strategy for transformation, but it's great if technology can rise to the occasion and encourage people to try new things - so long as they don't judge the remote-first approach from the outcome of an ad-hoc reactive solution. Google's Plan to Reduce Its Carbon Footprint - For us, this piece triggered lots of reflection about the carbon footprint of digital 'things' in general. We think of remote as very 'green', but data, tech and storage does have a cost in terms of energy, when you scale up. Or even how they suck power on your own laptop… See also: Why Irish data centre boom is complicating climate efforts. Flexible Workers Held Back by Tech Trouble - Some interesting research about how people feel about the tech they use, and when they're remote they're typically less 'supported' with this than in a colocated office. Do we need better training, or better tech? Possibly both, and there's a degree of convergence. And we also need a strategy about how we use them to support our collaboration (PSA: Virtual Not Distant can help with this!) You really need to lock down your Trello boards... right now - Oops. Public Trello boards are just that, meaning search-indexable. And this researcher from Wired found things in some public boards which definitely should not be there. And in other apps too, it's easily done - so this is a timely reminder to check that you understand how the apps you use are secured, who you are making content visible to at all times, the implications. It might mean digging into some settings and instructions… which is time well spent. https://lp.buffer.com/state-of-remote-work-2020 - This comprehensive annual report has just been released. Please take part in research like this, policymakers need it! Comparative data now shows that the more report you are, the happier you are, on balance - including 'how remote' your organisation is (hybrid set-ups are more mixed in satisfaction, and this segment is fastest-growing). The challenges and downsides identified will not surprise any of our regular listeners… But there is SO much to dig into in this research, we urge you to check it out and read it in detail. This topical segment was recorded on 12th February 2020

Welcome to the second in our special series in association with ShieldGEO, with our guest host Bree Cagiatti, in discussion with an amazing panel of guests: In this episode we explore how disconnection presents itself, and we started by talking to Laurel Farrer, remote work advocate and founder of Distribute Consulting. Developer Brian Rhea has identified this too, and is building an app to help — in response to an enquiring tweet which blew up into a huge validation of the existence of a problem of loneliness for remote workers. Teresa Douglas, author of Working Remotely, is presently researching psychological safety in remote teams. Tim Burgess, ShieldGEO co-founder, first experienced loneliness and disconnection in his first job, where he worked alone in an office in a new country — not remote then, but deeply isolated. Asia Hundley (also from ShieldGEO) pointed out the way that excitement can mask such feelings at first in a new situation (in her case, a new country). Occupational Psychologist Richard MacKinnon says it's difficult to spot, because people can seem outwardly very happy, while reporting feelings of loneliness only if asked. And Dr Julianne Holt-Lunstad, who has researched this area extensively, reminds us of the persistent social stigma and shame around admissions of loneliness and other emotional needs. So if you're feeling disconnected and alone as a remote worker, we hope this episode has been both reassuring and insightful — your situation is not uncommon, and we'll have more to come in terms of how you can help yourself and your colleagues throughout this series. Starting from self awareness, you can begin to identify where you might be able to make changes in your total set of work-life circumstances, and use that insight to help others too.

Hello and welcome to this multi-guest episode, where we delve into the world of online communities in the context of remote work. This podcast is brought to you by Virtual Not Distant Ltd. Please see full shownotes at https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/online-communities-remote-work. Guest interviews: 7.48 Lisette Sutherland - Collaboration Superpowers 28.58 Alex Hearst: Hoxby 48.13 Mark Kilby, Agile Florida 1.06.34 Martin Gilbraith Chair of IAF England Wales