21st Century Work Life

For once we are truly working from home, because we’re recording this episode in Maya’s home office! Usually we record from different countries on Skype, but it’s quite fun and very appropriate to do things differently today.   This podcast is brought to you by Virtual Not Distant, a London-based consultancy helping organisations transition to successful office-optional working. What’s going on? Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker recently unveiled an $18 billion transportation investment bill that includes a tax credit that will give companies more flexibility in offering work from home perks to their employees - more on LinkedIn here. Employers are not supporting tech learning, at least not as much as their employees would like. This UK research in People Management was disappointing to read. The reasons why are not clear, but the expressed frustration certainly is. Leaving people to figure things out for themselves is NOT the way to implement effective digital transformation! WeWork have cancelled - sorry, postponed - their forthcoming IPO Pilar and Maya don’t really get it, the corporate co-working movement and replicating the office you’ve left behind, but clearly some people love it… Not enough to fundamentally shift the problems of office space costs, but maybe it’s good to remind us of the many different options in terms of co-working alone. Work From Home Week - listen to Rebecca Corliss, VP of Marketing at Owl Labs, recapping on this interesting initiative they promoted in July, encouraging corporate partners to experiment systematically with home working.  It’s great to learn more about their ‘Meeting Owl’ product as well, a 365 degree conferencing camera that puts the remote participants in the centre of the hybrid meeting, instead of stuck up on the wall somewhere. Work From Home Week was a great experiment which taught participants a great deal, and the blog post shares these fascinating insights.  “#WFHW” will be repeated, but you don’t have to wait : Why not have your own ‘work from home week’ within your organisation? BBC Bitesize have been writing about ‘workplace perks’, and we all went ‘ahhh’ about the concept of ‘Fur-ternity’ leave - offering new pet-parents the option of working from home for a week while settling a new non-human family member. Anything that brings on experimenting with remote working is fine by us, as is any embrace of the diversity and individuality of human motivation. Pilar has been a panelist this week for a Minds at Work event, which was run as a hybrid event in London plus a parallel remote one, while the two cohorts were kept completely separate.  The remote side used Remo, a new tool for remote events, which worked very well - offering lots of flexibility for participants to ‘choose a table’ and talk to each other, then listen to broadcasts in bigger sessions. Event sessions included finding your community at work, and how that differs in the remote space (do people still meet their best friends or their life partners at work?), as well as the ways we communicate and changing degrees of formality and the evolution of the business conversation generally.  So many shifts, and the question of how to make remote work better are often questions about how to make work better generally… this event and others are really helping to broaden the conversation, and if you get the chance to participate in one in future, why not check it out? You can do so from anywhere in the world, for example somewhere like Maya’s home office - which she has recently reclaimed from a shared space, banishing her other half to his own home office in another room! She has added a comfortable arm chair for reading and research, and also a standing desk zone (though the way this is being used as a bookshelf reveals that not a lot of standing up takes place every day) - at least the theory is there, and it’s good not to sit too much!  Also to change your focal point, by looking at something further away than the screen in front of your nose. A work in progress, Maya is doing her best to organise the space - small as it is - by function, to create different zones for different activities, which is a powerful way to overcome any feeling of being “stuck in one place” all day, as well as switching up the energy: Pilar does a similar thing moving around her apartment, and both enjoy getting out of the home office and interacting with other people in the neighbourhood too. And how about if more employers encouraged people to do things in their community, safeguarded the time needed to take a class or do some exercise? Surely everyone’s health AND productivity would improve.  But you can always find ways to connect when remote working, such as apps like FocusMate - which pairs you with an accountability partner to work alongside  remotely via webcam. Anything which helps you get things done is worth a try, though some people might find it distracting or want to talk to the other person and get to know them - which is the opposite of the whole idea. We would love to hear your thoughts about working from home - which is just one aspect of remote working and wholly optional one. Let us know what you thought of this episode, what you think of working from home, and what you’d like us to explore and discuss next. Send us your comments, or catch up on Twitter to join the conversation.

In this episode, we hear from how different people are going about growing their companies. They have different customers, different recruitment processes and different ideas about the size and make up of their workforce. However, they have one thing in common: their employees are distributed over different geographical locations. What's Going On section links: Harvard Business School’s research summary “How Companies Benefit When Employees Work Remotely” Highlights from Flexjobs 2019 Annual Survey. ">Appear.in has changed its name. Find out why here: https://whereby.com/information/brand Judy Rees and Lisette Sutherland are running a series of workshops on Running Remote Meetings. Starting 18 Sept 2019, book here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/remotetogether/289398 Info Q is publishing a series of articles on Remote Meetings, and celebrating the series with a session on Mastering Remote Meetings, on 1st October! Details here. Finally, news from Virtual not Distant: Our online course Leading Remote Teams through Visible Teamwork is cooking in the online oven, register here to be alerted of when it goes live. ">Growing a Remote Organisation 22.56mins. Wade Foster and Jeremiah Smith talk about their first steps in setting up the company and why they decided to set up their businesses. Our guests explain why they started to employ people at Zapier and Simple Tiger. 29.40mins. Pilar explains the nature of employment at Virtual not Distant; Wade explains how they recruit at Zapier; Jeremiah talks about his own process when looking for other people to hire; while third guest Tim Burgess takes on a different strategy when looking for employees for Shield GEO.
 
 43.40mins. So far, hiring for remote seems very similar to hiring for colocated. However, there is one thing that makes a huge difference when you’re growing a remote company: Timezone differences. Tim and Wade discuss their thoughts and experiences around hiring globally and asynchronous (and text-based) communication specifically. 54.00mins. Hiring globally means that you can grow and grow and grow and grow… but that’s not on everyone’s mind.

Today we have such a detailed episode for you, that we’ve had to split it into two, for practical distribution reasons. This is part two of two These shownotes for both episodes are available at  http://virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/collaboration-dangers) -because it really is just one big conversation. Collaboration platforms - the dangers Too much information, vs “fear of missing out”? How do we stay on top of all the messages in our platforms, making sure we don’t get overloaded, while not missing anything vital? What if you get back from a holiday or an illness and there are 400 alerts…? Your team agreement needs to specify what to check, as opposed to what you can let go, or the best way to catch up on the conversation after a break. And your team agreement needs regular review to ensure relevance and that it’s continuing to serve you well.  Your team changes, and so does the tool (for example you might want to consider the appropriateness of animated emoji use, non-trivial for any users with dyslexia, or whether our emoji-sets are too culturally exclusive anyway).   Too much text Some of us type better than others do, and might also need to get comfortable with a speed vs accuracy tradeoff.  Remember you can dictate, you can record audio, you can record video.  You can use photos, of drawings or even handwriting. Draw your own emojis!  While we can’t customise the platforms themselves, and how they look and feel, but our culture and team personality can really emerge quite creatively. But, if it’s an important communication which might need to be referred back to or found in search, then text - which can be dictated text - is the only thing really searchable/indexable, for now (soon the AIs will be able to search our audio for keywords easily). So do consider that when choosing how best to post. Episode 153 should we be talking or typing goes into more detail on this.   Always on We need to choose a collaboration platform with good mobile tools, but we do need to remember to ensure those boundaries between work and non-work.  When your collaboration tool is there on the homescreen of your personal mobile phone, you’re never away from it. Richard Mackinnon discussed on a recent Work Life Psych podcast ‘my phone, where’s my phone!’, how truly addicted to our devices we are.   And sometimes we are left anxiously waiting for responses, in the same way as we crave our Facebook likes - is this person confused, annoyed, or just responding asynchronously when it suits them best?  The reward-centres of the brain that overthink these things have made the social networks billions, but do we want this effect in our work communications? Managing hostility This article from Workable about hostile work environment signs and fixes led us to think about how signs of bullying, harassment or oppression become visible (or not) in the online workspace, and an interesting Twitter thread emerged as a result.   Conflict at work might be less obvious to others, but conversely it is easier to provide evidence of when communications are digitised. There are lots of issues here about whether this is done ‘officially’ or not - this article from People Management, Do you know what your employees are saying in private messages? discusses this in depth from a policy point of view, but everyone should remember that nothing in the digital space is truly secret. It’s important that everyone knows how to discuss difficulties and with whom, and that people get to know their online colleagues as whole people and develop their own support networks.  And while there are apps which can help highlight inappropriate communications, (such as the one described here in Venture Beat Valued raises $1.7 million for Slack chatbot to combat workplace harassment), there are dangers in abdicating any of these responsibilities for team wellbeing and safety, to a tool or app. So many issues to think about, when it comes to our collaboration platforms, whether we call them chats or digital hubs or our online offices… we need to use them well, use them right, because these ARE our workplaces now. We conclude this episode with a lovely anecdote about two very creative people communcating asynchronously, in an unusual setting… but you’ll have to listen to find this little gem, which reminds us just how many different ways there are to communicate. Don’t forget to keep communicating with us! About your collaboration platforms, or any other aspect of remote work.  You can message us directly, you can tweet Maya or Pilar or the Virtual Not Distant account at any time, to keep this conversation going - asynchronously of course.  

Today we have such a detailed episode for you, that we’ve had to split it into two, for practical distribution reasons. This is part one of two These shownotes for both episodes are available at  http://virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/collaboration-dangers) -because it really is just one big conversation What’s going on Buffer are looking at the introversion question too - and how to make this work when virtual teams meet up in ‘real’ life Ten reflections on Buffer's 10th team retreat. I am sure it helps if your CEO is introverted! But there are lots of good ideas in here for every team. Santander brews up the first uk work cafe for small businesses - is it a cafe, is it a bank, is it a co-working? An incubator? We’re not sure, but we like the idea and look forward to seeing how it develops, the more flexibility the better chance of everyone finding their perfect work space locally, and these days banks need to do more to connect with their communities. Formatting in Trello - yes you can italicise... but not in the mobile app. Oh well! We all learn something new every day, and this was news to us. New MSTeams accessibility features, explained at Use Immersive Reader in Microsoft Teams   Shared by our friend from previous podcasts Chris Slemp (ep. 202 and others). Text is NOT the optimal communications mode for everyone, and it’s good to see platforms addressing this. We’re looking for more evidence-based research to support our work with remote teams - Pilar had a shout-out on LinkedIn here with some fascinating replies. Can you add anything? Speaking of networking, Pilar is starting a face-to-face meetup group in West London, for people in the remote leadership space. No powerpoint or pitching, just coffee and in-depth conversation. Let us know if you’re interested and date (likely October) will be confirmed. And another upcoming event which might interest London area listeners, from Minds@Work LAB on the 17th September 2019, all about Mentally Healthy Remote Working - so do check that out, Finally, don’t forget to let us know about any events you know about or are planning, that we can share with our community   Collaboration platforms - how we’re using them now A truly 21st Century work-life phenomenon, it’s time to talk about the tools we use every day. It’s time to talk about ‘chat’ - whether you use Slack, MSTeams, Twist, or other more project-management based tools which also include the ongoing conversation that ties the whole work process together. Slack was one of the first truly built for business, rather than repurposing consumer tools like MSN messenger and Skype (which was a consumer tool at first, and now Skype for Business is being subsumed into MSTeams).   We enjoyed this paper about How scientists use Slack, which demonstrated the versatility of it and how different types of workers can shape it to their own needs, from conversation to creation. Collaborating on a research paper with international colleagues is a great example of time-agnostic asynchronous remote work. They also use the reminders tool - and we didn’t know you could set reminders for other people. Very interesting! And there’s a subtle difference when an app asks or reminds people about something, rather than a colleague… Interesting too how tools like Slack are being used at an organisational level, with hundreds or sometimes thousands of users - requiring very different moderation and interaction approaches, and potential new challenges, and leading Slack to introduce new admin tools for professional users. We’d rather see team agreements and consensus, than controls - but perhaps with scale it’s becoming inevitable. So these tools are becoming multipurpose communications hubs, not always real-time chat - channels can become discussion forums, co-creation spaces, announcement channels and so on. And as we’re always saying, asynchronous conversation rocks! Our friends at Buffer experimented with turning Slack off altogether - Slack-off Fridays: What Happened When One Team Experienced a Day Without Slack - there are many other ways to do visible teamwork effectively.  The use of the word chat (or instant messaging, from which these tools evolved) frustratingly suggests an instantaneous response. So we need a new collective noun. What shall we call them? Does “collaboration platforms” work? “Digital hubs”? Where we live and do our work online needs a better name, so please let us know what you think! Don't forget to continue to download and enjoy part two of this conversation next...

  >Today’s episode is a solo show, as Pilar was part of two conversations she wanted to share with you straight away. And she also took the opportunity to ask the community managers at Minds@Work to tell you about their next event. The episode was prompted by a message that Pilar received from a friend of hers. His team is currently colocated, but some of the team members would like to go remote; plus he’s realising that the business might benefit from recruiting in other geographical areas. He’s wondering whether he should turn into a hybrid team, or a fully distributed one. The benefits of being a hybrid team, within an organisation:    You have a presence in headquarters as a team. Those staying in HQ can still have spontaneous interactions, which could be a point of connection for some team members. You might have a team member who acts as a connector, between remote and colocated; some people are really good at keeping everyone together, regardless. A lot of communication is electronic anyway, so it might be easy to follow visible teamwork practices. ">The Drawbacks: Different visibility in the organisation between team members can cause friction, as some people might be missing out on networking and promotion opportunities, and other stuff going on in the organisation.   Clusters might form (remote vs colocated) in an unhealthy way. Feelings of inequality and isolation. People in the office could also feel isolated; if some members can go remote because they have a comfortable place at home, while others don’t, and so have no choice but to stay in HQ. And remote team members can easily feel like they’re being forgotten about. Benefit of being fully distributed: Everyone’s in the same boat, which has lots of benefits. Downsides:   It could be expensive if the team has different overheads than the organisation: a coworking budget, new equipment, expenses which are difficult to explain in some organisations More change to manage. A hybrid team can be more organic, but a fully remote team will need a lot of adapting to. Team could lose visibility in the organisation, but you can develop a strategy to avoid this. 13.50 How should you have difficult conversations in a virtual team?  After a few Twitter interactions, here are those things you should consider when having a difficult conversation: Do you and your team member feel comfortable with video, how do you best connect with the other person? What role will emotions play? For example, is it important to see the other person’s emotions/reactions; or is the expectation that we don’t want others to see how we react? What is the norm in your team? If you always use video, probably video is best. If audio is the norm, the audio might be best. Or you might want to suggest something different to elevate the importance of the conversation… (but which can make the other person more nervous…) What are individual’s preference? You need to know yourself and your team members Think about all this BEFORE you have to have a conversation. Be prepared. (Even share this episode with your team to kick off the conversation!) If you’ve never worked remotely or managed people virtually, go carefully through the advice you read or are given, there is no one way of doing this.  24.15 Hear about An Event about Mental Health in Remote Working April Doty and Sarah Bingham tell us about the Minds@Work event Minds@Work LAB on Mentally Healthy Remote Working will take place in London on 17 September 2019 6.30pm BST, and online. (It looks like Pilar will be joining a virtual panel there.) Pilar mentions a past episode on Open Space, you can find it here: https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/agile-meets-openspace She also thanks listeners for their feedback on episode 203. If you would like to be involved in the podcast, fill in this form.

We have two interesting guests for you to meet today, and our first conversation is an excellent example of some of the things you might not obviously know about people when you work with them remotely, as we delve into some of the non-work things which make our associates into whole people. But we do talk about creativity, 21st century careers, and content marketing too and the way everything is evolving. We’re making lots of changes to our content at Virtual Not Distant - have you checked out the website lately?  Plenty of new things to see, we would love to hear what you think about all of it, and changes in the podcast too... including our new section: 03.49 What’s going on! This will be a regular round-up of news, events and issues in the remote space. Right now: Pilar is discovering the joys of unplugging, and going properly ‘out of office’ - which you still need to do in remote. Just because you can stay in touch constantly, it doesn’t mean you have to, and stepping out of the conversation for a while brings many benefits. This article from the BBC in July made the headlines for not having an office… and it turned out to be our friends from Automattic (see episode 136). They’ve been around since 2005, but for the Beeb ‘Wake Up to Money’ programme this was big news! Good to see the mainstream catching up... A great conversation on LinkedIn recently (in Italian, sorry!) spoke up for the potential of collaborative creativity in remote, delving into the difference between individual and group creativity in an interesting way - and they really understand the name of our organisation, which was highly gratifying. More on sychronous/asynchronous collaboration, something we talk about a lot - here’s a thoughtful piece on creative ideation in remote, and another great take on this from Buffer - lots to think about, but the main thing is that it’s possible Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter - for a regularly monthly shot of inspiration and ideas And do send us YOUR ideas, about what’s going on in remote work!   16.56 21st Century Work Life - with Luis Magalhaes It doesn’t get much more ‘21st Century’ than Luis Magalhaes’ CV, where his portfolio of roles includes marketing, podcasting, dentistry and gaming… His main activity for the past couple of years though is being Director of Marketing and Editor In Chief at DistantJob. The company promotes remote work as a solution for companies who want to scale and grow, and they specialise in recruitment from a global marketplace. For businesses it means hiring the best person wherever they are located, and DistantJob deals with all the contractual and logistics complications which may arise from hiring outside of their own location and jurisdiction. Content marketing helps DistantJob target their sweet spot of medium-sized businesses - ready to hire, but not to open international branches - and they test and iterate and keep doing more of the things that work. They develop their content strategy collectively and transparently as a team, and constantly review their own practice and thinking, based on the people they talk to. Everything they learn, and reflects their values and culture in hiring - hiring for themselves and their clients. DistantJob create 3 pieces of quality original content each week, two articles and a podcast, and it works. Inbound marketing is the ‘karma based economy’: provide valuable information, and people will come to you when they need what you’ve got to offer.  Luis rarely practices dentistry these days, but always loved the intersection of science, medicine and diagnostics - and his evident passion for helping people clearly has parallels here. He also enjoys the synergy of using his hands and brain together, to make things better. Helping people find the best job of their lives has more in common than we might have thought, with fixing their toothache. Luis also loves videogames, and attributes much to that passion, from writing and creativity, to co-ordination, even the spatial awareness needed for dentistry. He podcasts and writes about gaming from time to time, to try and offset the bad rap they get in popular discourse. He writes fantasy fiction too (and is a best seller in Portuguese, while also releasing his new novel The Silvery Moon this summer in English).  Amazing insights were generated in this conversation with Luis, and reflected and expanded upon by Pilar, about the impact of language and bilingualism on creativity. We should bear in mind the impact of this in our global teams, and remember that real time video might not always be ‘the best’ - remember Allon Shevat’s comments in our last episode. Check out Luis’ podcast at Distant Job (on which both Pilar and Maya have guested), and check out their blog too. Luis tweets as well. And talking of content and creation, here’s further insight about SEO and how content gets found in the first place...   59.01 Jeremiah Smith founder and CEO of SimpleTiger A specialist in SEO for software-as-a-service companies, Jeremiah has seen 2 decades of trends in search engine optimisation, which is now being transformed by more intelligence: AI is superceding traditional algorithms, and handling content very differently. This trend will deepen, and search will get ever more prescriptive, as we provide constant feedback on its success.  And Jeremiah reminds us that search does not just mean Google - Amazon is one of the world’s biggest search engines, for example, just specialised in products. Creating authentic and high quality content which creates a good user experience throughout the customer journey, should continue to be rewarded by search traffic - whether you’re an SME startup or a Fortune 500 company. Keep up with Jeremiah on Twitter for further thoughts. --- What do you think about quality content and conversation in remote work? Do you have a view you’d like to share, on this or any aspect of 21st century work life? We now have a podcast guest application form, and really welcome your ideas and contributions for the show

Maya and Pilar have always enjoyed discussing a range of conversations and ideas about remote work and collaboration, but it’s great that we’re increasingly noticing more fragmentation and variation in the public discourse around this subject.  The opening up of niche communities and content in the remote world is encouraging us to transition this podcast towards a tighter focus on remote / virtual /distributed teamwork as the conversation proliferates, and gives us more to dig down into and discover with each episode. We love to hear what you think, via our contact form, and also on Twitter (@Virtualteamw0rk) At Virtual Not Distant we are all about a deep understanding of the world of remote and how to make it work well. Experimentation is good, but oversimplification is not - and can lead to quickly concluding that ‘remote didn’t work for us’, a lose-lose outcome. So many variables, not least between companies which start as distributed teams versus those who transition to a more office-optional situation further down the line, and also the increasing number of employees who are now working remotely - whether at home or in a co-working - alongside the typical/traditional freelancers and entrepreneurs. This one is interesting because small and new organisations encourage and recruit for flexibility and less predictability, the wearing of multiple ‘hats’ at work… whereas traditional employees might be less autonomous and need more support. Though not everybody agrees with us!  Maybe for a chaotic startup, a fixed office space can create the only stability to focus on. And we can personalise that space and make it our ‘home’, which is very important for some people. (have a look at the first chapter of “Thinking Remote” for more reflections on the digital vs physical workspace). And developers, why not think about giving us more customisation options in our platforms and hubs, so we can make our digital offices feel like our very own? Another issue is the relationship between remote work and flexible work, and whether remote work means complete flexibility to work and deliver at the best time and place to suit each person… or do we expect people to be working fixed hours, contactable at specific times? In what other ways can we make the work itself more autonomous, while still being accountable and connected, and how much of this is about managerial expectations as opposed to deliverables and outcomes? 21.30 "Advice" on remote culture... An article we encountered on social media recently made Pilar’s heart sink… We don’t often rip apart articles on this podcast (not since episode 126!), but every now and then you do feel you have to respond. It’s called “How to build a strong company culture with a remote team” - but there was really nothing in the article about culture.  In fact just as in an event Pilar recently attended, there was an equating of culture with banter and chat, and no correlation of the idea of culture with values or guiding decision-making, perception… Which is a reminder that culture is not something people (outside of our geeky change-management space perhaps) really talk or think about. Culture is not easy to change, it’s often deeply ingrained and internalised, and it’s much easier to focus on behaviour and changing that instead. But there was a lot to take on in this article. It really felt like the writer had little direct experience of remote teamwork and felt insecure about being able to manage work at a distance. And apparently remote teams need to ‘let their hair down’. Oh dear. Enough said. A sub-heading in the list (of course, it was a listicle) referenced online “meetings” - complete with the quotation marks, making Maya cringe. Their advice was to use ‘videoconferencing’ - a thing we were talking about a decade ago, so go and get your suit and tie on first. Perhaps this does remind us all that we are still struggling with consistent vocabulary as it evolves in the remote space. What do you call it when you just want to hop on a quick video call with someone in your team? We’d love to know. Another tip from the Telegraph article suggested you “set rules about the tech you use” - OK, so far as it goes. But nothing about how you use the tech was mentioned, and the very term “rules” suggests a different approach to a team agreement, the idea of building a consensus around how we want to communicate and why. A further confusion between social media and team communications was a bit strange too, and while boundaries are more blurred now between internal and external communications, the distinctions between the two are still critical. Finally though, one assertion in the article had Pilar and May both raging at their screens. Apparently, “introverts struggle more with remote working”.  Introverts “find it harder to initiate conversation” - well, that was bound to press the buttons of two introverted writers/consultants/podcasters who also happen to be professional communicators and remote work advocates. And it betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of what the introversion/extroversion spectrum actually is.   People who score highly on introversion scales re-energise in private, as opposed to gaining energy from the company of others - while introverts thrive on the company of others for stimulation and energy.  There is zero correlation either way with communication skills. Remote working enables people to control their environmental preferences, whether that means creating peaceful space for deep working, or enjoying the bustle of a busy co-working. But introverts are not shy, reserved, or suffering from a communication skills impairment. 45.06 Is it introversion, or a cross-cultural assumption? To explore introversion and its implications in more depth, Pilar spoke to Allon Shevat, who shed some interesting light on the issue by reminding us that behaviour perceived as introvert could be something very different, depending on the cultural backgrounds involved. For example a question from a business superior might be seen in Western culture as expecting an immediate response - but in Japanese culture, thoughtfulness would be valued more highly than immediacy, and a considered answer a delivered little later more appreciated. Another colleague might be reluctant to give a negative answer in some circumstances, and prefer to respond privately if the news is bad - a sign of respect and courtesy, over the transparency of sharing bad news publicly which could reflect on the manager or the whole team. (Maya has also had experience of this when working with developers and contractors from the Indian subcontinent, who seemed incapable of expressing anything like, “no, this work is not going ok” or “nope, that cannot be done”, when that was exactly what needed saying...) Silence or a lack of response also has cultural implications, and can be a way of expressing lack of agreement rather than shyness or introversion. Dissent could also be indicated via a backchannel or indirect communication, in cultures where it simply wouldn’t be acceptable to express a negative opinion about a colleague.  Finally Allon reminds us that on international teams, delayed or written responses can simply reflect use of a second language, rather than anything relating to introversion/extroversion, and can lead to disadvantage in synchronous calls or chats. If you want to learn more follow @AllonShevat on Twitter (and he is the secret mastermind behind another twitter account we also enjoy - but you’ll have to listen to find out which one!) We discussed many issues surrounding cultural differences in Episode 201 with Theresa Sigillito Hollema and Surinder Kahai if you want more on this fascinating area, and also back in episode 138 with Nancy Settle-Murphy.   All of this reflects the fact that so much more is now going on in the remote workspace conversation - we’ll be digging into the ongoing issue about hostility in the workplace soon as it applies to remote, and other deep-dives into other burning issues are also coming your way. Please tell us if there’s something specific you’d like us to research and explore. For now, thank you very much for listening!

Welcome to episode 202 of the 21st Century Work Life podcast from Virtual Not Distant, where today we’re revisiting the roles of tech - particularly chat-based platforms - in teams, and the relationship between tech and strategy… Interestingly much of which also applies nowadays within organisations we don’t think of as ‘remote’, and depends a great deal on how we agree to use the tools at our disposal (including our expectations regarding speed of reply) Don’t forget to come and say hello to us on Twitter, @VirtualTeamW0rk and @PilarOrti… we love to talk to our listeners, and we talk about all sorts of interesting things, like a new feature in MSTeams which Pilar had a strong reaction to… Maybe there are some situations where text is better than a call, even when it’s urgent? Do join in and tell us what you think.  And please bear with us as our website is being updated, we’re bringing you a refreshed look and feel and some great new content - in particular look out for more about our self-paced learning programme to accompany the Thinking Remote book, if you’re serious about improving your remote leadership practice. 21st Century Work Life: Chris Slemp, Customer Success Manager at Microsoft Today’s guest Chris actually introduced us to one of our favourite phrases, ‘Office-Optional’, so it was great to talk to him for the third time on our podcast.  Moving from a small consultancy to Microsoft gave Chris and his wife a chance to relocate to Scotland, and his work involves helping people to be more productive with the tools they already own. To support customers they use a blend of face to face visits but also online, and of course they use Microsoft Teams. Clients include organisations like police forces and local councils and other workplaces we might not think of as ‘remote’, but actually involve people in many locations, including many non-office situations, and reminding us that it’s not only knowledge workers who can benefit from these tools. The work is not location-dependent, so the communication should not be. From a customer support point of view, it’s essential to understand and relate to roles outside of the IT dept, even if that’s the first point of contact. Technology needs to be a partner, not a supplier, to realise its potential these days, and help businesses solve their problems effectively. We should be driven by the need, not by the tech. Even within their own team they had to evolve the way they used their own tools effectively, and improving meant an ongoing blend of coaching individuals and moderating and managing the conversation itself. Perhaps the problem is that the tools now look and feel so similar to those we use in our personal lives, where we’re used to pleasing ourselves what we do with them, and we really need a team agreement or a ‘collaboration constitution’ to nail down the way we’re going to do things. In a flattened organisation, tools enable visibility which enhances influence. Different communications styles may be advantaged by different modes, and we need to learn new ways of engaging effectively. TL;DR - the person posting the right gif might get more engagement than the one with the long insightful text. Teams need different kinds of social glue, and the asynchronous space is still overly text-heavy, to its detriment. MSTeams is bringing functionality to record and stream voice calls and meetings, which creates automatic transcripts and even translations - AI is making this doable with increasing accuracy, and it means that audio becomes searchable on a par with text. The future role of AI is a fascinating area, and at Microsoft they are talking deeply about the ethics as well as the enablement it can bring. Intentionality solves a lot of problems, as machine learning frees up a lot of time from administrative tasks, and might help us avoid repeating the mistakes already made in social media. But what about areas like sentiment analysis? Yammer is looking into this functionality, as well as a bot to recognise and respond to FAQs, for everyone who would rather ask than search. Have a look at Chris’ site http://whichtoolwhen.com/ for more insight, into this and other ongoingly essentials questions. And keep up with Chris on Twitter to join the conversation.   48.08 Tools: Otter.ai Maya and Pilar talk about text into speech, using this AI-driven tool, which also works well with multiple voices too.   Instead of detailed notes on this segment, here’s the full transcript of our conversation instead, courtesy of Otter! And a brief after-word: We did some research about the privacy angles of using Otter and similar apps… Here’s one take on it from Zdnet which was unsurprising, and the main thing is that you need to read the small print and make your own mind up, whether use of any given tool is inline with your objectives and stated policies as an organisation. This does also remind us why many organisations are choosing to keep their entire digital workspace within a single ecosystem.  This is an important issue to which we shall doubtless return. 54:00 Wellbeing: Transitioning to remote as a journey of discovery At Virtual Not Distant we see this transition as an opportunity to dissect and discuss our teamwork, the ways we interact and work together - has this evolved unconsciously, or is this what we want to be doing? Have we got the courage to really examine this, and make bigger changes if we need to? This is much bigger than which tool we use and how, and we should be scrutinising this on a regular basis, not just when things go wrong. What do we each value about each aspect of our work?  It’s easy to assume others think like we do, and for both physical and digital workspaces to reflect the preferences of a minority. You can’t really enter into this discussion without some self reflection on what helps YOU do your own best work. If you are very specific and clear about what you do and don’t like, what you value and enjoy about your work, then you can think about how best to replicate this online. Transitioning to remote is a chance to reassess where we want to invest our energies and attention, as individuals and as a team.

  A special episode today and, let’s be upfront about it: a promotional one. Thinking Remote: inspiration for leaders of distributed teams is a book for those of you managing, leading, or championing your remote team, or transitioning, or considering transitioning to an office optional approach. The book is a collection of articles written by Pilar Orti and Maya Middlemiss giving an overview of different aspects of leading remote teams. And at the end of each chapter, there is a set of leadership reflections, which are questions to help you think through what you have read - or listened to, if you go for the audiobook - and help you take the next steps. The best way to support people at a distance, we believe, is by adopting a coaching mindset, and that is exactly what we've done with this book. And for some readers it has worked! If you want to read about how, I encourage you to read Teresa Douglas’ thorough review over at her site . She covers what she took from three of the chapters and ends with a sentence that we could only have dreamt of: ‘Thinking Remote’ is a thoughtful, thought provoking work that belongs on the shelves of any leader who manages office optional workers. The chapter included in this episode was written by Maya, and if you want to listen to a bit more before you buy (or if actually two chapters will do you nicely) then check out the sample of the book on any of the audio retailers, as that is the chapter on Psychological Safety, which was originally written for Online Meetings that Matter - which is taking me so long, but hopefully will come out this October - and will include that chapter again, I have to admit. The book is available on Audible, through your subscription, also in Amazon to purchase, iTunes and other audiobook distributors; and it's really not pricey, it's going to take us ages to make the production money back - also, check out your local library, because we've also done our best to distribute it to them. 05.14 mins “Is Work Causing You Stress? Going remote is not a magic pill,” from the section of the book on Remote Wellbeing. 15.32 mins if you’ve enjoyed that and fancy 12 chapters more, check out the different book formats here. As mentioned earlier, seeing as we’re here in a promotional episode for Virtual not Distant, Pilar will talk about who we work with. Maybe we could work with you… We work with curious professionals - this is very important to us, because we’re not the kind of company that likes telling others what to do - we prefer to help them discover what they should be doing. So, we need to work with people who are curious. We focus on helping managers of remote teams - virtual teams, distributed, dispersed, and also hybrid teams, those where some people are colocated (in the same space) and others not. And we look to help those who are transitioning to remote, or as we say, in not the sexiest of ways, but we can’t find another term - office optional. And interestingly, in the next podcast episode you will hear from the person who we stole that term from, Chris Slemp. We help to introduce remote teamwork practices, we help managers adapt their leadership styles to the remote space, in a number of ways. First off, for you the individual, we have loads of inspirational stuff for you to read or listen to here on our website - and we’re now creating some online courses and we’re going to build that little online academy slowly. And we’ll continue publishing books, blog posts, podcast episodes and we have a monthly mini-publication which maybe you’d like to sign up to. We also have coaching services available if you are a manager of a remote team and would like some one-one professional development. Furthermore we help organisations by working closely with HR and Leadership and Development, or the training department. And there we can deliver in person workshops, online workshops too, we can do a little bit of handholding through consultancy, but always adopting a facilitative style. We bring our knowledge - we have some in this very fast evolving space - to help you find out what the best way forward will be that will fit your culture, your set up, and the plans of your organisation - both at a developmental level and a strategic one. We can also facilitate team discussion that leads to a team plan on you will work when you’re not all in the office together at the same time. We’re also investigating how podcasting, or the creation of audio can help team members feel closer together, and also how it can create a sense of belonging in organisations - so if that’s of interest to you, get in touch. Thank you very much for reading and listening - wherever you are whatever you’re doing , enjoy.

Today we’re going global! With two great guests, collaborating remotely between the Netherlands and New York. Don’t forget to check out everything we do, over at the Virtual Not Distant website (including our new podcast guest submission form, and new formats in which Thinking Remote is available). Thank you for all the feedback on our milestone celebration episode all about celebrations! Shout-out to Jeremy and everyone in our community who commented and chatted and twittered about this one, we are so glad that this topic resonated (and we have a related blog post on celebrations ready for you now too). 06.30 21st Century Work-life - Theresa Sigillito Hollema and Surinder Kahai Theresa is the Director of Interact Global, a Netherlands-based consultancy supporting multicultural virtual teams and the organisations they belong to, and no stranger to the 21st Century Work-Life podcast.  Surinder is a Professor at the Binghamton University, in upstate New York. They met through online discovery, Theresa was drawn to Surinder’s academic work on remote team leadership, and contacted him to propose writing together.  In his turn he was keen to see more non-academic dissemination of the growing body of research on virtual teams, and a lasting collaboration was born. The interview explores in detail their approach and the rhythms of communication that they developed, and how they learned about each other and their motivations and interests and built the shared purpose and trust needed to write together. They reflect on different styles of leadership and motivation they have both observed in the workplace, and which personal qualities are demanded of a good leader for virtual teams.  Theresa and Surinder agree that a transformational style of leadership combined with a genuine care and regard for the other yields the best balance for success, but that this is definitely more difficult to do at a distance. However, distance can be used to advantage to overlook superficial differences (such as appearance and race, as well as behaviours which can lead to conflicts), to focus on the vision for the work and what you truly have in common.  It’s surely time we started to talk more about the advantages which come from not being together, advantages for the team and the work, not just the preferences of the individuals involved.  But leaders can struggle to understand and care, especially on globally distributed teams. Caring from a distance is harder, but it must be role modelled by the leader. As Surinder says, "I'm a key believer in relationships as productivity".   33.57 Tools: everytimezone.com There are many websites which help us work out timezones, but Every Timezone is a nice visual way of seeing different timezones in relation to each other on a map and slider, so that you can really picture them clearly in terms of being ahead or behind each other. The paid version is great for remote teams particularly as you can put your team members into their timezones - and don’t have to worry about what the zone is called or whether or not they’re on daylight saving, you just know that ‘Alex Time’ is 2 hours ahead, or whatever. A nice touch, particularly if you are dispersed in different parts of the world, and you can update your location when travelling - where is Alex time this week? Ah yes, Alex Time is presently 4 hours offset. This version has meeting scheduling tools as well, letting you pick and choose who should be in your meeting and invite them - assuming its at a good time for them of course.   38.32 Wellbeing - Timezone stress Do we overlook the cognitive load, of taking account of timezones in our virtual teams? Recent research from TinyPulse has examined this, and found that it does cause some stress. But a lot seems to depend on whether you have a ‘main’ timezone, relating to a headquarters or centre - which does suggest some kind of a hybrid set-up, in which those who are more than 3 hours away from that can indeed feel distant emotionally from their teammates.  And they might end up having to work hours which they find antisocial, indeed they can end up working extra hours to accommodate meetings and things which are outside of their typical day, - as Human Made found in recent research, even the stress of scheduling can make things harder on the outliers in particular.  A day is only 24 hours long, so surely no-one should have to attend a meeting any more antisocial than 8am or 8pm, for example? It’s unsurprising that results from the TinyPulse research suggest that a truly distributed team with no central zone to organise around leads to better relationships for everyone, and remember that people can choose to work in any segment of their own local day.  Your team could also be over-reliant on synchronous communication anyway - remember what we learned from Marcus Wermuth in episode 195 for inspiration here. But it’s vital not to cut off the flow of information from anybody, wherever they are located. Maybe we need to take a better look at what flexibility really can mean, and what each of us needs in order to do our best work in our best way.  What do YOU need? Tell us, via our contact form or tweet @Virtualteamw0rk.