21st Century Work Life

We have reached episode 200! We are celebrating… and we invite you to celebrate with us. Many of our listeners and guests responded to our call for contributions for this episode, and it’s wonderful to reflect the diversity of teams and people working in various ways virtually and remotely and flexibly, as expressed in the variety of ways we celebrate together. Because 21st Century Work Life is about choice and the way you want to do things. Maya and Pilar may have celebrated this milestone by connecting with listeners and how they celebrate. Sometimes it’s the smallest things - like the way emojis can convey so much emotion, in so few pixels.  (And if you’d like to communicate more with fewer words, send us your favourite emoji as a celebration of this episode!) Larger teams might create more formal ways of using their regular communications channels to celebrate in a slightly more structured way, such as Morgan Legge (interviewed in Episode 146) at Convert.com who sent us a screenshot of their Slack, where they have created channels for #humblebrag #gratitude and so on - things that are outside of the everyday work but weave the recognition and acknowledgement of each other throughout the working day. Gant Laborde (Episode 174) at Infinite Red have a #kudos channel for similar effect, and also have internal ‘ask me anything’ sessions to wrap up successful projects - which often take on a celebratory tone. Tim Burgess from ShieldGeo share that they go further and prompt all team members to contribute to a weekly round-up of shout-outs for colleagues - a lovely way to encourage people to reflect on who has helped them and how, and all interesting uses of asynchronous communications from all these teams: you don’t need to be in a special meeting or conversation, to recognise a job well done. When new people join a team that is also a cause for celebration, and Marcus Wermuth from Buffer (Episodes 188, 195 and more to come!) shared how they have a GIF party in their Slack to welcome new arrivals (because if an emoji speaks a thousand words, how about one that moves..?) Marcus also shared he likes to celebrate work things with his wife, do something out of the routine in the working week, it doesn’t have to be with his team to be a celebration. Jamon Holgrem ( Episode 183) from Infinite Red does something similar, ‘pelting’ new hires with GIFs in a special channel, while at Buffer they use an app called thread.com for calling out more business-related achievements for specific recognition and attention. Employees who are around long term can be acknowledged in other ways: 17.57 Teresa Douglas (Episode 193) from Kaplan (author of Secrets of the Online Workforce) On their 10 year anniversary with the company they celebrate with a professional caricature portrait of their team-mate, reflecting aspects of their interests and personality in a unique way - Teresa got hers last year. They also celebrate in more ad-hoc ways, including ‘secret’ team happy hours over video where all of the Canadian team got together to celebrate with one another, on the day that all their US colleagues were enjoying Memorial Day - being a multicultural team means you can enjoy each other’s local holidays in creative ways. Meetings are often the focus of team celebration of course Alison Jones (Episode 173) of practical inspiration reminded us to look beyond the work in hand, and they have a quarterly team meeting in which they ask each person to reflect on their high spots for sharing and validation - bringing a great positive energy into the meeting from the opening. (Talking of books - Maya and Pilar’s book Thinking Remote: Inspiration for Leaders of Distributed Teams is now available in audiobook. Message us for your FREE copy before the 1st July 2019, so you can celebrate with us!) 22.09 Vladimir Smolyakov Vivify Ideas As an Agile company Vivify Ideas use their cyclical retrospectives to present their projects to the wider organisation, in the presence of refreshments and a celebratory atmosphere which also helps share information within the larger group They also celebrate personal achievements and accomplishments, which is really motivating, to feel that a team of 100 people is behind you and encouraging your work. 25.00 Mark Kilby, Agile coach at Sonatype, (and veteran guest of episodes 73, 95, 175, 197... ) On Mark’s teams they use celebrations to maintain connections and also to reflect the characters of different team members - not everyone is comfortable being called out directly, or indeed doing that calling-out themselves. Some retrospectives might be very celebratory and full of appreciation, and we have to be sure to loop in the right people if they’re not in the room so they are included in the acknowledgement. Mark also shared with us how their teams all went out for, or stayed in, for lunch - including a colleague who joined them from a restaurant via webcam! In global teams, practicalities can prevent some kinds of celebration In hybrid teams it’s important that celebrations don’t take on a ‘them and us’ quality, also to acknowledge that not everyone can easily get themselves to a central location even for an epic party, so those at the greatest physical distance could feel excluded. But it does take a lot of planning to celebrate well together in a dispersed team. Jane Hatton (Episode 180) from Evenbreak used to buy donuts and icecream when their colleagues were colocated, and recognises that this is harder to replicate in remote. Their work meetings online tend to be about work - but, as they’re all friends too, they connect more informally on social media as well, reminding us that we can use the whole internet to support our teamwork relationships! 40:13 Luis Magalhaes at the DistantJob podcast Luis shared that they use Zoom calls to celebrate birthdays, which felt a bit awkward at first, but with the founder’s determination and persistence some flow was instigated (including a flow of liquid refreshment), and the team now looks forward to these friendly gatherings. ____ 42.34 And finally we had to celebrate with Ross and Maya, just getting the whole Virtual not distant team on one call for once - complete with outtakes and rustling! And we also happened to be recording on Maya’s birthday. We all enjoy doing different things on the anniversary of the day we are born, including recording podcasts.  Ross prefers to get away offline and go camping, but is planning a party this year for his birthday, and Pilar recently celebrated going out to eat with friends. We wrap up with some quick celebrations from even more previous guests, including Paul Read’s new online course, Robert Glazer making team-member’s dreams come true, Richard Mackinnon’s 40th podcast episode (featuring Pilar), and let’s remember to celebrate Pilar’s other shows Management Cafe and Wordmaze, and Maya’s Crypto Confidence show. Finally from Pilar, Maya and Ross - from our three different countries - we’re celebrating all that podcasting means to us, and celebrating each one of you wonderful people who listen to us every week. Thank you!

A special episode bringing you a bit more of our fascinating conversation with Justin Morris, because despite being overscheduled with amazing content for our regular fortnightly show for the next few weeks, we really wanted to look beyond the whole ‘Ethical Walls’ story to explore Justin’s work at Modality Systems, and his unique overview of online collaboration. Justin and his colleagues help people provision and adopt MSTeams, so that they get the most out of it, and transition to the new more collaborative space which MSTeams represents. It’s fundamentally a change management process, with a data-driven approach to successfully drive adoption. Indeed the level of tracking and data available within MSTeams is surprising, but as Pilar pointed out this could be perceived as over-intrusive surveillance. Justin explains that these analytics are also available to the user, and as such provide a lot of insight into how we manage our time and productivity. If we can make the fundamental mindset shift from suspecting surveillance to welcoming analysis, it helps to remind us that the data (and the technology which reveals it) is intrinsically neutral… how organisations and individuals use it, is what adds the nuance and intent.  The MSTeams set-up is versatile and flexible, to take account of organisational culture, individual preference, and even local regulation and legislation. But as Justin points out, many people are simply unaware of the trail of data breadcrumbs they leave behind in all online interactions, professionally and personally. Simply staying abreast of the latest updates, conversations and issues in Microsoft Teams and the digital workplace space is a full time job, but it enables Justin’s unique perspective on the needs and expectations of different organisations and teams - and their level of maturity in respect of the collaboration space, internally and externally (there’s lots more on this in episode 191 with Matt Ballantine and his fantastic cheat sheet https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/collaboration-in-organisations) Today’s conversation also explores attention and the role of video in the online space: how engaged are participants in video vs audio meetings, and the way some people are still defaulting to what is familiar, rather than exploring what the technology can do. The opposing point of view of a youtuber and a podcaster make for an interesting contrast! And serve to remind us all of the sheer versatility of online team communications today… audio, video, text, multimedia, which do you prefer, when, and for what purpose?  Justin and Pilar first connected when he answered her written question with a quick video, which also had the effect of making that interaction public for a wider audience. (You can watch the video here: https://youtu.be/KHq6k1xuxqI ) Justin is a big social media fan - well, he did meet his wife on Twitter, which was a new one for us! So connect with him @justimorris, or digitalteamwork.tv for his videos.

Nearly 200 episodes in, we have seen plenty of our own transformations both at Virtual Not Distant and the 21st Century Work Life podcast - and today we explore how organisations are adapting and changing, as the digital landscape does the same. First, a quick follow up from previous episodes - we found this great article about one of our frequently-used collaboration hubs, so make sure you check this out: 30 incredibly useful things you didn’t know Slack could do. And Pilar has been tweeting a lot lately, which was how she connected with today’s guest Euan Semple via his book Organisations Don’t Tweet, People Do. Within this book she found many resonant quotes, including “where possible sharing as much as you can when you are able to do so means that people are more likely to respect you when you say you cannot share some information,” and “Blogging can help people to understand themselves and their work better and by doing so help them to change at a profound and fundamental level” - these words were written in 2013, but resonate so well with our visible teamwork approach in 2019! Do look out for our anniversary episode up next, where we celebrate 200 podcast episode by exploring celebrations in remote teams! And look out for a special offer just for our listeners then. 09.55 21st Century Work Life: Euan Semple, author and speaker on the impact of technology at work Euan has been blogging for 18 years, and shares his words on LinkedIn, Facebook and Medium. He started blogging as a ‘memo to himself’ about the impact of technology at work, but found it resonating with a wider audience. Back in the day you had to know how to use Moveable Type in order to blog, but much has changed in the blogging world, and Euan’s career has spanned most platforms in this fast-moving landscape’s history! He now writes and speaks globally on the impact of digital transformation in the workplace. As Euan says, "It's easier to digitise our dysfunctions than to deal with them." Sometimes we need to fix things at a more fundamental level, before trying to find the right app and fix the tech, and you can’t simply leave it to the IT department to sort out organisational issues.  Consumer technology preferences are very personal but organisations make broader choices, and Euan talks about ‘shadow IT’ and how fragmented the work IT landscape has become, with individuals and teams going around official procedures to get things done, and the unforeseen consequences of change. Many users too are struggling to keep up, it’s not generational, it’s about individual transformation and development, and lots of organisations don’t help people enough - then limit the extent to which they can take initiative for themselves.  Euan’s work at the BBC has exposed him to a wide range of platforms and apps and the way they are marketed and implemented, and finds it unsurprising that people sometimes buy overpriced and over-engineered systems and then try to fit the organisation to the platform instead of the other way around. An ecosystem approach empowers the user and the organisation, putting the tech in its proper place - and we usually get this right more often in personal tech than at work, where we don’t like to question the way things are done. Hierarchies are inevitable in organisations, but decentralisation is an important trend, and designing that ecosystem requires input from those actually using it, a group which may be forever in flux anyway. Euan likes the phrase ‘an ephemeral meritocracy’ - power and influence in organisations should be relevant and timely, rather than acquired for all time. Changemakers can come from anywhere, and any level. Embracing the advantages of remote work and digital collaboration can also be overlooked, such as the effectiveness of online communication in overcoming introversion and social anxiety. The online conversation can become very polarised, but, it can also be enlightening and amazing, representing the very best of human nature. And we’re all fully rounded human beings with more to us than our online personas… which is why Euan also drives trucks as a sideline (while listening to podcasts and generating creative ideas of course) - giving him a different perspective on roles and authority and collaboration for sure. Ever an optimist, Euan likes to leave people with a sense of infinite possibility - there are opportunities everywhere, so grasp them while we can!  So do connect with euansemple.com, @euan on twitter (a handle that length is proof of an early adopter!)   42.49 What do you mean by that? Ethical Walls We spoke to Justin Morris, global strategy director of Modality Systems, to explain this idea: Sometimes in business there can be conflicts of interest when two parts of an organisation talk to one another, and this might apply particularly in highly regulated industries. This might have been managed physically in the past - such as by keycard access. Now this phenomenon is mirrored in the online workspace in Microsoft Teams, where information barriers called ‘ethical walls’ can be inserted, to stop specific teams and individuals communicating with each other. Pilar’s initial reaction to this update was instinctively negative - what about trust, integrity..? However as Justin points out in this conversation, there are very real compliance needs in many circumstances, to avoid possibilities of breaches like insider trading or client confidentiality, and organisations have to be able to demonstrate they have addressed the problem structurally to the best of reasonable ability.  The flatter hierarchies that Euan talked about above can over-facilitate conversations which are not appropriate to specific kinds of highly regulated work. Creating a trustless environment actually protects the individuals as well, both from temptation and easy accusations - while such barriers can presumably be circumvented, this would have to be deliberate and overt. Look out for a bonus episode with Justin shortly for more on this subject, and meanwhile you can connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn, and his website Digitalteamwork.tv   49.33 Wellbeing: Beyond work-life balance Knowledge workers have so many tools and devices, it can be difficult to disconnect and unplug. It was easier when we could leave it all behind in the office, as we did a generation ago. But do we feed that always-on mentality, and risk becoming addicted to our continual conversation with and about work? Does it make us feel valued and connected? How easy do you find it to avoid checking your phone in the evenings or at the weekend? Are you the master of your alerts - or is it the other way around? Everyone finds their own preferred balance, but you need to decide for yourself and be intentional about it, instead of letting default notification settings or the expectations of collaborators dictate what you are thinking about and dealing with in your own time? We need to talk about how we feel as well as what we think, and be conscious about our boundaries. Don't forget to check out Virtual Not Distant, for our newsletter, blog and services, if you enjoyed this podcast.

In this episode, Maya and Pilar call for a halt to some of the remote madness! Where’s that ‘reset’ button... But first to follow up on the ongoing Twitter conversation from our last episode, about whether remote is suitable for everyone - thank you Bart and everybody who joined in, and do check out Maya’s recent article about this idea of challenging your own assumptions, on Medium - because it all relates to today’s theme on the flipside: while some people cannot imagine working out of the regular office, those of us who love remote work are in danger of becoming so evangelical about the benefits that we can risk losing sight of the potential downsides. So we need to talk about some of the pitfalls out there. Don't forget to check out our book Thinking Remote or sign up for the email series https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/books Starting with conversations - 5.50 Synchronous and Asynchronous Conversations Most of the tools and apps we use in remote collaboration offer us the ability to communicate in a wide range of modes, and this can increase confusion about whether a conversation is happening in real-time, or encouraging response over a longer time period. We can have lots of different kinds of conversation in our online teams - check out also Jason Fried’s new book “It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work”,  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doesnt-Have-Be-Crazy-Work/dp/0008323445  from which we draw the insightful quote, that we want to go towards ‘a culture of eventual response, rather than immediate response’ - regardless of what the tool itself can do, this culture respects the time management and thought processes of the correspondent. If we frame our communications with that intent, we’ll remove the pressure to reply straight away, whether our colleagues are head down in deep work, or fast asleep in another continent. And it will help us make our communications purposeful and deliberate… there’s a place for chit-chat, a place for talking about the work, another for actually doing the work. What are you putting out there? 14.45 And what about the tools themselves? Back to basics! The tool shouldn’t be leading you into an expectation of how to use it… Even email can get used as a real-time conversation, in a ghastly chain of reply-alls, but that doesn’t mean we should. We have so many apps to choose from, so choose well.  If you master your own notifications on your various devices you can take back control… This blog post from 2 years ago, Your Notification Settings are Your Friends will help you, as will this great suggestion from regular listener Teresa The productivity pit: how Slack is ruining work (with a fabulous gif summing up the whole problem). And don’t forget that a lot the business tools we use can share richer content like audio or video, all of which can be asynchronous. A great way to share an idea, or a screencast, and if you want considered feedback it might be best to give people a chance to think about it, rather than gathering people into a meeting where they’re expected to respond immediately. If you have a clear communications strategy you won’t be searching for that remark or file wondering whether it was on email or Slack or in a document… and this includes being unafraid to say ‘I’m moving this conversation over to its channel on XXX’ - managing the conversation, so it continues to serve its purpose. 30.10 Speaking of meetings: Just because you can do something in remote work, doesn’t mean you should. You can join a meeting from anywhere, like your car or a park bench - but if you need to refer to documents in that meeting, then you probably need to be indoors, at a desktop device. Are you relying on someone else to share the doc, to provide more attention than you are, to the conversation? How respectful does this seem, to the person you’re meeting with, whether that’s internal or external..? 33.33 Designing the workflow and conversation The way we create the work in the first place can shape what we need to do to talk about it - if we design ways to make the teamwork visible, then we don’t need to report on it in a meeting, or go and update a task list somewhere else… Anything which takes you out of the work, to report on the work, is inefficient, and likely less accurate - and if you’re collaborating online then all the information must be available anyway, it’s just a case of data visualisation and smart design of the systems. For example, a Trello board shows the whole team, as well as the manager, what everybody is working on right now and what’s next, without anyone having to go and ask about it, or get others to stop what they’re doing to explain… We’ve got lots of suggestions as to how and why you should share your work, as part of the natural workflow, without being too noisy about it - and we’ve got lots of information in Thinking Remote 39 30 Because, it can all go wrong sometimes. Remote doesn’t always make things better: Tools can be used for the wrong reasons - or to fix the wrong things. Technology can be used to control, instead of to enable and empower.   Managers can project their own preferences and hangups on to global teams now, instead of just the folks in their office We can use tools to track and monitor the wrong things, and undermine the trust that is vital for successful work in distributed teams We can duplicate effort and waste time, because 46.10 And finally, we can get silly about what remote/office-optional work actually means day to day. How cool is your co-working, how exotic is your home office, how much do you travel? We love that remote work enables you to design the lifestyle which suits you best, and we don’t need hashtags and competitive glamorous Instagram images to define what that should look like. If you love hibernating at home, go for it, and if you love the London vibe and commuting to a central office then that’s great too. It’s just as exciting -or predictable - as you want to make it.  So don’t anyone else dictate your aspirations. Back to basics indeed! 50:50 What do you mean by that? Visual Facilitation We asked coach and facilitator, Andi Roberts, to help us explain: Using visuals to support (rather than take over) meeting processes helps to engage participants and bring different senses into the conversation, and it can help to handover power to the participants. Visual tools can be prepared in advance to interact with as a template, such as for a roadmap for a process to be completed, or they can be co-created in the moment - flipcharts and sharpies at the ready, as participants draw how a situation makes them feel, or what an outcome would look like. Enhancing interaction, showing rather than telling, and enabling new ways of expressing… You don’t need to be an artist - if you draw how you feel about something then explain it, you articulate that feeling in a way that might not have been possible directly. You can reach a deeper level of thinking, and ideas which are not always easy to articulate. It also deepens connections between the participants, which has lasting benefits. You can connect with Andi on Twitter too, and listen to more in Episode 177. 55.42 Tool: Scrivener Scrivener is a great tool for long-form writing, such as a book, perfect for organising lengthy and complex content as well as research. It has tools for outlining and planning, whether you’re the kind of writer who does that in advance or when you’re halfway through it. It lets you work with huge documents, either all at once or in sections, and manage the structure as you go along. It’s good for creating a distraction-free environment in full screen, and less distracting than using a cloud-based word processor - in fact it’s beautifully designed to help you do one thing only: write the book.  Yes, you can write a book without it. But the right tool for the job makes a big difference. Not cheap at $45 but you can try it for free, and it’s a one-off charge rather than software as a service, also you can install it on more than one device - it’s now available for windows and iOS as well as the mac. We’d love to see collaboration tools in the next version please, Literature and Latte!

Welcome, from the team at VirtualNotDistant.com Can you contribute to our 200-episode anniversary show? We’d like to hear about your celebrations, within your team/community… Please send your words or even audio to Pilar so we can celebrate celebrations together!  We love to hear from our listeners and bring multiple voices and points of view onto the show whenever we can. We have some great conversations on Twitter too, like this one where we discussed changes in Microsoft Teams, some of which concerned us - like the introduction of ‘ethical walls’, to separate people in different teams and prevent them from using the platform to collaborate. What do you think?  We were thrilled to get a reply from Justin Morris who helps people professionally with adoption of Microsoft Teams, and he even made a video reply - which definitely helped us to understand the potential compliance and conflict of interest issues. Pilar has also been guesting on the Distant Job podcast with Luis Magalhaes, where we had a great conversation about visible teamwork - and feedback you might not have expected. Do check it out for a great listen.  And thank you for recommending us Bart Van de Rooy on LinkedIn (as part of a very interesting conversation about the pros and cons of distributed working). We’re keeping an eye on Google Podcasts and their transcript creation ideas (as discussed on the Libsyn podcast The Feed), anything which brings us to a wider audience - do tell us how you catch our show (or if there’s anywhere else we should be). And don’t miss our monthly newsletter, and our new free email coaching sequence, exploring and developing the ideas in Thinking Remote 16.48 The voices behind the book: Mark Kilby and Johanna Rothman, authors of From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams We have been waiting for this one to be published for a long time, and you definitely don’t need to be an Agile practitioner to benefit greatly from it. Mark is an Agile coach and long term friend of this show, Johanna’s background is in product development, where she consults and writes prolifically.  Software development is often seen as challenging for online collaboration, but the authors felt strongly that there were lots of strategies worth considering, and case studies that many could learn from. Practical industry issues include timezone overlap, or lack of - and balancing the iteration of the work with the cadence of the regular checkpoints and milestones. Scrum is all about fixed timeboxing and needs some flexible thinking to apply to a team who cannot all work at the same time, it can be done. The Agile approach of experimenting and exploring and keeping what works, applies well to optimising these rhythms. They’ve also written a great article about how they wrote the book as remote collaborators, “You Have to Say More There: Effective Communication in a Distributed Agile Team”, which resonated significantly for the Virtual Not Distant team, and is a highly worthwhile read on its own. This approach led to a really close collaborative process mostly writing and editing synchronously in real-time, producing a very consistent and unified tone of voice for the book as a whole even though they brought different stories and experiences to each element of the content. They also delve into the feedback and consultation process, and the LeanPub approach for writing and getting feedback fast - an Agile approach to creating content, that helped ensure the book truly reflected the needs and truths of its audience. And the conversation on tools leads into the bigger one we’re continually having about the tech ecosystem itself - and to another great article from Mark and Johanna For Distributed Agile Teams, It’s Not All about the Tools (because it’s more about the why behind the tool than the what). The Agile mindset clearly has a great deal to offer to remote teams on so many levels. Do check out the book, available from all the usual places, and of course keep up with Mark and Johanna via their respective websites, where you can also sign up for the newsletter.  1.08.46 Oh no, my teams gone remote! And how will I rally the troops! We all have different mental models of the typical leader. (Pilar mentions one she observed in the TV series Bad Banks.) One leadership archetype we often think of is the ‘hero’. The charismatic, inspiring orator, delivering team-talks which get everybody enthused to action - but this might not easily translate to the online space. If we rely on that group energy to pump up the motivation with our personal passion, it just won’t work so well (though there are routes to this, for example, high-quality video). A mindset shift to being an enabler within the team and a champion of the team, relating to our colleagues as individuals rather than a mass to be moved collectively. We have to make use of all the channels and tools we have at our disposal to connect effectively and tap into what motivates each person, as part of our leadership role, and our management practice. See you next time!

It's Friday and we are Fickle! Pilar shares her conversation with Theresa Sigillito Hollema on creating task interdependence in virtual teams. Check out Theresa's culture cubes: http://www.interact-global.net/category/working-across-cultures/culture-cubes/ Over on Twitter, at @Virtualteamw0rk thanks to Tim for his feedback https://twitter.com/planetburgess/status/1116813859627520001 on Maya's article on accessibility in remote teams https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/blog/enabling-remote-accessibility Thanks also to Teresa for her contribution to our discussion of the article on the health dangers of hot desking: https://twitter.com/teresamdouglas/status/1120413880289771521 And finally, Pilar reminds us that loneliness is not always the result of a lack of human contact: "I’m never lonely when I’m on my own, but I feel lonely when I’m with people I don’t connect with." And thanks to Brie for her interaction too! https://twitter.com/PilarOrti/status/1123649055542927366

21st century work-life has many differences from the traditional paradigm, and one of these differences is the many ways we can use technology to make our work visible to others.  Even when we’re working remotely the internet can remove the walls, and we can decide consciously whether and at what point our work will be of value to others if we choose to share it.  It’s all about visible teamwork – and the way this has evolved from ‘working out loud’, to become something far more deliberate and conscious. We are used to this as an internal concept, how we share with one another (and we’ll explore this in far greater detail when we bring you our special series on ‘Thinking Remote’ and our upcoming training course). But what about how we share publicly, when our sharing becomes part of our brand expression and content dissemination? Even when we’re recording our podcast, we’re talking about our work with an awareness that there’s an audience, a third party to the conversation, which brings qualitative differences to how we think about and discuss what we are working on… Someone who has been "working out loud” https://blog.freistil.it/working-out-loud-doesnt-mean-being-noisy-c71010e0d236 in the team for a long time, and since evolved the practice to share outside of his organisation is Jochen Lillich, from Freistil.it. (Pilar actually recorded this last year, but he’s only doing more of it now!). 14.08 The voice behind the blog: Jochen Lillich https://blog.freistil.it/turning-working-out-loud-to-11-live-coding-on-twitch-7dface39203e Friestil is the German word for ‘freestyle’, and his blog post explains how Jochen came to be livestreaming his work on Twitch, about as ‘out loud’ as you can possibly work. Twice a week at fixed times he does his coding in public, narrating in real time as he does the work, and also managing a live chat about what he’s doing. It’s like a screencast, but completely live and unedited, radically transparent. As a gamer, progressing from recording for internal use to livestreaming publicly felt like a natural transition for Jochen, and reflects Freistil’s transparency values – as coding is an unpredictable environment, things don’t always go to plan. The community - whose numbers grow steadily – can even suggest and help out when things get stuck, and Jochen feels strongly that his work has improved as a direct result of this regular broadcasting. Committing to the twice-weekly slots creates structure and accountability as well as a learning environment - an interesting solution perhaps, to the discipline issues some people struggle with when working from home… As well as weekday sessions, Jochen is also live coding on Saturdays 3.30pm, to reach people who can’t make sessions during the working week.  Tune in here if you’re curious to see Jochen in action! https://www.twitch.tv/fullstacklive _________ So how else could this kind of radical transparency be used to make our work visible? Maya is the first to admit that as an introverted writer, she couldn’t imagine anything worse than ‘writing out loud’ in this way (and declined Pilar’s challenge to try it!).  But Jason Fried from Basecamp has done just this and created a Youtube channel called ‘Getting Real – how we work at Basecamp’ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdx5Dk3EWTe2i8YDA7bfl6g (their podcast Behind the Scenes https://rework.fm/go-behind-the-scenes/ is also a great example of their approach).  Maybe it naturally suits certain industries, like the very open-source based software industry, to work in this way - though it obviously can work for collaborative writing projects. But at what point could ego get in the way and offset the benefits the Hawthorne effect (where we raise our game because others are watching) brings to the situation? Lots to consider… But sharing this way can only increase informal learning within the organisation, not least as it provides a focus, for watching and conversation (we found evidence for this in “Non-formal learning and tacit knowledge in professional work”, by Michael Eraut, British Journal of educational psychology, 2000, 70, 113-136).  It also reflects the blended aspect of organisational community, in which people can move fluidly between roles such as employment, contracting, consumption, being a brand ambassador (have a look at episode 193 when we discussed an article about just this kind of silo-busting).  Certainly in hybrid teams, where remote employees might be concerned about their visibility, livestreaming certainly adds new possibilities for making yourself and your work manifest - both within and without the organisation. Red flags: obviously there might be security aspects, considerations of intellectual property and personal data. With coding in particular there must be risks of disclosing sensitive content accidentally.  It requires very explicit understanding of boundaries – what is part of the public story? It’s not about sharing everything, but sharing meaningfully and appropriately. For more on this, Pilar recommends reading “Show Your Work” by Austin Kleon. Even the most transparent organisation has some ‘trade secrets’ – and once again, really conscious and deliberate practice must be the solution.  But it’s great to see the opening of content like company handbooks online, such as MeetEdgar and Buffer (who share so much! Even salary data! https://open.buffer.com/transparent-salaries/), and it’s an excellent way of communicating company culture to potential new hires. Start with your own team, if you need to get comfortable with greater levels of spontaneous transparency and visible teamwork… Take a look at our podcasting products, for your team or organisation, as a potential first step. If you don’t want to share your face or your screen, just sharing your voice is amazingly intimate, and reminds us of the variety of ways we can communicate   57.11 Richard Mackinnon: Workplace Psychology Definitions Today we have 3 more fascinating definitions from the workplace psychology expert Richard Mackinnon: Psychological Contract – we have legal contracts of employment in the workplace, but it can’t encompass every aspect of what we do. We supplement this with built expectations, particularly with our direct management… But if these expectations are not discussed, it’s easy for the other party to breach this ‘psychological contract’ (eg “if I work late tonight, I can leave early on Thursday”). Explicit discussion matters - exposing the expectations below the waterline really helps avoid misunderstandings and potential conflicts (see episode 19 of My Pocket Psych podcast for more on this) Stress – What Richard experiences when Pilar asks him to define complex terms in a few sentences! But true stress is when the demands upon us exceed our capacity to deal with it all, and as such it’s highly subjective, and hard to deal with. Identifying the source is a good start, because you can only reduce stress by tackling its cause. See episode 13 of My Pocket Psych for greater detail. Resilience – from adverse circumstances can come personal growth, and make us stronger… Increased self-awareness, learning from experience, and new perspectives. It’s not about bouncing back to where we were before, but being somewhere new on our developmental journey, a point we only reach as a result of what we have experienced. More on this in episode 16 of My Pocket Psych This concludes our series of definitions with Richard, but check out My Pocket Psych, on which Pilar is a regular co-host, and worklifepsych.com for lots of additional inspiring content about the way individuals and teams function.          

Welcome, to all listeners - our audience is a vital part of this podcast, so please stay involved, we love to hear from you. Don’t forget to tell us about your favourite tools, how you use them, books and podcasts which have inspired you… email, or drop us a quick note, it’s always great to have more listener voices on the show.  Remember how easy it is to share audio files, and they bring a new dimension to our sense of connection in the remote space. Look out also for the 6 part email coaching series, written to accompany Thinking Remote: Inspiration for Leaders of Distributed Teams - you can sign up for the free coaching series, even if you haven’t read the book yet, and thank you to everyone reviewing and feeding back your thoughts on both products, we really appreciate it. 08.02 21ST CENTURY WORK-LIFE: MARCUS WERMUTH Marcus is the mobile lead at Buffer, and joined us in our first episode of 2019 from maker to manager, but we wanted to catch up with him again to talk about connecting across a global team. At Buffer they try to avoid giving undue weight to location in recruitment, because it can distract from the hiring criteria which really matter and people move around anyway - so geographical factors can always be overcome. But they now Marcus’ team work across 5 timezones from Taiwan to San Francisco, which has made real-time team calls a problem.  So they have implemented alternatives, including a useful tool Carrot for sharing updates asynchronously. Communicating in this way has helped them to be more deliberate and intentional, as well as enabling introverted team members to shine in a way that online calls don’t always facilitate. It creates an interesting balance between the other channels of communication, to use this tool specifically for sharing updates on a fixed day each week, but across multiple timezones. Bringing an entrepreneurial mindset to such temporally distributed work is essential, because micromanagement does not work where multiple timezones are in play.  Autonomy, initiative and self-motivation are needed, to get things done as part of a team, while the rest of the team is offline or asleep. Marcus considers that there is no such thing as over-communication in remote - you have to repeat things more than once, and this also fits with his personal principles of total transparency and trust within the team and organisation, very much in line with Buffer’s publicly stated position as well.  Artificial harmony (which we have discussed in a previous episode) has to be avoided at all costs, people need to feel safe to say what they really think - a successful team isn’t everybody being happy all of the time, because differences of viewpoint are natural and important. For this reason Buffer have stopped calling themselves a ‘family’ - qualitatively the relationships are, or should be, very different, and blurring boundaries is unhelpful. Keep in touch with Marcus on Twitter - he’s always happy to connect and expand his network. 35.40 REMOTE WELLBEING: THE PERILS OF “PRODUCTIVITY HACKS” We try not to talk about “tips” and “hacks” at Virtual Not Distant on principle, and this article from Fast company Science explains why productivity hacks and resolutions are practically destined to fail usefully encapsulates why - the fact that change is a process, not an outcome you can check off and mark as done (and productivity is a long-term practice, not something you can simply apply at a stroke). of space between stimulus and response. We can learn and develop improved psychological flexibility. Creating sustainable change in habit and behaviour is challenging, but incredibly worthwhile - so you need to project-manage it as a change process, and allocate the effort and resources, as well as accounting for the potential opportunity costs of making change (such as learning curves or temporary productivity dips as you embed a new practice). It’s not about a new resolution or tool or app, which is going to make the change for you.  There are no shortcuts. And while you can change more than one thing at a time, focussing on specifics and ensuring new habits are securely adopted before moving on, can create more lasting transformation. Change is not a single moment in time, it’s iterative, creative, and needs to be in sync with our fundamental nature - something to bear in mind when working with a team, containing a range of character types and different motivations. So there is no off-the-shelf “hack” which is going to make it all happen for us, as individuals or managers. Sorry about that... Pilar also commented on this article in Ep 31 My Pocket Psych, and see also this article from Atlassian, Productivity - hacks or myths. 44:05 RECOMMENDED TOOL: VIVIFY SCRUM   Vladimir Smolyakov is the social media manager for Vivify Scrum, which was a platform they built initially to fulfil an internal need at Vivify Ideas for managing Agile software development processes. It works right out of the box to implement the Scrum framework (though it can be used with Kanban type frameworks), with great interactivity and flexibility whether for small teams or large organisations. It’s composed of various transparent boards users can invite participants to with embedded Scrum tools (backlog, sprint planning, time tracking/estimation, checklists etc), in order to speed up and streamline the project management process. The time tracking operates as a standalone app or browser plugin. They also offer a Scrum education portal , to provide accessible and engaging information about Agile and Scrum for all of their clients.   The app is offered on a freemium basis, with pro features unlocked on purchase after a free trial.   Vlad and his colleagues actively welcome user feedback, so that they can continue to improve and develop their product - so do email or tweet them with your thoughts.

Welcome back A small correction to a recent discussion, when we look at Dr. Heejung Chung’s research about gender and remote work – we’re glad to point out that the work we’d referred to as UK only actually had much broader scope, and we strongly recommend checking out the twitter thread with links to the original research: https://twitter.com/HeejungChung/status/1106489489998991360. We love our Twitter community  - and glad to shout out a few more of our friends on this episode, with gratitude for making us think and grow, always. And we have had some great conversations on LinkedIn too – so many ways of connecting in in our 21st-century work.   12.38 21st Century Work-Life: Nick Steenhout Speaker trainer and consultant on web accessibility Web accessibility is the practice of making web content and apps accessible to all users, regardless of ability /disability. It covers so many things from colour to responsiveness to keyboard-accessible elements… And for developers, there are so many things which can be done, all of which make sites better for people without disabilities too. And when Google remains the biggest screen reader for every site, it’s definitely a win-win. After a quarter of a century of the internet, the same accessibility issues come up time and again - and new frameworks still get developed and released without these considerations built-in. It can be an unknown unknown, which nobody addresses due to lack of foresight, through to tagging the idea on as an afterthought… ‘oh, a third-party plugin can handle that’.   But none of it is rocket science (and some good baking analogies help make accessibility very accessible). And advances in tech such as voice recognition, and the cost of assistive devices, make things better all the time. For all of us. And Nic has a very 21st Century Work Life of his own, living in a 40ft RV – when we spoke he was in national parkland in British Columbia, enjoying the digital nomad life with his partner, despite Canadian winter temperatures and rationing mobile data. He doesn’t find work-life balance to be too challenging, as a wheelchair user on wheels, and has more space in the RV than some city apartments – space guaranteed to be available and accessible, and often with a lovely view. Check out Nic’s podcast, A11y Rules https://a11yrules.com/ Twitter @vavroom And his website https://incl.ca/  31.29 What do you mean by that? Welcome back workplace psychologist Richard McKinnon, with some great definitions for us: Personality: Your way of looking at the world, the lens through which you make sense of it all. We all have a comfort zone and a preferred pattern of communicating and interacting. But it is plastic and subject to evolution. Psychological flexibility: A set of thinking and behaviour skills supporting good coping and adjustment to the world around us, resilience in the face of change. The ability to put a bit of space between stimulus and response. We can learn and develop improved psychological flexibility. https://www.worklifepsych.com/psychologicalflexibility/ Locus of Control – Defining how we ascribe our influence and impact on the world, and the extent to which we attribute things that happen to ourselves, or to external factors. Developing a strong internal local of control puts you in charge of what happens to you! Learn more in Episode 3 of My Pocket Psych https://www.worklifepsych.com/podcast/ep003-psychological-flexibility-paying-attention-to-now/   47.40 Recommended Tool: Calendly A simple scheduling tool which works with Gcal and other calendars, to enable 2 more people to fix up a meeting when they’re both free. An easy way to avoid the endless emails back and forth about availability, and you can choose different appointment types to book (eg by length), and it also magically takes account of different time zones neatly for you. A range of paid tiers gives you access to group scheduling too – plan meetings with groups of people, wherever they are. Which is very powerful for distributed teams, and anyone working with clients and associates anywhere in the world. Just remember to block off all your unavailable time, so no one fixes a meeting with you!  

Just Maya and Pilar’s voices in today’s episode, and a single ‘voice behind the book’ segment: because this marks the official launch of Thinking Remote: Inspiration for Leaders of Distributed Teams. All these posts are curated from our own Virtual Not Distant blog https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/blog, and Maya selected the initial content following a thorough review. She specifically sought out the evergreen themes discussing principles which are broadly applicable across any team or workplace, and do not relate to tools or projects which are likely to date. The book has four sections: Laying the foundations for Remote work, Wellbeing, How are we doing? Looking Out. And, at the end of each of the 13 chapters there are some leadership reflections designed to get you thinking about the material and relating it to your own experiences and situation. So the book role-models the Virtual Not Distant coaching approach, and actually, it also role models the coaching mindset, which is so essential when running a remote team. This mindset is also reflected in the accompanying email series and follow-up course for the book, which is designed to help all readers get the material off the page and into their teams and organisations where they can make a difference. We look forward to your feedback and reviews, because everything we create is inspired by our community here, our podcast listeners and blog readers and social interactors. Everything worthwhile is a collaboration – and we worked with a great editor, Lisa, through Reedsy.com, Manuel did our cover, and Simon designed the interior of our print version, the e-versions have been done by myself on Vellum. Thanks also to Marija for being involved at a distance and thanks to Ross for putting this episode together, as always... To bring this book to you our readers, in as many formats and stores as we can - https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/books If you are having trouble getting hold of it or if you have any thoughts on it, let us know https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/contact-us