21st Century Work Life - Remote Working, Virtual Teams And Flexible Working

Welcome to episode 250 - a nice milestone to celebrate, so we even altered our usual running order to make this round number an occasion for Pilar and Maya to record together, and discuss what’s going on in the world of remote work right now in October 2020, brought to you by Virtual Not Distant Ltd in London. Don’t forget you can receive our valuable guide to leading through visible teamwork, just by signing up for our newsletter.  For now, let’s take a look at ‘What’s Going On’... Hybrid workspaces and practices Beware the office politics of hybrid workplaces, we’ll have to see how this emerges and unfolds - and see who really has a chance to make a choice.  This New York Times article picked up on tensions in some big tech companies in this article: Parents Got More Time Off. Then the Backlash Started. The evolution of remote work Eva Rimbau shared this OECD study: Productivity gains from teleworking in the post COVID-19 era: How can public policies make it happen?, demonstrating large organisation unde

Virtual not Distant Ltd brings you a fascinating episode today, exploring the role of employers in the future of work, and how remote work fits in to this -  with two very different interviews and points of view. Firstly, on the 8th October we have a webinar about sustainable asynchronous communications, in association with regular podcast guest Richard Mackinnon at Work Life Psych - classic webinar style, you can listen in passively, or join in the chat conversation of course. And on the 27th October, when Pilar will be talking about adopting Visible Teamwork in your team through asynchronous communication - to help you put it all into practice. 8.06 Erica McMannes, Instant Teams Erica McMannes and Liz Rodewald put Instant Teams together four years ago, to meet the employment needs of military spouses, for flexible location-independent work opportunities. They knew there were companies who needed the dedication and skills that this underserved cohort could bring to that need, so they created the service s

WLP248 Emotional Intelligence in Remote Teams Today's episode explores the fascinating subject of emotional intelligence in remote teams, and is brought to you by Virtual Not Distant Ltd - with the help of Rowena Hennigan, and Sandra Thompson, from Rise in Emotiona Intelligence  ( also on LinkedIn) timestamps: 7.30 Emotional intelligence defined 18.24 Highly emotional intelligent teams 40.10 Developing Team EI  

Welcome to our monthly What’s Going On round-up, brought to you by Virtual Not Distant Ltd. Today we discuss tech, the future of the office, the future of life and housing and work life balance, and an upcoming event. 3.29  Tech AI-Driven Accountability,  https://tldv.io/  “too long, didn’t view”, 12.20 The future of the office  UK office demand 'shifting to the suburbs' amid Covid-19 crisis,   The age of the office is over – the future lies in Britain's commuter towns | Simon Jenkins   MGM Resorts Rolls Out Ultimate Work-From-Vegas Package At Bellagio And ARIA 23.06 Work-life balance and boundaries Building Work-Life Boundaries in the WFH Era -  Microsoft Analyzed Data on Its Newly Remote Workforce - 37.15 Back to tech - well, email anyway, and a cool event: The Basecamp/Rework team built a new email app Hey,   Built to Last – Audio Conference for Brand Builders.   46.09 What’s going in the Virtual Not Distant community Rowena Hennigan (see episodes 215 and 244) and Sandra Thompson have set up RISE Em

Today’s episode from London-based consultancy Virtual Not Distant is about asynchronous communication - for more on this subject check out episode 234, and also this podcast from My Pocket Psych - because being able to communicate flexibly across time and space without snagging people up in endless calls is so critical to successful online collaboration, as we discuss today with two fantastic guests. 5.02 Gonçalo Silva, CTO at Doist Gonçalo joins us from Portugal, where he works as the CTO of Doist (creators of apps like Todoist and Twist), a fully remote, global, and bootstrapped organisation of 13 years, where they walk their talk and make tools which work for their own communication needs in the first instance. They have grown slowly and carefully, expanding over 34 countries, to a team of now comprising nearly 80 people.  Gonçalo role-models the organisation’s core values through his day-to-day interactions, and working toward incremental improvements - self-reflecting, and sharing and making sure his a

WLP245 What We Can All Learn from What's Going On Brought to you by Virtual Not Distant Ltd: There’s a massive scam hiding behind Google’s search results - here’s an interesting story, proving perhaps that human ingenuity still beats out the algorithms, Meanwhile, big corporations have their eyes on a flexible future, and we’re seeing new practice emerge from around the world: Fujitsu Embarks towards 'New Normal', Redefining Working Styles for its Japan Offices: Compare this to our podcasting buddy Robert Kropp’s reflection on the remote transition at Siemans - another powerful reminder of just what a big deal it is, to transition to remote at this global scale, and a fascinating comment thread to dig into on this LinkedIn post. Meanwhile closer to home at Essex County Council they have also been reflecting on recent changes and done some primary research: Digital remote working - research findings - Service Transformation, and produced this transparent and insightful report. This depressing article from

This podcast is brought to you by Virtual Not Distant in London; please check out https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/questions-education-perception for full shownotes and detailed information. In today’s episode we bringing you two interesting guests dig in to some of the big questions about remote work and the future of work.  03:51 Robert Kropp: How education needs to evolve for the future of work Robert joined us in Episode 230, when he and Rowena Hennigan introduced us to Remote Work Tree, and we’ve enjoyed his articles before in our What’s Going On segments (you can enjoy them all on his blog at Allwork.)  20:50 John O’Duinn: Physical proximity and employment status John joined us last month on Episode 240 to talk about how Vermont is incentivising remote workers.  He also wrote this really interesting article, Physical Proximity vs Employment Status. Please note: this show returns to its previous fortnightly schedule from now on. Make sure you follow us and subscribe in your favourite podcast

Another solo show from Virtual Not Distant Managing Director Pilar Orti, completing an unofficial miniseries around the concept of visible teamwork. Please see full shownotes for this and all our podcast episodes at https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts. Visible teamwork is a set of practices which include using technology to make our work and ourselves manifest in our remote teams - staying connected, as well as collaborating. So we need to understand what drive us to do our work in the first place: our motivations, for being part of a team and working toward common goals. Deci and Ryan’s definition of intrinsic motivation comes from the positive position that we all want to do our best, in work and in life, but the environment gets in the way of that. It follows that we should assume positive intent in others too, so that’s a good place to start. They define the components of intrinsic motivation as autonomy, competence, and relatedness (see also Daniel Pink’s ‘Drive’ too, though he uses mastery and p

Welcome to our regular news round-up episode, that has become a monthly feature in the light of such fast-moving change in the world of remote work. In these episodes, Pilar and Maya discuss a selection of recent news items, announcements, and publications, which reflect the way issues and policies are unfolding. This conversation was recorded on 30th June 2020, please see full shownotes at https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/WGO-July-2020 Productivity monitoring: Considerations for HR, from compliance to culture More and more companies are resorting to ‘employee monitoring solutions’, to manage their remote workforce. . Our favourite quote: “Surveillance is not a replacement for leadership”.  However, in We Work Harder When We Know Someone’s Watching, HBR reminds us that external accountability definitely can make us more productive. Spain is introducing new legislation around ‘teletrabajo’ -   El Pais has been discussing it, and the Future for Work institute have published research Teresa Douglas

In today's episode, we look at the link between trust and visible teamwork. She covers: -Propensity to trust -What makes up trust -The difference between cognitive and affective trust (and why building trust is not just done through social interactions) -Do we need trust in remote teams? - Can visible teamwork damage trust? For more detailed show notes, go to https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/trust-remote-teams-visible-teamwork

This show is brought to you by Virtual Not Distant in London, helping teams with remote transformation and transition, In today's episode we have two excellent interviews on the theme of economic development and social change, being the bigger picture of remote work and its community impact - do check out full shownotes at https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/beyondwfh-socioeconomic-change. 5:00 John O’Duinn is a Senior strategist at Civic Actions, and author of Distributed Teams: The Art and Practice of Working Together While Physically Apart. 37.58 Tracy Keogh tells us all about GrowRemote, which is a community project that makes remote work local, by going into communities and making remote work both visible and accessible.

Pilar has been working on how the way in which are tasks are dependent on other team members’ affects the visible teamwork practices we adopt - and why. This episode is brought to you by Virtual not Distant. Thanks go to Theresa Sigillito Hollema from www.interact-global.net for the inspiration - and she now has her book Virtual Teams Across Cultures on pre-order! he principles don’t only help us to stay aligned in our teams, but they can help us to feel connected. (For more on Connection and Disconnection in Remote Teams, check out our 7 episode series!) The principles of Visible Teamwork can be found here, and follow three areas: Deliberate Communication Work Visibility Planned Spontaneity Understanding the level of interdependence of your tasks will also help you see whether the systems of visible teamwork are going to help you mostly with coordination of the work, or to increase your sense of connection with each other. Pooled, sequential and reciprocal interdependence. For detailed show notes, h

This podcast is brought to you by Virtual Not Distant Ltd, please see the full show notes over on our website.  What’s Going On We're reading and discussing: Covid-19 Just Accelerated What Was Already Happening [Long Read]  Five workplace trends will shape life after lockdown  Mapping “The Future of Work” Startup & Investor ecosystem.  Bill of Rights for Remote Work Facebook and Google extend working from home to end of year and  Facebook employees could receive pay cuts as they continue to work from home, also Google will let workers expense $1,000 worth of office furniture. We also discuss remote tracking/monitoring apps and trends, Brexit negotiations on Zoom, accessibility of collaboration tools (Making collaboration accessible to all with Microsoft Teams and  Accessibility overview of Microsoft Teams - Office Support), and online meeting fashion tips (yes, this is now a thing).   Meanwhile, at Virtual Not Distant, and our community… Bart, has a new book out in Belgium, with the Dutch title: "

With the sudden “rush to remote”, many teams and managers have sought training in working remotely - however, sometimes taking a different first step towards adapting to the new environment can be more beneficial to your team, in the current situation, and with a view to the future.  In this episode, we give you an overview of four different types of interventions. If you need help with any of them, get in touch at www.virtualnotdistant.com In this episode, inspired by the academic paper Team Development Interventions: Evidence-Based Approaches for Improving Teamwork  published in the journal American Psychologist 2018, Vol. 73, No. 4, 517–531, Pilar goes through four different training interventions that might be suitable for your remote team, right now.  Think of the team competencies you might need to address. For example,rather than training in working remotely, your team might benefit undergoing training in other areas like “communicating in writing” (you’ll probably need to do A LOT of that when worki

This podcast is brought to you by Virtual Not Distant, a London-based consultancy where we help teams transition to remote working, and operate happily and productively in that environment. Today we explore hiring remotely, and to do that we are joined by Jo Palmer from Pointer Remote Roles (04.33) to help us understand the unique perspective of the specialist hiring agency, and then by Morgan Legge from Convert (34.30) to look at how this global, fully distributed team finds new colleagues, who will be a fit within their framework of holacracy. Please find full shownotes over at https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/hiring-remotely

Welcome to the final part of our ‘connection and disconnection’ series with ShieldGEO, brought to you by Virtual Not Distant. Today we look back at these episodes and what we’ve learned from them, during an unexpectedly transitional time for the remote work space. For today we share a round-table discussion, featuring Pilar and Maya from Virtual Not Distant     , as well as Tim Burgess from ShieldGEO. Please see https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/reflection-connection-disconnection for the full shownotes and links.

This show is brought to you by Virtual Not Distant, a London-based consultancy offering support to remote teams worldwide.  Please see https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/flexible-communication for full show notes What’s Going On (this topical segment was recorded on 6th May 2020) A recent article from Workplacesless What Happens to HR When Everyone is Suddenly Remote? takes an in-depth look at the ‘emotional labour’ that people-people do and how that has changed, on top of the logistical challenges and uncertainties they’re dealing with. It’s a good tie-in with our special ‘connection and disconnection’ series underway with ShieldGEO, and we shouldn’t forget that HR professionals are at the forefront of supporting coping with these issues for everyone. Looking ahead to what the workplace of the future might look like, we start with this one from Buro Happold Social distancing in the workplace: the new norm. We’ve never had an opportunity like this to truly rethink how we want to re-create the workp

This podcast is brought to you by Virtual Not Distant Ltd, a London-based consultancy helping teams transition to happy and productive office-optional working. In the 6th episode of this special “connection and disconnection in remote teams” series in association with ShieldGEO, we explore what we can do individually, to strengthen feelings of connection with our remote colleagues. After looking at the manager’s role previously, we need to remember we can all do our part, to support our own well-being and that of our teammates. Our series host Bree Cagiatti and guests new and old explore this topic and its implications. Please visit https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/self-help-connection for full shownotes.

An organisational change is the perfect time to give employees the option to work remotely. In this episode, our two guests talk about the challenges of introducing remote work in an organisation, as well as introducing a new digital collaboration ecosystem. For more detailed show notes and to get in touch, head over to www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/adopting-a-new-mindset-remote

This podcast is brought to you by Virtual Not Distant Ltd, a London-based consultancy helping teams transition to happy and productive office-optional working. Today we return to our special series in association with ShieldGEO on connection and disconnection in remote teams, and into this 5th episode we explore the role of the manager or employer in ensuring their team members remain connected when working remotely. Please see full shownotes at https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/connection-disconnection-manager for all the links and details of our wonderful guests featured in this episode.