21st Century Work Life

In this episode, Pilar talks to Olivia Jones, a freelance copywriter based in London about being freelance and dealing remotely with clients.  Check out Olivia’s blog: http://goldenpulse.co.uk/ The transition to freelance and deciding what area to focus on. Working with freelancers in other countries when she was a project manager. How being a project manager has helped her to go freelance. How can you figure out if a client is going to be a good person to work with and what the barriers might be to fruitful collaboration.  What is copywriting? How Olivia initiates the conversation with a client. Would anything they say put her off? Olivia’s creative process; how she creates the right work environment for herself. Olivia’s health and fitness blog and the opportunities it creates. http://oliviathecopywriter.co.uk/ Working remotely with clients. (She might sound like one, but Olivia’s not a “millennial”.) Freelancers are always learning! Olivia on Twitter @imissolivia

In this episode, Pilar advocates for an Office Optional approach, where the office becomes one more place where we can work from and how the nature of how we work in those spaces needs to change.   Why “Office Optional” is a slightly better term than using some of the words that suggest there is a large physical distance between team members. (There is a complementary blog post to this episode: https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/blog/office-optional ) When will sitting next to each other benefit our work?   How “agile working” and “flexible working” are being used as terms that refer only to the physical space where we work from. If we don’t have an option to use an office and we are missing sharing a physical space, why? Pinpoint why and see whether there are ways of working to fulfill those needs. (eg. Push to talk, set times at the computer etc.)   How some companies use their often unused spaces to bring external ideas into the building. Check out the article: Smart Office Buildings: What Features do People Really Want? http://www.worktechacademy.com/smart-office-buildings-features-people-really-want/   Pilar mentions the Work 2.0 Conference, here’s the link to episode https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/work-2-conference Why companies might want to encourage people to use the office. What do people look for in an office building? As always, please send your thoughts and questions through https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/contact-us/

In this episode, Pilar and Lisette discuss a few articles that have caught their eye over the past weeks.  (1) Pilar and Lisette discuss a worrying new statistic: one in five employees in the UK are afraid to ask their managers to move onto flexible working. What's going on? Articles about flexible working: http://www.bmmagazine.co.uk/news/one-five-employees-afraid-ask-flexible-working/ https://www.fastcompany.com/3059295/inside-three-companies-that-are-innovating-flexible-schedules https://cms.aviva.com/media/upload/Aviva_Working_Lives_Report_2017_INTERACTIVE.pdf (2) We talk about Apple's new headquarters. The dangers of silos vs a great place where people want to work. Can buildings adapt as fast as they need to? The article about Apple’s New HQ https://hbr.org/2017/06/why-apples-new-hq-is-nothing-like-the-rest-of-silicon-valley (3) Article on the perils of being the only remote worker. The need to have empathy with those who are remote when most of us are collocated.  https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TragediesOfTheRemoteWorkerLooksLikeYoureTheOnlyOneOnTheCall.aspx (4) Some random updates. Pilar recommends using the microphone on your smartphone’s keyboard to reduce typing into it. Pilar’s new book “Hi, I’m Here for a Recording. The ordinary life of a voiceover artist.”  is out now “https://pilarwrites.com/2017/06/25/the-ordinary-life-of-a-voiceover-artist/ Lisette recommends an editor: The-editrice.com Pilar talks about taking part in the 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: https://alisonjones.leadpages.co/proposal-challenge/

In this episode Pilar talks to David Horowitz, co-founder and CEO of Retrium about why he created a tool to guide teams through retrospectives and how he’s growing a distributed business. How we fall in and out of love with tools. The origins of Retrium. Pre-build facilitation techniques in a package. https://www.retrium.com/ (If you would like some inspiration on running retrospectives or review meetings, check out episode 19 of this podcast. https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/retrospectives) From idea to finding a co-finder and building a business. Recruiting in a distributed team. Finding the right people for a remote team. What helps people gather as an online community? What helps a person create connections in a community? Do people need to be good at “being remote”? What can you tell if a person is a good match for your distributed company? Retrium’s latest hires and the role that social media can play. The importance of culture in remote teams and distributed businesses. (Yes, it does play a role, it is still important!) Emergence of culture and defining culture. Let’s talk about Retrium! How has the product developed and how has the initial vision changed and remained the same? How do you decide which facilitation tool you incorporate? From team improvement to organisational / across-teams improvement. How do you use a facilitation technique in a way that can lead to change? The four different types of retrospectives in Retrium. Retrium is also being used by all kinds of companies, not just within Agile. How Retrium uses Retrium. The Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjKivZc6adZJgYbj2KJTFbg https://www.retrium.com/ The ebook “Become a Retrospective Rockstar” https://www.retrium.com/ebook/become-a-retrospective-rockstar

In this episode, Pilar and Lisette talk about their recent experience being involved in a day online event on working in virtual teams. This might be of interest if you are involved in organising a virtual event for your team or community.  visit www.virtualnotdistant.com Lisette’s update, she’s found the perfect editor! The Internal Affair and Virtual Team Talk The diversity of opinions even in a group that shares a passion for making remote work, work. What happened at this event? Why it was an “internal affair” and not a “conference”. How we organised the event collaboratively, asynchronously. Pilar’s experience facilitating an audio-only session and how she discovered what she needs as a facilitator. Thoughts from the chats on building culture asynchronously and taking an “office optional” approach. “The company behind Wordpress is closing its San Francisco office because their employees never show up.” https://qz.com/1002655/the-company-behind-wordpress-is-closing-its-gorgeous-san-francisco-office-because-its-employees-never-show-up/   Pilar shares her impressions from a talk she attended by Sinead Lynch, Chair of Shell UK: we don’t need slides when we have something to say!

In this episode, Pilar talks to Brie Reynolds, Senior Career Specialist at Flexjobs, about taking control of your career when working remotely. www.virtualnotdistant.com Flexjobs has been around now for ten years, enabling people to find telecommuting jobs and other flexible jobs. Brie works there as Senior Career Specialist.  Brie's job is to help people find those jobs and she does so in a variety of ways, including organising webinars where representative from companies looking for new employees can interact directly with job seekers. Can you imagine the cost of doing that in the collocated space? In this episode,  Brie shares how she built a team of writers at FlexJobs How and why she moved from full time to part time https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-leaning-out-actually-helped-me-lean-learning-from-brie-reynolds Why she created a course for people who are recovering from a layoff.  https://www.linkedin.com/learning/recovering-from-a-layoff/ She talks about career progression in remote work. And we hear her response to an article by Jack Welch. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/working-remote-kill-your-career-jack-welch Connect with Brie on Twitter And be check out the great resources for working remotely on Flexjobs.com And Remote.co

In this episode, Pilar and Lisette analyse a recent article by Patrick Lencioni where he recommends to stay away from working as a virtual team. Visibility in Virtual Teams from the website. Scroll down the Inspiration page. https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/inspiration Other podcasts: Management Café Evidence Talks 1) Lisette's holiday Why it's so important to keep down stress levels. David Burkus podcast Radio Free Leader episode The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking with Judah Pollack http://davidburkus.com/2017/05/0816-the-art-and-practice-of-breakthrough-thinking-with-judah-pollack/ (2) Catch up on Agile conference and Work 2.0 Aginext http://2017.aginext.io/ For more on Work 2.0 listen to episode 125 of this podcast. https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/work-2-conference https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/blog/four-cs-teamwork (3) We recap the five dysfunctions of a team and analyse this article. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/virtual-teams-worse-than-i-thought-patrick-lencioni (4) How Microsoft is supporting their mobile workers https://www.wework.com/blog/posts/city-as-a-campus-the-future-of-work (5) Two more tools from Lisette that look promising. Telepresence Robot Ohmni Pukka Team

Welcome to a special episode of the 21st Century Work Life podcast, where I share with you my main reflections after attending the Work 2.0 conference last May 2017, in London and where I bring in the thoughts and opinions of other attendees. Don't forget to visit www.virtualnotdistant.com   Thank you too to everyone who very kindly agreed to taking part in this episode, it means that listeners get a much more varied view of the world of work, and it’s always great to hear different voices.   Work 2.0 consisted of the Future of Work conference and the Wellbeing conference. I attended mainly sessions on the Future of Work track – but I also managed to pop into a couple of sessions of the wellbeing track. I won’t go into the content of everything I heard, but I just wanted to give you an idea of what the main themes were. The first thing that I noticed when looking through the programme was the focus on Activity Based Working. Now, I hadn’t really heard of this in the context of organisations, but it’s basically about designing the office so that people can choose where they work from depending on what they’re doing – the activity they’re doing.   https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/blog/four-cs-teamwork https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/favourite-tools   I really enjoyed the presentation by Dr Nicola Millard from BT who talked about people needing to do four types of activities. Those involving Collaboration, Communication, Concentration and Contemplation. I love this last one, it really acknowledges that part of our work is to think.   Dr Millard presented a few numbers, including the percentage of people at companies who work from the office. Some interesting differences and I’m very biased in the numbers I took down: UK, 48%; Spain 53% and Germany 61%. This is a similar distribution to the recent Eurofund study on working from anywhere. Another interesting number: 82% of high performance companies provide anytime/anywhere collaboration tools, which also raises the question, probably for the less high performing companies, do we know what the tools are for? And talking of tools, while I was wondering around the exhibition floor, I came across the team from Sapenta, an ‘All-in-one’ software for getting work done.” , where they are paying attention to Contextual Communication. Guest segment: Colm Digby from Sapenta www.sapenta.com   Other stuff I jotted down in my notebook (thank you Podcast Website for the freebie last year at New Media Europe, by the way) : Shoulder bag workers   Isolationists in a company,   Echo chambers forming around teams where there is no cognitive diversity.   Getting the balance right of We/Me; yes, we need people who are different, but there also needs to be some commonality, as we tend to gravitate those we can identify with. The first panel session was around How workplace design can meet the needs of tomorrow, and because it was in the main hall, it was difficult to take questions from the audience, the whole audience was there, so the organisers used Slido, www.sli.do an app where people can post their questions and they are then shared on the screen, and other people can vote on the question too. I’ll share some of these questions with you in a second, but what I found most fun is that it can quickly become the way in which audience interacts with organisers or presenters, so at one point someone posted, Hey, we can’t hear at the back. It was really quick adoption of tech to suit the user, don’t you think? Guest Segment: Paula and Eduardo from Schneider Electric   David Fano from wework.com really highlighted how we’re moving away from the workplace as somewhere where we go to work and start to focus on the place where we create relationships – this comes very much from the coworking space point of view, where you go to be with other people out of choice.   Technology has given us this choice and I’ll bang on another drum to say that Flexible working is not working from home – a lot of the time it is, because some people like that, but sometimes it’s about not working in close proximity with your team, but you might well be with other people. Or you might even be with other people inside your organisation, or with clients, but there is an element of choice in how or where you do that from.   It’s time to share a story with you – I was just going to share it with you myself, but I thought I might as well bring the person who told it into the episode.   Guest segment: Katharine Metters from Posturite www.posturite.co.uk I have to say, that’s the most extreme story I’ve heard about not supporting your employees when you need to work from home. I would have loved to know more about why on Earth somebody needed a photocopy in their home to do their job in this day and age, or why such person was being forced to work from home… Anyway, I hope you chuckled, or cried… Ok, let me share now a more thoughtful approach to designing how people work, and a wonderful example of how tech can be used to fuel that intrinsic motivation that lurks inside all of us.   Case Study from Heathrow’s Innovation Department on their Enterprise Mobility Programme.   Neil Usher, who was Workplace Director at Sky. I really enjoyed hearing about taking into consideration the diversity of the workforce, depending on the type of work they need to do and how they go about doing it. There was also a separation between different types of workspaces that people might need access to: primary workpoints, like desk or a teamtable; alternative workspaces, I imagine, like a café or a quiet office from which to make a call; and ancillary spaces, like amenities, place to eat. Long are the days when everyone just has a desk at the office. In Sky, there are 3,600 people but only 2,500 desks.   Guest Segment: Andrew Spence @AndySpence on Twitter http://www.glassbeadconsulting.com/hr-transformer-blog/   The company we were talking about that does sound insulation and other stuff is Echophon Saint Gaubin. http://www.ecophon.com/uk/products/

In this episode, Pilar and Lisette share their favourite online tools and why they work for them. Can you add any to the list? visit www.virtualnotdistant.com How important are tools? Get out your pen and paper - or your favourite note-taking app! Lisette mentions HuddleWall (though she hasn't tried it out yet). TRELLO We talk about Trello!!!!! (Planner is the Microsoft 365 version.) Find out more about Trello and the company behind it in episode 68.  http://virtualnotdistant.com/trello-and-coffee/ SOCOCO To find out more about Sococo: #118 What Virtual Coworking can Teach Virtual Teams https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/lessons-virtual-coworking.com Join Virtual Team Talk www.virtualteamtalk.com IDONETHIS For narrating the work. What do you prefer: to know about people's tasks or their thinking process? Take diversity into account when selecting your tools.  Spying vs Working Out Loud Narrating the work shouldn't be linked to Performance Management, or else it becomes something else...  Pilar mentions Work Rules by Lazlo Bock and the episode 82 Work Rules Without Pants http://virtualnotdistant.com/work-rules-without-pants/ SLACK Signalling status. If you're using an online conversation system rather than email, customise your notifications.  Pilar mentions this article by Oliver Burkman: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/14/turn-off-notifications-break-free-distraction-oliver-burkeman Pilar has an article on Your Notifications are Your Friends https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/blog/notifications-settings "Under New Management" by David Burkus and the link of notifications and stress.  ZENDESK Lisette describes how the Happy Melly team uses ZenDesk Inbox to manage team emails.  TOODLEDO For prioritising and scheduling tasks.  WUNDERLIST For a beautiful ping when your task is complete. KUBI Telepresence!  Episode 87 on Hybrid Teams https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/hybrid-teams PERSONIFY For presenting online in front of your slides.  FACETIME and WHATSAPP POCKETFor saving articles.  You can send PDFs to the Kindle. Send it to your Kindle email address and put "convert" in the subject line.  KUDO BOX Say thank you via Twitter!

In this episode, Pilar talks to Chris Slemp about working out loud with teams, creating a collaboration environement and I how remote work has the potential of changing the structure of society.  visit www.virtualnotdistant.com A little bit of an intro from Chris. https://medium.com/@cslemp/leaving-a-global-company-to-change-the-world-b083839a2d0e How Carpool works and how they track how communication flows through an organisation. http://carpoolagency.com/ The "collaboration environment" and building the ecosystem. When the reality and our perception of what's going on is different - the importance of data. An anecdote. Will people misbehave in social networks? Working with clients as a remote company. Working Out Loud within the team and with the client. Role-modelling transparency and collaboration through a tight relationship with the client. The transition of Carpool to remote and the differences in the generations - not the ones you would expect... http://425business.com/the-anywhere-office/ The opportunity to change the world and the structure of society through changing how we work. Having "culture conversations". This isn't about the tools it's about thinking differently about how we work. "Office optional". Video: do teams need to use video? Using video as a broadcast mechanism in organisations. An example. Going live on Workplace by Facebook https://www.linkedin.com/in/cslemp/ Twitter: @cslemp