# data[].attributes.headline
Long Reads - The Long Distance Leader, Kevin Eikenberry & Wayne Turnel

# data[].attributes.subject
Long Reads - The Long Distance Leader, Kevin Eikenberry & Wayne Turnel

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Last Minute Deals Gift Cards & Top Up Best Sellers Customer Service New Releases Prime Video Prime Christmas Books Electronics Home & Garden Vouchers PC Shopper Toolkit Sell on Amazon Free Delivery Subscribe & Save Disability Customer Support

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Introduction
Pilar mentions these other podcast episodes that might be of interest:

https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/trello-and-coffee (with Brian Cervino from Trello)

https://www.collaborationsuperpowers.com/evolve-rituals-include-remote-colleagues-2/ (with Dom Price, today's guest)

The Conversation
The role of Work Futurist. His job involves looking at macro-level trends in the workplace to understand the complexity of the future world of work. (Although much of it is guess work...)

How Dom takes the "less hippo, more elephant" approach into his interactions with other companies/organisations.

What Atlassian does and where its employees are based.

From 500 to +2,000 people and the change that this brings.

How Dom's role emerged and how Atlassian developed its own way of staying agile.

They have now opened up their internal ways of working:
https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook
"We don't want to be famous for how big we are, but for how awesome we are."

How and why the playbook was created and opened up.

"As we scale, we want to feel smaller, not bigger. More creative, not slower."

As the company has grown, it has become more distributed in many ways. A shared language and way of working has become essential.

Building the awareness in companies of the need to remain adaptable and the dangers of "transformations".

Preventing hierarchies from emerging as your company grows and how the fear of failure could be driving this.

How you operate has nothing to do with size, it's all to do with attitude and mindset.

If we have to add something in, what other things can we stop doing?

"Collaboration is about being willing to be wrong."

"Organisational structure can give you a comfort blanket that's not real."

How remote working is evolving at Atlassian and how so many assumptions were challenged after acquiring Trello.

Dom's article on remote working:
https://www.inc.com/dom-price/why-ending-remote-work-in-name-of-collaboration-is-bs.html

@DomPrice on Twitter

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
WLP156 - Playful Growth at Atlassian - Virtual not Distant

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Introduction Pilar mentions these other podcast episodes that might be of interest: https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/trello-and-coffee (with Brian Cervino from Trello) https://www.collaborationsuperpowers.com/evolve-rituals-include-remote-colleagues-2/ (with Dom Price, today's guest) The Conversation The role of Work Futurist. His job involves looking at macro-level trends in the workplace to understand the complexity of the future world of work.

# data[].attributes.body
Long Reads - The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Select Your Cookie Preferences

We use cookies and similar tools to enhance your shopping experience, to provide our services, understand how customers use our services so we can make improvements, and display ads. Approved third parties also use these tools in connection with our display of ads.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
the culture code: the secrets of highly successful groups

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
business & economics / strategic planning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
popular psychology team teamwork sport leadership; talent code the secret race lance armstrong; sprint jake knapp team of teams general stanley mcchrystal; originals give & and take adam grant; simon sinek leaders eat last start with why; freakonomics steven stephen dubner levitt; building teambuilding advice strategy practical guide how to improve extraordinary special management manager skills; habit power change toxic perfect google pixar apple science proven scientific evidence best

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
business & economics / strategic planning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Buy The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups 01 by Coyle, Daniel (ISBN: 9781847941268) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

# data[].attributes.headline
Long Reads - Virtual Culture, Bryan Miles

# data[].attributes.subject
Long Reads - Virtual Culture, Bryan Miles

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Select Your Cookie Preferences

We use cookies and similar tools to enhance your shopping experience, to provide our services, understand how customers use our services so we can make improvements, and display ads. Approved third parties also use these tools in connection with our display of ads.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Amazon.co.uk : Virtual Culture, Bryan Miles

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Select Your Cookie Preferences We use cookies and similar tools to enhance your shopping experience, to provide our services, understand how customers use our services so we can make improvements, and display ads. Approved third parties also use these tools in connection with our display of ads.

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Reads - Reflections on Leadership During Perilous Times, Boston Consulting Group

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Reads - Reflections on Leadership During Perilous Times, Boston Consulting Group

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In our conversations with more than 100 CEOs about leading through the crisis, they emphasized six themes that are consistent with what we found in our long-term study on CEO performance. We heard many stories emphasizing the importance of purpose as a guide to action, a long-term approach to strategy, and the tracking of high-frequency signals. Since the crisis began, most CEOs have spent even more energy taking care of their people, communicating authentically, and honing their own leadership abilities.

Purpose Guides Action

Purpose anchors an organization's day-to-day activities to a higher goal. It is a company's reason for being that underlies what it does, makes, or sells. CEOs have drawn from the well of purpose to handle the crisis. "By reminding teams of our purpose and why we are working hard, we can do more to handle the crisis, strengthen our reason for existing, and help a greater number of people," one CEO said. Another told us, "My people are asking how we are going to help, both in communities and globally. As CEOs, we need to think about how we can help societies and how giving our people a sense of power to create some good links to our value proposition."

One CEO talked about how purpose enabled her to help "people move beyond grief to action" while another emphasized that "by reminding teams of our purpose and why we are working hard, we can do more to handle the crisis and strengthen our reason for existing."

One company that didn't have a purpose before the pandemic is now developing one. "It isn't just useful now, it will also be hugely useful for the future, especially if the crisis lasts another year or two," the CEO explained. "Purpose motivates a lot of people, especially when you can articulate that what you are doing is more than just making money."

The Future Is Now

Many CEOs have said that they are working simultaneously on today's issues and on setting up their respective companies for success in the new reality. As economic activity returns, these CEOs are increasingly thinking through moves for a postvirus world. One CEO shared that his leadership team is now spending one-fifth of its time focused on the longer term, a larger share than normal. "You can't just put out fires. The crisis brings opportunities. It unleashes a springboard for accepting changes," suggested another CEO. "We're looking to adapt how we work, making supply chains local instead of global. We are also changing how we get products to customers and how customers can interact with our products safely."

One CEO's springboard is another's platform. "For the first two months, we left strategy behind. But then we split our work in two. What do we do during the recovery, which could last two years? What do we do in the long term? We found that the crisis is a great platform to extend strategic initiatives, such as digital transformation, beyond the core business." And even amid uncertainty, companies can set their sights on fixed targets. "We chose to narrow our focus to what you can control, such as digital penetration and other strategic priorities that will not be affected by the state of the economy," one CEO said. "We then aligned with the board on our plan to have shorter, surer, and simpler goals."

The Signals That Matter Most

CEOs have been forced to find new signals to understand the business, markets, and overall economy during the pandemic. With quarterly metrics all but meaningless in the chaotic early days, CEOs have looked to high-frequency data for signs of employee health, business activity, and future trends. "We're seeing five years of change in five weeks, and that velocity is going to continue," explained one CEO. "We don't currently have forecasting capabilities for projecting demand in six to nine months or the ability to predict consumer changes across geographies, so we've moved to shorter-term targets," added another.

One CEO said his company was trying to predict future demand by looking more closely at customer segments and described the "need to understand the demand environment because it will be a long time before we return to normal." Careful tracking of high-frequency consumer data "tells us what the curves will probably look like to help us manage expenses and change," as one CEO put it.

CEOs with large operations in the US and in many emerging markets outside of Asia also need to be especially attuned to national, state, and local regulations as the virus threatens business activity. "One of the most difficult risks to manage is that varying regulations drive responses to the lockdown in the US," observed one CEO.

People First

CEOs have recently had to address employee safety, anxiety, uncertainty, job security, performance expectations, and burnout-sometimes in the same conversation. It's a tall task that demands clear action and communication. "We need an intentional plan to communicate with employees, customers, communities, and vendors on how to get through this together," one CEO said. Another told us, "We gave an advanced bonus to our employees and a special award to thank people working in our stores; essential workers are our most important asset and we have to take care of them."

Executives have also had to contend with the rise of remote work. According to one CEO, "Working from home is good for some and not so good for others. It is challenging to keep a sense of unity and purpose now that the crisis is no longer in the early phases and there are deep psychological impacts to consider."

New leaders have emerged during the crisis. One CEO has begun to empower and recognize leaders who excelled in the past few months by having them present their work to the board. "The recognition mattered more than a bonus. They know that they're valued," he explained. "One of the things that has been really powerful for me," another mentioned, "is how much the crisis has helped us uncover talent deep in the organization that had been suppressed or overlooked in better times." This emergence of a new generation of leaders is a silver lining of the crisis. One CEO remarked, "We now have a clear view of our star leaders, as well as those who have not been able to rise to the challenge. It's a great opportunity to find out who can make a difference to the business."

Communication Demands Authenticity

The coronavirus upended whatever communications and employee feedback programs companies had in place, leaving the CEO as the communicator in chief and, in the words of one CEO, the "storyteller in chief." CEOs have had to tell stories about safety, job security, demand shocks, and strategy. These are big roles to fill in the age of Zoom. One lamented, "I will forever be the 'virtual CEO.'"

Without the familiar forum of face-to-face meetings, CEOs have tried to connect through remote channels. "I aspire to build a personal connection so my employees will know me on a personal level," one CEO said. "A health crisis deserves a human response. People are looking for a vulnerable, calm, and clear-thinking leader."

Leaders are also finding ways to generate feedback and a feel for employee sentiment. As one CEO said, "It's very hard to know what's going on behind the scenes. It's important to find ways to check in informally and read between the lines, even online. I try to have a conversation with my people every week in different mediums to create clarity." One CEO sets unstructured time during meetings for allowing employees to "heal and nurture" and "to chat and get to know each other as we go through this together."

This is not a time for corporate speak, as comfortable as its ambiguities can be. One CEO suggested the following test to determine if a CEO is getting through: "If you asked an employee at any level 'What would the CEO want me to do?' would they have an answer?" Many leaders have had to grapple with tough questions about layoffs and other sensitive topics. One CEO recounted that following a lot of debate in a meeting, he explicitly stated that he does "not anticipate staff reductions but can't guarantee that for the future." His rationale? "Authenticity and honesty pay off every time."

Leading Through the Crisis

Most CEOs recognize that they are facing what will likely be the largest test of their tenures. Every word and action can inspire or be misunderstood. "This is an opportunity to train empathy, self-awareness, and breakout thinking," one CEO said. "You need breakout thinking to see the future, and you need self-awareness and empathy to connect and understand your own purpose, the purpose of the company, and to know how to shape your company's future."

A new CEO said that the pandemic has been his baptism by fire. "Without this crisis," he explained, "I might have been more tentative to act. It has accelerated my ability to engage." For others, it's all about moving forward. "Our challenge is to maintain realism and optimism and prepare for a wider range of scenarios," one CEO said. "We need to use COVID-19 as an opportunity to be stronger and as a benchmark for the art of the possible."

In our work with CEOs, we collaborate frequently with Frank Blake, an outstanding leader with extensive board experience, who became CEO of Home Depot shortly before the Great Recession. Blake offered the following advice based upon his role in the last major global business crisis and his deep involvement in this one: "In five years, you'll be rolling up your sleeves and showing scars and telling others, 'You wish you would have been there.' This is a great time to lead. Today's scars are tomorrow's stripes."

Leaders who embrace this challenge will be better prepared to create new, powerful opportunities to replace those robbed by the coronavirus.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
CEOs Reflect on Leadership in Perilous Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In our conversations with more than 100 CEOs about leading through the crisis, they emphasized six themes that are consistent with what we found in our long-term study on CEO performance. We heard many stories emphasizing the importance of purpose as a guide to action, a long-term approach to strategy, and the tracking of high-frequency signals.

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Reads - The Key to Building a Successful Remote Organisation, Harvard Business Review

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Reads - The Key to Building a Successful Remote Organisation, Harvard Business Review

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images

The Covid-19 crisis forced many businesses to suddenly adapt to having an entirely remote workforce. And once we all got past the novel challenges of family interruptions, #funnycatvideos, and virtual etiquette, a more complex problem raised its head: How do you work together when you are, in fact, alone?

For a virtual organization to function, geographically dispersed teams need the ability to communicate effectively. But that's only half the story. Decision-making has to be delegated and decentralized as well - and that means using data to shake up your culture.

Centralized offices have one big advantage: you can get everyone in a room until they solve a problem. But when you work virtually, you have to plan every part of the decision-making process, especially when it is asynchronous. Small things that we take for granted in physical meetings - such as body language, non-verbal agreement, and interpersonal connections - require a different kind of attention when you work remotely. That, however, may be an advantage.

Consider a company that was "born digital," like workflow automation company Zapier, which was designed to operate with virtual teams from the outset. The coronavirus crisis didn't force the company to manage a complex transformation in work style. For them, there is no such thing as "remote work" - only work.

I spoke with Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, who is adamant that the discipline that comes with distributed decision-making can bring out the best in us. In his view, when it comes to managing people and outcomes, traditional organizations let leaders get away with too much: "In traditional organizations, leaders can manage by presence - you can see your folks, and you can see work getting done," he says. "But when you can't see your team, when you're not sure what's happening, or you literally don't know if they're at work or not - you have to redesign how you manage your workforce from the ground up. That forces you to be a better leader and a better manager."

For many traditional organizations, sending teams home was a direct response to emergency "stay at home" orders - not an organizational design choice. When your entire head office decamps to "WFH," the hardest part to manage is not the technology or connectivity, but the culture shock.

Didier Elzinga, CEO of Culture Amp, a software firm that helps organizations track employee engagement and performance, believes that the shift to remote work will have profound implications for the organizational culture of big companies, especially when it comes to giving distributed teams autonomy to make their own decisions.

Leaders struggle to delegate when they wrongly believe that only certain people in the hierarchy can make a particular decision - someone who has earned the right to do so on account of their experience or skill. "Actually," he says, "it is because they have the context that somebody else doesn't have. Fortunately, data is a pathway to context."

When the pandemic hit, the first thing Culture Amp did was to address the impact that the crisis was having on the speed of their decision-making. "We've created a daily situation room," he says, "where we track everything that's changed overnight, internal to the business, but also in the external world."

The situation room at Culture Amp is a daily meeting with about 20 leaders where they run through a deck of the latest information related to the crisis, which is then published on an open channel on Slack. Once they gave people the data they needed to contextualize their decisions, Elzinga and his team made an exciting discovery. Leaders were more comfortable distributing authority and allowing teams to make their own informed decisions, without wasting time chasing down information and approvals. "Autonomy means getting to make your own decisions, and being trusted to make your own decisions," argues Elzinga. "But it also means trusting others to make decisions on your behalf, too."

When it comes to building trust, a little bit of structure goes a long way. At Zapier, distributed teams use a framework called DACI, which stands for driver, approver, consulted, and informed. Anyone involved in a decision will play one of four roles: a person responsible for driving the work and collecting the relevant data; an approver who gives the go-ahead; consultants who can provide expert opinions; and finally the informed, who need to know about the outcome because it impacts the work that they do. Knowing decision roles upfront speeds up team interactions and avoids ambiguities that can cause delays or friction.

Transparency is critical at both of these organizations. Major decisions at Zapier are documented in a decision log called Async, which is an internal tool that they built. The purpose of Async is to surface important conversations that might get lost in fast-paced Slack forums. It replaces internal email and acts as a searchable archive for anyone on the team to reference old discussions and keep up with company updates. According to Foster, Slack is where the teams at Zapier talk about work, while Async is where they share work with the rest of the team.

In this respect, distributed organizations are typically ahead of more traditional ones - where documentation can be sparse or buried in private email chains. "In theory," explains Foster, "this means we should get better at making decisions over time because everyone can benefit from the organizational decision-making muscle."

A good decision will still be wrong if it takes too long. Mars, Incorporated, makers of treats and services for humans and pets alike, was already well advanced in their plans for digital transformation before the crisis hit. However, when I spoke to Sandeep Dadlani, the company's Chief Digital Officer, he explained that the pandemic led Mars to embrace a new internal clock speed. Typically, big global consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies develop a rigid annual plan with their retailers that covers their products, promotions, and inventory. However, in this new world, with rapidly shifting consumer patterns and unpredictable events, rigidity no longer works. "In week one of the coronavirus crisis, getting your groceries was not a challenge," says Dadlani. "But by week six, suddenly buying groceries online had become 15% of the American market, a number that Mars was tracking to reach five years from now."

With speed now of the essence, or as they call it at Mars, "delivering value at 100x," Dadlani realized that the organization needed to reduce some of the subjectivity in communications and decision-making, and encourage their newly remote teams to frame problems in a way that led to scaled-up solutions. Dadlani told me, "Our supply chains are built of wonderful leaders who have known each other for many years, who pat each other on the back, and who know how things run because they're in the factories. They watch the trucks, pick up the phone, and get calls from the retailers. They nudge their other friends and workers to push another batch out or to get another production line changed." But, as the crisis accelerated, Dadlani noticed a behavioral shift. Now that the logistics and technology teams have lost their in-location perspective of the supply chain and can only access raw data about inventory, supplies, materials, and packaging, their interactions have changed. Conversations between remote team members have become more focused and less subjective, productivity has improved, decisions have become more data-driven, and new, more probing questions are being asked: "Why is inventory at this level? Can the raw materials in these factories be moved elsewhere? Can we drive a higher throughput?" It was, in other words, what the digital transformation team had been trying to achieve for some time.

"Organizations like ours have to pivot to identify trends, pick the right business models, fail a few times, and then succeed," he says. "At Mars, we call it the Digital Engine: find the problem, solve the problem, and then scale the solution as fast as we can."

Notwithstanding the importance of agility and response time, as companies and teams become more digital, there is a corresponding need for leaders to be able to grasp the nuances and risks of data-driven thinking. At Culture Amp, Elzinga coaches his clients and employees on recognizing the limits of AI and other statistical models - especially when it comes to predicting human behavior, or making sensitive hiring and firing decisions. "The challenge for us as an industry and for HR in general," he says, "is that we have to work not just on finding the answers, but also on data literacy."

Data literacy is a hard-won skill. It does not come easily, even to a generation fluent with apps, emojis, and hashtags. To get there, organizations need to invest in dedicated training and education. At Mars, Dadlani was shocked when an email intended for his technology team inviting them to a course on machine learning accidentally went out to thousands of employees at the firm, and - much to his surprise - many of those unintended recipients showed up, which changed his thinking about how ready everyone in the organization was to take on the challenges of new technology.

Foster has actively encouraged data literacy programs at Zapier, offering employees a five-part mini-course called The Golden Path to Data, which provides training on using data tools, creating queries, and interpreting results. As a further incentive to upgrade skills, requests to the data team are prioritized for people who have actually done the course.

Foster says, "You don't need everyone to be an expert, but the real benefit starts to happen when every team has a data power user in it, which can help the team respond to new questions and challenges faster. And that increases the decision-making velocity that's happening inside the organization."

Data will never be a substitute for genuine social interactions or company culture, but as we build more global, distributed, and virtual organizations, what it offers is something just as important: a common language for transformation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Key to Building a Successful Remote Organization? Data.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Covid-19 crisis forced many businesses to suddenly adapt to having an entirely remote workforce. And once we all got past the novel challenges of family interruptions, #funnycatvideos, and virtual etiquette, a more complex problem raised its head: How do you work together when you are, in fact, alone?

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Reads - Celebrating with Remote Teams

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Reads - Celebrating with Remote Teams

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At Convert they have a similar practice using channels called #humblebrag, and also use a Slack app called 'Hey Taco!', to enable the sharing of 'virtual tacos' very quickly and easily, as a kudo shout-out in any channel - another great move in removing the friction around quick celebratory 'yays'.

Convert also have regular 'Wins and Miseries' meeting sessions which recognise that the wins matter because they're not a given - work life has both downs and ups, we can learn from and mark both in a psychologically safe place.

The cadence of these different forms is interesting though - sharing a quick taco, vs having a full conversation. Having a regular channel and apps to shout-out the daily wins of all sizes really helps it to be fluid and expected. Conversely, making 'Wins and Miseries' a fixed meeting facilitates the deeper learning which can come from reflecting more deliberatively on our experiences good and bad.

Dedicated channels and apps also provide valuable leadership insight: who on the team uses them more or less than others, is anyone feeling that they're not contributing enough, or important enough? This might become an issue to address with them directly. The taco app can be used to generate analytics, and even a public leaderboard of praise and recognition - so you can decide whether this is something you want to nurture as an incentive.

Celebrating Us

Celebrations also give us a chance to bring more of our private life into the workplace, if we choose to. This can be particularly valuable for remote teams.

When we rarely (if ever) meet our team mates for completely non-work social interaction, it can habituate that our knowledge of and relation to one another to be 'all about the work'. We all choose to project specific aspects of our personality and keep others hidden in all relationships, but in the online collaboration space it's all too easy for this to be very thinly sliced, and to rarely talk about anything except our professional matters, This is to lose the very richness which makes us human beings.

Everyone in our team is more than their professional role or 'hat'. A hypothetical colleague Sam is the Assistant CMO who runs our marketing and comms, and we all know about that - but, she's also a mother and wife, triathlete, community organiser, breeder of pedigree puppies, and pursuing an Open University diploma. Of course it's great to celebrate the successful marketing campaign launches, and it's really important we do that, but what about all the other myriad milestones in her life, the things which matter to her personally? Celebrating who she is, is as important as celebrating what she achieves, and it can also have a bearing on the energy, context and mood she brings to the team.

We'd have to know about all these aspects of Sam's life in the first place, of course, and that's more challenging when we work remotely.

Tim Burgess at ShieldGeo shared an interesting solution to this that they have developed - they ask about personal milestones and interests that a new colleague is happy to share at the on-boarding stage, then they use a Zapier bot to insert this information into the view of everyone on their global Slack team: 'Hey everyone, it's Fred's wedding anniversary!' 'Shahid has a local religious holiday today!' Simply being part of an organisation which takes the time to compile and do this activity for no other reason than helping people celebrate and connect is already creating a warm feeling for me. (We discussed various examples of set-up for this on our recent podcast episode about celebrations , which was also an important anniversary for Virtual Not Distant).

By knowing these things about the people we work with, we start to build a more rounded picture of them as a human being - one we can be honest and vulnerable and authentic with, and bring a little bit more of ourselves to share with in return. There can be times when the work creates tensions and disagreements, makes us feel disconnected with our colleagues, and if work is all we've got then this can negatively impact the relationship in a lasting way. But then I remember that what whatever she just said to me about that work screw-up, Sam and I do share a passion for gorgeous puppies. It helps remind us that the colleague criticising our work is also a human we relate to on many levels and that helps us contextualise the criticism as coming from a source we respect, and with whom we have an ongoing connection and relationship.

Celebrating Similarities and Differences

Celebrations might challenge some of our assumptions too. It's easy to overlook differences in culture, taste, expectation and habit when we only relate professionally, and indeed it can be very challenging coming up with really inclusive ways to celebrate in the first place (which also makes me wonder something about the Taco app actually... is it a bit too culturally specific - does everyone on a global team enjoy tacos as a food/snack, even virtually? And what about my low carb diet, and somebody else's corn allergy..? Hmm, perhaps I am overthinking a lighthearted and fun idea, but even the default celebratory emoji is often a champagne bottle, which definitely has cultural limitations...)

I once had a really difficult time with the physical logistics of sending a hamper to a new colleague in Egypt, to include her in a team party ritual which had always worked fine across Europe - indeed it ultimately proved physically impossible to include her in the same way. Of course a local refreshment budget was easily provided, but sending her cash to buy her own party food just wasn't quite the same, and even created an errand for her to accommodate. It's important that the way we celebrate in online teams doesn't inadvertently reinforce differences in hybrid teams or satellite teams, instead of bringing them together.

And while sending a voucher or allowance is instant and global, there's something a bit special about physical post and deliveries - that connectedness between your remote location and the heart of the team, when you actually get a ring on your doorbell with a tangible thing. When Virtual Not Distant Director Pilar left Happy Melly, she received a gift card in the post, and it was so much more meaningful than an email voucher (she ended up keeping the little box for a long time afterwards). This article from MIT Sloan also reminds us of how special it is to receive anything physical in our increasingly digital-first world, and the way this creates a sense of belonging. It needn't be elaborate, just the occasional handwritten card, or even company swag, is likely to end up adoring the remote workspace for a prolonged period - creating that little burst of endorphins each time it is glanced toward.

The shipping to Egypt example was also a good reminder that in a multicultural team in particular, it's easy to assume that we'd all choose to celebrate in the same way. As leaders in online teams, we should always ask ourselves, could this amusing or jolly thing actually potentially be awkward or embarrassing or difficult for one of our colleagues?

This also needs to be front of mind when planning face to face retreats as well, as they do at ShieldGeo, for their truly global team . The practical logistics, from visas to accommodation, are really complex but, by considering each individual's needs and involving everyone in making it happen, they have learned to create events which are really worthwhile, and generate measurable return on investment in terms of creativity and productivity.

When you don't meet face to face regularly, just having the chance to do so is celebratory in its own right, even if you mostly socialise instead of gathering to actually do work. It deepens the relationships involved. There is some kind of universality to sharing refreshments together, as a way of giving and receiving hospitality - certainly whenever members of the Virtual Not Distant team manage to get together in person, it's usually at a nice restaurant! But, as any traveller would attest, the way we 'break bread' looks completely different in different parts of the world, and the one thing guaranteed to risk offence is to assume your own norms of courteous behaviour are the norms.

Instead, celebrations on diversely distributed teams can be a great way to learn more about each other's cultures in a fun and relaxed way, as well as gaining that little bit of personal insight into the lives of our co-workers, as well as marking the milestones which matter. We can use technology to mediate new intimacies: I was really touched to once receive a video message greeting on my birthday from a colleague whose beautiful hair I had never before seen, as for cultural/religious reasons she always kept it covered it in team meetings when men were present.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hoorah! Celebrating With our Remote Teams - Virtual not Distant

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At Convert they have a similar practice using channels called #humblebrag, and also use a Slack app called 'Hey Taco!', to enable the sharing of 'virtual tacos' very quickly and easily, as a kudo shout-out in any channel - another great move in removing the friction around quick celebratory 'yays'.

# data[].attributes.headline
Remote Working Doesn’t Mean All Day Video Calls, Harvard Business Review

# data[].attributes.subject
Remote Working Doesn’t Mean All Day Video Calls, Harvard Business Review

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Covid-19 crisis has distanced people from the workplace, and employers have generally, if sometimes reluctantly, accepted that people can work effectively from home. As if to compensate for this distancing and keep the workplace alive in a virtual sense, employers have also encouraged people to stick closely to the conventional workday. The message is that working from home is fine and can even be very efficient - as long as people join video calls along with everyone else all through the day.

But employees often struggle with the "workday" when working from home, because many have to deal with the competing requests coming from their family, also housebound. So how effective really is working from home if everyone is still working to the clock? Is it possible to ditch the clock?

The answer seems to be that it is. Since before the pandemic we've been studying the remote work practices of the tech company GitLab to explore what it might look like if companies to break their employees' chronological chains as well as their ties to the physical workplace.

The challenge for GitLab

From its foundation in 2014, GitLab has maintained an all-remote staff that now comprises more than 1,300 employees spread across over 65 countries. The "git" way of working uses tools that let employees work on ongoing projects wherever they are in the world and at their preferred time. The idea is that because it's always "9 to 5" somewhere on the planet, work can continue around the clock, increasing aggregate productivity. That sounds good, but a workforce staggered in both time and space presents unique coordination challenges with wide-ranging organizational implications.

The most natural way to distribute work across locations is to make it modular and independent, so that there is little need for direct coordination - workers can be effectively without knowing how their colleagues are progressing. This is why distributed work can be so effective for call centers and in patents evaluation. But this approach has its limits in development and innovation related activities, where the interdependencies between components of work are not always easy to see ahead of time.

For this kind of complex work, co-location with ongoing communication is often a better approach because it offers two virtues: synchronicity and media richness. The time lag in the interaction between two or more individuals is almost zero when they are co-located, and, although the content of the conversation may be the same in both face-to-face and in virtual environments, the technology may not be fully able to convey soft social and background contextual cues - how easy is it to sense other people's reactions in a group zoom meeting?

All this implies that simply attempting to replicate online (through video or voice chat) what happened naturally in co-located settings is unlikely to be a winning or complete strategy. Yet this approach of "seeing the face" is the one that people seem to default to when forced to work remotely, as our survey of remote working practices in the immediate aftermath of lockdowns around the world has revealed.

Tacit coordination

There is a way through this dilemma. Our earlier research on offshoring of software development showed that drawing on tacit coordination mechanisms, such as a shared understanding of work norms and context, allows for coordination without direct communication.

Coordination in this case happens through the observation of the action of other employees and being able to predict what they will do and need based on shared norms. It can occur either synchronously (where, for instance, two people might work on the same Google doc during the same time period), or asynchronously (when people make clear hand-offs of the document, and do not work on it when the other is).

Software development organizations often opt for this solution and tend to rely extensively on shared repositories and document authoring tools, with systems for coordinating contributions (e.g., continuous integration and version control tools). But GitLab is quite unique in the for-profit sector in how extensively it relies on this third path not only for its coding but for how the organization itself functions. It leans particularly on asynchronous working because its employees are distributed across multiple time zones. As a result, although the company does use videoconferencing, almost no employee ever faces a day full of video meetings.

How it works at GitLab

At the heart of the engineering work that drives GitLab's product development is the "git" workflow process invented by Linux founder Linus Torvalds. In this process, a programmer making a contribution to a code " forks " (copies) the code, so that it is not blocked to other users, works on it, and then makes a "merge request" to have the edited version replace the original, and this new version becomes available for other contributions.

The process combines the possibility of distributed asynchronous work with a structure that checks for potential coordination failures and ensures clarity on decision rights. Completely electronic (which makes remote work feasible) and fully documented, it has become an important framework for distributed software development in both for-profit and open source contexts.

GitLab has taken the git a step further, applying it also to managerial work that involves ambiguity and uncertainty. For instance, GitLab's chief marketer recently outlined a vision for integrating video into the company's year-ahead strategy. He requested asynchronous feedback from across the company within a fixed time window, and then scheduled a single synchronous meeting to agree on a final version of the vision. This vision triggered asynchronously input changes from multiple contributors to the company's handbook pages relating to marketing objectives and key results that were merged on completion.

GitLab's high degree of reliance on asynchronous working is made possible by respecting the following three rules right down to the task level:
1. Separate responsibility for doing the task from the responsibility for declaring it done.
In co-located settings, where employees are in the same office, easy communication and social cues allow them to efficiently resolve ambiguities and manage conflict around work responsibilities and remits. In remote settings, however, this can be difficult. In GitLab, therefore, every task is expected to have a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI), who is responsible for the completion of the task and has freedom in how it should be performed.

The DRI, however, does not get to decide whether the task has been completed. That function is the responsibility of a "Maintainer," who has the authority to accept or reject the DRI's merge requests. Clarity on these roles for every task helps reduce confusions and delays and enables multiple DRIs to work in parallel in any way they want on different parts of a code by making local copies ("forking"). It is the Maintainer's role to avoid unnecessary changes and maintain consistency in the working version of the document or code.

In a non-software context, say in developing the GitLab handbook page on expenses policies, individual DRIs, who could be anyone in the company, would write specific policies in any way they choose, and their contributions would be accepted or rejected by the CFO acting in the capacity of Maintainer, who could also offer feedback (but not direction) to the DRIs. Once live, the merged page serves as the single source of truth on expenses policies unless or until someone else makes a new proposal. Once more, the Maintainer would approve, reject, or offer feedback on the new proposal. In contexts like this, we would expect people in traditional management positions to serve as Maintainers.
2. Respect the "minimum viable change" principle.
When coordination is asynchronous, there is a risk that coordination failures may go undetected for too long - for instance, two individuals may be working in parallel on the same problem, making one of their efforts redundant, or one person may be making changes that that are incompatible with the efforts of another. To minimize this risk, employees are urged to submit the minimum viable change - an early stage, imperfect version of their suggested changes to code or documents. This makes it more likely that people will pick up on whether work is incompatible or being duplicated. Obviously, a policy of minimum viable changes should come with a "no shame" policy on delivering a temporarily imperfect output. In remote settings, the value of knowing what the other is doing as soon as possible is greater than getting the perfect product.
3. Always communicate publicly.
As GitLab team members are prone to say, "we do not send internal email here." Instead, employees post all questions and share all information on the Slack channels of their teams, and later the team leaders decide what information needs to be permanently visible to others. If so, it gets stored in a place available to everyone in the company, in an "issue" document or on a page in the company's online handbook, which is accessible to anyone, in or outside the company. This rule means that people don't run the risk of duplicating, or even inadvertently destroying the work of their colleagues. Managers devote a lot of time to curating the information generated through the work of employees they supervise and are expected to know better than others what information may be either broadly needed by a future team or that would be useful for people outside the company.

Recognizing the limits of the GitLab approach

However well implemented, asynchronous remote working of this kind cannot supply much in the way of social interaction. That's a major failing, because social interaction is not only a source of pleasure and motivation for most, it is also where the "random encounters," the serendipitous exchanges by the coffee machines and lift lobbies, create opportunities for ideas and information to flow and recombine.

To minimize this limitation, GitLab provides occasions for non-task related interaction. Each day, team members may attend one of three optional social calls - staggered to be inclusive of time zones. The calls consist of groups of 8-10 people in a video chatroom, where they are free to discuss whatever they want (GitLab provides a daily starting question as icebreaker in case needed, such as: "What did you do over the weekend?" or "Where is the coolest place you ever traveled and why?").

In addition, GitLab has social slack groups: thematic chat rooms that employees with similar interests can participate in (such as: #cat, #dogs, #cooking, #mental_health_aware, #daily_gratitude, #gaming) and a #donut_be_strangers channel that allows strangers that have a mutual interest to have a coffee chat to get together.

Of course, GitLab managers are under no illusion that these groups substitute perfectly for the kinds of rich social interactions outside work that people find rewarding. But they do help to keep employees connected, and, at a time when many employees have been working under confinement rules, this has proved very helpful in sustaining morale.
***
Working from home in an effective way goes beyond just giving employees a laptop and a Zoom account. It encompasses practices intended to compensate or avoid the core limitations of working remotely, as well as fully leverage the flexibility that remote can offer - working not only from anywhere but at any desired time. We have focused on GitLab because it not only has extensive experience in remote working but also because it pursues an unusual mode of solving the intrinsic challenges of remote work. While some of GitLab's core processes (like its long, remote onboarding process for new hires) and advantages (like the possibility of hiring across the world) cannot be fully reproduced in the short run in companies that will be just temporarily remote, there are others that any company can easily implement.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Remote Work Doesn't Have to Mean All-Day Video Calls

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Covid-19 crisis has distanced people from the workplace, and employers have generally, if sometimes reluctantly, accepted that people can work effectively from home. As if to compensate for this distancing and keep the workplace alive in a virtual sense, employers have also encouraged people to stick closely to the conventional workday.

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Read - Why Trust is Critical to Team Success. Research report by Reina

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Read - Why Trust is Critical to Team Success. Research report by Reina

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Read - What Are You Bringing With You? Nobl Academy

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Read - What Are You Bringing With You? Nobl Academy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At NOBL, a "check-in" is one of our favorite rituals-in fact, it's rare for us to run a meeting without it. At the beginning of the meeting, we simply ask every participant, "What are you bringing with you?" Think of it as a structured replacement for the first 10 minutes of every meeting (if not longer) that's spent in small talk. It's not for setting the meeting agenda-it's about getting present, offloading any distractions, and pressing ahead. This accomplishes five goals:

1. Fostering Safety. Psychological safety is the shared belief between you and your teammates that the team is a safe place to take personal risks, such as introducing a new idea or sharing bad news. Decades of social science research has shown that teams that have high levels of psychological safety are substantially more creative, more likely to achieve their goals, learn faster, and suffer less groupthink.

2. Cognitive Offloading. Using the "check-in" to offload a concern you have coming into the meeting can reduce the cognitive demand it has on you, and increases your focus and performance for the meeting at hand.

3. Anticipating Miscommunications. Taking the time to hear where others are coming from helps everyone reflect on how they communicate with others. For example, if Mark shares that he's exhausted from spending the night at a hospital with a sick family member, you might reschedule a difficult feedback conversation for another day.

4. Priming Contributions. The healthiest meetings encourage "equality of voices." Creating a moment at the top of a meeting for your most introverted members to contribute will set the expectation that everyone speaks up.

5. Saving Time. Check-ins take the place of the usual free-form chit-chat that happens at the head of meetings, and by giving it structure, keeps meetings starting on time.

How to Run a Check-In

If you want to introduce check-ins to your team, try the following:

1. Introduce the concept and science of check-ins to your team. Until you've all gotten the hang of it, remind your team that the purpose of this practice is to develop psychological safety, and with it, increase team performance.

2. Start by sharing something meaningful as your own check-in. Your check-in sets the tone for everyone else, so be open but brief. Here are a few examples of the range of answers:

Professional. "I have a big presentation after this meeting and I can't stop running through it in my head."

Personal. "It was my birthday this past weekend!"

Biological. "Fair warning everyone... it's right before lunch and I'm feeling a little hangry."

Logistical. "Apologies for needing to check my phone; I have a sick kid who may need to come home from school."

Silly. "I just noticed I'm wearing two different color socks today. Oops!"

3. Call on individuals around the room to give their check-in. Get them started by asking, "What are you bringing with you?" If your team is remote, it's better to use video. Don't let others get away with a non-answer (e.g. "I'm great!").
If someone does get emotional during their check-in, thank them, and remind everyone that vulnerability is an important part of being a leader. Follow up individually if you hear something that needs more time and attention.

4. Try it for a month. This practice was sourced from the world's highest-performing teams, but at first, it may seem strange or uncomfortable. Give it some time: the more you do it, the easier it becomes, and before you know it, you'll be checking in instinctively.
If you have back-to-back meetings, you don't have to do a check-in every single time-just a couple times a day to be effective.

If you have a larger meeting (more than 10 participants), you can still hold a check-in, but use a different format:

Pair or Triad. Ask participants to partner with people around them and share their check-ins. Give everyone three to four minutes to share back and forth, and then have a few people share with the room at large.

Fist to five. Ask the room "How are you on a scale of 1 to 5?" and instruct them hold up fingers-1 finger being not so great, all five fingers being great. On your count, have everyone reveal their number at the same time.

One word. Instead of a one-sentence check-in, limit meeting participants to one word.

Doodle. Give everyone one minute to draw their current state on a piece of scratch paper or in a notebook. On your count, have everyone reveal their drawing at the same time.

Finally, professional norms are very linked to culture, so yes, a check-in might sound very different in Beijing compared to New York. However, regardless of geography, there is always value because it gives people permission to connect in a very quick way that makes the following conversations more productive. In fact, check-ins are particularly useful if you have people joining from different time zones, as it's a moment to align before the work begins.

Published January 2, 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why a Quick "Check-In" Makes Meetings More Effective

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At NOBL, a "check-in" is one of our favorite rituals-in fact, it's rare for us to run a meeting without it. At the beginning of the meeting, we simply ask every participant, "What are you bringing with you?" Think of it as a structured replacement for the first 10 minutes of every meeting (if not longer) that's spent in small talk.

# data[].attributes.headline
Why your In-Office Friendship Matters, BBC

# data[].attributes.subject
Why your In-Office Friendship Matters, BBC

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There was a time, in the not-so-distant past, when going out to lunch, day after day, with the same group of colleagues was as mundane a part of daily life as the morning meeting or evening commute. But after six months of eating sad desk salads alone, the idea of lunch with our work clique has never felt so exciting.

As we've been working from our kitchen tables, many of our relationships with colleagues have been atrophying.

It's a phenomenon that has positives: the break-up of work cliques means the formerly left-out may have more opportunities to join the 'in-crowd' - or maybe there's no longer an in-crowd at all. But there are drawbacks to drifting away from your work buddies, too. Experts suggest that, while our work-based friendships are generally our most delicate ones, they're also some of the most impactful on our overall happiness.

Remote work has changed the dynamic of our work relationships. We can - and, in many cases, should - be trying to keep those friendships going, or even spark new ones. But as our offices operate online, that's easier said than done.
'Friendships of convenience'
"Work is the number one place where people make friends," says Shasta Nelson, author of The Business of Friendship: Making the Most of Our Relationships Where We Spend Most of Our Time. "It's also the place where most friendships end, because people change jobs."

Without the in-person interaction we're used to, many are finding that their best work friendships aren't so tight or easy to maintain any longer (Credit: Alamy)

Compared to friendships that begin outside work - which are often stronger and more sustainable, thanks to a foundation of common interests and deep personal knowledge - work friendships are often tenuous, because they tend to be built almost exclusively on shared circumstances and casual interactions. These relationships with colleagues are usually what Ho Kwan Cheung, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Albany in New York, calls "friendships of convenience, for lack of a better term. It's the person you talk to when you take a coffee break, or go to the pantry. The person who's readily available when you have a problem because their desk is next to yours".

And now, without those opportunities for interaction while we've been working from home, many have found work friendships fading; for many, finding other ways to maintain them virtually has not been a major priority while navigating the upheaval of recent months.

"Work friendships die pretty quickly with a lack of shared experiences," says Nelson. "Unless you work to create a new pattern and way of being together. Even six months in, a lot of people feel like the shift to remote work is temporary, so we're not treating it with intention. I think a lot of people's brains haven't made that adjustment of, 'OK, I have to be intentional if I want this friendship to continue'."
Pleasure and productivity

There's good reason to invest in your work friendships, especially now, according to Cheung, whose research centres on workplace discrimination and employee wellbeing. "They're not a distraction," she says. "A lot of us derive most of our social needs from those work relationships. They're what give people a sense of belonging in their job. Sometimes, there's an idea that when you're spending time with friends at work you won't get anything done, but the research says that employee happiness depends on social interactions."

So, too, does productivity. In a survey of more than 12,000 workers in the US, Germany and India, management-consulting firm Boston Consulting Group found that more than half the respondents who transitioned to working remotely during the pandemic reported a drop in productivity when it came to collaborative tasks - things like working in teams and interacting with clients. The analysis showed a direct link between productivity and social connection. Among those who said they felt less connected to their colleagues since transitioning to remote work, 80% said they were also less productive.

Being a member of a work clique can also contribute to professional fulfilment. Results from a Gallup survey of US employees showed that more than half of respondents who said they had a work best friend also reported feeling passionate about their job, with a strong connection to their company. Only 10% of people who didn't have a close friend at work could say the same.

"Work friendships are very important to job satisfaction," says Cheung. And while "job satisfaction doesn't always predict performance, the more relational-oriented your work is, the more it does. One example is creative work, or anything that involves creative problem-solving. When you're satisfied with your work and you enjoy being with your co-workers, it makes you more creative and a better collaborator".

It may be a while until we can return to work social events and happy hours that keep our office friendships thriving (Credit: Alamy)

In a 2016 study published in Personnel Psychology, a group of professors headed by Jessica Methot of Rutgers University showed that groups of colleagues who thought of one another as friends scored higher on performance reviews. The researchers offered a number of possible explanations: people were more likely to ask for help and seek advice from colleagues they considered to be friends, informal networks made information-sharing more efficient and morale was high overall.

In short, a sense of belonging among your colleagues makes you better at your job, and letting those friendships lapse during the pandemic could make your work suffer.
Killing the clique isn't all bad
There's a reason the word "clique" summons memories of secondary-school mean girls, however. While the benefits of being a member of a group of work friends are well documented, such friendships can have downsides. After all, for a clique to exist, some people need to belong while others have to be left out.

In a 2018 study entitled Friends Without Benefits: Understanding the Dark Sides of Workplace Friendship, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business wrote that, "anyone who has endured the social complexities of a school cafeteria can attest that close and exclusive friendship groups can lead to perceptions of exclusion. This awareness of others' friendships can be detrimental to outsiders and can have negative consequences for organizational functioning." So, while cliques are good for the people in them, those who are excluded or feel ostracised by them don't experience the same benefits.

This is even more problematic when you consider the people who are most often left out. Cheung explains that cliques are often quicker to form between people of shared racial and cultural backgrounds, and if an office isn't very diverse, that means people get marginalised. "We know that a lot of the relationship formation opportunities single out women and minorities, because you're not invited to lunch or happy hour," she says.

Remote work may be killing the clique, but that could also mean more opportunity for those who've been more socially isolated in the past to make in-roads. "Now, it's interesting because [lunches and happy hours] aren't a thing anymore. Everyone's at home and that has levelled the playing field."

Of course, building those bridges from a home office isn't simple, either. In transitioning to a remote work environment, we've lost many of the informal interactions and casual moments that lead to friendships, and while that means "no one is being ostracised, it's also harder for relationships to form or continue", adds Cheung.
'It's going to feel a little awkward'
This doesn't mean that your work friendships are doomed, or that you'll never be one of the most popular colleagues. But, like most things in a post-pandemic world, bonding with your colleagues now requires a slightly different approach.

Friendships have a formula, says Nelson, based on three main factors: consistency, vulnerability and positivity. "You need all three to create a friendship," she explains. "The workplace gave us the consistency piece. We didn't have to invite each other to come to work, so the consistency of seeing each other every day was built-in. As long as we got to know people - that's the vulnerability piece - and enjoyed it, which gave us the positivity, friendships formed."

It's still possible to have a solid social life among your colleagues, adds Nelson, "but you have to be waymore intentional about it." That means establishing consistency on your own, maybe by committing to daily lunchtime phone calls with your work buddy, or planning Monday morning Zoom catch-ups as a chance to chat about the weekend.

Work friendships tend to be more tenuous, since they're driven by proximity - but they're still vital for fulfilling our social needs (Credit: Alamy)

It can also be helpful, Cheung says, to look for the remote version of a casual moment by the office coffee pot. "Sometimes when you're waiting for the rest of the people to sign onto a Zoom meeting, you can chit-chat a little," she says. "It's possible to find and create those kinds of informal situations, even when you're working from home, like starting a separate Slack chat."

And as for taking the opportunity to join a clique, she adds, simply putting in the effort to connect with a colleague on an informal level can go a long way. "It's a matter of creating new bonds, when people aren't strictly on the clock," she says. Interaction that feels personal - just striking up a conversation about pandemic baking or sharing links to funny TikToks, for instance - "makes people feel a sense of belonging".

"It might feel forced, but that's fine," she says. "When we start to open up, it helps people feel seen, increases our appreciation for one another and helps us enjoy each other. We have to realise friendships don't just happen to us. You can't just focus on work and expect to feel close to people down the road. Yes, it's going to feel a little awkward, but relational health, work productivity and happiness comes on the other side of that awkwardness."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why your in-office friendships still matter

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There was a time, in the not-so-distant past, when going out to lunch, day after day, with the same group of colleagues was as mundane a part of daily life as the morning meeting or evening commute. But after six months of eating sad desk salads alone, the idea of lunch with our work clique has never felt so exciting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
2020 has been a reckoning for many of our clients: they're looking at their organizations and seeing strengths and flaws like never before. One client has been pleasantly surprised by how well the team is working-COVID has forced her leadership team to unite around a common purpose and make decisions without previous dithering or delay-and she wants to cement these behaviors as the new normal. At the same time, another client has seen existing silos and fiefdoms become even more entrenched as work has gone remote, causing internal progress to stall and customer outcomes to suffer.

Additionally, a few bold executives have gone beyond this: they've asked us how they could make a radical shift to their organization, to have it not only be a good place to work, but a force for good in the world. Some have taken a hard look at themselves and realized they were playing a role in furthering inequality, and inspired by the work of Dr. Ibram X Kendi and colleagues, are seeking ways to become anti-racist organizations. Others want to go beyond the lip-service of lofty purpose statements and challenge the system itself with a new business model, a new approach to ways of working, and a new way to measure their success. In one founder's words, "How can my company confront a world that's unjust, unequal, and quickly unraveling?"

Regardless of your vision for the future of your organization, the underlying question is one of resilience: how do we create organizations that can withstand uncertainty, ones that don't just survive, but adapt to a rapidly evolving future? With all of this self-reflection, a single phrase has gained intense popularity.

"Build back better."

The Beginnings of Building Back Better

According to Google Trends, "build back better" as a term has seen a dramatic increase in search volume since June. Partly, this is the result of one of the candidates for U.S. President adopting the phrase as their economic platform. But it's not just politicians using the phrase. Fast Company, the UN, and the World Economic Forum (among others) are calling on businesses to "build back better" in response to the pandemic.

The phrase first came to prominence in response to the devastating 2004 earthquake and resulting tsunami in Indonesia which left 170,000 dead in Indonesia alone. Aid responders realized that when rebuilding infrastructure, it should not just replace structures, but rather, be more resilient to future earthquakes. Not only that, there was a responsibility to address the societal conditions which themselves could foster or inhibit resilience. The phrase stuck, and the UN adopted as part of their general approach to disaster recovery in 2015. And while definitions have differed when proposals were being developed, guidelines have included concepts such as:

Preparedness for future disasters

Empowering people to direct their own recovery

Fairness and equity

Decentralization and local empowerment

Enabling entrepreneurialism

Increased coordination and collaboration of local agencies

For non-governmental organizations, AKA the rest of us, the task at hand is to translate what exactly "better" means if we intend to "build back better." Left undefined, "better" can remain slippery or outright obfuscating. In advertising, as an example, "better" is a well known "weasel word." It allows you to say something and yet nothing at the same time. It is a vague promise, one that conveniently can't be held to account. Therefore, if we intend to build back better, we should first define "better"-for those we are making the commitment to and for ourselves, so that we can actually track our progress toward a worthy, yet challenging goal.

A New Model for Resilient Organizations

In February 2020, only days before COVID would come to reshape reality here in the U.S., we at NOBL worked with our partner Undercurrent (informed and inspired by their incredible network of subject matter experts) to develop a model for organizational resilience extending from four emerging movements in the future(s) of work. After all, the original intent of the phrase "build back better" was to leave communities more resilient for the future. Together, we designed an initial playing field for organizations looking to "build back better" with clarity and commitment. The message of the model is not to say you must do everything, but instead, pick key areas to explore and traits to experiment with based on your ambitions and environment.

Our model for Organizational Resilience includes four overlapping areas to play:

Democratic organizations

Distributive organizations

Regenerative organizations

Responsive organizations

Democratic organizations, broadly defined, invite their workers and communities to have a say on matters which affect them most. Examples include W.L Gore and Associates in the U.S., Mondragon in Spain, and Semco in Brazil. Organizations here are diverse and can be plotted across a spectrum, from active listening all the way to direct control. Research indicates that democratic organizations may benefit from increased productivity, employee engagement and satisfaction, and organizational longevity.

Traits of a democratic organization may include:

1. Diversity and inclusion: History shows us that democracy, itself, is a project of ever expanding the communities and voices it includes in the decision-making process. Democratic organizations focus on accruing a diversity of voices, ensuring individual psychological safety, and enforcing inclusion in relevant decisions.

2. Localized control: Democratic organizations want to ensure that people have a say in the decisions which will impact them greatest. This is rarely about giving a say to everyone in the organization on every topic, and much more about localizing decision-making to those both most impacted and most "in-the-know" about the conditions relevant to the decision. At Semco, for example, they accomplish this localized control by keeping teams small and hierarchy lean.

3. Transparency and education: In order for workers and communities to make informed decisions, they need information to be transparent and readily accessible. They also need their team members to possess an understanding of the full organizational system so that they can comprehend the wider implications of their decisions. Remember, for every piece of information you make transparent, you must also ensure those with that information can understand and use it.

Distributive organizations, broadly defined, reward their workers more equitably for their efforts and distribute more of what was once considered private assets to their communities. Examples include Publix Super Markets, Google, Ben & Jerry's, Tesla, Recology, and Brookshire Brothers. Again, the spectrum here is wide as some of these organizations are fully worker owned or they simply make elements of the organization more freely available to the community. Research indicates that distributive organizations may benefit from increased profitability and resilience.

Traits of a distributive organization may include:

1. Equity and justice: A distributive organization should, at its core, include a belief in fair and just rewards. A distributive organization should place attention and commit to continuous improvement in overall fairness: particularly in how employees and communities are treated, compensated, and given access to opportunity and development. Moreover, distributive organizations must root out the systemic causes of inequity and discrimination (in all forms) through meaningful self-reflection, corrective action, and even external lobbying and influence.

2. Open technologies: Distributive organizations recognize an increased strategic benefit (and even moral imperative) in making their internal technologies, once a highly guarded asset, freely available to their competitors and the public. For example, in 2014 Tesla flipped all of their patents to open source with the stated hope of developing a cross-industry technology platform that could accelerate the advent of sustainable transportation and reduce carbon emissions.

3. Shared ownership: Rising from equity and justice, distributive organizations may also create opportunities for employee ownership. Moves to direct employee ownership are gaining in popularity in industries like craft brewing, where hard work, fairness, and independence are often core values. Further out, some organizations and researchers are experimenting with blockchain technologies to reward worker and stakeholder participation while also decentralizing management functions.

Regenerative organizations, broadly defined, respect the natural limits of their workers, communities, and the ecosystems in which they operate in order to serve all life. Examples include Patagonia, Unilever, Schneider Electric, Levi Strauss, and Method. This movement is a product of the larger environmental movement, advanced sustainability practices (including regenerative agriculture), the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, and 21st century economics. Proponents of regenerative organizations argue that not only is the approach essential in a world of fixed resources, but its practices produce higher shareholder returns and greater benefits for all of society.

Traits of a regenerative organization may include:

1. Circular design: Taken from the concept of the circular economy, regenerative organizations strive to design and develop products that have no beginning or end to their product lifecycle and therefore produce fewer waste products or pollution. For example, recognizing that two of the largest users of virgin rubber are shoe and tire manufacturers, Timberland has partnered with Omni United to produce a line of tires that can be recycled into the soles of new Timberland boots.

2. Healing earth: If the goal of circular design is to do no harm, many regenerative organizations aim to go further by actively restoring the landscape and life represented in the ecosystem surrounding their operations. In his TED talk, chef Dan Barber shares how in Spain he found a delicious fish and radical approach to sustainability.

3. Healing people: Regenerative organizations believe that organizations should support both the physical and emotional health of their workers and communities. This begins with basic workplace safety (psychological safety included) but goes far beyond this to include services such as coaching, counseling, caregiving, mindfulness, rehabilitation, and community development (among others). These organizations also believe that work can be a restorative force. For example, Nehemiah Manufacturing, based in Cincinnati, actively hires and supports workers with criminal backgrounds and sees not only lives transformed but dramatically lower turnover rates than the industry average.

Responsive organizations, broadly defined, learn from and nimbly adapt to their customers and communities. Examples include Zara, Spotify, Airbnb, Netflix, Microsoft, and Amazon. This movement originated from the software industry, with roots tracing directly back to the Agile Manifesto, but has since expanded as a shared mindset and approach to work across other industries. Proponents of responsive organizations argue that research shows it delivers faster response times to market changes, higher customer satisfaction, and improved efficiency.

Traits of a responsive organization may include:

1. Sensemaking: In an organizational setting, sensemaking is the process in which actionable meaning can be ascribed to events and needs by identifying patterns among weak and emerging signals. Responsive organizations need to make adequate sense of the world in order to better serve their customers and communities. Ultimately, sensemaking is a combination of activities which include listening (which begins with developing an architecture for listening), probing (via rapid experimentation), retrospecting, and finally a dispassionate comparison to what the organization has learned previously.

2. Adaptive learning: In a responsive organization, unlike in traditional management theory, "learning" as a muscle is not meant to produce an ever-calcifying set of "best practices" or "insights." Loosely borrowing from Bayesian logic, learning here is a process of collecting assumptions about the world based on previous experience, reflecting on new information gained through sensemaking, and ultimately making a prediction (recognizing uncertainty) about future outcomes. For example, let's say in the past our customers have tended to value choice and convenience even at the cost of affordability, yet during COVID we have signs that their purchasing power is limited, what odds of success then would we give a new premium product line? And what early events and outcomes could signal a need to rethink our approach overall?

3. Organizational agility: Responsive organizations compete through speed and customer intelligence. Consumer intelligence is accomplished through sensemaking and learning, speed is accomplished through an obsession with operational agility. This obsession often includes adopting a customer-first mindset, continuous improvement practices, network-based team structures (often interdisciplinary), and accelerated decision-making.

Again, we're not saying that your organization must embody all of these principles at once, or that your organization isn't "better" because it doesn't address one of these categories. Instead, think of democratic, regenerative, and distributive, and responsive as options for steering your organization towards becoming a more resilient organization-that is, one that can adapt and thrive in the face of the next swan, whether it's black or green.

The First Steps Towards Becoming "Better"

While models can help us understand where organizations can evolve depending on their strengths and skills, it's not enough: leaders must take action. As the World Economic Forum notes, "building back better is about much more than corporate social responsibility: it is about truly aligning markets with the natural, social and economic systems on which they depend." To get started:

1. Define better. Whether you simply want to reclaim what you lost to COVID, retain what you've gained, develop more resilience into your organization, or be a force for broader good, don't allow whatever promise you make to be "better" to be hollow or amorphous. Align on what "better" specifically looks like for your team or organization, and how you'll achieve that. Be wary of "___- washing" (whether that's greenwashing, wokewashing, or other) which focuses more on making a statement than following through with results.

2. Ask "better for whom?" Whose needs take priority? Who are we centering around? Is it the board? Staff or customers? The communities we impact? For those with power/privilege or for the marginalized and underestimated? Keep in mind, the desires of different groups may not always align: donors built "safer" houses for tsunami survivors in Thailand, but not ones that addressed the "needs, livelihoods, and lifestyle of the Moken people."

3. Provide context for the team. Any change-even one for the best-can feel like loss.Plan how to communicate why we want to be better, and why it's important that we do so at this time.

4. Remember "better" is a process. No one expects perfection. What's important is the process; the dedication to constantly and consistently make small changes that move you towards your definition of better.

5. Be humane. At the same time that we're trying to make things better, we're also trying to survive a global pandemic, political unrest, and more. Be conscious of how much change your organization can metabolize, and find ways to build in slack so you can commit to making change over the long haul.

Published August 31, 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Build Back Better" and Organizational Resilience

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
2020 has been a reckoning for many of our clients: they're looking at their organizations and seeing strengths and flaws like never before. One client has been pleasantly surprised by how well the team is working-COVID has forced her leadership team to unite around a common purpose and make decisions without previous dithering or delay-and she wants to cement these behaviors as the new normal.

# data[].attributes.headline
Podcasts - Bridging Culture - Virtual Not Distant Podcast

# data[].attributes.subject
Podcasts - Bridging Culture - Virtual Not Distant Podcast

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Hugo is the CEO of Ekipa, the global market for software teams and owner and founder of Bridge Global.

00:30 Pilar talks about how she met Hugo through social media. She reflects on how these conversations evolve on the podcast and the importance of devoting our full attention to the person on the other end of the line/skype etc. No distractions (we need a quiet environment for recording) and the focus on connecting with the other person.

Pilar mentions Hugo's article on LinkedIn The World's Best Tool for Remote Leadership.

11:20 Hugo shares how and why he set up Bridge in 2005, when outsourcing was not that common.

16:00 The model/framework that Bridge has developed to match teams and clients. The role of the "process manager" who looks solely after communication.

"Virtual work forces you to create structure and use the right tools."

22:50 Bridge's core values.

29:50 Moving on from Bridge and setting up Ekipa.

35:50 What are the major problems faced by people running virtual teams? Links to another article by Hugo: Six Experts Reveal Insights on Remote Team Management.

45:50 How can we help people to develop in remote teams? Hugo's own development, why he works with a coach. Are we allowed to be confused as leaders?

52:00 How do we know people are doing the work? Hugo's article about this on LinkedIn.

"The moment I start wondering about somebody's hours, something is definitely wrong."

Check out Hugo's books on remote team management: ekipa.co/ebooks

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
WLP36 Bridging Cultures - Virtual not Distant

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hugo is the CEO of Ekipa, the global market for software teams and owner and founder of Bridge Global. 00:30 Pilar talks about how she met Hugo through social media. She reflects on how these conversations evolve on the podcast and the importance of devoting our full attention to the person on the other end of the line/skype etc.

# data[].attributes.headline
Podcast - Communicating and Leading Virtually - Stanford

# data[].attributes.subject
Podcast - Communicating and Leading Virtually - Stanford

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Leading successful meetings remotely and being a strong speaker on-screen require specific skills. Communicating effectively has to do with your presence, ability to leverage tools, and your audience engagement. In this "Quick Thinks" podcast episode, host Matt Abrahams shares best practices for becoming a more effective and engaging online communicator.

Think Fast, Talk Smart is a podcast produced by Stanford Graduate School of Business. Each episode provides concrete, easy-to-implement tools and techniques to help you hone and enhance your communication.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Quick Thinks: Communicating and Leading Virtually

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Leading successful meetings remotely and being a strong speaker on-screen require specific skills. Communicating effectively has to do with your presence, ability to leverage tools, and your audience engagement. In this "Quick Thinks" podcast episode, host Matt Abrahams shares best practices for becoming a more effective and engaging online communicator.

# data[].attributes.headline
Podcast - Adjusting to Remote Working, HBR

# data[].attributes.subject
Podcast - Adjusting to Remote Working, HBR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, says that there are simple ways leaders can help their employees stay productive, focused, and psychologically healthy as they work from home during the current global global pandemic. The right technology tools and clear and constant communication are more important than ever. She recommends that managers do an official remote-work launch, carefully plan and facilitate virtual meetings, and pay extra attention to workers' behavior. For individual contributors, it's critical to maintain a routine but also embrace flexibility, especially if you're in the house with family.
Download this podcast TRANSCRIPT
ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Alison Beard.

We're taping this show in the middle of a global health crisis. The coronavirus pandemic is fundamentally changing the way many organizations operate. Governments and businesses around the world are telling those with symptoms to self-quarantine and everyone else to practice social distancing.

For a great many of us, then, remote work is our new reality. How do corporate leaders, managers and individual workers make this sudden shift? What can we do to maintain productivity, ease anxiety, and continue to effectively collaborate with both colleagues and external stakeholders? How quickly can we implement current best practices or develop new ones? Finally, could this big transition change the way we do business forever?

Our guest today has spent two decades helping companies learn how to manage disperse teams and she's here to give us some advice on how to cope with the current situation. Tsedal Neeley is a professor at Harvard business school and founder of the consulting firm Global Matters. Tsedal, thanks so much for joining us today.

TSEDAL NEELEY: Thank you for having me.

ALISON BEARD: So let me start by asking, are most organizations well prepared for making this sudden jump to remote work?

TSEDAL NEELEY: The vast majority of organizations are not well prepared to suddenly move their entire workforce wholesale into remote work, even though they've had portions of their organizations participate in dispersed work or even global collaboration. So no, this is an unprecedented type of scenario that we're seeing today.

ALISON BEARD: So if I'm a C-suite leader, CTO, head of an IT department, or even just someone who's trying to manage their team, what is the first thing that I need to do to make sure people are set up to work effectively outside the office?

TSEDAL NEELEY: Number one, you have to make sure that your infrastructure is set up to accommodate your workforce, meaning that you have the equipment, the technologies available, and that you're prioritizing appropriately - who needs what very quickly and ensure that you have the capacity to deploy the equipment and also to start training people at scale.

If you're a manager, you're thinking along those lines as well, but you're also asking the detailed questions to ensure that individuals have the preparation at the home front to ensure that every individual has the capacity to dial into the office if they need to do that, to get work done, to get through firewalls and things. You need to make sure that every individual has access to the devices that they need and the skills that they need to use their devices. And you need to make sure that no one feels left out. You have to make sure that everyone's included.

ALISON BEARD: So it sounds like this might mean investment in both technology that sent to people's houses and also training?

TSEDAL NEELEY: Absolutely. Technology, training - also prioritizing, who needs what when and all related to the work that you're doing, the stakeholders that you need to serve and the deadlines that you need to make sure that you need to achieve. It's really a set of activities that have to be thought through very carefully while at the same time ensuring that your organization is dealing with the traumatic events from a socio, emotional, psychological perspective. Once all the infrastructure, the technical means, are set up, you have to have managers do their team do their working from home team launches, and that has to happen right away.

ALISON BEARD: So what are some things that leaders can do to make that launch and create an effective remote culture for people who haven't ever done this before?

TSEDAL NEELEY: Every team, every group has to have a launch. This is some of the fundamentals or success factors in teams and groups. For a scenario like working from home, it's even more important to begin a new way of operating with these launches. My suggestion is to do it using some form of enabling media that has a visual element like video conferencing - may be Zoom or Google Hangout, whatever you're using in your organization. But something that can allow you to see other members of your group and you say to your team, "Hey, we have a new situation and I want us to talk about how should we communicate now that we're on this new platform, how often should we communicate? What's the best way for us to communicate? What are everyone's preferences?"

Solicit the suggestions from your group and begin to reestablish a new way of engaging, a new way of communicating. Whatever you used to do, communication wise, you want to increase those.

The other thing that you want to do is you want to establish how you're going to remain connected formally as well as informally. One of the things that you're going to lose when everyone is working from home, it's going to be the water cooler conversations - the let's grab lunch together or let's take a walk together. That goes away. So you have to find ways to recreate this virtually.

ALISON BEARD: You mentioned that this is an emotional struggle for people as well as a practical one. How do managers and colleagues ensure that everyone is feeling okay and adjusting to this transition?

TSEDAL NEELEY: You know, this is a very interesting question because on the one hand, managers are not therapists and psychologists and they have to be very careful. But at the same time, managers have to be quite attuned to whether or not their employees are present, are connecting.

One of the biggest battles that managers are going to have as their employees or team members are now at home is isolation. And they need to identify people that are isolating, that are withdrawing. They can identify those by seeing that people are withdrawn during regular meetings, if they're typically much more participative during group discourse. And suddenly they're not, that's a sign. If they're much more verbose in their writing on email and suddenly they're not, that's a sign.

So once you observe that, it's important to reach out and to check in to make sure that this is not a matter of people not knowing how to really engage and work remotely. Because by the way, remote work is an actual learned skill. People don't just do it well organically. So it's important to help people, to coach people, to provide resources on how to do it well. So you have to figure out, is this a matter of people just don't know how to do this and there's a gap there that we need to fill, or is this because of isolation and dealing with world events? And if that's the case, I would be prepared to connect people to employee resource groups to help people get through whatever struggles they may be going through that's beyond the, the adjustment to working from home.

ALISON BEARD: So what are some of those best practices that you recommend managers share with people but then also people start employing themselves to become more effective at doing this?

TSEDAL NEELEY: You have to create your routines, your regular routines, at the home front related to work. Meaning, you have to get up at the same time. You have to take a shower. Yes, yes you do. You have to get dressed, not necessarily what you would wear on a regular basis when you go into the office - but you have to get dressed, no pajamas. You've got to go carve out that space where you would work, that comfortable space, negotiated space. If you have a partner, you've got to figure out what that space is. And you have to be very disciplined. You've got to figure out what your physical activities are quite to be on a regular basis. Otherwise you're going to start feeling bad, very quickly.

ALISON BEARD: So what I'm finding is that routine is very important, but I also need to have flexibility. You know, like many people, I have kids at home now who are disrupting my day to some extent. So how does a manager and an individual worker navigate that balance? Sort of knowing you need to try to replicate work as much as possible, but knowing that it's impossible.

TSEDAL NEELEY: I'm so glad you brought that up actually, because flexibility is actually one of the greatest benefits of remote work. You can have these disciplined ways of starting your day and ending your day. But what you do in between or even deciding that you'll work eight hours a day, but when you begin your day and when you end your day - first, your commute is now what, three and a half minutes long? Yeah, so commuting has gone away.

Nine to five may not be the way people work. Someone may work from 4:00 am to 8:00, and then you know, spend time, homeschooling as many people are now a days of for two, three hours, and then pick it back up for certain periods of time. But you need to communicate with your manager, help them understand that the rhythm of work has changed a little bit.

But the most important thing, Alison, is that managers have to trust their teams 100%. You have to trust that people are working, that they are going to fulfill their responsibility. If you have hired and you have trained and you have competent people on your team, you give them full trust, you equip them, you support them, and your trust that they're going to work. And you accept flexibility is part of the gift that comes with remote work, and you accept that their workday might look like an accordion and that is perfectly fine.

ALISON BEARD: And can we as organizations and individual workers expect productivity to be the same?

TSEDAL NEELEY: Ordinarily, productivity does not get affected with remote work. And in fact, evidence we have is that productivity actually goes up with remote work. Having said that, what I think will happen during this particular unprecedented era is that it is possible that we might see a dip in productivity because there's this radical change, kind of this tsunami level shift that we're seeing in our societies right now.

And people are distracted, communities are being affected wholesale, and there's so much uncertainty all around us. Entire industries are shutting down. Our clients, customers, our ecosystems are shifting all around us. So do we know that productivity will remain steady in this kind of environment? No. We don't. Does remote work affect productivity on an ordinary basis? Absolutely not. So this is kind of the tension that we have before us.

ALISON BEARD: Do you have some tips for staying focused?

TSEDAL NEELEY: Being very, very disciplined and working in bursts. Turn off all of the things that would draw us and during particular period, meaning cut off all access to external social media. Television, no way. Do the things that you would do normally, be very disciplined about those.

But after a certain period, you've done that for an hour, an hour and a half, two hours. It depends on what you do. You should get up, move, walk around, stretch, and then come back to your position and then, go at it again.

ALISON BEARD: So let's talk about virtual meetings, because I know that's something that people struggle with. It's one thing to talk one on one with someone on a video chat, but to make sure that a team of 10, for example, can discuss an issue and everyone can feel included. How do I make sure that they work virtually as well as they would have in person?

TSEDAL NEELEY: Virtual meetings can be as effective, as effective as face-to-face meetings. Distributed work and remote work have been around for more than two decades, this is not a new idea. Global employees have been doing it for a very long time.

You want to make sure that you've set certain norms, like turn off your phones, don't email, don't multitask so that we focus on our conversation. A video-based digital tool is the best way to do it. You see everyone's face, you can see what everyone's doing.

The other thing is, you don't want to jump straight into the conversation or your agenda. You want to spend the first six to seven minutes checking in with people's kind of this open-ended space. We call this structuring unstructured time. It's akin to the water cooler conversation that you no longer have access to, but informal communication has direct bearing on performance. Just to check in - how are you today, Alison? So-and-so, Mary, how are you today, Curt how are you today? It could be a specific question that you go around asking people. So, very quick check-in. Everyone feels seen, everyone feels heard. And then you can jump into your topic.

ALISON BEARD: What about meetings that are challenging in person already? You know, really large meetings or things like brainstorming sessions. Are there things you need to do differently now that we're in a virtual setting?

TSEDAL NEELEY: The difference is that you can only treat one or two challenging topics at a time, because you don't have the opportunity to work out any lingering issues through walking into someone's office after the fact to smooth things or to do any social lubrication, the way that you would if you were in a physical space with a group.

So for that reason, you have to be thoughtful about when you raise issues and how much time you have to work these things through. The best practice that we've seen is that you thoughtfully raise one or two difficult conversations. Over time people will develop the muscle. But for now you're training and teaching people how to do remote work. So I would really be thoughtful about how I raise these difficult and challenging issues.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So, we've talked a lot about how managers can be interacting with employees and how a team can interact with each other. What about external stakeholders, you know, clients, customers, suppliers, investors. How do we start doing all of that business virtually?

TSEDAL NEELEY: We do them in the same way. Listen, we're going to be online, we're going to communicate through all of these digital tools and media and we need to think about doing them in similar ways. If you need to develop rapport, connection and relationship with people, it's really important that you select the tools that will allow you to do those as quickly as possible. So the visual ones really are important. I was joking earlier in that I actually have just in the last 24 hours, used at least four different digital tools because I engaged with four different external parties.

So I ended up on Zoom, WebEx, Skype, this other system that I'd never even heard of. And it took me a few minutes to figure out how to work it - in fact, 20 minutes before the actual call and I figured it out eventually. So this is what's going to happen. Not everyone is going to use the same digital tools, so you'll have to adapt quickly if you've never used it before. You can propose to use your own. And if others don't know how to use yours, be prepared to use theirs. Suggest video if it's possible and if not, adapt. But this is our reality and we've got to go with it. You can't wine and dine like you used to, but you have to learn quickly, engage fast, and try to communicate with people frequently.

ALISON BEARD: And your research shows that redundant communication is really good too, right?

TSEDAL NEELEY: Absolutely. Redundant communication and pairing various modes of communication can help influence people in various ways. And importantly, it ensures that people's communication or intended communication has gotten across quite clearly. That might be an important thing to do nowadays as people learn to convey their various intended messages through digital tools that they might have never used before.

ALISON BEARD: Right. At the top of this episode, you talked about the need to equip everyone. What if it's an organization where some of the people are able to work from home but some people still have to go in? How do you keep everyone feeling unified and like a team?

TSEDAL NEELEY: There's been such an unusual role reversal with the vast majority of employees working from home with some having to go to work. And those having to go to work feeling like they're losing contact and losing connection. Managers have to remember that those who have to go to work need attention. They need contact, they need communication so that they don't feel like we're the ones who have to go in - maybe even put ourselves at risk when all of the others are safe at home with their families.

And we don't want to get into us versus them phenomenon which is what you typically get when you get into the subgroup differences. This is some of the basic things that we see when you have dispersed workers. You can easily get that, with we the at home people and we are the office people, us versus them.

So a manager has to work very hard to ensure that there's this psychological oneness among the group. Yes, they're there and yes, we're here, but we are part of one team. And those who are home have to routinely make contact with those who are not home and even express gratitude for what they're doing.

ALISON BEARD: Two forward looking questions. We're all struggling. We're all bumbling around trying to get the technologies to work and figure out how to do this well. How long is it going to take us to feel like we've got it down?

TSEDAL NEELEY: Not long. It doesn't take long. Listen, I received an email today from a 70-year-old. This person actually is retired from a very senior executive position, currently sits on boards of extraordinary companies. But this person sent me an email saying that he held an online meeting and used virtual background on his Zoom meeting and was very excited about it. He knows how to do this now and that is exciting. So I don't think it's going to take long in this transition. The technical transition is going to be the easiest thing to happen and you're not going to turn back. People are going to feel like they've known this stuff all along and we'll be glad for it.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So that gets to my last question. You know, do you think that this period of forced remote work is going to change the way we operate as organizations going forward, even when the crisis is over?

TSEDAL NEELEY: I don't think it's going to change our way of working wholesale, but I do think it's going to increase our capacity, our repertoire as individuals in our organizations overall. I also think that our global talent pool will expand as well. We will all realize as individuals and even as organizations that we can actually have employees from anywhere in the world work remotely and be part of our organizations. And individuals will also realize that they can be remote employees and be part of any organization from anywhere in the world. And I think that's a new idea that people would probably never have considered.

The third thing that I think is going to be happening is people are going to have empathy for all of the remote workers that have been part of their organizations, whether global or not for many, many years. And they never quite understood what it was like for them to either work from home or work in another country and be part of their teams. And today they know exactly what that's like. And, through this empathy, they'll be better team members, there'll be better managers, and in the end, better organizations.

ALISON BERD: Tsedal, thank you so much.

TSEDAL NEELEY: Thank you. It's always a pleasure talking to you, Alison. Thank you for having me.

That's Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard business school and founder of Global Matters, a consulting firm. This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buccholz is our audio product manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I'm Alison Beard.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Adjusting to Remote Work During the Coronavirus Crisis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, says that there are simple ways leaders can help their employees stay productive, focused, and psychologically healthy as they work from home during the current global global pandemic. The right technology tools and clear and constant communication are more important than ever.

# data[].attributes.headline
Podcast - Avoiding Miscommunication in a Digital World - HBR

# data[].attributes.subject
Podcast - Avoiding Miscommunication in a Digital World - HBR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael.

We all know that between emails, texts, Slack and more, the way we communicate with our co-workers has changed enormously. That's brought benefits - like the ability to work remotely or on teams spread across the globe, the ability to have things in writing versus forgetting what we said in a phone call, and the ability to send thousands of messages a day.

We tend to think of these new forms of communication as incredibly efficient. But they also often cause more problems than they solve, says Nick Morgan.

NICK MORGAN: Actually, a face-to-face meeting is very efficient in one important sense: that is, we humans care about each other's intent. Intent is very hard to convey except face-to-face, where it's easy and effortless. We've evolved for millennia to be able to understand each other's intent quickly and effectively face-to-face. And so think of that as a different kind of efficiency.

Nick Morgan is a speaking coach and an expert in communication, and he has some tricks and tips on how we can make up for some of the deficiencies that come along with high tech communication.

He's the author of the new book "Can You Hear Me?: How to Connect with People in a Virtual World." Nick, thanks for talking with us.

NICK MORGAN: It's a pleasure, Sarah. Glad to be with you.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I think a lot of people would say, yeah, there are downsides to electronic communication, but you know Skype and texting - you know, we have more ways to communicate with each other more cheaply and easily than ever before. So why is it so bad?

NICKL MORGAN: Yeah. Let's start by acknowledging the magnificent benefits. It's really cheap. It's much less friction. The unintended consequence of that, of course, is information overload. And one of the immediate problems of information overload is that we then start to have to triage all that information that we're getting and so we skim more and more. We look at it less and less closely. And we respond more and more quickly.

And so one of the results of that is that our responses become less and less clear, more and more prone to misunderstanding, and also liable to create more problems than they solve. The research shows that we both think we're better at expressing ourselves in email and other virtual forms than we actually are, and we also think we're better at understanding other people than we actually are.

The real underlying problem here is a lack of feedback. We're not getting the kinds of feedback that we're used to getting, that we get easily enough face-to-face. And even face-to-face, of course, it's possible misunderstand people and mistake their intent.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Is it any better if you're on the phone? Because I know a lot of people will say, "Oh, you know, just pick up the phone and call the person and it will save you so much time." Is that actually true?

NICK MORGAN: Well, I talked to one neuroscientist who said, when I asked him, "So if email is so bad, what should we do about it?" And he actually said, "Pick up the phone and read your email to the other person." That's better because at least you could stop and say, "Did you understand that? How did that affect you?"

But no, there are problems with audio conferences too. One of the issues which is fairly subtle, is that when you convey something over the audio conference, it condenses your voice in a way that strips out what we call overtones and undertones. So the basic pitch at which you're speaking comes through, but the overtones and undertones that gives you your voice its particular quality - so that you can tell your voice from your mother's voice, from your colleague's voice - those tend to get stripped out or condensed.

Now one of the things that gets conveyed in especially the undertones is human emotion, human intent. And so even that becomes less clear - even though we are speaking perhaps live with somebody over a phone, still, their intent is less clear to us than it would be if we were face-to-face.

SARAH GREEN CARMIACHEL: So I'm wondering though, is there any benefit to writing something down? Because a lot of us, I know even though, you know, I host a podcast, but I have the benefit of someone coming along and editing me, making me sound better. And I know in real life I always wish I had that person. So a lot of times I do, if I have something special I want to say, I do write it down because I want to make sure that, you know, the message is really thoughtful and that I have more control over what I'm saying. So are there scenarios where it's actually a good thing to use text instead of verbally talking to someone?

NICK MORGAN: Oh, that's an interesting question. Yeah, absolutely, I suppose if you were concerned about the emotional tone of the message. The issue though really is you have to understand the basic problem. Any kind of form of writing, unless you're Shakespeare, involves basically less emotional information getting through than a face-to-face conversation. And so you might feel safer in that situation. You might feel like you can control it better.

But what happens when we get face-to-face is that willy-nilly, we exchange a huge amount of information about intent. And that's what humans really care about. We care about what's the other person intending toward me? Is that person friend or foe? Is that person going to have me for dinner or am I safe with that person? Is this person more powerful than me or less powerful? So those are the kinds of questions that we're asking.

When we don't get that information - and here's the important point - we tend to make it up. The brain hates to be deprived of information like that because its survival depends on it, and it's always predicting a few seconds ahead: is there danger here? Is there danger here?

And so what the brain does is when it's deprived of those channels of information, the brain makes up information. And here's the kicker: it makes up negative information because that's more likely to keep you alive if you assume the worst. And so that's why so much of written communication gets misunderstood, and typically misunderstood not on the positive side, but on the negative side. People usually are offended or their feelings are hurt. You rarely get people calling up and saying, "Boy, I misinterpreted your email. I thought it was wonderful!"

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yes, I don't think that has ever happened. I am wondering if we're going to try to address this problem, how do we start going about it? Is there any use to telling someone, you know, I really prefer phone or I really prefer, you know, an exclamation point on the end of the email, so you sound more friendly. I mean, is there any sort of purpose in sharing our preferences with other people or do we just have to adapt?

NICK MORGAN: When you think about it, email we've been doing since the 1970's - 40 years we've been doing email. And I like to say there's one thing we've learned as a species about email: that all caps means you're shouting. And basically we haven't learned anything else. So the learning curve is very, very slow on this one.

So yes, the answer is we need to start doing a lot more to improve email. It's not going away. It is an incredibly efficient means of communication, so we're stuck with it. We should by all means, try hard to make it better. And there are lots of little ways to do it. Unfortunately, there's no one button you can press, but there are lots of little things we can do to make it better.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So as the sender of an email, what are some of those little things? Like if you're the one composing an email, what should you be thinking about?

NICK MORGAN: So you should be thinking about making your intent clear in as many ways as possible. So one simple thing to do is to write the email and then read it aloud. And here's a fun thing to do, if you've got a few extra minutes: read it in different tones of voice. So read it as if you were being really sarcastic and see if the meaning sustains that sarcastic reading because that's what the other person's going to do.

Put a headline in that makes your intent very clear. Basically just says, here's the one sentence takeaway from the email and here's my intent - I'm trying to create a happy outcome here. This is what I want. And then - and this may surprise some serious Harvard listeners - but I'm a big fan of emojis. And the research right now shows that people still think emojis are a little juvenile or for teenagers or something, in the business setting.

And so I'm on a one-man crusade to change that because emojis can soften the anticipated sting of an email by putting a little smiley face on it. It sounds a bit silly perhaps, but it can save you a huge amount of time. And so I've started to use emojis and all my friends and colleagues are now getting used to the fact that my emails come with a string of emojis attached.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: You know, I have to say I've worked at HBR almost 12 years and for that whole time I have used emoticons or emojis in my emails. I don't apologize for it .

NICK MORGAN: Good for you. That's awesome. You are saving yourself and your recipients a lot of time in trouble. It's a good idea.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah, so if we're the one composing these messages, whatever the format is, there's a lot we can do to kind of exude extra warmth so that the recipient knows that we care about them. But if we're the recipient of a message, I can't tell you how many times someone has shown me an email saying: "Look at this email, can you believe it?" And I read the email and I think it just seems like a normal email to me, but clearly it's triggered something in the recipient. So if we're on the receiving end of an email that feels ambiguous or threatening, what should we do? Like how should we respond to that?

NICK MORGAN: Your natural instinct - you're hardwired to assume the worst and so you should fight that natural instinct just because the odds are probably pretty good your colleague isn't out to get you - at least I hope that's the case. And so the helpful thing to do in that situation is to email them back and just question them about their intent: What did you mean here? Can you clarify? It's going to add an extra round of emailing, but that beats starting a Cold War with your colleague that could last for weeks, months or years.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah. Well I wonder about that too because there are times when people can get pretty defensive if you ask them to clarify. For example, if someone forwards you a whole email thread and just says "Your thoughts" or "FYI." In those situations, you know, you kind of write back: "I'm sorry, you know, I'm not quite sure what this is about. Can you fill me in?" And you know, we are all triaging. People do - they're just trying to clear their inbox. They think they've put it on you to now figure this out and now you're coming back with more questions. So I understand, but how can we sort of do this in a way that's a little bit more... building connections rather than building frustration?

NICK MORGAN: If the risk is really there, is really real, and you're in danger of, as I say, starting in Cold War, then I would say pick up the phone and talk to the person directly. Every relationship that's predominantly virtual needs to be updated or reinforced every now and then with a face-to-face meeting.

And it's astonishing to me as I was doing the research, how often I talk to people who said they were in an office with somebody who was literally only three or four cubicles down and they never talked to that person face-to-face. And in fact, they would rather send them a text or an email then get up and take 10 steps and talked to them. So you're going to have to renew the relationship every now and then face-to-face. And that's the sort of the first best thing to do.

And, and we started this conversation talking about how efficient email is and that's why we get so much of it and that's what we have to triage it. But actually a face-to-face meeting is very efficient in one important sense. That is, we humans care about each other's intent. Intent is very hard to convey except face-to-face where it's easy and effortless. We've evolved for millennia to be able to understand each other's intent quickly and effectively face-to-face. And so think of that as a different kind of efficiency: Get together every now and then and just clear out the inbox of all the misunderstandings and the mistaken intents and the lack of clarity, and over a cup of coffee, get to know the other person. It's really much, much simpler in the long run.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That's interesting. I love a different definition of efficiency. What if though you are in one of those virtual teams where you are all scattered around the world. Are there ways to get some of those benefits of face-to-face communication without being face-to-face or do you just have to kind of make the effort and spend the money to all get together?

NICK MORGAN: I would say the first best answer is yes - spend the money every now and then bite the travel bullet and go ahead and get together. Failing that - or in between those magnificent trips to Bali where your colleagues are fortunate enough to live and work - I would say one thing you can do - it's very simple nowadays - is get out your mobile phone and record a quick thirty second video. Send the video to them.

You can formalize this on the virtual team by saying everybody sends some quick update on their local culture - something that will be fun, perhaps a sports event that you care about, or a nice dinner that you had or whatever is appropriate in the context and in the culture. Make it fun. Send those around. That can do wonders for making the other person human and seeming relatable.

Another one is to begin every meeting with going around the room and asking everybody, are you - think of a stoplight - red, yellow, or green? Where red means I'm facing Armageddon. I'm having a meltdown. Don't talk to me. I really shouldn't be on this call. Yellow means I'm having a normal stressed out day. Cut me a little slack, but I'm here. And green means everything's good to go.

So what that does is that allows people in a safe way to express the sort of intents that they would normally do if they had a face-to-face, everybody wander into the conference room, kinds of meetings because you'd spend a minute or two looking at each other and, and if Jack there looked haggard and worn, you'd say, "What's the matter, Jack?" And if Jane looked all bubbly and happy, you'd say, "What's up Jane?" And you just naturally sort those things out.

That doesn't happen on the standard team audio conference, just because it's much harder to do. The usual first five minutes of a team audio conference are probably the worst five minutes of your day because it goes like this: Boop, "Oh, who just joined? Great, uh, it's Jack. Jack, how are you?" Jack starts to speak and then boop, "Oh, who is that? Oh, did we just lose somebody who's on now?"

And you do that for about the first five or 10 minutes depending on how time sensitive the team is. And by the time all of that's sorted out and you sort of given up and everybody who's on the call is going to be on the call, everybody's a little tense and you have no idea how everybody else is doing. And so it's just incredibly counterproductive.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah. Conference calls present a whole host of difficulties. There is sometimes difficulty actually hearing people, especially if there's a bunch of people are in a meeting room and the other people are calling in, that can be really difficult. As you pointed out, there is this kind of chaos of people joining the call at slightly different times. Are there sort of special rules for these kinds of conference calls that you have found particularly helpful either to getting everybody to participate or even just to be able to hear what's going on?

NICK MORGAN: So the first thing you have to be aware of, it's just the research that more than 60 percent of the people on a conference call are going to be on mute doing something else. So they're not paying attention. In a sense, you're setting yourself up for failure, if you're the team leader, before you've even started, because your team is only going to be a half participating. So you want to think about trying to reinvent that a little bit and see if you can make that better.

There are a number of ways to do that. One of them is not to think about that audio conference in the same way that you thought about in the old days of face-to-face team meeting there. It made sense perhaps for everybody to meet in a conference room for an hour.

On an audio conference, they're almost always scheduled for an hour or 30 minutes. That's just because we're all fighting the last war. There is no real good reason for them to last that long and in fact one company that I studied the setup daily audio conferences - and you think that would be awful, but they limited them to nine minutes. Now, that turned out to be a really good way to get everybody to focus and pay attention because they knew the suffering wouldn't last that long and they did have information they actually wanted to exchange. And so everybody focused and work much harder to make that go well.

That's the first thing. Another thing to think about is setting up an MC, so if you have an ongoing meeting and you're the team leader, don't try to be of both the boss and the person who makes the meeting go well. Instead, ask somebody else to be the MC who will listen for who's contributing and who's not contributing, and every now and then to stop the meeting in mid flow and say, "All right, let's sum up. Here's where we are. Jack, you haven't said anything for a while. Do you want to weigh in? How are you doing?" And so it's, it's up to you as the leader of that meeting to check in with people.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Are video calls any better or video conference technology?

NICK MORGAN: In some ways they're better because you do see the expressions, the facial expressions of the other people involved. Although, what we find when you track - there's a little bit of research on this - when you track people on video conferences, what they're actually looking at is that little picture of themselves most of the time.

And when you think about it, that's a very strange behavior because, when you and I are talking face to face, it would be as if I held up a little mirror and was constantly sort of looking at myself as we talk. How odd would that be? And yet that's what we do on a video conference. So that just tells you right there, it's not the same thing. But there's a deeper problem with it. And it's something that we have no good fix for yet, which is a video conference is typically screen-to-screen.

And that's a two dimensional thing. One of the things we humans care about unconsciously, but we care about enormously - we you put it a huge amount of time in something called "proprioception," which is figuring out where everybody is in space. We do this for obvious survival reasons. We want to know if somebody is coming at us to attack us or give us a hug. We want to know the difference.

That's very hard to do when you're looking at something that's very confusing for your unconscious mind. It's a flat screen, but it appears to have some depth in it and so my unconscious mind is trying to figure out how far away actually are you, Sarah and I have no idea, so I find that very tiring.

The brain is kind of spinning its wheels trying to figure out where are you in space in relation to me. And so that lack of clear information about depth perception causes our brains to work overtime and that's one reason why we find video conferencing so tiring. Most people report that after an hour or so, a video conferencing, they're exhausted and that's the reason, is your brain is working too hard.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So I'm wondering, we've talked about some things people can keep in mind to exude warmth and you know, sort of make all of this easier; build connections with people even when they're not in the same room. One of the things you talked about in the book was to focus on your message, not on yourself. Can you just tell us a little more about what you mean by that?

NICK MORGAN: Yes. You mentioned this sort of warmth, and it's natural as we talk about this, when we talk about the need for human connection and the need for a human interpersonal comfort and the sense that we're not threatened by other people. But when we think about intent, especially in a business setting, we're actually asking a lot of very subtle questions about intent.

So if I'm sitting around in a meeting, face-to-face, I don't have to think about this in the same way I do online, but I care a lot about the intent of other people in the sense of not just are they warm and friendly or not, but is this person going to support me n this idea I'm putting forward? Who's in charge here? What's the power hierarchy? And is it shifting? Does somebody have a good idea there? Am I going to support that or am I going to be a backstabber? And try to undercut it in some way because of some political move I'm going to make later on.

These are the kinds of games that we play in the business world. They're extremely important to ourselves and our careers and everybody else around us. We can be good colleagues, we can be bad colleagues, but all of that is about intent. And so that's really what we care about. So we're not talking about just are we getting warm, fuzzy feelings of friendliness from other people?

We're really talking about decoding lots of different kinds of intent. And that's what we care about and that's what we need to be able to do better online. And so when I talk about focusing on the message, I mean thinking about the message as a complete package that includes what your intent is and that's the important thing that you need to be able to get across. Otherwise you're wasting your time.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I do wonder also, something I've seen in the last few years is sort of more hybrid meetings. So for example, the way we write headlines now at HBR for the website is a group of us sit together in a room, but we all have our laptops open and we're all in a Google Doc and we're all sort of brainstorming headlines at the same time. And then when someone sees when they like go by, they'll say, "Oh, who just wrote that one? I like that one." And so I'm wondering, as more and more meetings start to happen like that, where maybe there's a mix of in the room and on the computer and on the phone, is all of this just going to become sort of more second nature to us? Will we finally get used to it? Will we adapt?

NICK MORGAN: I think almost certainly humans will figure out work arounds like that. I mean, that's a pretty good one, actually. Smart. You folks at HBR, well done. I think for example, I gave the instance of humanity learning over 40 years that all caps means you're shouting in email. So we do learn slowly these things and we do get more comfortable with the technology.

My fear is that if you get used to, for example, sitting around in a room not addressing people face-to-face, but rather texting them, which I've seen millennials - dare I say it - do because they feel more comfortable communicating via text than they do face-to-face. Then what we're going to get is a generation or a workforce full of people who are uncomfortable communicating face-to-face and incompetent communicating virtually.

And so that's sort of the worst of both worlds, so that's the nightmare scenario. That's my fear and that's one of the reasons why I wrote the book was just to say, "Come on, we've got to do better at this and we've got to start getting clear about intent and helping each other out a little bit, communicating more effectively."

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Nick, thank you so much for talking with us today.

NICK MORGAN: It's a pleasure, Sarah. Thanks for having me.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That was Nick Morgan, a communication expert and the author of the new book "Can You Hear Me?: How to Connect with People in a Virtual World."

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe and Curt Nickisch. We got technical and production help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager.

Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Avoiding Miscommunication in a Digital World

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nick Morgan, a communications expert and speaking coach, says that while email, texting, and Slack might seem like they make communication easier, they actually make things less efficient. When we are bombarded with too many messages a day, he argues, humans are likely to fill in the gaps with negative information or assume the worst about the intent of a coworker's email.

# data[].attributes.headline
Ted Talk - Why Working From Home is Good For Business

# data[].attributes.subject
Ted Talk - Why Working From Home is Good For Business

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Matt Mullenweg: Why working from home is good for business

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As the popularity of remote working continues to spread, workers today can collaborate across cities, countries and even multiple time zones. How does this change office dynamics? And how can we make sure that all employees, both at headquarters and at home, feel connected?

# data[].attributes.headline
Ted Talk - 10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation

# data[].attributes.subject
Ted Talk - 10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Celeste Headlee: 10 ways to have a better conversation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When your job hinges on how well you talk to people, you learn a lot about how to have conversations -- and that most of us don't converse very well. Celeste Headlee has worked as a radio host for decades, and she knows the ingredients of a great conversation: Honesty, brevity, clarity and a healthy amount of listening.

# data[].attributes.headline
Ted Talk - Go ahead, tell your boss, Stanford

# data[].attributes.subject
Ted Talk - Go ahead, tell your boss, Stanford

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Go Ahead, Tell Your Boss You Are Working From Home | Nicholas Bloom | TEDxStanford

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How can we get people more engaged, more productive, and happier at work? Is technology part of the problem – and could it also be part of the solution?

Dave Coplin, Chief Envisioning Officer at Microsoft, imagines what might be possible if more organisations embraced the full, empowering potential of technology and encouraged a truly open, collaborative and flexible working culture.

The RSA is a 258 year-old charity devoted to creating social progress and spreading world-changing ideas. For more information about our research, RSA Animates, free events programme and 27,000 strong Fellowship.
Find out more about the RSA at http://www.thersa.org 
Follow the RSA on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thersaorg
Like the RSA on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thersaorg

------
This audio has been edited from the original event by Abi Stephenson, RSA. Animation by Cognitive Media.

Listen to the full lecture audio: http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2013/re-imagining-work-shifts-in-the-digital-revolution

Watch the edited video: http://www.thersa.org/events/video/vision-videos/david-coplin

# data[].attributes.headline
Long Read - Strengthsfinder 2.0. Tom Rath

# data[].attributes.subject
Long Read - Strengthsfinder 2.0. Tom Rath

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Select Your Cookie Preferences

We use cookies and similar tools to enhance your shopping experience, to provide our services, understand how customers use our services so we can make improvements, and display ads. Approved third parties also use these tools in connection with our display of ads.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
[strengths finder 2.0: a new and upgraded edition of the online test from gallup's now

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
discover your strengths [with access code] by rath

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
[Strengths Finder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup's Now, Discover Your Strengths [With Access Code] by Rath, Tom]Author [Hardcover]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Buy [Strengths Finder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup's Now, Discover Your Strengths [With Access Code] by Rath, Tom]Author [Hardcover] by Tom Rath (ISBN: ) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

# data[].attributes.headline
Long Read - Coaching for Performance, John Whitmore

# data[].attributes.subject
Long Read - Coaching for Performance, John Whitmore

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Select Your Cookie Preferences

We use cookies and similar tools to enhance your shopping experience, to provide our services, understand how customers use our services so we can make improvements, and display ads. Approved third parties also use these tools in connection with our display of ads.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
coaching for performance: growing people

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
business & economics / mentoring & coaching

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
business & economics / human resources & personnel management

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
business & economics / mentoring & coaching

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
business & economics / human resources & personnel management

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Coaching For Performance: Growing People, Performance and Purpose

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Buy Coaching For Performance: Growing People, Performance and Purpose 3 by Whitmore, Sir John (ISBN: 9781857883039) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

# data[].attributes.headline
Long Read - The Coaching Habit, Michael Bungay Stanier

# data[].attributes.subject
Long Read - The Coaching Habit, Michael Bungay Stanier

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Amazon.co.uk : The Coaching Habit - Michael Bungay

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Last Minute Deals Gift Cards & Top Up Best Sellers Customer Service New Releases Prime Video Prime Christmas Books Electronics Home & Garden Vouchers PC PC & Video Games Toys & Games Kindle Books Beauty Fashion Sports & Outdoors Health & Personal Care Food & Grocery Pet Supplies Car & Motorbike Baby Shopper Toolkit Sell on Amazon Free Delivery Subscribe & Save Home Improvement Disability Customer Support

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Read - Productivity Boost of Working from Home, Stanford University

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Read - Productivity Boost of Working from Home, Stanford University

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There has been much debate about working from home and whether or not it's a productivity boost or major productivity drain. Paranoid managers envision employees lying on their couches at home in Metallica concert T-shirts eating Doritos off their belly and watching Ellen.

But Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom has definitive data that paints a very different picture and indicates it's time once and for all to embrace and enable the benefits of working from home.

Bloom found a willing lab rat for a ground-breaking experiment in his graduate economics class at Stanford--James Liang, co-founder and CEO of Ctrip, China's largest travel agency, with 16,000 employees. The CEO was interested in giving employees the work-from-home option because office space in the company's Shanghai HQ is supremely expensive and because employees had to endure long commutes to work (not being able to afford city living). The result was horrendous attrition.

So Liang wanted to make the work-from-home move but needed proof it wouldn't tank productivity.

Enter Bloom, who helped design a test whereby 500 employees were divided into two groups--a control group (who continued working at HQ) and volunteer work-from-homers (who had to have a private room at home, at least six-month tenure with Ctrip, and decent broadband access as conditions).

You can watch Bloom describe the study and the findings in his 2017 TEDx talk below.

Bloom expected the positives and negatives to offset each other. But he was wrong.

Instead, the robust, nearly two-year study showed an astounding productivity boost among the telecommuters equivalent to a full day's work. Turns out work-from-home employees work a true full-shift (or more) versus being late to the office or leaving early multiple times a week and found it less distracting and easier to concentrate at home.

Additionally (and incredibly), employee attrition decreased by 50 percent among the telecommuters, they took shorter breaks, had fewer sick days, and took less time off. Not to mention the reduced carbon emissions from fewer autos clogging up the morning commute.

Oh, and by the way, the company saved almost $2,000 per employee on rent by reducing the amount of HQ office space.

One surprising finding did put a cautionary veneer over going all in on work-from-home, however. More than half the volunteer group changed their minds about working from home 100 percent of the time--they felt too much isolation.

The research comes with a valuable recommendation.

The sum total of the research led Bloom to recommend going for it with work from home but enabling it just a few days a week versus its being a constant.

I think Bloom is right on with his recommendation. Here's why.

I switched from a corporate, office-driven environment to the work-from-home life (except when I'm keynoting) of an author, speaker, and coach.

I feel I'm consistently at the most productive I've ever been in my entire life. My morning commute is a seven-second walk to my study and I actually start working far earlier than I did in the corporate world.

While I make it a point to not work any later than I did at a corporate office, I'm working more deeply with far fewer breaks in concentration. I quite often "get on a roll" that lasts four-plus hours at a time. I can't remember the last such streak working in an office.

I'm able to be so intense and productive that on most days I intentionally break my day up with exercise, which refreshes me and recharges me for another "burst" in the back half of the day. I was never able to do this in a corporate office setting.

I've written before about the one downside of working from home day in and day out--it can be lonely. I can absolutely see how it could impact team cohesion. So Bloom's recommendation to dive in but keep an eye toward maintaining face-to-face contact and cohesion makes a lot of sense.

The nature of every job does not necessarily lend itself perfectly to working from home, even a few days a week. The bigger thought here is that it's time to erase the stigma about telecommuting in general.

It's time for working from home to formally find a home in your company's portfolio of engagement tools.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A 2-Year Stanford Study Shows the Astonishing Productivity Boost of Working From Home

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There has been much debate about working from home and whether or not it's a productivity boost or major productivity drain. Paranoid managers envision employees lying on their couches at home in Metallica concert T-shirts eating Doritos off their belly and watching Ellen.

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Read - Tips for Coaching Someone Remotely, HBR

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Read - Tips for Coaching Someone Remotely, HBR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Leaders are providing less explicit direction to their employees these days, and relying more on coaching as a leadership tool, as organizations become flatter and more dependent on knowledge work. But many people also manage teams that span locations and time zones, which means they must do at least some of their coaching virtually.

While most of my coaching with clients and MBA students at Stanford is conducted face-to-face in the Bay Area, over the last decade I've worked with people across the U.S. and internationally, from Brazil to London to South Africa. Here are some guidelines for virtual coaching that I've found useful.

Don't dictate the medium. You may have a preference for phone or video, or your organization may rely on one more than the other. But for coaching conversations, it's important that both parties choose what's right for the situation, rather than have it dictated by you as the leader or by the organizational culture.

In my experience, both phone and video can work well for coaching. One isn't better than the other, but they are different, and it's important to get a sense of which medium will work best for each relationship (this may change from call to call). Video can provide helpful visual context, but it can also be a distraction, particularly if there's a poor internet connection. Try experimenting with both phone and video to see what works best with different employees.

E-mail can play a useful role in virtual coaching, but I recommend using it to augment phone or video conversations. I often e-mail my clients and students follow-up questions and links to readings and other resources, but it's much less useful for in-the-moment coaching. Text and chat provide a sense of immediate connection, but it's difficult to use them to convey anything more complex than basic information.

Location still matters. The physical setting can have a significant impact on the success of a coaching conversation. When I'm coaching clients and students in person, we meet in a place that will allow for privacy and minimize distractions. This can take many forms, from a reserved conference room to a long walk around the placid Stanford campus.

Because it's far more difficult to pick up interpersonal cues when working virtually, it's even more important to ensure that both you and the other person are in a private, comfortable space where you won't be interrupted.

Focus, focus, focus. Effective coaching in any setting requires focused attention on the other person. That can be tough when we're coaching virtually, because of the pervasiveness of multitasking. A virtual coaching conversation is a special kind of interaction - very different from a typical conference call or online meeting, where we can often just partly tune in and still get the gist. When we're coaching, the most important details are easy to miss. If we allow ourselves to become distracted, we'll be less likely to notice things like a subtle change in someone's facial expression or tone of voice, or an unusual turn of phrase that may signify something more. We may also fail to monitor our own emotional responses and instincts, which are vital sources of data. Even worse, others can sense when our attention wanders, leaving them reluctant to discuss truly important issues.

Get the right equipment. Investing in better technical gear can dramatically improve the virtual coaching experience. One of the clients I work with via video is a CEO who leads a virtual financial services firm. Almost all of his employees are spread out across the country, and they do most of their collaboration online. His home office is equipped with high-quality webcams, monitors, and microphones that give him a vivid virtual presence. Our video coaching sessions aren't quite as high-definition as real life, but they're close.

Even small investments in equipment can go a long way. I worked with a CEO who had a slight speech impediment that made it difficult for me to understand him over the phone. We had no problems communicating when we met in person, but most of our work was going to be virtual, so I bought the kind of immersive headset that's used used by video-gamers, which allowed me to understand him perfectly. I also have an external microphone and speakers so that when I'm working with clients via video I don't have to rely on my laptop components.

Manage the time. In most meetings, including phone calls and video conferences, the discussion goes right up until the end of the allotted time, at which point we rapidly conclude and move on to the next meeting. This is another way in which coaching conversations are different: It's part of your job, as the coach, to track time during the conversation - I usually set a timer to minimize distractions - and stop at a point you've agreed on in advance.

It's hard to tell where coaching conversations will end up. They tend to be more wide-ranging than typical meetings, which makes them more meaningful and valuable. But this also means you'll want to leave some time between the end of the session and the next event on the calendar. This enables both you and the person you're coaching to reflect on the conversation and deepen the learning. Coaching conversations can also bring up strong emotions, and it's essential to leave time to process those emotions. Even a few minutes can make a substantial difference, helping both you and the person you're coaching get the most out of the experience.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Leaders are providing less explicit direction to their employees these days, and relying more on coaching as a leadership tool, as organizations become flatter and more dependent on knowledge work. But many people also manage teams that span locations and time zones, which means they must do at least some of their coaching virtually.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Day-to-Day Communication in a Remote Team

When we work in a remote team (or a team by another name where communication regularly takes place online), most of our regular conversations tend to be asynchronous and transactional. It's therefore easy to miss out on the opportunity to initiate an interaction that will help a team member to learn on the job, to grow as a professional (even as a person!), when the expectation is that of a short, actionable reply. Being afraid of becoming a bottleneck when we know someone is waiting for an answer or solution which we can quickly and easily provide, we fire off a quick email, or do our best to give quick instructions over a ten minute call.

But it is precisely in this kind of team, where team members don't have regular, daily, spontaneous interactions and people work to different schedules, that everyone needs to be more autonomous and not rely on the manager for help. Once upon a time, managers held mountains of information in their desktops or their filing cabinets. Now, if our ecosystem has been set up correctly, team members should have access to the information and people they need to do their job in a timely way - and under regular circumstances, to use their managers and colleagues as sounding boards and mentors, instead of solution providers.

Enabling and Empowering Instead of Solving and Fixing

Amy is not a rare case. She is committed to her work, and wants to be accessible to her team members at all times. However, constantly solving her team members' problems is resulting in her team members being over-dependent on her - and in turn, she's beginning to feel a little bit stressed.

Amy could help herself and her team, by adopting a coaching mindset during the interactions with her team members.

This post isn't going to introduce you to some revolutionary way of working made possible by advances in technology - the aim of these words is to remind you of the essence of leadership, which can be applied regardless of the technology you're using to communicate.

What I'm suggesting goes beyond taking a coaching role during one-to-ones (although that is also desirable): adopting a coaching mindset is about resisting the urge to fire back a quick email or message solving a team member's problem, when a better strategy would be to slow down and help them think through the problem themselves. It's about recognising when you want to help team members in a way that makes you feel useful and needed, rather than in a way that can help them develop as they navigate through their work. It's also about recognising the potential in other people to learn through every obstacle, gaining in confidence and capacity as they use their own knowledge and imagination to generate their own solutions. And to be humble enough to recognise that the best answer might come from the team member instead of ourselves.

Not all our interactions will be best served by a coaching approach - some occasions do require fast problem-solving or a more directive response - for example during emergencies, or when a team member is in the early stages of their learning journey, or going through a difficult patch. But on the whole, many of our regular interactions can be turned into learning opportunities, however small. (For more on when a coaching approach is more appropriate, see Ken Blanchard's work on Situational Leadership - although I am suggesting, that in remote teams, we probably need to consciously adopt a coaching mindset as a default position.)

Flipping the Conversation

These are some of the questions you can ask yourself when faced with a request for help or the opportunity to review a team member's work.

I can totally answer this question and provide guidance in a short email -but will that create an expectation that I am willing and able to solve every problem that arises in the future? What kind of questions can I ask them to help them find the answer themselves? Or, what kind of guidance can I give them to help work through the problem in a way that makes sense to them?

Does this require a quick answer, or could finding the time to turn it into a conversation create more value for the team member in the future? Although there is much talk of team meetings in the online space, it seems to have become unfashionable to ask for a "quick chat". Picking up the phone or jumping onto an online call can turn a short request for help into a conversation that will enable the team member to feel more secure in tackling similar problems when they emerge again.

Is this a question I often receive from this team member? In the past, you might have offered answers or suggestions that had worked for you given your context and experience, but that didn't match that of the team member's. Rather than giving them a quick answer with clear directions, it might be time to help them come up with an answer they can own.

It might be time to raise the fact that the obstacle keeps coming up and that it's worth spending some time to address it. Ask whether a real-time conversation where they can think out loud, or asynchronous communication that can help them think through your questions on your own might be best. Then offer a set of questions to guide them step by step to find a solution (and which can help them develop the habit of thinking through the problem themselves.) For example: What is the obstacle you're facing? What are your different options? What stands in the way? Who else has already solved this problem? What's the next step you can take?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Coaching Mindset for Remote Team Leadership - Virtual not Distant

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When we work in a remote team (or a team by another name where communication regularly takes place online), most of our regular conversations tend to be asynchronous and transactional.

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Read - 15 Tips to Effectivity Manage Remote Employees, Forbes

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Read - 15 Tips to Effectivity Manage Remote Employees, Forbes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
With 50% of the workforce working in some sort of telecommuting role and 80 to 90% of all employees saying they would like to work remotely at least part of the time, according to Global Workplace Analytics, offering remote opportunities is an attractive way to gain productive workers.

While this is the ultimate work scenario for many employees, it can be difficult for many managers to come to grips with. You may feel like you have no control over the situation or find that gaining a trust level with a remote team can be a bit of a challenge. Yet, it is the way of the future of the workplace, and managers need to adapt to make the situation work for everyone involved.

To give managers some guidance, 15 members of Forbes Coaches Council provide top tips for companies to both embrace and better manage a remote workforce. Here's what they recommend:
1. Set Clear Expectations
Everyone has a different idea of what doing something "quickly" or "well" means. Whether showing examples of what you expect to be done, calendar sharing, etc., make sure you have clear expectations from those you work with online. The more prepared they are, the better they can serve. - Ilean Harris, Ilean Harris
2. Treat Remote As Local
Treat your remote people like they are local and treat your local people like they are remote. Give remote people as much access to you as possible. Remember, your local people see you in the halls, eat with you at lunch, stop by your office, etc. The remote people don't have that access and can feel distant. Respond to them as quickly as possible. Make your local people set appointments. - Wayne Anderson, Leadership Science Institute LLC
3. Engage Regularly
Engage your remote workers on a daily basis through some kind of communication. Use multiple channels to communicate. Then, plan a regularly scheduled face-to-face meeting. This can be weekly, monthly, or annually, and could be combined with a training or coaching program. This constant interaction and engagement will help remote workers feel included in an important aspect of the organization. - Barbara OMalley, Exec Advance LLC
4. Schedule Video-Based Coaching
I think it's incumbent, especially with virtual employees, to schedule time and look at one another when you're speaking. We use Zoom to work with our clients and our employees. If we do not schedule time or talk with one another and hopefully face to face, silence becomes very loud and dangerous, as remote employees might end up wondering how they're doing. - Tim Hagen, Progress Coaching
5. Trust Your Team
Sometimes, companies are not willing to embrace a remote workforce because there's an uncertainty about whether or not the work will get completed at the same level as if they were in the office. To combat this belief, set up work-from-home guidelines, such as emails must be responded to within 24 hours, use text for urgent matters, and no calls between certain hours to make sure teammates are not working around the clock. - LaKiesha Tomlin, Thriving Ambition, Inc
6. Make It Feel Inclusive
Too often, it's easy to just relegate remote staff to secondary consideration. This can be overcome with virtual meetings and staff partnerships. Consider assigning remote staff with a local point of contact where communication and connection are valued. Do expect there to be a ramp-up period filled with clear steps, expectations and check-ins to ensure the process is fully embraced. - Laura DeCarlo, Career Directors International
7. Filter For Mission, Values, Outcomes And Role
Remote workers are often frozen out of regular-office human interaction, so on-target overcommunication is critical. Help them get aligned with mission, the values that truly matter to them, as well as the outcomes they love delivering to others and their natural role in any situation. This will keep them truly motivated and working with you longer and more productively. - Yuri Kruman, MasterTheTalk.com
8. Have Reliable Tools First
If remote employees can't download files, struggle hearing on a conference call, and consistently receive meeting invitations for times when they are still asleep, you have failed to address the basics. First, invest in reliable tools to make collaboration possible. Then develop clear processes to use such tools. - Leila Bulling Towne, The Bulling Towne Group, LLC
9. Stay Focused On Goals, Not Activity
It is important to manage expectations and stay focused on goals when embracing a remote workforce. Don't worry as much about what is being done. Instead, concentrate on what is being accomplished. If we are meeting our goals, then great. If not, we need to look into the situation further. It is all about accomplishment, not activity. - Donald Hatter, Donald Hatter Inc.
10. Be Intentional
Create a remote workforce atmosphere of engagement and genuine connection. Be intentional in preparing and orientating employees for the remote workforce culture. Establish clear expectations. Make each team meeting count with intentional purpose and opportunities to engage and contribute in a variety of ways. Intentionality is an essential practice, particularly when we cannot readily "see" our people. - Tonyalynne Wildhaber, The Courage Practice
11. Create A Communication Strategy
Managing a productive team remotely begins with a strategy for communication. First, arrange for the appropriate number of weekly formal "report-ins." Second, set guidelines about daily needs. Some people work better with a shopping list of questions and thoughts while others like a trickle. An understanding of what is urgent will further mitigate inefficiency, allowing ultimate productivity. - Deborah Goldstein, DRIVEN Professionals
12. Avoid Multi-Tasking
Figure out how to avoid multi-tasking. Video conferences instead of phone conferences work well. Encourage people to stay in working mode and off email back-and-forth as much as is reasonable. Email trails with extensive "reply all" can be stifling on productivity. This tends to peak on Fridays as people are trying to move work off their plate. Send a note to whoever needs it, but send it early in the day! - Matt Norquist, Linkage, Inc.
13. Connect Their Goals With Yours
The world is shifting quickly to a workforce interested in learning and skills advancement rather than stability. Working for 30 years for the same company has gone the way of the dodo. I take a personal interest in my team's learning and life goals, and in our meetings, will often take a moment to connect their interests to the goals of my company. Engagement and performance stay much higher. - Tina Dietz, StartSomething Creative Business Solutions
14. Use Technology To Build Community
Building community is important to developing an engaged remote workforce. Use technology to create dedicated spaces for celebrating special days (e.g. birthdays), company milestones (e.g., months or years of service), as well as community recognition. Being intentional about creating community helps develop a corporate culture that inspires connection, which can result in increased productivity. - TC Cooper, UpwardAction® LLC
15. Establish Close Bonds, Help And Support Frequently
Empathize and appreciate their life by discussing family, commonalities and shared beliefs. On the management end, check in frequently (daily) using collaboration tools, shared docs and spreadsheets, phone calls, chat, and video to invest in the relationship. Show you are supportive of their success by using inquiry to help them achieve their goals rather than check on their progress and numbers. - Louis Carter, BPI

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Council Post: Top 15 Tips To Effectively Manage Remote Employees

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With 50% of the workforce working in some sort of telecommuting role and 80 to 90% of all employees saying they would like to work remotely at least part of the time, according to Global Workplace Analytics, offering remote opportunities is an attractive way to gain productive workers.

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Read - Resilient Teams Have Good Connections, Nobl Academy

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Read - Resilient Teams Have Good Connections, Nobl Academy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Resilient Teams Are Founded on Good Connections

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Editor's Note: This post is from Dr. Erin Raab, Co-Founder and Executive Director of REENVISIONED. Check out her panel from the Change@Work Conference to learn more about resilience. When the future is unpredictable and five-year strategic plans have been thrown out the window... This is a time for resilience.

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Read - Working Alone, Together. New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Read - Working Alone, Together. New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A. J. Beyer, a software developer, leads a bicycle through Indy Hall in Philadelphia, a co-working space. People are "going back to the office to be around people again," one of its founders said. Credit... Mark Makela for The New York Times

Whitney Tingle, a New York entrepreneur, once had the common fantasy of ditching the 9-to-5 world, starting her own business and working in the serenity of her home. It did not quite work out as planned.

A year after cofounding Sakara Life, an organic-meal delivery company, she discovered that "there was no beginning or end to work," said Ms. Tingle, 27. "I would get distracted by dust bunnies under the desk and end up vacuuming in the middle of the day, or look at myself in the mirror at 7 p.m. and realize I was still in pajamas." And though health food was her business, she could not stay away from her boyfriend's pretzel supply. "They would stare at me from the perch above the fridge," Ms. Tingle said plaintively.

Concerned about her sanity and waistline, she and her business partner, Danielle DuBoise, in August applied to NeueHouse, a new "co-working" space near Madison Square that has fashioned itself as a private club. The work space has a lavish industrial-chic interior, courtesy of the designer David Rockwell; charter members that include Chris Blackwell, the Island Records founder, and Jefferson Hack, of the British magazine Dazed & Confused; and yearly fees that can reach five figures.

In just a few months, Ms. Tingle said, her mood has brightened, and her company has doubled its revenues through the contacts she has made there. "It's impossible to get that sort of thing at a Starbucks," she said.

This was supposed to be the age of the mobile (a k a nonexistent) office, with "solopreneurs" telecommuting from home or the beach in elastic-waist pants. But many who work independently are discovering alienation lurking behind the home-office fantasy, and an increasing number are joining a new generation of co-working organizations, like Grind, Fueled Collective and NeueHouse - some more exclusive than others. There are work spaces for writers (the Brooklyn Writers Space); for design types and bloggers ( Studiomates, in Dumbo); and scores for tech entrepreneurs, including ones that double as continuing-ed campuses ( General Assembly, which opened in New York in 2011, offers classes on subjects like "back-end Web development").

Though there were grumbles when the Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer did away with her employees' work-from-home arrangements, maybe she was on to something: many workers are saying they need a hive to be happy and productive.

One is Rebekah Epstein, who used to run a public relations agency out of her home in Austin, Tex., with only her dachshund, Dixie, whose barking once forced Ms. Epstein into a dark coat closet as she carried out a sensitive negotiation by phone with a client. Frustrated, she joined a local space called Link Coworking, which offers birthday drinks, mixers and potluck dinners to members, as well as colleagues to look presentable for. "It seems like a small thing," Ms. Epstein said. "But getting dressed for work makes a huge difference."

Ivory Chafin-Blanchard, a Web producer in Brooklyn who similarly wearied of working in a bathrobe and sunglasses on her sun-drenched terrace, had another complaint.

Image

Co-working sites, which allow for solo work but also encourage collaboration, include Grind, a Manhattan "work space for free-range humans." Credit... Todd Heisler/The New York Times

"When you don't have to commute, and you've got a demanding workload, it is very hard to switch off," said Ms. Chafin-Blanchard, 32. At home, she added, "if I wasn't working, I felt guilty."

She spent so many hours "on" that she tried to make her home office physically uncomfortable - installing a hard, upright chair and a glass desk - to keep her from spending too many hours there. "I had to depersonalize my house," she said.

Last September, she gave up and joined Grind, a so-called "work space for free-range humans," a "22nd century platform" on Park Avenue South that opened with a minimalist-chic interior in 2011, promising to "help talent collaborate in a new way: outside the system." (Or in front of the vending machine, where Ms. Chafin-Blanchard said she met someone who is now a partner in her business.)

Ever since the futurist Alvin Toffler painted utopian images of the "electronic cottage" in his 1980 book, "The Third Wave," professionals have imagined trading committee meetings and soul-crushing commutes for a life of self-directed fulfillment. The percentage of American workers who work exclusively from home, while still small, grew by 37 percent between 1997 and 2010, to 6.6 percent, according to one Census Bureau survey. While estimates vary widely on the number of millions who make up Freelance Nation, as of 2009, more than 15 million workers in the United States listed themselves as self-employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it seems the work-from-home dream was not all it was cracked up to be. There are now nearly 800 commercial co-working facilities in the United States, up from a little more than 300 only two years ago, and about 40 in 2008, according to an annual survey by Deskmag, an online magazine that covers the co-working industry.

Surely it wasn't the fluorescent lights and office politics they were missing? But Tierney O'Dea Booker, 37, who ran a media consultancy out of her home in Austin before joining Link, pointed out that there can be a positive side to the latter. "The workplace is essentially gameified, with points and obstacles, rewards, pitfalls and allies," she said. "When you're alone, you have to make up your own system to self-propel. It's easy to set the bar at the wrong level for yourself on a daily basis, either by not pushing yourself hard enough or too hard, trying to reach an unrealistic goal and feeling inadequate as a result."

Offices can also be compelling sources of personal narrative, as evinced by the success of television shows like "Mad Men," "30 Rock," "The Good Wife" and, naturally, "The Office."

"Those shows are popular because they're about a community," said Ms. Booker, who worked at 30 Rockefeller Plaza as a news producer before moving to Austin. "You have friends, feedback, drama, comedy," she said. "Working by yourself, you lose out on that."

This is not to say that working remotely has been disappointing for all. An oft-cited 2007 Pennsylvania State University meta-analysis of 46 studies on telecommuting found that working from home for people employed by traditional companies can have "small but favorable effects on perceived autonomy, work-family conflict, job satisfaction and performance."

But "high-intensity" telecommuters at home more than three days a week and fulltime freelancers risk feeling alienated, said Ravi S. Gajendran, an author of the study who is now an assistant professor of business at the University of Illinois. "The need to feel socially connected is a fundamental human need," Dr. Gajendran said.

The San Francisco Writers' Grotto. Credit... Heidi Schumann for The New York Times

A Google search on "freelance lonely," for example, yielded 3.6 million results. For many, the "electronic cottage" has become an "electronic tiger cage," said Paul Saffo, the Silicon Valley technology forecaster.

"We went through our work-from-home-in-your-bunny-slippers phase and discovered it was lonely," Mr. Saffo said.

No wonder some work spaces are playing up their party atmosphere. Link holds "Mad Men"-themed holiday soirees. Indy Hall in Philadelphia, which opened six years ago, members organize after-hours jams and art shows in their mural-covered space, all in line with a quasi-communitarian dogma espoused by Alex Hillman, a founder of Indy Hall.

"People aren't going back to the office for the office," Mr. Hillman said. "They're going back to the office to be around people again." With its emphasis on fun, Fueled Collective, a new 18,000-square-foot work space in SoHo, feels more like a frat house, with a whiskey room, carts with free ice cream and Ping-Pong tables.

And at Grind (which has a waiting list of 200, according to a founder, Benjamin Dyett, and is expanding to the garment district and to Chicago), members are encouraged to sit next to someone new every day.

No co-working space, however, has debuted with the same social aspirations as NeueHouse. With its exposed plywood, cast-iron chandeliers and concrete floors, the 50,000-square-foot interior suggests the Ace Hotel crossed with a Las Vegas mega-club. Its founders - Joshua Abram and Alan Murray, both veteran tech entrepreneurs in their 40s, along with Oberon Sinclair, a partner - are targeting globe-trotting creative professionals, the Monocle magazine types who consider it strategically crucial that Neuehouse plans outposts in far-flung locales starting with Los Angeles, London and Shanghai, and do not flinch at the cost ($600 a month to work in the main "gallery" downstairs, starting at $4,000 for the private studios upstairs). The work space features a screening room, broadcast studio and recording studio.

"We have members, not tenants," Mr. Abram said. Membership, by application, is "curated" by a board that includes Michelle Grey, a former gatekeeper at Soho House, the London-based chain of private clubs, and Tracey Ryans, a former collaborator with Serge Becker at velvet-rope night spots like the Box. Early members include Frieze Art Fair and Blue Bottle Coffee.

Not that snobbery is condoned. NeueHouse's organizers say they are looking for nothing more than a diverse set of skills from its members, so that they might come together organically to form the blockbuster start-ups of tomorrow.

"It's an ecosystem," Mr. Ryans said. "A lot of places focus on creating an environment where it's like a lake, you've got four species of fish. We think we're the Great Barrier Reef."

NeueHouse, also in Manhattan, a collective organization of work spaces and common spaces for entrepreneurs and "solopreneurs." Credit... Evan Sung for The New York Times

The very layout of Neuehouse is meant to suggest that work nowadays, at least for entrepreneurs, is a glorified version of hanging out. The main, gallery space, which opens next month (its upstairs studios opened last spring), is a collection of spaces meant to bring people together: there are retro-style library tables, kilim-covered cushions on a grand staircase designed for lounging, and conversation nooks with coffee tables and leather sofas.

"The design strategy is a typology that looks at accidental encounters, as much as organizational clarity or efficiency," Mr. Rockwell said.

It's an office designed for the interactive, serendipitous manner in which creative professionals work today, in a supposed ideas economy where corner offices and in-boxes feel like relics. "We've gone from a task-oriented office culture to a cafe culture," Mr. Murray said. Such lofty talk may help sell memberships, but even such new-model offices eventually start to feel a bit like regular offices, said Po Bronson, the writer who co-founded the San Francisco Writers' Grotto 19 years ago. Meaning: Competition, gossip, envy and ego as well as collaboration.

"It's like in school; you want to go to a school with other good students, but you don't help them with their homework," Mr. Bronson said. "You compare yourself with them. You don't want to be the loser."

Besides, not every freelancer these days wants to enjoy a college-housing-co-op level of intimacy with a bunch of strangers.

Milano Buckley, a former advertising copywriter, rented a sleek, glass-walled office at We Work in SoHo when she left a fashion label to work on a memoir. The guys next to her used to bring their dogs to work, and the dogs were cute. But sometimes, you can have too much of a good thing, even "community."

"It was a little bit of a fishbowl feeling," Ms. Buckley, 33, said. "People want to know what you do, so that communal culture lends itself to, 'What are you working on, awesome, high five.' But for some kinds of work, you don't necessarily want to share it."

But at least co-working spaces have one advantage over regular offices, said Ms. Booker, of Austin: You're there by choice.

"If anyone is annoying you," she said, "You just move."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Working Alone, Together (Published 2013)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Whitney Tingle, a New York entrepreneur, once had the common fantasy of ditching the 9-to-5 world, starting her own business and working in the serenity of her home. It did not quite work out as planned. A year after cofounding Sakara Life, an organic-meal delivery company, she discovered that "there was no beginning or end to work," said Ms. Tingle, 27.

# data[].attributes.headline
Podcast - Coaching Matters More Than Ever, Coaching Culture

# data[].attributes.subject
Podcast - Coaching Matters More Than Ever, Coaching Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This is the second in Coaching Culture's 'Now More Than Ever' Podcast Series, a collection of podcasts released every week for 6 weeks as part of our #NowMoreThanEver campaign.

Because coaching matters, now more than ever, our ICF-accredited coach and course author Jo Wright is speaking to professionals from a wide range of industries, finding out how coaching is helping them through these times of change and crisis.

Jo's guest on episode #2 is Colin Watt, Global Chief People Officer at NCC Group. Listen in as Jo and Colin discuss what is expected of leaders and managers in the workplace during the pandemic, the challenges of implementing coaching as a management style, and what coaching means within his organisation.

For more information on why coaching matters Now More Than Ever, and to find out how to give everyone in your organisation the capability to coach, head to www.coachingculture.com or call us on 0161 410 0707

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Coaching Culture - Coaching Matters Now More Than Ever: #2 - Jo Wright & Colin Watt

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is the second in Coaching Culture's 'Now More Than Ever' Podcast Series, a collection of podcasts released every week for 6 weeks as part of our #NowMoreThanEver campaign. Because coaching matters, now more than ever, our ICF-accredited coach and course author Jo Wright is speaking to professionals from a wide range of industries, finding out how coaching is helping them through these times of change and crisis.

# data[].attributes.headline
Podcast - Emotional Intelligence in Remote Teams

# data[].attributes.subject
Podcast - Emotional Intelligence in Remote Teams

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
EI was defined in the 90s by Daniel Goleman, who first described the ability to understand and manage your own emotions, as well as understanding those of others to build great relationships and contentment. Goleman's work coincided with early academic investigations into teams and how they function, and in the leadership space is closely related to empathy, as well as personal vulnerability and authenticity.

Developing EI is a continuous journey, because the multilayer complexity of emotions never ends, and there is always more to know. Emotional intelligence is a skill anyone can develop and improve, creating a lifetime pathway for growth.

The lockdown and forced home-working period induced more self-awareness for some, and facilitated some good team interactions and conversations - perhaps triggered by the video-call glimpsed reveals of personal homes and lives, creating new openness and a way to talk about things that have never been brought to the office. This practice can strengthen us as teams for the long term, including if/when we go back to more traditional ways of working, or return to work after a long period of furlough.

People who feel that their managers are doing their best to empathise with them are well positioned to move on together, and cope with future change and challenges. But not every manager, every team, know how to have conversations about emotions in a safe way, particularly as a group rather than one to one - hence the training materials created by Rowena and Sandra, to help facilitate these conversations.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
WLP248 Emotional Intelligence in Remote Teams - Virtual not Distant

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
EI was defined in the 90s by Daniel Goleman, who first described the ability to understand and manage your own emotions, as well as understanding those of others to build great relationships and contentment. Goleman's work coincided with early academic investigations into teams and how they function, and in the leadership space is closely related to empathy, as well as personal vulnerability and authenticity.

# data[].attributes.headline
Podcast - Motivational & Visible Teamwork, Virtual Not Distant

# data[].attributes.subject
Podcast - Motivational & Visible Teamwork, Virtual Not Distant

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
5.23 Autonomy

Having a choice of where to work from feeds autonomy, so it's easy to conclude that 'remote = better'. But right now external circumstances may constrain that, as may the structures of large organisations trying to change the way they move forward in a safe and hybrid way. Choosing how and when to do the work matters too, and even who we do it with - so creating choice wherever we can will help people feel more autonomous.

In Visible Teamwork, Deliberate Communication and Visible Work gives us autonomy by putting us in the driving seat, and helps your correspondent too by giving them information they can use - but encouraging over-reporting or using badly-understood tools, could make things worse.

10:18 Competence

Both doing our job well and learning to improve, are important here - so asynchronous, flexible communication supports this, promoting deep work without disruption.

Being unable to get hold of people or information makes us feel less competent, so we need the structures of Visible Workflow and effective communication tools, to feel confident in what we are doing, when and how. Bear in mind that when introducing any kind of change programme, like a shift to more remote working, can reduce productivity - and this impacts on feelings of competence.

Learning together helps people feel connected and in control, but they need intentional frameworks for doing this through deliberate communication - it won't just happen, especially in distributed teams.

14.23 Relatedness

We need to relate to people, the work, and its purpose - and this reminds us how much we need to stay connected to the whole organisation and the bigger picture, as well as our immediate team and work.

Open conversations, structured reporting back, and sharing news can help here, using any means of sharing flexibly. And research from MIT by Sandy Pentland and his team has indicated that high-performance teams communicate well outside of their teams as well as internally - again this needs to be planned and scheduled, or it won't arise, so cross-functional meetings or social events might help here. (See HBR's The New Science of Building Great Teams.)

Interpersonally, Planned Spontaneity supports relatedness - making sure we bump into each other in and around our work, and finding ways too to deepen the interactions we have with our colleagues, wherever that takes place.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
WLP243 Motivation and Visible Teamwork in Remote Teams - Virtual not Distant

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Having a choice of where to work from feeds autonomy, so it's easy to conclude that 'remote = better'. But right now external circumstances may constrain that, as may the structures of large organisations trying to change the way they move forward in a safe and hybrid way.

# data[].attributes.headline
Podcast - Measuring Productivity, Remote Work

# data[].attributes.subject
Podcast - Measuring Productivity, Remote Work

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Liam Martin, co-founder and CMO of Time Doctor, joins Job to discuss his companies that help organisations embrace remote working and how you can measure productivity (remote or not).

Episode notes:
Time Doctor Running Remote Conference
Liam on Twitter: @vtamethodman

Job on Twitter: @Jobvo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
3: Measuring productivity with special guest Liam Martin - Remote Work Podcast

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Liam Martin , co-founder and CMO of Time Doctor, joins Job to discuss his companies that help organisations embrace remote working and how you can measure productivity (remote or not). Episode notes: Time Doctor Staff.com Running Remote Conference Liam on Twitter: @vtamethodman

# data[].attributes.headline
Ted Talk - Leaders Who Coach Create a Better Workplace, Ted Talk

# data[].attributes.subject
Ted Talk - Leaders Who Coach Create a Better Workplace, Ted Talk

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Leaders who coach are creating better workplaces, and so can you.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Workplaces where humans thrive are possible! With a strong solution-focus, leaders who coach empower and develop talent in others. Companies are increasingly adopting a coaching culture, quietly bringing about a positive revolution in work relations and performance. Coaching is more than a skill, it’s a new leadership style that brings out the best in everyone and creates value all-around. In fact, anyone can use a coaching style at work and at home. Learn how to, in this talk.

# data[].attributes.headline
Ted Talk - Millennial Leadership: Stop Complaining, Start Coaching. Ted Talk

# data[].attributes.subject
Ted Talk - Millennial Leadership: Stop Complaining, Start Coaching. Ted Talk

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Millennial Leadership: Stop Complaining, Start Coaching

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Millennial Leadership: Stop Complaining, Start Coaching | Danita Bye | TEDxBismarck Danita speaks about how millennials want a coach and a mentor rather than a boss. She asks the questions "What are the coaching and mentoring micro-moves that we can make that will have a major lifetime empire state building impact on our millenials?"

# data[].attributes.headline
Video - Understanding Unconscious Bias, The Royal Society

# data[].attributes.subject
Video - Understanding Unconscious Bias, The Royal Society

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This animation and briefing on unconscious bias adapted by Professor Uta Frith DBE FBA FMedSci FRS introduce the key concepts and current academic research around unconscious bias with the aim of alerting Royal Society selection and appointment panel members to potential biases that can arise when making judgments or decisions. They form part of the Society's efforts to ensure that all those who serve on selection panels are aware of differences in how candidates may present themselves, how to recognise bias in oneself and others, how to recognise inappropriate advocacy or unreasoned judgement. All panellists receive an electronic copy of the briefing in advance of any meeting, it is also read at the beginning of each meeting as a reminder.

The Society is concerned with excellent science wherever and by whomever it is done and is committed to increasing diversity in STEM by seeking out participation from underrepresented groups, in order to build and develop a world in which studying and working in science are open to all. Addressing unconscious bias is one tool that the Royal Society is using to ensure that our funding, awards and appointments are drawn from the widest range of talent.

Further reading
Making better decisions in groups Diversity in science Implicit and unconscious, the bias in us all

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Understanding Unconscious Bias | Royal Society

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This animation and briefing on unconscious bias adapted by Professor Uta Frith DBE FBA FMedSci FRS introduce the key concepts and current academic research around unconscious bias with the aim of alerting Royal Society selection and appointment panel members to potential biases that can arise when making judgments or decisions.

# data[].attributes.headline
Long Read. -Remote, Jason Freid & David Heinemeir Hannsson

# data[].attributes.subject
Long Read. -Remote, Jason Freid & David Heinemeir Hannsson

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Select Your Cookie Preferences

We use cookies and similar tools to enhance your shopping experience, to provide our services, understand how customers use our services so we can make improvements, and display ads. Approved third parties also use these tools in connection with our display of ads.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
business & economics / workplace culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
jason fried; david heinemeier hansson; remote working; working from home; working out of the office; business advice; management; office working; office jobs; business advice david heinemeier hansson jason fried management office jobs; office working remote remote working working from home working out of the office; innovation rework management style creative companies workplace working staff; tony crabbe focus the hidden driver of excellence daniel goleman fierce conversations; bosses productivity technology anxiety balance drink efficient huffington mindfulness; how to unwind relax revive job unwinding tony crabbe busy how to thrive in a world of too much; office productive product

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
remote; jason fried; david heinemeier hansson; remote working; working from home; working out of the office; business advice; management; office working; office jobs; business advice david heinemeier hansson jason fried management office jobs; office working remote remote working working from home working out of the office; innovation rework management style creative companies workplace working staff; tony crabbe focus the hidden driver of excellence daniel goleman fierce conversations; bosses productivity technology anxiety balance drink efficient huffington mindfulness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Buy Remote: Office Not Required by Heinemeier Hansson, David, Fried, Jason (ISBN: 8601418186649) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

# data[].attributes.headline
Long Read - Distributed Teams, John O’Duinn

# data[].attributes.subject
Long Read - Distributed Teams, John O’Duinn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Select Your Cookie Preferences

We use cookies and similar tools to enhance your shopping experience, to provide our services, understand how customers use our services so we can make improvements, and display ads. Approved third parties also use these tools in connection with our display of ads.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Amazon.co.uk : Distributed Teams, John O'Duinn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Select Your Cookie Preferences We use cookies and similar tools to enhance your shopping experience, to provide our services, understand how customers use our services so we can make improvements, and display ads. Approved third parties also use these tools in connection with our display of ads.

# data[].attributes.headline
Long Read - Virtual Leadership, Penny Pullan

# data[].attributes.subject
Long Read - Virtual Leadership, Penny Pullan

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Amazon.co.uk : Virtual Leadership, Penny Pullan

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Last Minute Deals Gift Cards & Top Up Best Sellers Customer Service New Releases Prime Video Prime Christmas Books Electronics Home & Garden Vouchers PC PC & Video Games Toys & Games Kindle Books Beauty Fashion Sports & Outdoors Health & Personal Care Food & Grocery Pet Supplies Car & Motorbike Baby Shopper Toolkit Sell on Amazon Free Delivery Subscribe & Save Home Improvement Disability Customer Support

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Read - Digitally Nudging Teams for Collective Intelligence, Carnegie Mellon University

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Read - Digitally Nudging Teams for Collective Intelligence, Carnegie Mellon University

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Read - Innovating in a Remote Environment. Raconteur

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Read - Innovating in a Remote Environment. Raconteur

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
After months of enforced working from home during lockdown, when only a quarter of UK employees want to go back to the office full time, 55 per cent report higher levels of productivity.

The finding, by identity management firm Okta, reveals a major productivity benefit of remote work, which bodes well as a future model for businesses that embrace the necessary technology and digital transformation.

But in the absence of an office-based physical workspace and the spontaneous interactions that often spark new ideas, it leaves bosses with another challenge: how to innovate at work?

Home working can recapture the time lost to commuting and its flexibility is conducive to productivity, as well as home life. However, a number of the benefits of face-to-face working are lost, particularly the creation of social ties and reciprocal trust essential to innovation.

"Research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown successful innovators build a foundation of trust around micro-interactions that occur in the workplace. And the Allen Curve shows that if you don't see someone face to face, you don't collaborate with them," says David Shrier, programme director at Oxford Cyber Futures.

"New technology can help bridge this gap, even to the extent of having an artificial intelligence, or AI, assistant that helps your team do a better job of working together. This technology exists, but it's down to the willingness of organisations to implement it."

A new report, Innovation and communication media in virtual teams: an experimental study, by the University of Cologne and Leibniz University Hannover, suggests employees working from home are unlikely to be less innovative. The report says video conferencing among team members can compensate potentially negative effects on innovation when employees work remotely from each other.

"Previous research has shown that creative performance is significantly lower when there is no face-to-face communication," says Professor Bernd Irlenbusch, who co-led the study. "However, the current lockdown has fostered the adoption of new technologies to conduct collaborative tasks when team members work from home. Video conferencing can mitigate the gap in creative performance."

Remote teams can be creative at work

But is it possible to replicate the creative spark and harness the collective energy that drives innovation among a remote team? To try and recreate those spontaneous exchanges, global media agency Wavemaker is looking at how to innovate at work by encouraging everyone worldwide to call five people a week who they would normally bump in to in the office.

Global head of organisational effectiveness and chartered occupational psychologist Emma Brock says: "There's no agenda, no formal calendar invite, just a random call to say hello, see how they're doing and see if this sparks a good idea or new opportunity."

Nigel Davies, founder and chief executive of digital workplace Claromentis, believes the company has already solved the challenge of how to innovate at work when staff are apart.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the team of 40 worked from home or the office, as they liked. Productivity levels are maintained by replicating the innovative company culture in its digital workplace, prioritising good communication, using project management tools and encouraging online learning. Staff use their collective energy to innovate continuously, while individuals are encouraged to work on product or company innovation solutions of their own.

Davies says: "Three of our coders joined forces to create a more accessible build system for our codebase, and another team has been working on a new way to get relevant functionality to our customers without them having to upgrade, so we can deploy anything they need in these unusual times really quickly and simply. We've also developed a new process that makes it easier for smaller companies to try our software.

"How to innovate at work is to ensure innovation is truly ingrained in your culture and to remove any barriers to getting started. We have Slack channels dedicated to ideas and innovation, we encourage people to work on their own projects without asking and we publicly celebrate initiative."

Innovative ideas that benefit business

The company hosts an annual innovation week hackathon event when everyone briefly downs tools on client work and spends time away from the office together, working in small teams to build anything they think the business would benefit from. Last year's event saw bugs fixed and new processes written.

"There's no reason we can't replicate our hackathon virtually using our proprietary remote collaboration and project management tools," says Davies. "By dedicating a week to innovation and temporarily halting client work, our employees have the time and headspace to create and build. We'll still look to make the week as enjoyable as possible, with social events scheduled throughout the week on Zoom."

There are digital tools and apps for stimulating creative thinking and solving problems alone, such as brainsparker, an app that generates random prompt cards to overcome mental blocks and spark fresh thinking, and Coggle, an online tool for creating mind maps and flow charts.

"Innovation can occur and prosper in solitude, just as it does in team-oriented environments," says Dr Julia, Jones, neuroscientist and founder of The Music Diet. "It can occur during deep, focused thinking, as well as spontaneously and instinctually. So remote working is just as likely to engender forward-thinking and 'eureka' moments, such as those that take place around the water cooler, when someone is walking their dog and their brain is in a default and uninhibited mind-wandering mode."

Anyone can have a good idea

Given that diversity of thought and inclusivity are the building blocks of innovation, remote working could offer greater opportunities to enhance the diversity of the workforce as companies are no longer restricted by geographical boundaries when hiring.

The move to distributed working is also providing opportunities for different people to shine, says Bev White, chief executive at Harvey Nash Group. "Whereas in traditional office working it's usually the more extrovert and self-confident people who take the lead, the more remote working model changes that.

"Other qualities - independence, efficiency, self-organisation - become more important than before, and these attributes can provide a real boost to productivity and innovation."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How remote working impacts innovation and productivity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After months of enforced working from home during lockdown, when only a quarter of UK employees want to go back to the office full time, 55 per cent report higher levels of productivity. The finding, by identity management firm Okta, reveals a major productivity benefit of remote work, which bodes well as a future model for businesses that embrace the necessary technology and digital transformation.

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Read - How Gaming Can Improve Teams, Tech Republic

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Read - How Gaming Can Improve Teams, Tech Republic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Here's a look at how companies are using online gaming techniques to advance employee skills and confidence.

Image: iStock/Bimbimkha007

Regardless of industry sector or company size, managers face daily challenges of training new employees and continuing to grow the internal knowledge base among existing employees. They also face the problem of staff always going to the same people (usually highly compensated, high demand people) for answers to questions. This ties up resources and can cause work delays.

So how do you get new and existing staff in your projects, at the help desk, in customer service, or even in sales to expand what they know without having to constantly go to the same old people?

Many companies have turned to the gamification of their knowledge and support systems to improve employees' desire to learn, and also to aid managers in motivating and developing employees while building teamwork and staff bench strength.

Bunchball, a gamification provider, defines gamification as "the process of taking something that already exists, such as a website, an enterprise application, an online community - and integrating game mechanics into it to motivate participation, engagement, and loyalty."

There are systems of gamification like Jive which integrates game playing mechanics like earning badges, levels and prizes, into existing business systems in order to better engage, motivate and teach employees.

Here is how gamification worked at Cisco:

The company wanted to encourage employee participation, self-learning and knowledge sharing in its Cisco Learning Network.

"At that time, the network was more than a decade old and had more than 850,000 users," said Mahal Torres, who was then administering the system, in a Bunchball case study. "With that kind of volume, it was no surprise that administrators were frequently overwhelmed with questions. We knew we needed a way to encourage users to answer one another's questions."

Cisco incorporated gamification into its learning network so that employees could learn subject matter, test on it by answering questions, and then earn certifications for mastering certain knowledge areas. Employees began at a grassroots level and then built their game reputations up by becoming members of specific study groups, and then advancing to specialist or expert classifications on a given subject.

The net effect was that employees began to cross-engage with each other, work silos broke down, and the question load on administrators was reduced.

Gamification has been used most successfully in cases where an employee base is widely distributed geographically (such as a field sales force), and knowledge about the products, the company and production schedules is needed. Customer service and the IT help desk are also areas that have benefited from gamification.

For managers interested in taking a look at gamification to help motivate and educate their staffs, here are several best practices:

Develop your business case first. You can do this by identifying an area of knowledge that would enhance your staff's ability to produce at higher levels if more people had the knowledge.

Develop metrics so you can compare "before and after" results for gamification. Frequently used metrics are: reduced time spent answering questions by your most expensive (and in demand ) staff; increases in employee engagement in online training and knowledge sharing; and improvements in staff execution of tasks and projects.

Next, design a gamification approach that focuses on the information, mastery and/or sharing that needs to be attained, and the test batteries that need to be developed to enable employees to meet certain mastery levels. Most managers do not have these skills. Instead, they engage training consultants or educational experts who then develop the approach.

Determine (probably with the help of a consultant) how to integrate your gamification tools with your in-house systems.

Start small and then expand your approach. Throughout the process, you should constantly solicit information from your employees on what's working well and what isn't.

Finally, measure. Did you meet your expectations?

"Adults learn best through experience and reflection," wrote Dr. Kelly Monahan, Cary Harr, Marjorie Knight and John Crump in a 2016 Deloitte white paper. "Serious gaming can provide an additional mechanism to acquire experience and reflection in a safe environment. In addition, the learning environment can be customized to specific scenarios, enabling leaders to acquire skill sets through repeated problem solving with near-real circumstances."
Looking for a programming job in a big tech firm? Find one by playing games with Code Arcade
Why Facebook could be where you find your next tech job
Run your IT like a circus, in a good way
Video: Top 5 ways to update your management style

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How gamification can help motivate and train employees

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Here's a look at how companies are using online gaming techniques to advance employee skills and confidence. Regardless of industry sector or company size, managers face daily challenges of training new employees and continuing to grow the internal knowledge base among existing employees.

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Read - How Offices Will Change After Coronavirus, BBC

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Read - How Offices Will Change After Coronavirus, BBC

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As many nations cautiously make their way toward relaxing Covid-19 lockdowns, many of us are starting to envision a time when we can stop working at our kitchen tables and return to the office. Yet, in the absence of a vaccine, aspects of modern workplaces will have to change if employees are to safely return to their desks.

Experts suggest this could involve a combination of short-term fixes aimed at boosting worker confidence, reducing the number of staff in the office at any one time and longer-term design upgrades and modifications that put hygiene at the heart of workplace planning.

The first phase of resuming office life will involve making basic changes to keep employees safe and allay fears, says Albert De Plazaola, global strategy director at design firm Unispace. "We may have lived with the flu for many years, but this is the first time our generation has experienced a pandemic. We're now hyperaware of health risks, whether real or imagined. And employers are hypersensitive about the potential for liability if people get sick at work."

Yet, with so much uncertainty, it's unlikely that major refits will be undertaken anytime soon, explains De Plazaola, who is based in San Francisco and has worked with Facebook and Yahoo!. "There's a flurry of activity, but it's purely focused on tactical solutions. No one is willing to invest a significant sum on solutions that could be rendered ineffective [by our increased understanding of Covid-19, or a vaccine] in six-months' time. What you will see is small, targeted hits - almost surgical interventions - that will provide employees with a sense of safety."

The 'sneeze guard' is one such low-cost, high-impact measure. Brent Capron, interior design director at global design practice Perkins and Will in New York, uses the term to describe an additional panel fitted between socially distanced desks. "Previously, workstations were about privacy and acoustics. Now they represent a physical separation between colleagues. Until we hopefully have a vaccine, having that physical barrier will make people feel more comfortable," he says.

Distributed offices and rotating days

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many are heralding the end of the open-plan workplace and the return of small, private offices. Huddle rooms, for example, could be used as offices until social distancing protocols are relaxed. However, Amanda Stanaway, Sydney-based principal architect of architectural and consulting practice Woods Bagot, says the cellular office plan has "limited benefits for workplace culture and communication".

Workplaces will use short-term fixes to boost employee confidence before looking at long-term solutions

Some of her clients, she says, are more interested in the idea of the distributed office. Shunning a crowded central hub for a distributed set of smaller offices that may be closer to where staff live could mean less exposure to infectious diseases like Covid-19 on public transport. "Having small groups of people working collaboratively would address the need for connections and improved mental health, but without risking massive exposure, where one person gets the virus and everyone else has to self-isolate," she says.

In the short-term, it seems likely that many of us will remain working from home even after government orders to do so are lifted. A staggered workforce may become standard, with smaller groups coming in on alternate days and shifts that avoid transport rush-hour peaks.

"Organisations are working out who most needs to be at the office, and capping staff numbers off at about 30%, which is probably the sweet spot for social distancing," says De Plazaola. For starters, he foresees firms subsidising home offices, given the home is now considered a legitimate workspace. This is something that could potentially allay concerns about health impacts from ergonomically inadequate set-ups.

Stanaway says a shift to home working could "liberate" parts of the workforce such as working mothers and those who live far from major cities and have struggled to find work. But she believes commentary about the office becoming redundant is overblown. "Yes, most people work to earn money, but we also work because we enjoy coming together to create ideas and solve problems. I think that's what we've been missing these past few weeks. That sense of connection is fundamental to the human race."

Offices that resemble hospitals

In the longer term, experts predict that society's heightened awareness of contagious diseases could usher in a new type of office - one that has elements in common with a hospital.

Post-pandemic offices could include hygiene stations, signage indicating direct routes, separated seats and more automation (Image: Unispace)

Capron, who has designed office buildings for hospitals and worked with healthcare interior teams, is now applying that knowledge to designing office spaces. "One of the guiding principles is choosing materials that can withstand heavy cleaning using caustic products. You'll see porous surfaces like natural oiled wood avoided, with a preference for stone or laminates," he says. He also expects to see solution-dyed carpets with moisture-barrier backing used, because they can withstand heavy shampooing.

These more durable materials are not necessarily costlier than the more familiar alternatives. This is important, because in these straitened economic times, few organisations will have a budget for an expensive refit. "The cost difference is not great - it's more about mindfully choosing between A and B," says Capron. "I also think tenants will demand more from their landlords in terms of more regular cleaning."

He also expects to hear more discussion about air filtration systems that use ultra-violet light. "Even though a UV system isn't something that you should have out in the open - they tend to be hidden back in the ductwork - companies may look at heavy UV cleaning when everyone has gone home to make sure that the air is as clean as we can get it."

Another feature of hospitals that is likely to become an office staple is sinks: expect reception and common areas to be fitted out with them. "I love the idea of handwashing becoming a new ritual when you enter an office or a public space," says Capron.

He also expects office layouts to change, with circuitous routes eliminated. "Doctors' work is so urgent and their time is so precious that they will find the fastest way to get from point A to point B. We, too, will be more focused on getting from A to B in a very direct manner, and conscious of what we're touching along the way."

Privacy versus self-regulation

Another concept that may emerge is the 'contactless office' - something experts predict could become widespread among organisations who can afford it.

For example, employees could eliminate the need to press communal buttons by using their smartphone to send a command to the elevator or staff coffee machine (in fact, Perkins and Will have such a coffee machine in their new office). Conference rooms could be fitted out with voice-activated technologies to control lighting, audio and visual equipment. Passing through doors or flushing the toilet would require a simple wave, while self-service in office kitchens could become a relic of the past, to be replaced with automation or a dedicated server.

Thermal scanners have been used in airports - but would deploying similar technology in workplaces spark privacy concerns?

There's also the idea that companies could more aggressively monitor for sick employees. One possibility is embedding sensors underneath desks to monitor body temperatures, with a facilities manager alerted when someone has a fever. "This kind of technology already exists and wouldn't be tough to integrate," says De Plazaola. "But it raises huge privacy issues. HR and legal departments would need to weigh in on whether this is the right course to pursue."

Some organisations have already introduced somewhat similar measures. Sydney-based wholesale IT equipment distributor Dicker Data brought in staggered shifts for essential onsite workers, giant sanitising stations and extra cleaners. They've also invested AUD$10,000 (USD$6,470, £5,258) in a body thermal scanner, which beeps if anyone has a temperature while standing in front of it. The warehouse manager is responsible for assessing whether the staff member looks sick and should be sent home.

"There were a couple of instances when we did ask staff to go home. And I think that gave our staff a sense of safety," says Mary Stojcevski, the company's chief financial officer. No objections were raised to using the thermal scanner, she adds, and when the company's new office building is completed in October, all 400 staff plus visitors will pass through it.

Aodhan MacCathmhaoil believes that self-regulation is preferable. The founder of Sydney-based garbage company Waster is currently looking for new office premises and although he has a long list of safety requirements, he will not contemplate temperature checks. "I think the negative aspects would outweigh the benefits. Morale would suffer if people felt that they were being policed. Should I know about my employees' health? It's definitely a grey area. I'm not a medical professional, so I wouldn't know how to interpret the data anyway."

Whatever happens in the months ahead, and even if a Covid-19 vaccine becomes available, it seems likely that the experience of living through a pandemic will have a long-lasting impact on the way we work and how our workplaces function. If nothing else, the idea of coming to work while sick could become socially unacceptable. On the other end of the spectrum is a focus on health and hygiene so pronounced that it gives new meaning to the idea of working in a sterile environment.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How offices will change after coronavirus

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As many nations cautiously make their way toward relaxing Covid-19 lockdowns, many of us are starting to envision a time when we can stop working at our kitchen tables and return to the office. Yet, in the absence of a vaccine, aspects of modern workplaces will have to change if employees are to safely return to their desks.

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Read - Innovation in Remote Teams, Matrix Blog

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Read - Innovation in Remote Teams, Matrix Blog

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Even in a forward-thinking workplace where your colleagues are constantly learning and evolving, it's easy for employees to fall into a rut.

In face-to-face environments, it's easy to bring people from different parts of the workforce together to inspire innovation through brainstorming and sound boarding. However, in the increasingly popular remote working landscape, the same kind of creative boost is harder to come by.

While remote workers are often more motivated, inspired, and satisfied than their in-office counterparts, they don't have the same diverse selection of people to bounce ideas off.

The good news? There are ways that team leaders can empower their mobile and remote workforce with an extra dose of creativity.

Read more: Why can't organizations learn and innovate fast enough?

Encourage employees to take advantage of flexibility

One of the reasons that remote working is so popular is that it allows for greater flexibility in the working world. Team members don't have to be sitting at a desk between 9 am and 5 pm every day to accomplish things. Instead, they can enjoy the freedom of being able to build their own schedules and even choose their own working environments.

Unfortunately, in an effort to maintain proper management of their remote employees, some business leaders end up restricting the flexible nature of creative work. While telling your team members that they need to be online at certain times each day can help to give them structure, it also means that they could begin to suffer from the same creativity blocks that in-office workers get.

Remember, 69% of millennials worldwide say that they're happier when they have flexibility in how and where they work. Happier team members are often more creative too. Encourage flexibility by:

Allowing employees to choose their own schedules. Try not to outline every day for your employees in advance. Give them the freedom to work when they feel inspired.

Offer scheduled free time. Companies like Google offer scheduled free time to help employees refresh their thinking when they feel bogged down by work.

Make it possible to work anywhere. Ensure your team members can access tools on the cloud or via a smartphone so that they don't have to stay in their home office to be productive.

Provide the right tools

Just like your standard employees, remote workers need access to the correct tools to remain productive. Before you begin hiring distributed employees, make sure that you know what kind of tools they need most.

For example, your customer service team might need access to a business phone line that they can connect to on their smartphone and a cloud CRM system. Alternatively, your marketing team might need to be able to access things like email marketing tools and content management systems from a distance.

As well as ensuring that your employees have the individual tools that they need most, think about how you can keep them collaborating with other members of the team. For instance, cloud storage systems where people can share files and documents are essential. Task management tools where people can check their progress and manage deadlines are often very useful for remote workers too.

Read more: How to make remote collaboration and training easy: File sharing, video learning, communication, and other tips

Last but not least, remember that all your employees need training, no matter where they are located. With the help of a learning management system you can make sure they'll be able to access learning materials and get targeted support at their moment of need.

Encourage regular communication

One of the main reasons that creativity can begin to suffer when an employee works remotely is that they end up feeling isolated. If your team member is located somewhere far away from the rest of the team, then they can't bounce ideas off their coworkers, or look at projects from a different perspective.

As a team leader, you'll need to make sure that you're addressing this problem by encouraging regular communication. The good news is that communication in the digital world can include everything from quick instant messaging on tools like Slack to online coaching tools like Fingerprint for Success to in-depth mentorship programs. Make sure that you're supporting your team by:

Establishing a regular schedule for audio and video meetings

Supporting regular video conferencing for face-to-face interaction

Ensuring that someone is available for the employee to reach out to when they need help

Allowing for constant communication through email and chat

Keeping team members updated on news from the business

Recognize employee success

In the standard workplace environment, company leaders know that they need to recognize the achievements of their team members to keep them motivated and inspired. However, it's easy to forget that your remote workers need the same kind of support when you don't see them every day.

Keeping track of the progress that your employees are making, wherever they are, is a great way to ensure that you're not ignoring their achievements. Remember, the SHRM group has found that employee recognition programs support creative thinking and business bottom lines. The Society for Human Resource Management revealed that 90% of leaders practicing employee recognition achieved superior engagement.

At the same time, recognizing the success of all your employees leads to healthier and happier workers, reduced talent churn, and improved employer branding.

Help build better workplaces

Finally, while you can't always control the environments that your remote employees work in, you can encourage them to build more inspiring environments. A study by Mindspace found that around 33% of employees think that their workspaces are dull.

Remind your team members of what a creative workplace looks like by designing your own office correctly. This way, when your employees come to visit, they'll get a boost of inspiration and an insight into what their own home office environment needs to look like.

You can also provide your team members with tips on how to renovate and enhance their remote environments.

The right office space - even if it's not located in your business building - can make a huge difference to employee performance.

Overcome the creative block

Remote team members don't have access to the same inspiration as in-office employees. However, with the tips above, you can ensure that your staff always have the creative boost they need to accomplish amazing things. Taking advantage of the benefits that remote working has to offer doesn't have to mean giving up on creativity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to enable innovation and creativity in remote teams | MATRIX Blog

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Even in a forward-thinking workplace where your colleagues are constantly learning and evolving, it's easy for employees to fall into a rut. In face-to-face environments, it's easy to bring people from different parts of the workforce together to inspire innovation through brainstorming and sound boarding.

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Read - Transitioning to Remote Working, Stanford Business School

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Read - Transitioning to Remote Working, Stanford Business School

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Brought to you by the Stanford Digital Transformation program
Businesses across the world are implementing remote work policies in response to the coronavirus. Organizations that embraced digital transformation early on are in a good position to continue business operations during this transition, having long ago built the digital infrastructure needed to support a remote workforce.

But where does that leave companies that have been slower to adopt a digitally-minded culture and business model? They may not have all the technology, tools, and skills to thrive in this new environment.

Digital transformation impacts every facet of a business, and there are many ways a company can jumpstart change. When transitioning staff to work remotely, companies would be advised to focus on the following three areas.

Create a productive remote workforce

Supporting telecommuting requires more than enacting work-from-home policies and outfitting employees with company-owned laptops. Businesses can and should provide staff with digital tools and platforms to help them work efficiently and effectively.

Communication platforms like instant messaging, video conferencing, audio conferencing, email, Voice over Internet Protocol, and integrated messaging apps give employees numerous ways to stay connected with coworkers and clients.

Cloud-based project management and collaboration applications enable staff members to stay on top of ongoing projects, share documents, and make updates in real time.

With the right combination of software and tools, businesses can recreate, and even improve upon, in-office productivity from any location.

Protect and secure company data

If businesses don't adequately supply their employees with the technology needed to work from home, staff will likely find their own workarounds. Such instances of shadow IT can be enormously damaging, creating security vulnerabilities and putting companies at risk for data breaches. As CNN reported, there's a huge security risk with millions of employees working from home.

Data security is a major concern for telecommuting arrangements. Employees may use home networks and personal devices to access business applications and platforms, expanding the company's attack surface. For example, a cybercriminal could use an employee's unsecured personal device as an entry point to the organization's network.

Organizations can tackle data security and integrity from a few different angles:

Provide remote workers with virtual private networks to prevent external actors from accessing in-transit data or viewing communications between employees.

Outfit employees' devices with updated cyber security tools including antivirus and anti-malware software to remove threats before they can cause any damage.

Establish disaster recovery protocols to protect against certain threats like ransomware attacks as well as unplanned outages or disruptions.

In many cases, the best defense against security threats is knowledge. Training remote workers to recognize security threats and adhere to the latest security standards and best practices will significantly reduce the risk of exposure.

Train employees

Access to cutting-edge digital technologies will only go so far if employees lack the skills to take advantage of them. Training sessions should go beyond the basics of cyber security, cloud computing, and collaboration software to truly transform the workforce. Fostering a complete cultural shift to embrace a digital mindset will help bridge the knowledge gap and jump-start digitization efforts.

Managers play a key role in keeping a company's workforce productive, positive, and united in the transition to working remotely. These managers need to be equipped with training that teaches them techniques for effectively leading a digital team. Communication, project management, and relationship building need to be approached from different angles when being conducted remotely; it is not realistic to expect leaders who are accustomed to in-person management to successfully transition to an all-digital work style without guidance.

From an employee perspective, digital transformation presents a number of opportunities to grow and develop professionally. The move toward digitization has increased demand for skills relating to artificial intelligence, data analytics, and robotics, among many other advanced technologies. Companies should provide employees opportunities to build new skills in these areas.

In these turbulent times businesses cannot afford to keep digital transformation as an afterthought. The sooner companies act, the better position they'll be in to stay competitive now and thrive in the future.

Brought to you by the Stanford Digital Transformation program

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Transitioning to a Remote Workforce: Organizations should focus their digital transformation on these 3 areas

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Brought to you by the Stanford Digital Transformation program Businesses across the world are implementing remote work policies in response to the coronavirus. Organizations that embraced digital transformation early on are in a good position to continue business operations during this transition, having long ago built the digital infrastructure needed to support a remote workforce.

# data[].attributes.headline
Podcast - Remote: Office Not Required Q&A Part 1

# data[].attributes.subject
Podcast - Remote: Office Not Required Q&A Part 1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Like what we've got to say about business? You'll love Basecamp >

Earlier this week, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson held a live Q&A about remote work. We're splitting the session into two episodes. Part 1 covers questions about video calls, brainstorming, setting priorities, and good management during a time of stressful transition. If you'd like to watch the Q&A session in its entirety, you can do that on Periscope. You can also check out Basecamp's Guide to Internal Communication.

Jason and David's book, REMOTE: Office Not Required - 00:55

The full session on Periscope - 1:00

Question 1: In a workplace with a mix of local and remote workers, what are some good strategies for making the remote workers feel more connected and not left out of office events? - 8:12

Basecamp's Automatic Check-ins feature - 9:25

Question 2: How do you qualify employees and gain trust if you don't meet in person? - 14:14

Question 3: How do you handle the transition in a company that hasn't been very remote until now and can't make a quick switch to writing more? - 18:30

A Guide to Managing Remote Teams by Claire Lew, CEO of Know Your Team - 19:40

Question 4: How do you handle video meetings with more than 20 people? - 23:44

"Is group chat making you sweat?" (Signal v. Noise) - 30:00

Question 5: How do you prioritize tasks? What's your productivity system or non-system? - 30:14

Shape Up, Basecamp's book about product development - 30:50

Question 6: Do you believe any developer/designer/product manager can work remotely? - 36:09

Question 7: How would you host a brainstorming meeting? - 38:17

Question 8: How do you properly handle large layoffs of more than 10 people? - 40:51

"Stanley's Abruptly Closes After 52 Years of Selling Affordable Produce, Longtime Workers Caught Off Guard" (Block Club Chicago) - 44:30

Question 9: What are the key things I can do as a manager of a small team to make remote working a great experience within my team, even if our company culture is still catching up after being forced to go full remote? - 46:02

The Full Transcript:

Shaun: [00:00:00] Okay, this is Shaun Hildner reporting from the cupboard under the stairs, it's cozy.

Wailin: [00:00:08] Wailin Wong reporting from the cupboard under the stairs with Shaun and 20 spiders.

Shaun: [00:00:14] Hi, spiders. Welcome to Rework. I think that's good.

Wailin: [00:00:17] Okay.

[00:00:18] Broken By Design by Clip Art plays.

Shaun: [00:00:20] Welcome to Rework, a podcast by Basecamp about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Shaun Hildner.

Wailin: [00:00:24] And I'm Wailin Wong. Earlier this week we released an episode saying we were putting the show on hiatus for a couple weeks. We were going to take some time off to get organized, take a breather and set up our home recording studios.

Shaun: [00:00:37] But, life comes at you fast as we're all learning over and over again these days. A lot of people very abruptly became remote workers as offices closed and we all started practicing social distancing. Here at Basecamp, we've been promoting remote work for a long time. We even wrote a book about it. This week, our founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson did a two hour live stream Q&A all about remote work.

Wailin: [00:01:01] Obviously, these are terrible conditions for starting work from home routines. We're stressed and anxious and things are scary, and a lot of us, including myself, are taking care of kids all day at home, too. We all need to give ourselves, and the people around us, especially employees and coworkers, a lot of grace. With that in mind, there are still strategies you can use to ease this transition into working from home.

Shaun: [00:01:24] We're bringing you Jason and David's Q&A in two parts. The second part will run on Wednesday of next week, so make sure you're subscribed to Rework so you don't miss it. Now, here's part one of the Q&A.

Jason: [00:01:41] Welcome to this. We're going to go for an hour or more, or however long it takes, at least an hour, to go through all these questions and talk about these things. So, over the past week, we've been getting a lot of questions about remote working. People are starting to explore this for the first time. Companies are scrambling to figure out what to do. And we've been doing this for 20 years so we thought it would be good for us to be here to offer up some advice and help people out with this because people are struggling.

[00:02:09] The thing I wanted to start out with, and we're going to get into questions in a second, but I thought I would start by talking a little bit about the opportunity here, actually. As companies struggle to go remote, what ends up happening is companies begin to try to simulate the office remotely. Which is not really the right way to do things, although it's the natural way to do things. It's kind of like... it reminds me a little bit of back in the mid-'90s when the graphical web browser first hit, most websites started to look like CD-ROM interfaces and DVD interfaces because it was basically a direct port. It's like, we don't know what this new medium is, so we're just going to port this design over from the way we interact with DVDs or CDs onto this other medium.

[00:02:52] And I feel like that's kind of what's happening now, what people are struggling with. They don't know how to work remotely so they're trying to simulate what it was like to work in the office which means people are having the same number of meetings, they're just doing this by video instead. Or, they're even turning on, I was talking to a journalist yesterday who was telling me about, she's hearing a bunch of companies are turning on these perpetual video streams in everyone's computer where people are able to look at each other all day long while they're working. Or taking a picture of people every 10 seconds and whatever.

[00:03:23] This idea that you want to try to simulate what it's like being in an office where you can see everybody so why not see everybody at home. But this is the wrong approach, but, again, I understand why people do it. It's comfort.

[00:03:32] The real opportunity here with remote work is to embrace the advantages of remote work. There's some disadvantages, certainly, and for people who are unfamiliar with this way of working, a lot of things are going to look like disadvantages at the start. No different than if you threw me a trombone and said go play something. I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. I would suck at it. And a lot of people are going to suck at remote working for a while.

[00:03:57] But there are huge advantages to remote working and one of these is that there's a mindset shift. It's not just about working remotely and trying to simulate what it's like to work locally. It's about actually giving people more time and attention to themselves. It's about being more asynchronous, so not turning everything into a real time situation. It's really easy to pull people into an office or a conference room at the office, which is why people have meetings all day long. When you're remote, don't just throw people in a video chat all day long, either. How about having fewer of these things and writing things up instead and disseminating information so people can absorb this information on their own schedule.

[00:04:35] These are some of the ways you can begin to shift the way you work. This is actually an opportunity to rethink the way you work. It's actually like being thrown off course a little bit and having to look around and go, where should we go next? These are these moments that we don't often have, because most companies are-they're pushed by momentum. They're going to keep working the way they've always worked and they never have a chance, because everyone's always so super busy, to reconsider the way they work and this is one of those unlucky lucky moments when we get a chance to rethink the way we're working.

[00:05:08] So a lot of the things we're going to be talking about today are probably going to seem counter-intuitive to many. Some of the answers we're going to give are going to seem strange because people are going say, how do you know what people are doing? And the answer is you don't need to know what people are doing all the time. How do you know if people are working? You don't need to know if people are working. And we'll get into this, I'm sure, as we get into questions, but this is really, truly an opportunity to rethink the way you work and do some things in a new way that we think are actually going to pan out in a big way for you over the long term.

[00:05:36] So I wanted to start with that. I'm sure David has some thoughts additionally, and then we'll jump into some questions.

David: [00:05:39] Yeah, I think one of the opportunities here, too, is to realize that when you switch into this new mode where it's not about getting everyone together at the same time, this is also exactly what we need right now. There's going to be all these other demands on people's time. They're going to need to be, if they have a family, help their family during the day. They're going to need to help their friends. They're going to need to do all these other things where gathering five people together at 10:30. Do you know what? Don't do that as much. Do less of that and take the opportunity, as Jason says, to do these status meeting, not as a meeting, but as a write up. Do the pitch of something you want to do right now, again, not as a meeting, as a write up. There's so many things that people call meetings for or they force people to be at the same place at the same time for, it just doesn't need to be like that.

[00:06:30] Now, at the same time, as Jason's saying, video chat is good, right? Why are we doing this right now? Why aren't we just writing this up as a bunch of answers? Because this creates a connection. There are definitely times where that's exactly what you want. You just don't need to do that all the time. Sort of rationing that out and doing it when it matters, is the switch to make.

[00:06:52] I think we can jump into the questions.

Jason: [00:06:53] Yeah, the other thing I want to add to that is I was talking to someone this morning about this. One of the questions, this hasn't been asked yet, but one of the questions that comes up is, the social component is lost for people who are used to being in an office. So one of the suggestions I had was, this is, again, to reiterate the fact that this is a time to do things a little bit differently. If you always have a Monday morning stand up, where everyone's around a room, or whatever. Substitute that for a Monday morning social. Cut out that Monday morning stand up business meeting and instead just allow people to talk about what they did last weekend or what they're planning to do this week. So substitute some of that work for some life. Don't try to go business as usual and then also fit that in. Make some sacrifices on the business side, because that meeting that you probably have Monday morning, you probably don't need to actually have that meeting. What's probably more valuable is the social component right now and then instead of having that meeting, write those things up and disseminate those things so people have the information on their own schedule.

[00:07:52] So anyway, I'm sure we'll talk about plenty of that, but I think that's another way to think about some of these things is to swap and to shift.

[00:08:00] By the way, Andy, who you can't see on screen is sort of managing this live stream, so he'll be popping questions up, and we'll just go ahead and answer those as they come in. So, Andy, if you want to throw the first question up, we'll take that.

[00:08:11] All right, Joe asks, in a work place with a mix of local and remote workers, what are some good strategies for making remote workers feel more connected and not left out of office events?

[00:08:22] Well, events, it depends on what you would call an event. Lunch? Can't really do that. After work drinks or get together, can't do that sort of thing. But as far as, like-

David: [00:08:33] But also, pause, shouldn't be doing any of those things right now.

Jason: [00:08:36] Right.

David: [00:08:36] Even if you have to go to an office, don't go out for drinks, don't do any of these things, right? The whole reason we're doing this right now is social distancing. So, but I think there's more to this than just that.

Jason: [00:08:48] Certainly, absolutely true right now. But let's say six months from now, hopefully. Nine. Whatever it is when we can finally, maybe... I think what happens is there's going to be a hybrid shift now where people are going to be... some people are going to be working at home even after this because people find out that it works pretty well. So then, what do you do? I think the key is first of all recognizing that it's not the same everywhere. Some people who work locally are just going to have more physical interactions. They're going to be together more. They're going to do some things that you can't do remotely. That's going to happen. However, there are some techniques that we use at Basecamp to sort of help level that.

[00:09:20] One of the things we do, so Basecamp has a feature called Automatic Check-ins. And this is a feature that automatically asks people questions on a given schedule automatically. So, for example, every Monday morning, Basecamp asks our entire company automatically, what did you do this weekend? Now this is a totally optional question, okay? Completely optional. You're free to share or not. But the point is, is that, what it does is it prompts people to share some of what they've been doing outside of work with everybody else.

[00:09:52] So we have employees who live all over the world, so it's really cool to see someone in Spain doing something, and someone in Brazil doing something, and someone in Canada doing something and someone in the US doing something. So we're not all together physically, but this is a way to share those moments with one another so we get to see a little bit of each other's humanity essentially, and to see what people are doing. And this is a way where these are... events are spread out around the world but they're shared in the same manner in Basecamp by writing them down, by sharing pictures. Sometimes people share video. That's a way to encourage people to share physical things that are happening in their lives that are not happening at work, not happening around other people but that inform other people of what's going on.

David: [00:10:32] And also, bring up when it comes to the actual work part. Leveling the playing field is the way to go. Don't have five people sitting around a conference desk and then one person dialing in from the outside. That is a such a shitty experience. The lag between who's dialing in from the outside and the people who sit around the desk is just insufferable, and I think actually, this is how people get a bad impression of what it is to work remotely. Because they get this experience where there's five people around the desk and they're all there, in person. There's no lag. And then someone is calling in from the outside and seems like they're just on another planet. It doesn't work.

[00:11:10] So even if you have the set up where some people are at the office and some people are remote, level the playing field. When you do a call that requires remote workers, do it all remotely. Get into your own offices, sit at your own desks or whatever, and use a video chat system instead. The absolute worst way is these conference phones where people dial in. The lag is horrendous, the quality's terrible, and when you mix it with people who are in the office, it just feels really shitty.

[00:11:37] I'd also say shifting most of this stuff to an asynchronous format, it's not just substituting all these meetings, right? Writing it up instead. When you write it up, everyone is on the same page. Whether people read it in the office or they read it at home, there's no disadvantage. So becoming better writers, becoming more frequent writers and making that the default and then occasionally leveling up to having a call when you actually need to debate something.

[00:12:01] I think that's the other thing that sometimes people have a hard time figuring out. When should I use a call? What is the format I should use a call for? Should I use it for status calls? No. Status calls are great written up, they're communicating information, facts in that regard. It works great when it's written up. People can read it whenever. When you need to debate things, when you know there's disagreement about something, that's when we level up. Usually when we jump on a call is we try it writing first. We try just having that debate there and then when it kind of hits the dead end where we go, you know what? Now we're just arguing back and forth and writing doesn't feel right for that. Level it up.

[00:12:39] So leveling the playing field, I think, is a good mantra. Even if there's just one person, and that's actually the hard one, right? This is why a lot of companies have a hard time starting with remote. Because if you have 40 people in the office and you have two remote workers, it feels like such a drag when you are doing a special concession for just one person. But that's the way to do it right.

Jason: [00:12:59] The other thing I would say is just, as a practical example, we do have an office in Chicago. No one's there right now, but, let's just go back three months. Office in Chicago, handful of people there. If we ever have to make an announcement company-wide, I don't stand up in the Chicago office and make the announcement to the local and then write it up for everybody else. I write it up for everybody and that's all I do. So that's about leveling the playing field as well. There are not different announcements made differently locally as well as remotely. There's one announcement made. It's posted to our Basecamp, what's called our Basecamp HQ, which is the project that everybody in the company has access to.

[00:13:33] But anyway, leveling the playing field's important. That makes everyone feel the same. It also helps reduce complexity, because if you give one message to one group one way and another message to another group another way, inevitably the messages are going to be slightly different and you might leave out some information in one or add something to the other. And you're going to wonder why didn't those people know about this, I thought I told everybody. Well, you told two different things. So by writing things up, and posting them in one place, there's a central source of truth. And this is something that we're probably going to come back to over and over. You want one central source of truth for everything that you say. You don't want to say things in multiple places in different ways. That's a recipe for complexity. So, anyway. Let's get to the next question here.

[00:14:14] Marijan, I'm sorry if I'm pronouncing that wrong, asks, "How do you qualify employees and gain trust if you don't meet in person?"

[00:14:22] That's-part of that is the hiring process. So it starts before you hire someone. You don't hire someone you don't trust and then wonder how to trust them. We're very careful about the hiring process. We spend months and months hiring an individual person. We go through many rounds of interviews, have many people involved, and we press people in this way. Do we feel like we can trust them? Trust is a feeling, by the way. It's not a fact. Trust is something you feel about somebody and you get there by asking different kinds of questions and seeing how responsive they are and seeing how good they are at giving feedback. And talking to people who they've worked with in the past. Those are the kinds of things that you do.

[00:14:58] But once you hire someone, you must trust them. You can't figure that out later. So I think that it's hard to give you step by step things, like, how to decide to trust someone or not? But my bigger point here is that you've got to suss that out during the hiring process. And then, once you have someone on board, you must trust them. If you don't trust them, you're already in too deep. You're already in too deep, and that's what happens with a lot of managers where they go, well, how do I know if someone's working if I can't see them? Well, what does seeing somebody have to do with judging the work? Looking at somebody pound away at a keyboard tells you nothing. All it tells you is someone's pounding away at a keyboard. Looking at someone playing with Photoshop or Sketch or whatever they're using doesn't tell you that they're designing anything, it just tells you that they're using a tool. You have to look at the work itself.

[00:15:46] And the work itself can be looked at from 6,000 miles away, it doesn't really matter where you are. So this idea of trust being a physical quality is also not true. You don't trust someone more because you can see them, than someone who you can't see. So I just want to make sure that that's clear, as well, up front.

David: [00:16:05] It's funny because when I read the question, and we get this question all the time. There's just so many assumptions built into that question. Like, the assumption essentially being that most people are untrustworthy, that trust is this sort of rare quality that most employees are not worthy of and you need to do these special hoops to get to that point. I don't believe that. And maybe that's because I've had different life experiences, maybe we've been lucky at Basecamp, we've done all these other things. I think most people are trustworthy. When you go through even just a regular hiring process, by the time someone is hired, if you extend trust to them, they'll give trust back to you. But if you start out essentially not trusting them, the natural response from them is not to return the trust in kind. So you get what you receive and what you should be giving is you should be giving that trust.

[00:16:57] And I think unfortunately, as Jason said, this idea that you can trust someone and you can see how they work because they're pounding at a keyboard is where a lot of it lies. The lack of trust is a projection of someone's own insecurities as a manager. That you're incapable of evaluating the work on the basis of the quality of the work, because maybe you don't know the work. Maybe you just don't have the capacity or the insight to assess whether the work is good or not or it's done in a reasonable time or not, and you know what? If those things are true, you're unqualified to be manager. If you cannot assess the quality of the work that's being done on your behalf or under your direction, you're unqualified to be a manager.

[00:17:41] And I think the hard truth is there are a lot of unqualified managers and they help breed this idea of trust. And some of that qualification, again, is not a character flaw. It's a skill. You can learn it. If you are working in a company where you have people reporting to you where you can't assess the quality of their work? Figure it out. Learn it. People learn things all the time. You can learn to develop an eye for what works or not. I mean, we work in software and there are plenty of very good project managers in software who don't know how to program who still know how to assess reasonable degrees of quality. And that is simply, perhaps, the key skill you have to learn as a manager. The key qualification is to be able to assess the quality of the work that comes out.

Jason: [00:18:25] All right, David, you want to take this one first?

David: [00:18:27] Sure. I think this is a handle here, neerjax. "Thank you for hosting this. How do you suggest we handle the situation where we haven't been a very remote firm till now and suddenly transitioning to writing more and not going to work immediately. How can we help teams transition through this? What training, best practices, can we provide?"

[00:18:48] Yeah, I think this is... I mean, this is why we're doing this, for example. This is one example of just trying to share our experiences working remotely. Because you're dropped into a bit of a new world and you have to learn some new habits and you have to learn some new skills. But note that it's not that different. People often, I hear a lot of people talk about it, well, there's certain people who are just really good at remote work, and you have to find those people if you want to work remotely. Bullshit, everyone can work remotely. It's not rocket science in that sense. There is a new set of skills and there are a new set of habits you have to develop, but everyone is totally capable of learning those things. Can't expect that it's all going to happen now. We wrote a whole book about it called Remote: Office Not Required, published seven years ago where we tried to lay out a bunch of things that we've seen, doing some of that, good.

[00:19:38] I know Claire from KnowYourTeam.com has released a big guide about managers new to remote work. So, I think, I mean there is a lot of information out there. I think for having someone at the company, taking a little bit of a charge, to get a survey of all the guides and the write ups that are out there and help others. Send some tips, like, hey, we're going to read this. We're going to have a little book club here at the office and we're going to read this guide today, and we're going to discuss it tomorrow. What fits in with our culture, how do we do it? That's really what it is.

[00:20:14] There's this set of skills here, you've just got to try doing it, and you're going to kind of suck. The first couple of write ups, the first pitches you do in writing when you're used to just doing them in person, maybe they're going to be kind of a little bad. But sort of the good and the bad thing here is we're going to be here a while. This isn't over the next week. It's not over the week after that over. It may very well be months before things return to "normal," right? So better start learning now and just get better at it, and at the end of it, you're going to be pretty good.

Jason: [00:20:44] And, related to that is leadership needs to have a certain degree of empathy here and recognize that people are going to suck at this for a while. Yeah, it's not rocket science but it's new, right? Like I said at the beginning, if you throw a new musical instrument in my hands and ask me to play it, no one would expect me to be able to play anything that makes sense. Luckily with work, we have a head start here, so it's not about not understanding the mechanics of musical instruments. It's like, writing instead of talking.

[00:21:13] First of all, one thing I would encourage you to do is to simply write like you talk. Sometimes, not even sometimes, most of the times, business writing is so banal and terrible because it's stripped of any conversational tone and people try so hard to make their point when they can make their point just fine if they're speaking. But they can't make their point when they're writing because they're trying too hard. I would just relax a little bit here, and just write how you speak. And if you're not even good at that, just transcribe yourself speaking and give yourself a 90% head start there. Be easy on yourself.

[00:21:45] The other thing is, and I was hoping to get to this in some other question, but businesses need to curb their ambition a little bit right now. And recognize that time is going to have to be dedicated to adjustment right now. People have to adjust. They have to adjust at home. They have to adjust at work. There's a lot of adjustment that's going to happen and you can't pile that in and have the same expectations of work getting done as you did three weeks ago. So, maybe 20% of the time right now is spent on learning how to work remotely. And like David said, this is going to be going on for a while. And by the way, even when this is over, I think this is going to be a sea change shift in working from home. A lot of companies are going to allow people to continue to work from home. And so this is a new skill to develop and a new opportunity here. This is not... it's clearly a scary time, but it's ultimately an opportunity to improve in a lot of different ways and actually make your company far more resilient.

[00:22:35] Imagine what would happen if everybody became a better writer over the next three months? That would be a good thing. But again, companies need to allow time for that to happen. So, anyway, that's generally-

David: [00:22:45] And I think it's also important to take note here that even when this is over there's going to be some long and deep-seated resistance to working remotely and some people are going to try to use the fact that this is a scary time where people are not going to be able to work at 100% as sort of a ding against remote work. Oh, look at this, we did all this from remote and productivity dropped. Yes, you know what, if you crammed everyone into the damn office right now, productivity would have dropped, too. A lot of people are worried about this, as they should be. So make a little mental note about that, that if at the end of this when we're settling the score on whether this remote thing worked for us or not, if you're not calculating in the fact that there's no way we're giving this a full fair shake in the sense of an A/B comparison between working remotely or working from the office. Someone probably has an agenda on how to tilt the boards there, and just get around that.

Jason: [00:23:41] Brigitte asks, "How to handle video meetings with more than 20 people? What are good rules in how to moderate this?"

[00:23:47] This is a good point here. This gets back to the point about simulation that I don't like. Now, I don't know if this is exactly your question. I'll try to answer it my way first, then we'll come around and only you will know if it's the appropriate answer. But one of the reasons people have a lot of people involved in meetings at businesses is because they have large conference rooms and large conference tables. And around those large conference tables are a lot of chairs. And empty chairs aren't a good look, so you fill up rooms with more people than need to be there. 12 chairs, 12 butts in seats. That's how meetings often go. This is an opportunity not to have to do that. We don't have to have 12 empty talking head boxes in your video chat thing. If there's only three people or four people that are required to jump in a meeting then that's all you need. You don't need to fill up boxes on the screen.

[00:24:39] This is a great opportunity the number of people that need to be involved in meetings and give that time back to those other 15 people. So, if you only need four, or let's say you only need five and you have 20 before. 15 people just got freed up to do some other things that are really important. And given the fact that right now, everyone's going to be a little bit thin on time and a little bit high on anxiety, it'd be wonderful to be able to give people more time back.

[00:25:02] The tactical answer is how to handle video meetings with more than 20 people, like. You don't have meetings with more than 20 people. You don't have meetings with more than a few people. But if you have to, you have to find some video software and people come up with a system where they raise their hand or whatever. Put a question in the chat. But the point is, is like, that is not actually addressing the root problem here, which is that meetings probably don't need as many people. So that's where I would begin to solve for this versus just trying to figure out how to simulate what it was like in person to have a meeting with 20 people. So, anyway, that's my take.

David: [00:25:36] Yeah, I think that this goes back to what are you calling the meeting for? What is the purpose of this meeting? Is it to disseminate information? Unless that information is of truly high emotional stakes and it must be given sort of face to face, it shouldn't be a meeting, it should be something else. And if you're trying to address more than 20 people, the one thing, again, that these video chats and these meetings work very well for is debate. Can you have a reasonable debate with 20 people? Are 20 people going to go back and forth? Not that commonly, right? If you need to have a debate with 20 people, maybe you can have a debate with maybe five times four people. You have five different groups that have four people talking together. I've found at Basecamp, whenever we have more than four or five people on a call, they're not great. The video chat formats, the debates that really work well are when you're less than five people on a call. Usually even less than four. I love three. So for us three is kind of the magic number.

[00:26:34] I'd also say that this is one of those things where this is already happening. People are already, when they work in an office, are calling meetings for 20 people where 15 of them do not need to be there. This is why we get all these stories about people checking their phones under the desk and otherwise trying to reclaim some productive time they're just zoning out, they're not chiming in or these other things.

[00:26:57] This is something to embrace. I saw a write up from, I think it was The Wall Street Journal, essentially coming with all these mandates about, oh well, now we have to work from home, just when you're being called into a meeting, make sure your video chat is on so I can essentially monitor that you're not zoning out. If someone is not interested in the content of the meeting, the kindest thing you can do is release them from that meeting. Why should they be in that meeting if they don't feel like they're getting value out of that, right? Free them up to use that time for work or for something else and you're much better off.

Jason: [00:27:29] One other thing I want to add is, look, some organizations are enormous and need to have 20 department heads from 20 departments. I get that that can be a scenario occasionally where that needs to happen, but most cases having 20 people and having 20 people's opinions present, it doesn't lead anywhere good, actually. It actually leads to indecision. If you want to be even less sure about something, all you need to do is ask one more person what their take is. And that's a great way to be less sure.

[00:27:57] I know the answer that you want, which is which system should I use and what techniques should I use, but really our answer is too many people, and it actually is far worse via video than it would be in person. People speak up over each other, it's impossible. There's lag, you can't see what-someone coughs and then the picture changes to them. It's like, too many people, too many problems and I would just encourage you to really tone back and dial back and see if you can get by, and I'll bet you can. And those other people that weren't there, initially they might be like, why wasn't I included but pretty soon they'll be like thankfully I wasn't included because now I have other things I need to do that I can get done.

David: [00:28:35] I'd say, one caveat to this is if you have an emergency where every second counts. This is true at Basecamp when our servers are down, every second counts. We're measuring this on a per second basis and we roll the whole thing out. We have used video chat systems in the past. And the way we use it is, everyone is on, but a very small number of people are actually interacting, and everyone else kind of gets just to see that. It's almost like a theater based operating room. You have sort of a surgical team of perhaps five, six people doing the bulk of the work. They're talking, and then you have a spectator group of perhaps another 20 or in some of our cases, we've had 40 people who watch that surgical group do the remediation on the problem right now. And then they're taking that information and maybe some of them work support, they take what they learned live and communicate that to customers or something else like that. That can work. There, the mute button is certainly your friend. But I'd say that's the only scenario at Basecamp where we have huge video calls like that. And they're not even-they could be something else, they could almost just be streamed. Like, there's five people who need to see and talk to each other and then there's another 40 who just needs to spectate.

[00:29:46] And I mean, this is also one of those cases where if you do need something live, there are a bunch of spectators. Chat is, again, not a bad tool for that. I'm sure we'll get other questions about chat and we have a lot of opinions about when to use chat and most of those opinions about when not to use chat. But in an emergency with a lot of people, we do need to keep everyone informed and every second counts. It can work, as well. So that can be a substitute, too.

Jason: [00:30:10] David, do you want to take this one and I'll take the next one?

David: [00:30:12] Yes. Jermaine asks, "How do you prioritize your tasks that need to be done, or in general what is your productivity system or non-system?"

[00:30:23] Great question. How do you figure out what to do, right? This is one of those things where, at the broad level, at the top level, this is what managers should be doing, right? They should be figuring out what should we be working on, when should we be working on it and what is a reasonable amount of time to spend to this?

[00:30:40] Now, a lot of this information, I think, is particular to the industry that you're in. We're in software. We wrote an entire ebook called Shape Up, it's at Basecamp.com/ShapeUp that details how we prioritize work at Basecamp as a software company, and I'll just cherry pick out a few ideas from that that we use in the software world.

[00:31:01] One of the key ideas from Shape Up is the idea of not using estimates. A lot of companies think accountability means asking someone to guess about the future and then if that guess is wrong, then they're bad people. That's sort of a summary of accountability that a lot of firms seem to run on. It's a really poor version of accountability. A lot of, especially creative, endeavors cannot be estimated to any reasonable extent because you don't know really what you're building, you don't know how to build it. So we're just all making guesses and humans are just terrible at that. So inevitably what happens is that the estimate is wrong and then someone gets sucked in to working overtime or doing other things because now they're accountable to this estimate they gave on something they didn't know how long it's going to be.

[00:31:49] What we do at Basecamp is we instead do budgets. So we say, this general concept, let's say we're working on a new feature. It's worth three weeks. Make the best version of what you can of this general fuzzy concept that's just outline sketched in three weeks and we will trust you to come up with the best version within that time. If it's going to take six weeks, it's not worth it, right? A lot of the contention around estimates comes in when you've blown the estimate and then now people feel like, sheesh, this is taking six weeks, it was never worth that. If I had known in the beginning that it was going to take six weeks we would never have started on this project. Bake that in right from the get-go. Set up a budget and say, this is worth three weeks, make the best damn version within that and then that'll ship.

[00:32:33] So that is basically the idea of keeping the scope flexible. You fix the number of people who are working on something. You fix the amount of time they're going to spend working on it, but you leave the scope of the thing flexible, so let's just leave it at that. That's-

Jason: [00:32:50] Yeah, and real quick, on a personal level, my general feeling is that if you need to make a long to-do list of things you need to do today, you have too many things to do. You should really be focused on a couple things. A few things. And you should know what those things are, and if they're broken down at such a level that you have dozens of them, then you're probably getting too granular to begin with and now you're struggling to come up with a system to manage your own work that probably doesn't need to be managed in the first place that way. I don't have a personal to-do list in the morning. I don't make a list of the things I need to do today. I kind of know what I need to do today because I either didn't get those things-I'm working on a project that continues today because I was doing it yesterday, or something's coming up today that I need to deal with and I'll do that. But I don't over-detail the work I need to do.

[00:33:42] And I know that's not how everyone's going to be able to work given whatever their work is, but for example, here at Basecamp when there's projects going on, we have shared to-do lists for the work that needs to get done and some people make individual to-do lists as well, but most of that work is shared in Basecamp project so everyone can see the work that needs to get done versus having separate lists of all the detailed work that needs to get done personally and that sort of thing. So it's a different way of looking at things but I would not over-organize your time. Let me put it to you that way. I think that that's kind of a-and you end up then, it becomes a chore, you end up being frustrated if you don't get through everything in that day, and you probably spend too much time jotting things down that you can keep in your head and if you forget them they probably weren't that important anyway and that's sort of the truth as far as I see it. So, anyway, that's my take.

David: [00:34:31] And then I'll also say that it's easy to get lost in these individual to-dos and rather than thinking what am I trying to get done this week? What sort of major project do I need to move forward because I think a lot of people they end up perhaps trying to track things in to-do lists or otherwise, and then at the end of the week, they're like, wait, what did I get done again? Like, what did I actually move forward? So being a little more coarsely grained in how you try to set this up, I think, can help you moving this forward.

Jason: [00:35:02] Another way to look at that would be, like, instead of, by the end of the week feeling like you can look back and you checked off 120 to-dos, I'd much rather you have 12. 12 big picture things that you're trying to move forward, and that's enough. That's more than enough, geez. In fact, every Monday morning, we ask everybody at Basecamp, Automatic Check-Ins the feature in Basecamp asks everybody at Basecamp, what do you plan on working on this week? And people write up what they plan on working on. And usually it's a few bullet points. Four, five or six bullet points, some big-picture ideas. Some big-picture things, and some of those things, all of them get done. Other times a few of them get done. Other things come up and those don't get done. That's enough to kind of set it up in general and then when your head's in the work itself, you kind of know what you're doing. You know what you need to be working on when your head's in the work.

[00:35:52] So I wouldn't keep pulling your head up and looking over here, figuring out what the next thing is, and looking over here. You kind of know what needs to be done, and if you don't, I would say get closer to the work itself and you probably will. So, anyway, we can go on and on on that and I know it's a little bit abstract so it's maybe not that helpful, but that's just how we look at it so we're kind of sharing that.

[00:36:08] Egor asks, "My understanding is that not everyone can do remote, this being not job-related, but person-related. Am I right? Do you believe any developer, designer, project manager, whatever can?"

[00:36:18] I believe everybody can work remotely, of course. Not if you work in the retail industry and you need to be on the floor or you work in a restaurant or front of the house. Of course, those things are not. But if you do information work, and the examples here, developer, designer, project manager / whatever. These are all informational work. This is all work done at a computer. If work can be done at a computer, it can be done anywhere you can put a computer. Everything I do lives on a 13-inch MacBook Pro. I can do that in person, sitting next to someone. I can do it 4,000 miles away. The work is happening in the computer so it doesn't matter where I am or what desk I'm sitting at, what city I'm in right now. Absolutely.

[00:36:57] Now, there's introverts and extroverts and there's certain people who feel like they need to thrive around other people, and I understand that especially during this time it's going to be harder for some of those people to not have the human connections that they're used to having. But can they do the work? Absolutely they can do the work and everybody has to make some sacrifices. You know, there's a lot of people who are introverted who are forced to work at offices every day for years. They don't want to be there, but they have to put up with it and they deal with it. So now it's time for everyone else who feels like they can only work in an office, now that they can't, they're going to have to put up and deal with it as well and adjust. And I think that's the reality on the ground at the moment.

David: [00:37:35] Yeah, I mean, where we're at right now is not, like, what would you prefer? What would be best for you right now? Absolutely fucking not. Get home. Get out of the office. We're not going to have people sitting next to each other on god-damned computers that they could sit on 4,000 miles apart as Jason and I right are 4,000 miles apart. That's a question you ask, perhaps, like, once all this is done. Once everyone has had a chance to try remote for a long period of time, then you decide, what would you prefer? Would you prefer to work in an office? That's fine, there's plenty of people who want to work around other people. That's great. Now is not the time to have that debate. Now is the time to get the fuck home.

Jason: [00:38:14] "How would you host a brainstorming meeting? I'm used to, in real life, service design type."

[00:38:21] Well, again, just because you're used to it doesn't mean that that's the way it has to be. I think that's the first thing to think about here, is like, we've done this in person, therefore how do we do that same thing remotely. I wouldn't try to simulate that thing. So what you might, instead, ask people to do is to, I don't know how you do it, but to go away and present some ideas. To come with some ideas presented. Come with some ideas pre-thought about. Write them up, sketch them out and bring those things to each other. You can either do it via writing in a tool like Basecamp or whatever you might use, or maybe you have a video chat. You share the screen here and there and go around and talk about the work or whatever.

[00:39:03] But I generally think that brainstorming should actually be done individually and then you bring those ideas to the group and then you can discuss them, versus coming into a room blank slate. And... what do you think? What do you think? What do you think? I don't think that that's actually productive in the first place, and so if, I don't know how you're doing it, but if that's how you're doing it, I would encourage you not to do it that way. I would encourage people to bring ideas to everybody and then discuss them together versus coming up with ideas on the fly from an empty room. That's my take on it.

David: [00:39:31] This is one of the things I think we do a lot of at Basecamp. We call it the pitch. So you have an idea for something, or you even just decide that here's an area we should have ideas on and someone is designated to come up with the pitch. They'll post it in Basecamp, and we let it sit. We let it marinate for a little bit. The thing about brainstorming, too, is you get a bunch of people together in real time and they start shooting from the hip. And sometimes good things come out of that. It's not that it can't ever work, but you know what? I think even better things can come out once you plant a seed, you post a pitch, and you give it a day. Or two days for people to let it marinate in their brain, maybe even sleep on it. And then they'll either present their own ideas back and if there's then some sort of debate, it's not obvious what to do, call the video chat. Like, let's talk about the ideas that kind of seem to be in conflict, or let's see where they-a lot of times that's not even necessary.

[00:40:28] The number of pitches that either me or Jason or someone else at Basecamp will do where the answer is fuck yeah, this is great, let's do it. No meeting required. Someone sat down, thought about a thing, presented those thoughts and the people went, that's great. Let's go. No meeting required. It's a large share of the number of pitches that we do.

Jason: [00:40:47] Cool. Oof. This is a tough one. Not exactly remote work question, but I think very relevant right now. "How do you properly handle large lay-offs, over 10 people?"

[00:40:58] To be honest, I'm the wrong person to ask, we've never had to lay anybody off, so I don't have that personal experience. The only thing I can say is, God, what can I say about that? If we had to do something, I would be as-you have to be as empathetic as possible but you also have to be as clear as possible with people. And what I would be careful about is false hope. This is one of those things that's tricky, especially if you have to lay someone off or you have to fire somebody or whatever. Especially with layoffs, people don't really know how long this is going to go. So a layoff, technically, is that hopefully you'll be able to come back to work at some point. And I've seen some companies already saying like, we're going to close the office down for two weeks, and then we'll back. We'll be opening, you know, March 30th or something. It's like, probably not. Don't put false hope out there, because at some point it makes you look like you don't know what you're doing and you're uninformed. So I'd be very careful about that. So if it's layoffs, I wouldn't say, we'll be back in touch in April. I would say, we don't know how long this is going to last, we're terribly sorry about this. We've tried to do everything we can to prevent this but this is the reality of the situation right now and we hope down the road, if it's a layoff that we can bring people back, but we just don't know right now, I think is the most honest way to approach that.

[00:42:13] But I don't have tactical experience in this so I don't have much to share. Maybe David has something else to share, but.

David: [00:42:19] Well, I've been on the receiving end, or I've worked at companies that went through layoffs, and yeah, I'm struggling to find what is the good way to do it. Hopefully someone has thought about this, because every one I went through, they were fucking terrible. Maybe that's just what they are, they are fucking terrible. I've not put enough thought into it to really think about how to do it better. Although, anything related to that we've done at Basecamp is that we've fired people where for whatever reason we thought it wasn't going to work out anymore. And in those situations we always tried to do it in person. We tried to have a document ready that spelled out all the details. When someone is getting this information, it's a huge mental shock. Emotional, mental shock and they're not going to remember the things that were said necessarily when that happens so they need something to hold onto after the fact.

[00:43:10] And in those situations, it was also not a debate, it was a statement of fact. We've already, by the time you're in that meeting, this has already happened. It's not a thing for us to sort of go over how it happened or whatever. And I think that's the other part of this. Keep it mercifully short. People are going to be extremely distraught after this. Being stuck in some conversation with a person going over this, is not that helpful. Again, writing it down.

[00:43:38] But, I think, as Jason says, we're not the right people to do this. There are specialists, I think, at companies who have gone through this in multiple rounds or whatever who hopefully have better information about it.

Jason: [00:43:48] The one piece I would add, though, is, because I've just read some stories about this. And, you never want your employees to find out about this in the news or something like-you have to tell people directly why you're making this decision. And you, the leadership, or team lead, or manager, whoever's responsible for this person needs to tell them. You don't want to send out some blanket statements. You don't want people to read about it in the news or hear about it in the news.

[00:44:14] You don't want people to show up-there's a small grocery store near us. This was a year or two ago, called Stanley's in Chicago. It's like a fruit market. It's a little grocery store, and people have been working there for 10, 15 years. And people came to work one day and there was just a sign on the door saying, we're closed. We're done. Or it's over. And employees had no clue this was coming. They didn't know. They didn't hear from anyone. They just showed up. They took public transportation and showed up that day and saw a note on the door saying, "You don't have a job anymore."

[00:44:45] There's no shittier way to do it than that, and you feel terrible for those people and the management, you just want to fucking punch them in the face. Because that is just a heartless way to deal with people. To treat people. And so, that kind of thing, you want to be very careful about.

[00:44:58] So, anyway. Clear communication. Honest communication. If there's paperwork required, have it ready for people. Don't say, like, you're laid off, next week you'll be hearing from legal. There should be no gap in time here. You have to have everything prepared for people and do your job, as well. So.

David: [00:45:15] I'd say one other thing, the final thing about layoffs. What I've seen a lot of times is this sense of, once the layoff is executed there's zero trust. These are almost like alien intruders and need to be escorted out by security or something like that. If someone is being fired for being abusive or threatening or whatever, totally. That's a rational thing to do. But as a precautionary measure for everyone that, like, all of a sudden now you're going to treat them as though they were potentially going to, I don't know, do something terrible? Just, no. There's a lot of this, cover your ass, like, well, we're just taking precautions in case. Well, also take some precautions for just the basic humanity of the situation.

Jason: [00:45:58] Yeah. All right, next one. Coming in from Twitch, I believe. "What do you think are the key things I can do as a manager of a small team to make remote working a great experience within my team, even if our company culture is still catching up after being forced to go full remote?"

[00:46:12] So, again, this is a situation where, I think empathy is required, and also just like, pausing expectations. So, let's say you're in the middle of a project last week, and then all of a sudden it's remote time. There's an announcement made, everyone can't work from the office anymore. Starting Monday, we're remote. The announcement's made Friday. You cannot expect Monday everything's going to be normal, it's just going to be remote. That's not how it's going to be. You need to cut back your ambitions a little bit. You need to have some time for people to adjust. You need to let people get used to things. You need to let people get their home office set up. You need to let people get their equipment if they don't have any. You cannot just assume that business is going to continue as usual. You have to dial back ambitions. You have to put things on pause for a little bit.

[00:46:55] So, to me, that is the most important part here. People will figure it out. You will all figure out how to do this one way or the other. But you can't figure it out if you're also being pushed forward to do everything you were doing right before at the same speed in the same way. That's just unfair. It's just flat-out unfair and it's unreasonable.

[00:47:18] So I think it's incumbent on leadership to slow down, to chill out for a little bit, to relax, give people some space to figure this out amongst themselves, to get the right tools in place, to get the right protocols in place, to let people screw up a bunch of times here and force it to work.

[00:47:32] I always think about the opposite. We've been remote for 20 years. We use Basecamp every day to do our work. I don't have to see anybody, whatever. If we were forced, if we said, you can't use Basecamp, everyone has to come to the office every day. What would we do? We'd be like-aw, I don't fucking know what to do. Yeah. It would take us a while to figure out how to adjust to that. The same thing is true on the other side of course, and for most people it's true right now, which is companies and leadership and management need to create some space for people to have some time to figure it out. Adults will figure it out. It's not that hard. Like David said, it's not that challenging, it's just different.

[00:48:09] And anything that's different takes some time to break some habits and get used to some new ones. So that's the advice I would give people is, ask your management if they're not giving you space to give you a little bit of space. If you are a leader, if you are an owner, if you are a manager, if you have power in an organization, create some space for people, let them ease into this and don't just throw them at it and assume everything's going to be the same.

David: [00:48:26] I'd also say, if you're a manager, now is a good time to be a leader. So, step forward. Make some decisions about how we're going to work together. There are a billion different tools you could pick, pick some! Or one.

Jason: [00:48:38] One.

David: [00:48:38] And go with that. Right? Pick a tool and say, this is what we're going to do. Don't leave it up to, I don't, I guess maybe we can use a little bit of this or a little bit of that. Now is not the time for sort of the lack of clarity that comes from having everything everywhere. Pick a tool, run with that and then be the example, right? Instead of being, like, the first thing we do Monday morning is we do a video call that's going to last two hours with 40 people, as someone was talking about. No. You set the good example, by Monday morning, you have a write up ready that's detailed about how we're approaching this that's empathetic as Jason was saying, in writing. Hey, we understand that everyone can't work at full capacity.

[00:49:19] Jason shared a write up that we had posted at Basecamp earlier this morning. You can find it on Twitter. Just do some of that and then set out the work. The other thing here is when people are under stress and they're fearful, now is the time to give them guidelines. Some boundaries like, okay, we can't just freeform, right now, this week, let's just try to get through these five things. Let's just try to focus on this right now so that people can kind of almost be a little mechanical in their work as they get going. And then, once there's momentum and we're going and we're posting in this way, things are good.

[00:49:55] But it really is on you, as a manager, to first find the way, and then show the way.

Jason: [00:50:02] The thing I want to add here, this is going to sound like a bit of a pitch for Basecamp, and essentially it kind of is because I believe Basecamp is probably one of the best things you could be using right now for remote work. But here's why. And I've heard from a few people like this. They're wondering what do we get? We haven't worked remotely before, so what tools do we need? And people go off and buy four or five, they buy a chat thing and they buy a messaging thing and they buy a file-sharing thing and they buy a scheduling thing and what ends up happening is, in times of stress right now, if you pile four or five different tools in front of people and try to onboard them in four or five different tools and there's no system in place, people are going to go where do I put information? Do I put it here? Do I put it there? Do I put it? It's actually going to be far worse and you're going to be digging yourself a very deep hole right now.

[00:50:46] What you want to find is, I would encourage you to use Basecamp, but you can use whatever tool you want, but I would find a tool that's more of an all-in-one style tool, or all-in-one style product that has a variety of different tools built into it. So at the very least, if someone puts something in the wrong place, they're still putting it in one product. When you put something in the wrong place and the wrong product, it's a total mess and people aren't going to know where to find things and they're going to follow the wrong examples. So what you want is a central, single source of truth, and if people put information in the wrong place at least it's in the right general place.

[00:51:18] So I think that's something I would encourage you to do. Whatever you want to use is fine with us, of course. But find something that handles many things together and not just something that is a small piece of the overall toolset that you're going to need, because you're going to find yourself in a deeper hole than you're going to want to be in in a week or so when people are completely confused and stuff's all over. And people say, why didn't you see that? Well, it was over here. I didn't know to look over there. I thought I was supposed to be looking over here. This is what's going to happen when people are scrambling with too many tools at once, so. Pick something, stick with it, and run with that.

[00:51:53] Broken By Design by Clip Art plays.

Shaun: [00:51:58] Rework is produced by Wailin Wong and me, Shaun Hildner. Music for the show is by Clip Art. Remember, we'll bring you part two of Jason and David's Q&A next week. If you subscribe to Rework, you'll get the episode as soon as it's released. You can find our show on Apple Podcast, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Wailin: [00:52:15] If you have a story about what it's been like working from home for the first time, we'd love to hear from you. You can record a voice memo and email it to hello@rework.fm or leave us a voicemail at (708) 628-7850. Again, that's (708) 628-7850.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Earlier this week, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson held a live Q&A about remote work. We're splitting the session into two episodes. Part 1 covers questions about video calls, brainstorming, setting priorities, and good management during a time of stressful transition.

# data[].attributes.headline
Podcast - Remote: Office Not Required Q&A Part 2

# data[].attributes.subject
Podcast - Remote: Office Not Required Q&A Part 2

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Like what we've got to say about business? You'll love Basecamp >

This is the second part of a two-hour live Q&A on remote work that Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson held last week. Part 2 covers questions about interruptions, mental health, hardware and software tools, and building culture as a remote company. You can find Part 1 on our feed in your podcast app or on our website. If you'd like to watch the Q&A session in its entirety, you can do that on Periscope. You can also check out Basecamp's Guide to Internal Communication.

Question 1: How do we get aligned with coworkers without interrupting them through chat/phone calls and while respecting their time? - 4:03

Pings (direct messages) in Basecamp - 6:34

Hey is Basecamp's upcoming email product - 7:23

"Interruption Is Not Collaboration," our episode where we discuss Office Hours - 8:45

It Doesn't Have to be Crazy At Work - 10:48

Question 2: How would you encourage leaders to prepare (or how has Basecamp prepared) for an eventuality where large numbers of workers will be sick for extended periods of time? Adding more buffers to time estimates? - 14:15

Question 3: How can we best nudge our bosses in the right direction with this stuff? - 18:39

The Guardian published an article that mentions DHH's efforts to shame companies whose employees aren't allowed to work from home - 18:57

David's tweet asking for stories of companies - 19:08

Denver Post article about Charter Communications' remote work policy - 19:41

REMOTE: Office Not Required - 21:23

Question 4: Where do you put ideas that are mostly about code? Do you have discussions in GitHub for that? - 25:06

Question 5: What can you do for taking care of the emotional well-being of the work community that's going to be remote for weeks in the middle of such unprecedented crises? - 27:32

You can send reports of companies to corona-reports@hey.com - 30:36

Question 6: How do you each spend your typical days at Basecamp? How do you balance team collaboration and meetings with more solo, "deep" work? - 34:33

"Wait, other people can take your time?" (Signal v. Noise) - 41:36

Question 7: How do you set up a culture and understand cultural fit when building a fully remote organization? - 41:54

"Introducing the 5x12" (Signal v. Noise) - 43:48

"The books I read in 2019" (Signal v. Noise) - 45:10

The Basecamp Employee Handbook - 46:51

Question 8: How do you help first-time WFH employees to ensure we are getting the most out of them? - 48:38

Question 9: How do you manage boredom, anxiety, and isolation while working remote alone? - 51:25

Question 10: What technologies (hardware included) are you excited about (outside of Basecamp) to help support remote? - 55:45

A photo gallery of Basecamp employees' work-from-home setups - 57:30

"Big Brother at the Office," our episode about employers surveilling their workers - 59:36

REMOTE on IndieBound (currently on backorder) - 1:01:44

The Full Transcript:

[00:00:00] Broken By Design by Clip Art plays.

Shaun: [00:00:02] Welcome to Rework, a podcast by Basecamp about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Shaun Hildner.

Wailin: [00:00:06] And I'm Wailin Wong. We're still technically on hiatus while we catch up and adjust to producing this show from our homes. How's your shelter in place going, Shaun?

Shaun: [00:00:16] It's going well. My home office is almost completely set up. How's yours going? You hanging in there with the family.

Wailin: [00:00:22] Yes. I no longer know what day it is.

Shaun: [00:00:25] Right.

Wailin: [00:00:25] And we did one week of e-learning at home and that went okay. This week as we're recording this is spring break for my kids' school so now we really are at loose ends because we're not even getting a sliver of a worksheet emailed from the teacher, so.

Shaun: [00:00:45] Right. Wailin: [00:00:45] Yeah, it's a lot of screen time. The advantage of having to set up our home office and our home recording studio is that I have a mountain of cardboard.

Shaun: [00:00:56] Ooh, yeah, that's fun.

Wailin: [00:00:56] I've been saving all the cardboard, because I'm like, well, we can do something with this. We can make a cardboard city or maybe she wants to make some creepy dioramas or something. And it's gotten to the point where I keep holding up stuff and showing it to my husband and being like, should we save this for a craft project. And he's like, no, that's garbage. Please just put it in the garbage.

[00:01:17] The other day, I had a bottle of creamer. An empty bottle of creamer, like a Coffee-Mate bottle and I was like, oh, if we get ten of these, she could make a set of bowling pins. And he was like, put it in the recycling bin.

Shaun: [00:01:31] Who doesn't want a set of bowling pins.

Wailin: [00:01:32] He's like, we can't just be-we can't just have a mountain of garbage in our house on the off-chance that maybe she'll want to up-cycle it into a craft project that then we'll have to get rid of later anyway.

Shaun: [00:01:41] Right. That's-a craft project is just garbage glued together.

Wailin: [00:01:46] Correct. But you know, if it's going to fill up two minutes worth of time, I'll take it.

Shaun: [00:01:49] Sure, sure. Work-wise, I have noticed that the days are flying by.

Wailin: [00:01:56] Okay, opposite issue for me.

Shaun: [00:01:56] Really?

Wailin: [00:01:57] Well, yeah, because I'm like home all day trying to keep a very extroverted seven year old from going off the rails.

Shaun: [00:02:05] That's fair. Well, you and I get to play Dungeons & Dragons this weekend, so you have something to look forward to.

Wailin: [00:02:12] That's true. How many other games do you have going?

Shaun: [00:02:14] Three, now.

Wailin: [00:02:16] Wow, okay.

Shaun: [00:02:17] It is the quarantine activity of 2020.

Wailin: [00:02:19] Well, I did download Animal Crossing on your and other peoples' advice.

Shaun: [00:02:23] Oh good, yeah, we can go visit each others' little islands. So, work from home has been going relatively smoothly for us. But we also put a call out for our listeners to send us their work from home stories. If you would like to share your work from home story, you can give us a call and leave a voicemail at (708) 628-7850. In fact, here's Chris from Colorado.

Chris: [00:02:45] Hey, Basecamp. My name is Chris and I work for the federal government as a contractor. I was on a vacation recently to Spain, actually got back mere hours before the Spanish government locked things down. But my agency, my contractor is one of many currently who have enforced full-time work from home policies and it's just been an interesting perspective to see what you can get done while you're working throughout the day. I'm constantly online, of course. I stay in contact via phone which... and we have many meetings that were in person previously, but now can be converted to email or to a conference setup by web [inaudible] and whatnot.

[00:03:30] So for those fortunate enough to be able to work from home, good luck to them and carry on as we get through this.

[00:03:35] Broken By Design by Clip Art plays.

Wailin: [00:03:36] Last week Basecamp cofounders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson hosted a two hour livestream Q&A all about working remotely. They shared a lot of really helpful tips for folks who may have suddenly found themselves working from home. We split the Q&A into two parts so if you haven't heard part one, you may want to go back and catch it. Now here's part two of the Q&A.

Jason: [00:04:02] Next question. Leonardo. "How to get aligned with coworkers without interrupting them through chat, phone calls, and respecting their time?"

[00:04:08] This is a great question and to me this is not about local or remote, this is just about working together. Respecting other people's time and attention is the most valuable thing you can begin to practice right now. And the number one thing I would say is, you don't need to be aligned all the time, first of all. You should be able to slide past one another. Sometimes you need something from someone else and you ask, but you don't want to have an expectation of immediate response. When you have expectations of immediate response, you end up driving other people crazy.

[00:04:41] And it's actually quite arrogant to ask something of someone and expect them to get right back to you. That's saying that whatever you're working on is far more important than what they're working on. Who knows what they're working on. So the idea is to relax your expectations of one another. Build a little bit more self-reliance in effect and if you're going to ask a question, before you ask it perhaps see if you could figure it out yourself. If you can't figure it out yourself, ask the question but don't expect people to get back to you immediately. Expect them to get back to you when they have time. And you can encourage that by telling people that. Saying hey, I'm stuck with this, whatever. I know you're probably busy. No rush, get back to me when you have a chance.

[00:05:17] We need to be able to practice reminding people that they don't need to get back to us immediately. And a lot of tools today that are instant tools and we have these in Basecamp, there's direct messages, there's chats in Basecamp. Just because you can write the question quickly and you can send it instantly doesn't mean that you should expect a quick, instant response on the other side. And while some of us might recognize that, I think it's important to reinforce that by sort of over explaining that in your question. Say, get back to me when you have a chance. No rush. Not ASAP.

[00:05:50] And of course, if it truly is, then it is and you say that. But I would practice that. And remember that asynchronous work, which means not making things realtime which means not requiring people to be on the exact same schedule, is actually far more productive work in the long run. Because people get to have long stretches of uninterrupted time to do their work, then they're going to take a natural break and a natural pause and that's when they might check their messages and go, oh, okay, Adam needs me to get back to him about something. Kris needs me to get back to her about something. And so that's kind of how you do that.

[00:06:21] So, don't put people on your schedule, let them stay on theirs and it will all work out fine in time.

David: [00:06:27] So, a couple of tactical ways of doing this. In Basecamp, we have all the tools, right. There's direct messages and the Pings and there's a chat. And it always seems like that's the easiest way to do. Right, it always seems like it's the easiest. I can just type it out. I'm just going to type Jason one thing. We need to remind ourselves at Basecamp even, over and over again, is this right for chat? Is this right for Ping? Because if we do a Ping, it's unrealistic to expect that the other person is going to just ignore that Ping until it's the right time for them.

[00:06:58] Some people are very good at that. I'm not one of those people. If I get a Ping, a direct message from someone, I'm going to look at it, right now. And I'm going to want to help them. So what we encourage people often is put the question or the request or whatever you're doing for alignment in another tool. For us, at Basecamp, often times it's To-Dos. If I find, oh there's an issue here in the product, we're working on this Hey product right now, so I'm finding shit all the time. Oh, I just noticed this thing. And my first instinct, every single time is let me tell Zach about it. I just found a thing in the iOS app where it comes up with the wrong thing. Let me just ping Zach about it and every time I have to stop myself. No. This does not have to be a Ping. This is not an emergency. I can file a To-Do item, I can assign it to Zach and he will see it when he sees it, and I'll get an answer back maybe later today, maybe tomorrow. And if it's not urgent, maybe next week and it'll be totally fine. The work has been captured. It's not lost. This report I have is not lost, it's right there.

[00:07:56] The same thing with a new idea, right? A lot of times what happens is you get a new idea into your head. You're so fucking excited about it and you feel like, I must share it with someone and I must get some immediate gratification back from that. So you do a Ping or you do a chat. You just throw it into a chat room, what do you guys think about this? And all of a sudden, you've not just disturbed one person. You've disturbed five people and you've pulled them all into an ad hoc discussion where they're just shooting from the hip about this grand idea you just had.

[00:08:22] Post a message instead. A message, you write it up, a couple paragraphs. Again, people have this natural expectation that they can read a message on their own time and they will. So a lot of this is picking the right tool for the job, and most of the time the right tool is not chat. That's for emergencies.

[00:08:42] And final tactical thing I'd say, a thing we do at Basecamp is call it office hours. So a lot of times, the request when you need help it goes to the same number of people. At Basecamp, we have two people who are our JavaScript experts, for example, it's called our R&F team, Research & Fidelity. They field a lot of questions about JavaScript from designers, from other programmers. People are trying to figure stuff out. And oftentimes when you're dealing with JavaScript as with any other type of programming, you hit a wall, like aaah, I can't figure this out. I just need this one thing. And you think, oh, it's just me. I can just ask Sam. It's just one question. But it's never just one question, right? Because even just at Basecamp, we're a tiny company. We have 15 people who could potentially have a JavaScript question during the day. So it's just three of those initiate a conversation with Sam or Javan during the day. You've shot that whole day for Sam or Javan.

[00:09:36] So what R&F does at Basecamp, they reserve one day. It's Thursdays, and I think it's from... maybe it's from 10 to noon, they have office hours. And you put your name on essentially like a little schedule, and say, I would like some of your time during that time and then we can discuss it. And it's so much nicer because first of all what happens is a lot of people... that's a bit of friction. You actually want friction.

[00:09:58] The problem here with a lot of modern tooling is it has no friction. Chat has zero friction at all. The ease-it's a chat box to someone else's brain. You type it in there and boom! It's in their consciousness. There's a horrible lack of friction, actually, in that. And that's great in those tiny circumstances where it's truly an emergency, blah blah blah. Most of it is not. You want some friction. You want to say, oh man, office hours are two days away, let me just try to figure this out. And you know what? Nine out of ten times you fucking figure it out. And then if you don't figure it out, you have a glorious 30 minutes with some experts who feel like they're being valued with their time because you took the effort to schedule with them. Who feel like this is the most important thing for them to spend time on right now, and quarantine time is just for this and it's so much nicer to work that way.

Jason: [00:10:45] By the way, little quick pitch here. In our latest book, It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work, there's actually a whole chapter on this topic, called office hours. And it explains how we do it and why we do it. It's a really valuable thing to do and it's actually been kind of a game changer for us. Every different group in the company sometimes establishes office hours. R&F, like David was saying is typically the most prominent one but Strategy has had them, I've had them. David's had them. Different groups in the organization have had them. Data's had them in the past, as well.

[00:11:14] And some people might go, well, I can't wait 'til Thursday, it's Monday. Well, do something else. There's something else you can do. There shouldn't be these blockers that you can't move forward on. There's always ways around things. There's always things you can put on hold for a moment and switch to something else for a while. So anyway, the office hours thing has been a great help for us.

David: [00:11:32] Let me make one last point about here is the power dynamics. If you are a manager, this applies 10,000 times more to you than to anyone else. When you Ping someone and you're their manager, they will drop everything to answer you right now because there's an implicit understanding that their job depends on pleasing you. So you have so much more obligation to not use these tools unless it's an emergency. And I feel this every week. Every day I feel this, because, again, the instinct is, ah, I'll just type it into chat. And every time I do, people mysteriously have all the time in the world to help me figure this shit out. Of course they do, because I'm their god-damned manager and at the end of the day, I could fire them, right? So, just have that in your head every single time you think, oh, I should just ask John about this. John knows, right? Yeah, John knows, but respect John's time, or Jane's time and put it on their plate.

[00:12:26] This is another thing we do. So, sometimes you think of to-do items as, hey, do something for me. It can also just be a question. We have Jane that works in data analysis for us. A lot of the work is just a question. Oh, I'm curious, like, I don't know. What was the sign-up rate last month, or something, if we don't have it on the dashboard. Let's say, it needs some computation. It's just a question. You put a question on a plate. Everyone can see what the plate is. Everyone else can see what the plate is. You're not just fielding this question that I'm putting a question on Jane's plate that only Jane and I can see. A lot of times it's actually helpful to see, you know what? Jane might not get to my question because there's five questions ahead of me that are probably more important. I can also see whether they're more important, right?

[00:13:09] And making that visibility around the work and who has the requests and so on is a really helpful thing. Office hours does the same thing by allowing everyone else, they're putting the dates on there on the office hours. Everyone else can see that, so, if you're signing up for Basecamp now, this is the division between teams and projects. Every team in Basecamp, like data has a Basecamp for themselves, R&F has a Basecamp for themselves, and this is the teams. This is the first block up at the top, this is where we put these things, and we usually called it requests or the plate or something like that. Or triage where someone, they just add the to-dos and then the team will go through these things.

[00:13:44] And they're separate from the projects, right? The project is like, we're working on this specific feature and we're doing this. The teams are these long-running things that each team, like data analysis, they have their own Basecamp, and they'll field ideas and questions on it.

Jason: [00:13:55] What's nice, too, is you can subscribe to a to-do list, so if you care, if you're Jane, and you want to know whenever a new request has been added, you can subscribe to that list and get a notification. Meanwhile, I don't have to be bombarded with notifications on that to-do list because I haven't subscribed to it. So there's those little things.

[00:14:13] Yeah, this is a great question. "How would you encourage leaders to prepare, or how is Basecamp prepared to eventually, when large parts of workers will be sick for extended periods of time, adding more buffers to time estimates, et cetera?"

[00:14:24] I mean, look. Reality is what it is. So it's completely unfair. If people are out sick, literally, or if there's someone in their household who's sick or whatever is going on. You can't expect them or the rest of the team to deliver what you thought they would be able to deliver in the same amount of time. You just simply cannot do that. So you must relax your expectations. And the best way to do that is to get out ahead of it. We haven't posted this internally yet, so we'll make some little news here in a sense. But we have this product called Hey coming out in April. Well, it's not going to come out in April anymore. It's going to come out later than April. Now, there's a few reasons for that. It was gonna come out in April, but we have to slow down a little bit right now. We have to let people spend some more time at home, especially people with kids at home who are now in charge of childcare because childcare's closed down and schools have closed down. Our full-time workers who have kids are essentially going to be part-time workers for a while. So we have to say, that's the reality and we have to support them. And the way to support them is not by piling more work on them or demanding that they get the same amount of stuff in a shorter period of time. They simply can't and we don't want them to do that.

[00:15:29] So we have to relax that a little bit. Also, of course, launching a new product in the middle of a pandemic is probably not a very thoughtful thing to do as well. But part of this is also that. But part of it is getting out ahead and making an announcement internally which we'll be doing later today. That, let's keep working on Hey, as we're planning on working on Hey. But late-April is not our target anymore. Let's not work as if it is and let's not make you feel anxious about hitting that deadline when all of a sudden you only have-you have 15 hours fewer a week to work. That sort of thing.

[00:16:02] So I think it's very important to just be very clear and to be very understanding and show as a leader, as an owner or whatever it is to your team, that you understand the reality on the ground. And it's not about, you need to buck up. I mean, look. Let me just say this, too. There are certainly industries where people probably have to put in more time now. People who are researching a vaccine? People who are creating masks. There are some industries probably where we need all hands on deck right now. It's a national and a global emergency. Okay. Your start-up is not that, probably. Our software company is certainly not that.

[00:16:36] Even though lots of use Basecamp, Basecamp works just great. Hey doesn't exist yet. We can decide to push Hey off a little bit here to release the pressure valve. That's on us as leaders to release the pressure valve. So anyway, that's my quick spiel on that.

David: [00:16:50] I'd say the number one thing to remember here for all product companies, all deadlines are made up. We made them up. We invented them. We can reinvent them and we can change them. Now, if you're working with clients where you have contracts and so on, maybe that's a different story. But in a lot of places, the deadlines you're stressing out about? They're made up and you made them up and you can un-make them up. You can change them.

[00:17:16] And I think that that comes back to this notion of, or misunderstanding of what accountability is. Accountability is not killing yourself to make made-up goals, made-up targets. That's the other thing. Sometimes it's deadlines, and sometimes it's goals. Oh, our goal was to call so-and-so many customers this week or this month, or grow so-and-so much or publish so-and-so much. These are all made up and you can just change them. And you should.

Jason: [00:17:42] Now that's because facts have changed on the ground. I think that's the important part. What we're not arguing for here is deadlines that no one believes all year round. You can't just keep moving your deadlines out, that's not going to work, right?

David: [00:17:54] Yes. No.

Jason: [00:17:55] This is about like, when you set the deadline, there was a reality, and there's a new reality. You have to also adjust the deadline given the new reality.

David: [00:18:04] Yes.

Jason: [00:18:05] Yeah. So that's kind of the important point here. And if that doesn't-if that's not the case then you should stick to those deadlines. Deadlines are very useful, important tools. But if the ground shifts you've got to shift the deadline as well. Or eliminate the deadline, or scale way back. Scale your ambitions way back. Whatever it takes. Something has to give here. You cannot ask people to do more work in these kinds of times unless the work is critical life and death work and yours is probably not, is sort of the answer.

[00:18:33] All right.

David: [00:18:35] Yep.

Jason: [00:18:36] Ooh. David, you want to take this one?

David: [00:18:37] Yes. "How can I best nudge our bosses in the right direction with this stuff?"

[00:18:42] Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about a lot over the last few days because I don't know if nudge is the right word as much as beat with a stick is what I've been trying to do on Twitter for a while. I started this weekend with companies that are failing to realize the gravity of the situation and are not allowing people who could work from home to work from home. One tactic I've used, and I'm not saying this is the right tactic for all cases, it certainly is not. But it's to call that shit out publicly. Leak it. Get it out to journalists. I've talked to a ton of investigative journalists who are thankfully working on stories right now calling companies to account for their shitty practices if they're forcing people who could work from home to come into an office. You could leak to some journalists.

[00:19:27] Hey, some safety tips here. Do not use your company email address to do this. Use your personal device. Figure out a way to do where you can keep anonymity. There was just a story, I think it was this morning or yesterday that a worker at Charter Communications was fired for bringing up this stuff to management, like why they weren't allowed to work from home when they could. You've got to keep safe and it's reasonable to be afraid that you would lose your job if you work at a place where they have still not got the memo despite everything that you should not be working from an office if you can work from home. Because those are not considerate and kind people and you should take your precautions accordingly.

[00:20:07] Now. Let's say. That's at one end of the spectrum. I'd be blunt here and say, that's the shit-head end of the spectrum, right? You're calling people into the office who don't need to be in the office just because you're a shit-head. That's the most extreme end. Then there's another end of like, someone's not a shit-head, they're just not educated yet. They're trying to be kind they just haven't understood it. You can send them resources and there's a lot of information out right now. There's a lot of great write-ups of what happens with social distancing. I've seen some wonderful simulations that show how much we can do here if we do social distancing early. What the fatality count is going to be if we don't. Send those things. This is just science. This is science and projections. Facts. To people who are willing to listen where they're not stonewalling because they're shit-heads. They're stonewalling because they're uninformed.

[00:20:59] That's absolutely a thing, and I would start here. Don't assume that someone's a shit-head until they have proven to you that they're a shit-head. Then you go full bore public shaming. Leak to investigative journalists, the whole nine yards. But let's start with something milder than that. And then also, some people may also just not know how to do this. This was actually the whole reason we wrote Remote: Office Not Required in 2013. It was born directly out of Jason and I having conversations with other technology executives who seemed to simply be a) uninformed and b) under-equipped to figure out how to do this. They didn't have the skills, they didn't have the knowledge. They didn't know how to do this.

[00:21:40] Now, seven years later. The information is out there. So if you care about this, nudge your bosses by sending them tutorials how we could do this. Suggestions, hey, here's a good tool we could use to do this. Here's some resources we could do. Here's the reasons why. Prepare the full argument. And sort of go with best intentions. There's no blaming, there's no nothing. Just, we're trying to get people safe, we're trying. Keep an open and helpful tone, again, until that's proven not to work. Then you go more drastic from there. But you've got to approach this from maybe they just don't know. Maybe they just haven't realized. Maybe they aren't following this stuff as closely as I am. You'd think, like, that's probably a ding, if someone's not paying just a baseline of attention right now, but okay.

[00:22:26] Again, the most important thing is we've got to get people home and start working from home.

Jason: [00:22:32] So that's definitely the macro angle. The micro angle is like, how do we nudge our bosses to do some of this stuff, what I'm also hearing is some of this stuff, like, not having meetings all the time, or whatever. A wholesale change is going to be hard for anybody. You don't want to give someone a list of 12 things they need to change. Try changing one thing. Try encouraging them to do one thing. Like, this video conference with 18 people on Monday morning, it's just not working boss, or Bill, or whatever you call your boss, or Sally, or whoever she is or he is. Can we try and write this up instead? Can we just try once? Can we try this next meeting that we would normally have, can we try writing it up instead? Can we try that?

[00:23:09] And just kind of ease into some of these changes and show that, oh, gosh, that was okay. That was actually better. In fact people seemed to like that. In fact we had a different quality of a conversation. Our quality of a conversation went up. People were more thoughtful. What's really hard about meetings, people forget about this. Everyone's on stage and everyone has to come up with shit on the top of their head. That's fucking hard for a lot of people. A lot of people are much better at thinking it over, thinking it through and responding an hour later. Imagine if we could do that at meetings, but you can't because everyone's on stage, the spotlight shines in different people's faces and they have to say something brilliant instantly. That's hard.

[00:23:52] If you say, let's write something up and give everyone an hour or two to respond, or three hours, or by the end of the day? You're going to see the quality actually of the discussion go up. That's what people are going to want and your boss should want that, too.

[00:24:06] So, again, that's one small little tactical thing you might want to try that I think would be effective. So. Anyway.

David: [00:24:11] And be that change. Be the change you want to see. If you want to get write-ups instead of meetings start writing things up. Start setting the example. A lot of these times, and maybe you can find a few like-minded colleagues who are also interested in that, start setting the good example. And things sometimes follow.

[00:24:28] The other thing I would say is that people in positions of power are sometimes sensitive about even nudges. Right, like, could we maybe write this up. It's a very fine line between that and being seen as an attack as why haven't you already done it, right? Versus here's just me, I'm putting out my work in the format that I think it should be in. This is a writeup of a pitch. I'm explicitly telling everyone, just. Let's talk about this tomorrow. Let's give people time to think about it. Maybe you can just work within your group. I mean, the best is when these things come from the top, but sometimes they just can't come from the top and then you grow it from the bottom up.

Jason: [00:25:02] Next Q: You want to talk about this, David?

David: [00:25:03] "Where do you put-" yes, I will do that. "Where do you put ideas that are mostly about code-"

Jason: [00:25:08] I'll be right back, go ahead.

David: [00:25:10] "-[crosstalk] discussions in Github for that?"

[00:25:12] We get this question a lot and some people seem to sort of think that we must have some ticketing system or something else like Jira or... nope. We just put it all in Basecamp. Anything that's about sort of the architecture, the approach, the scope. It all goes generally into Basecamp messages. If it's something that a team is actively working on, they're working on it together. A lot of-some of that goes into chat. A bunch of it is then detailed in To-Dos. But what we do use Github for in terms of discussions and what I think it's excellent for is for pull request reviews.

[00:25:45] So Github has this feature, they've had for forever, where you can on a per-line basis offer suggestions or critique of code. And we do that a ton. A bunch of what I do at Basecamp is to do pull request reviews. Now, that's a whole art in and of itself and there's some great write-ups on how to do pull request reviews in a good manner. A good manner is not like, this is wrong, change it. A good manner is one of suggestions and one of kindness.

[00:26:14] And sometimes also realizing the limitations of the written word. If a pull request needs a substantial change, sometimes writing up 45 individual lines is not a good way to do it. What you should do instead is level that up to an actual conversation with someone.

[00:26:32] We've been using this tool called Tuple, which is a screensharing tool specifically built to pair programming. Two people can get to run the keyboard and the mouse at the same time. It works excellently when you do a very in-depth code review or you're trying to hash out a piece of code together. Tuple is really great for that. We have some teams who have used it a lot, I've used it just a little bit over the last few weeks and I've been thoroughly impressed by it. It's called Tuple. T-U-P-L-E. Use that. Write up the big approaches about anything in Basecamp.

[00:27:04] Don't spread it out, I would say, such that you have half the stuff in Github, half the stuff in Basecamp. If Github is your tool, then double down on Github. There's-I think there's a wiki in Github, you can do tickets in Github. You can totally do development in that. So if that's your jam, do that. What we do at Basecamp is we keep all the broad discussions in Basecamp, and we just do the code reviews in Github.

Jason: [00:27:30] "What can you do for taking care of the emotional wellbeing of the work community that's going to be remote for weeks in the middle of such unprecedented crisis?"

[00:27:38] Well, this is of course up to each individual company to do so. Number one, we've got to be understanding of the situation. Businesses have to chill out. This is not a time for unlimited rapid growth, especially. This is a time to slow down a little bit. To understand the stresses people are under. To understand the stresses people are under at home and at home, especially parents right now. Or people with elderly relatives, or their parents who are nearby and they're terrified of what's going for them, and they're not listening. All this stuff. There's a lot of things going on in life right now.

[00:28:15] Just about understanding that and letting your employees know that you understand that and acknowledging that we're all human beings right now. We're literally all in this together as much as we've ever been. And just letting people know that you know that too. I think that is a big initial step. The other thing is, and I'm well aware that not every company can do this. But something we announced internally today is that basically our full-time employees are essentially going to be going part-time because a lot of them have kids at home. Half of them have kids. So they're only going to be able to put in part time work, and that's fine. We're still going to pay them full-time salaries but we understand that they're not going to be able to put in full-time and that's just the reality.

[00:28:57] And we're not forcing people to have to take personal days or vacation days to make up for those moments when they simply just cannot work for whatever reason for a day or two. If you can relax some of those policies and let people know that they don't have to be worried about what if they want to take a vacation December, they're going to blow through all their vacation time right now because they have to make a run to the store although everything should be delivered right now. But if you can't for whatever reason, and you need to run to the store with your mask on, whatever you need to do. People shouldn't feel like they shouldn't do that right now because work's going to ding them for being out for half a day.

[00:29:31] We need to relax those things and chill out. So that's my general point of view on this.

David: [00:29:36] I would say the second thing is here, do not fucking gaslight people. The number of company announcements I've seen that start something like, the most important mission at company XYZ is the wellbeing of our employees. It starts like that, right? And then it goes down to, but we still expect everyone to do all their commitments, come into the office. Like, what the fuck are you doing? If you're not going to be a sort of, a company that is invested in the emotional wellbeing of your employees as the question puts it, don't pretend to be!

[00:30:10] Just say the things you're going to do and do those things. I mean, of course you should be emotionally invested, but it's even worse when you're being a shit-head who's pretending to be caring at the same time. That's really the worst. I've seen a huge number of the reports I've been fielding... So, part of this calling out companies that are not allowing people to work from home who could work from home is I set up this email address called corona_reports@hey.com where people are essentially leaking bad places of employment and they're sending in these announcements. And my head is just blown. They're full of all this fake concern. It's all words and then there are no actions. Or worse, it's all words and then the actions are, I still expect you to do all your commitments. Basically there's no slack. You still have to do everything.

[00:31:01] And I just go like, "You motherfucker." Right, as Jason said, the impulse at this time is there's a lot of managers who like to punch you in the face. It just seems like it's so callous, so uncaring, and it's not going to work. That's the thing that's really just aggravating is that you can call everyone into the office. Do you think you're going to get 100% out of anyone right now? No you're not. You're absolutely deluding yourself. And if you are calling people into the office, what are you? How many days are you away from someone saying, oh, I've been tested positive. And now what do you have on your hands? Someone exposing the rest of the company to this and potentially more employees?

[00:31:36] It just doesn't even work. So even if you are just like, well, I need to maximize, or you feel you have to. I'm sympathetic with that, too. Some companies don't have a lot slack. Their margins are very thin. They do feel like, well, we've got to do everything we've got to do. That's fine to believe that. It's fine to want to do that, but you've got to accept reality and reality is you cannot get 100% out of everyone. The reality is calling people into the office right now is just grossly irresponsible and you need to stop doing that.

Jason: [00:32:03] One of the things you can do, too, is you can simply ask people how they're feeling. You can set up a place for people to share their own little self-care techniques at the moment. A lot of people aren't really sure how to cope or what to do or what's safe or how they should be feeling right now. Some people are trying to feel like they're really strong right now, when they feel very vulnerable but they're afraid to be that way. And I think it's important for leadership, especially, to set those examples that it's okay to talk about these things.

[00:32:30] Maybe these are things we don't normally talk about at work, although I would say it's healthy to talk about this stuff at work. But let's say you don't normally. Well, now is definitely a time to do that and set up a place for people, where people can do that. Or if you have an HR team, or HR, have them reach out to people and see how they're doing. Show concern. Show legitimate, genuine concern for people. I think that's a really important point right now. Some of the things that we've seen internally is when we've posted some of these announcements, people simply appreciate that we understand the situation that we're in. It's not that we're able to change the situation all that much. I mean, we can certainly give people a bit more time and not let people worry about taking some time off or whatever. But we can't send childcare to people's houses. I can't fix that problem, obviously, right now.

[00:33:14] But what we can do is we can acknowledge the fact that we understand that's a hardship right now. A real extreme, serious hardship. And many times that's all people want to know is that you understand where they are and what they're going through. You want to do it in a genuine way. I just want to recommend that, first of all, like David was saying. A lot of these corporate announcements are such bullshit and people can see the bullshit. It's so obvious. There's nothing more obvious than bullshit and when you write an announcement that shows you don't really care, or you say one thing but you act a different way in that situation. People aren't going to trust you anymore. And you're actually going to damage trust which is what you really need right now, moving forward. So I would think those things through.

David: [00:33:53] And I also say, get on the same level of, you've got to call people in. You've got to think that you can ask them to work 100%. You know what, if you make it through this, people will remember. Let's say you get through this and your business is still there. Everyone is putting in their CVs somewhere else. It doesn't work in the short term because it's unrealistic and it doesn't work in the long term either because people remember.

[00:34:17] Even if you're just focused on yourself and your own god-damned business the self-preserving thing to do is to be a kind, understanding human being because that's what's going to actually work.

Jason: [00:34:27] All right. You want to take this one, David, and I'll jump in after [crosstalk]?

David: [00:34:31] "How do you each spend your typical days at Basecamp? How do you balance team collaboration and meetings with more solo or deep work?"

[00:34:39] I think this-everyone has a different routine. My routine is usually I start working around 9:15 Pacific time. That's when I've dropped off kid at school. And then I spend the time before lunch on collaboration. Writing things up, chiming in on things. Reading things. Catching up. And then the four hours or so after lunch is when I do my deep work. I'm on the west coast so it's helpful that most of my deep work actually happens when some people at the company are already off. It's easier to focus like that. So that's my routine. Splitting the day up in half and half.

[00:35:17] It doesn't always work like that. Some days I'm really fired up about something I'm working on and I kind of just ignore the collaboration for a day or two. And then I do the whole day as deep work as best I can. And other days, now is a good example. Not a lot of deep work has happened just the last couple days, right? We've been focused on other things and then the whole day is collaboration and chiming in and getting things settled.

Jason: [00:35:42] Yeah, and mine is very similar. We don't have prescheduled meetings so that-it just, we don't have that as an impediment to our day. We'll have ad-hoc discussions between two or three people sometimes will jump on a video call sometimes. Like, me and David and someone else. Jonas, lately has been, we've been having a call once a week, just three of us to go over where we're at with Hey. But we don't really have anything scheduled beyond that. So my days are kind of jumping around whatever needs to be done. I've been doing a lot of writing lately, so that's kind of my focused work. But there's still ongoing projects going on with Hey and I'm reviewing all the work that's happening occasionally whenever that's necessary.

[00:36:19] So you just kind of bounce around but I don't have a standard day other than I usually start around nine as well and kind of end around five, but sometimes if I take a few hours in the middle of the day to go take a walk or something, I might make up some of that time at night. So it all sort of depends but that's how we do it.

David: [00:36:32] What I will say, though, is it is good to have an idea that it's valuable to protect your time. If you think the entire day is for team collaboration and you're trying to be kind and you're trying to respond to everyone who pings you? You will end up at the end of the week having not gotten things done that you wanted to do. And that's not a good place, either. This sort of, both the self-care and the collaborative care is that you take time away for yourself and you reserve hours where the main thing you focus on is your solo deep work and it's only emergencies that really should burst that membrane.

Jason: [00:37:05] The other thing I want to add to that is this is maybe going to come as a shock to many people. We don't have a shared calendar system at Basecamp. So I can't see anyone else's calendar and no one can see mine and that is intentional. We do that so that nobody can easily take each other's time. If you look at your own schedule, your own calendar right now, I would bet you that the majority of the time that's blocked off was blocked off by somebody else. Most people don't even have control of their own day so you can't expect people to get work done if they don't even have control of their own day. So at Basecamp, we prevent people from taking each other's time systematically.

[00:37:39] If you want someone's time, you simply ask for it. It's a negotiation. It's valuable, so you say, hey David, are you free tomorrow morning at noon. Well, that wouldn't be in the morning, but at 10am, I want to go over something with you. And he'll be like, no, I'm busy how about 4 in the afternoon. I'm like, that's cool, let's do that. Or whatever. It's actually a negotiation and it's hard. It might be a hassle. Well, we might throw out three or four times, and none of them work. And you're like, well, we should use a system for that it'd be so much simpler if we had a calendar. But there's tradeoffs. When it's really easy to take people's time, you end up taking more of it. The easy things to do are the things you keep doing. We want it to be hard to take people's time from one another. That requires everyone to be in full control of their day and they get to dole it out as they wish or they don't wish.

[00:38:22] The tools you use, the systems you have in place have a huge impact. You can't just say, it's oh, well some people use it well and some people use it poorly. Systems have defaults. Software has defaults. Every feature you see is a default decision by the company that develops it and every system you use, you would essentially adopt those defaults. And so if you have a calendar system that runs your company, essentially, you are defaulting to the calendar company's assumptions about how time should be split, shared, whatever. It's your company, it's not theirs, but you are defaulting to the way they encourage people to take time from one another. And you know what? They're going to make it as easy as possible because that's the business that they're in. They're in the calendar business, so they're going to make it really easy to take other people's time.

[00:39:07] So you've got to be very careful about the tools you use. And I don't care how popular a tool is or what other people are using. What matters to you? How do you want to work? That's what you should be looking at. So it's very very important to be very selective and careful about the stuff you use and don't just spin up a bunch of stuff because it's the hot tool of the moment.

David: [00:39:24] Friction is a feature. There's so much of software that's about just reducing friction to an absolute minimum and juicing engagement to an absolute maximum and that is just ... that's in their interest, right, in some cases. It should not be in your interest. Man, I love not having a calendar. And it's so funny, too, because whenever I talk to people who run on calendar systems at their company, they're sort of just assuming that that's how the whole world runs. I'll just send you an invite. I never... I very rarely click on those invites that you send. Those little ICS thing or whatever and say yes or no. I'm manually typing that thing into my calendar because I want it to feel annoying to me, too. I don't want it to be a one click for me to get someone on my calendar because it's so easy a week in advance, you say, eh, sure, I'll do it like click, right? I want the friction of having manual data entry to remind me, actually do I want this?

[00:40:22] And the number of times where I've started typing out call with whatever at 10:30 and then, eh, fuck it. Escape. No. Right, it's just helpful to just have some cool-down period there. If you don't have any cool-down period on saying yes and it's just a click and you're going to do the thing that has the least social friction, right? You don't want to say no. You want to be kind. If you have the calendar that's visible to all, and there's a gap, are you going to be the person who says, no. I don't want to talk to you. No, that feels awkward, right? Why would you want to invite that awkwardness and you can just not do it by not running your company on a calendar.

Jason: [00:41:00] The other thing about that is it's your calendar. It's your time. And what David was just saying makes a lot of sense because it's like, if you want to put something on your calendar, you should put it there. Even if someone asked you for your time. You should put it there. You should not let anyone else put anything on your calendar. It begins to create a gulf between your time and your actions and pretty soon before you know, it eh, people fill up my calendar all day long and I have no fucking time to do anything else. So anyway, we can go on this rant forever. We've written about this in a bunch of our books. Shared calendars are some of the worst inventions made by software companies in the past 20 or 30 years. There are some good ones that don't have all this invite stuff going on. And calendars are wonderful things in general, but things that make it easy to take other people's time, not so much.

[00:41:51] Anyway. Let's move on to the next one.

[00:41:53] "How do you set up a culture and understand cultural fit when building fully remote organization?"

[00:41:58] This is a good topic to talk about, which is culture. What is it, first of all? Because we can't talk about fits or building one without understanding what it is. And it's my view that culture is not something that's created. Culture is something that exists. It is the byproduct of consistent behavior. It is what you simply do. That's what culture is.

[00:42:21] So when you hire people to fit into your culture, what does that even mean? Do you even know what it is? Is it what you say it is, or is it what you actually do that is what it is? And it's what you do.

[00:42:31] And so I think that's the first step here, is understanding that. And I've seen a lot of companies with long lists of missions and statements and whatever. Who we are and what we are. And if you secretly pulled every employee into a room and said is that who they are, they'd go, no, that's not how it is. That's not how it is here. Let me tell you how it actually is. And how they tell you it actually is, is the culture. That's what culture actually is.

[00:42:53] So that's the baseline thing I want to start with. As far as like, remote or local, again, in my opinion, and I know this is just my opinion here. There's nothing that magical, or let me put it to you this way. Seeing people in person doesn't create a culture either. It's just that they happen to be there. It's not that anything is magically created because of that. Culture is how you treat people. How you work with people. How patient you are with one another. These are the things that you actually do. How you ask for feedback. How you give feedback. How understanding you are when people have to be out for a few days or whatever it might be. Those are the things that you actually do.

[00:43:33] So, that to me is independent of location. Now, that said, let me give you a few tactical things that we do here because we are pretty much fully remote. We do something... we haven't done it for a little bit. But we typically do something once a month called the 5x12. Meaning five people and 12 meaning one month per year. 12 months. One day a month, we pull in five random people. They get an invitation about an hour or something before this event. And then it's also, plus me and David, so it's really 7x12. But anyway, we do a video chat once a month with five random people across the company. It's about a one hour chat and we cannot talk about work. There's no work discussion whatsoever.

[00:44:15] And this is about mixing people who often don't work together, because there's pulled from every different department. People who don't often work together and we just talk about life. Talk about things that are on our minds. Talk about the shitty bread in the United States, that's David's favorite topic. Talk about air quality. Talk about [inaudible] global warming. These always get really morbid and terrible. But they're fun and the point is is that that's something we do just so people can get to know each other in a way that maybe you might get to know each other around lunch if you are physically in the office. These are sort of conversations you might be talking about in a physical proximity but you might not talk about remotely. But we kind of encourage people to do that.

[00:44:51] So we do that once a month. And we transcribe that call and then everybody in the company gets a copy of that transcription. It's a really nice thing to get to know people and get to talk to people. Get to see what's going on with people's lives, on top of the fact that we also do that Automatic Check-in every Monday morning which is what did you work on this weekend. Once a month we also ask everyone what have you been reading? And people share book reviews and topics that they're interested in and there's other things you can do there. And I've heard from a number of employees who've never worked remotely before who work here now who say they know their co-workers far better than they did at their other job even though they barely see anybody. You can really make sure people know one another even if they don't see each other.

David: [00:45:30] I think the other thing here is that example I was just giving earlier where this announcement comes out, like, we are a company that cares the utmost for all our employees' wellbeing. And then they essentially detail all the ways they do not care about the wellbeing. This is how you create culture. A culture of mistrust. A culture of management is full of bullshit. I think that's, a lot of the times is there's this sort of, the active statement. Right, action statement is we care about our employees' wellbeing. And then there's what we actually do, and then the active thing serves. If you just said, hey, you've got to come to the office, we expect everyone to do everything all the time. You would have at least a culture that's consistent or cohesive or congruent. It'd be a shitty one, but it'd be congruent, right?

[00:46:17] 10x worse is to do that and then add on top this culture sprinkles where basically it's gaslighting everyone by saying, we care about you even though here are the ways we don't care about you. This was why, for a very long time, we haven't focused very much at Basecamp about the writing it out. In software, we often talk about frameworks are extracted. First you write the [inaudible] code and then you extract the lessons from that and put them into sort of a tool kit. Culture and writing up about culture is much the same way. We've written up our company handbook after like, what? 15 years? What was the company handbook? Was that just us sitting and brainstorming what it should be? No. It was an extraction of what we actually do.

[00:47:02] And one of the things that I tell all new employees that start at Basecamp that I get a chance to talk about this stuff with is hey, you are in a uniquely valuable position right now. You can tell us all the bullshit that we pretend is true. Read our company handbook. Tell me what's not actually true. Because the other thing is, is you get marinated in not just in your culture, but your misconceptions-

Jason: [00:47:28] Mythology.

David: [00:47:28] -of the culture. Yeah, the mythology of what the culture is. Oh, we're a company that cares out our employees, and then if you're not, you kind of need someone to actually tell you. Dude, you're full of shit. So I think this is what new employees if somehow you do have a culture where there's honesty, maybe that's not actually a thing that'll happen that often if you are at a company that's sort of gaslighting everyone.

[00:47:52] But at Basecamp, this is what we're trying to do. Is use the fresh eyes that someone new to the company comes in with, and we've changed the company handbook a ton of time because this is also, it's being read for the first time. They're not-none of the assumptions are sort of baked in. They just take what we say and is this what we actually do?

Jason: [00:48:09] Here's just another quick plug for the book It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work. If you go to the table of contents, the longest chapter is called Feed Your Culture and there's 16 essays in that chapter, okay? We have a lot to say about this. In fact, out of the whole book, there's more essays in this chapter than any other chapter, so if you're interested more in how we talk about culture and how we believe in culture and how we think about culture, pick up It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work and then check out that Feed Your Culture chapter.

[00:48:36] So, all right. "How do you help first-time work from home employees to ensure we are getting the most out of them?"

[00:48:42] Now, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you didn't really kind of mean it that way. But, um. I'll still address it, like, getting the most out of somebody, to me, is not ever the goal. It sounds like you're trying to extract or squeeze. I'm not a fan of that method of management. I think what you want to do is get the best out of somebody and the best is not the most. The best is the best. And so what you want to create is an environment where people can do the best work of their lives. This is not work from home versus local. This is just, what is your environment like? How much autonomy do people have? How much trust can they feel? What size are your teams? Do you have too many people involved in a project? That makes it really hard, actually, for people to do the best work of their lives?

[00:49:28] Do you take care of people? Do you pay them well? What are the benefits like? How fair are you in certain situations if someone needs time off or needs something to deal with... Those are the things you can do to create the environment so people can give you their best. And want to give you their best. I think that's the other thing. You might be able to whip someone into shape in a sense. There's a lot of companies that hold carrots over peoples' heads and bonus bonus bonus, just do your best. Yeah, maybe you can get a lot of work out of somebody, but it's not the best work and they're not going to stick around. That's unsustainable. It's totally unsustainable.

[00:50:01] I mean, you could say, there are moments that come up where you want to motivate people and [inaudible], I don't know. I'm still not even a fan of that but fine for a moment. But that's not a sustainable practice. It's a mind shift. It's not about getting the most, it's about getting the best and that starts with you as leadership creating an environment where people even have the chance to do their best work.

[00:50:20] Anyone who's listening to this right now. If you don't have three or four hours a day to yourself, it's going to be very hard to do your best work and I think most people, if they pull their calendar up right now, they'd go, like, it's like fucking Tetris. There's boxes everywhere. I've no time for myself. Oh, there's a little small gap. Maybe I can fill that with something. That's not an environment where you can do your best work. A great open schedule is the environment where you can do your best work. A moment or a place where people can't take your time from you is where you can do your best work. A company that supports you and allows you to work from anywhere that you need to on your own schedule, that's probably how you can do your best work. So anyway, it's about best, not about the most.

David: [00:50:57] I think this comes up, too, in job openings, often. People talk about, like, we're looking for a rock star programmer. A ninja designer. Something else like that. They're not thinking about, like, do we have a rock star environment. Start there, first. The number of people who can be wonderful employees at your company is almost endless. It is up to you to create that environment to make that happen.

Jason: [00:51:23] All right, let's take this one, here. "How do you manage boredom and anxiety?" And I'll also add, isolation even though it wasn't in the question, but I know people want to bring it up while working remote, alone.

[00:51:33] This is a real thing for a number of people, no question, even people here at Basecamp have brought this up before. First of all, talking about it is the first thing you need to do. If you feel isolated or lonely, tell your teammates, tell your manager, tell your team lead. Tell somebody. And people are very accommodating, very understanding in those situations because a lot of us have dealt with that. I think one thing that's really important is we're in an extreme situation right now where we shouldn't be outside of our homes or seeing other people. I was going to say, like, you can go out and get a coffee, you can go out and take a walk. Taking a walk, I still think, is fine. But you want to stay away from people and whatever.

[00:52:08] So we're in a different, slightly different situation than normal. But in normal times, what I would encourage people to do is to get out of the house and take a walk. Do something else for a while. Break your day up a little bit. Just make sure your team is in the loop if you're going to be out for a while. So, like, hey, I'm out for this afternoon, or whatever. I'm going out with my kid or whatever it is. I'll be back later. I'll make some time later. If there's anything you need me to do just make a list. Or whatever it might be. Just communicate. But break up your days.

[00:52:35] And that can also just mean watch some TV. It can mean whatever else makes you feel comfortable. Maybe making a hot pot of tea. Maybe making yourself lunch. I don't know what it is. But break up your day because if the feeling of being alone working is what's isolating, then you want to break up the feeling of working alone by not just working alone. You might want to do something else for a while.

[00:52:56] So hopefully, in a more normal times there's a lot more things you can do. You can go to a coffee shop, you can go to a coworking space, you can go to a public library. You can go to a public event. You can do other things. You can see more people in the park. You can go jogging and wave at other joggers, whatever it is. But right now, I think we're in a different situation. So I think you're going to have to also-people are just going to have to cope for a while. We are all going to feel cabin fever, even those of us who are used to being at home. This is extreme. We are in our homes. Not just working from home. This is, you're not going to the restaurant. You're not going out. That's what this is and that's going to be very difficult for a lot of people. We can't cure that because we can't go out into public spaces right now.

[00:53:38] So I think the best that we can do is talk about it and empathize with one another and sympathize with one another and kvetch with one another and share our loneliness. And say, this sucks. I feel totally isolated. It's weird. I'm not used to this. I don't feel good right now. Talk about it with the people you work with or your partner or whoever, your friends, and get it out. And that'll help quite a bit because isolation means you feel by yourself and you might physically be by yourself, but emotionally you can be with others and I think that's the important part here.

David: [00:54:08] And I also actually give a plug here for chat. We give chat a lot of shit at Basecamp because it's not a great way to work in many cases. But it is a reasonable substitute for human connection. The main thing we use chat for at Basecamp is the human connection. Sharing funny things or sometimes not funny things. News stories right now. We have a team on our Basecamp called All Parents where parents are sharing stories about oh, now we're new to homeschooling. Now we've got to do this thing. We have an All Pets for people with pets who share pictures of their dogs, their cats or whatever.

[00:54:47] Using chat for that social connection is really nice. Don't have it necessarily open all day long, that's not great. But you can just check in on it a few times during the day and feel like you are, yeah, actually I'm part of something even if I'm here alone. There are other people alive in the universe. I happen to work with someone of them. We can share laughs, we can do something else. Get our minds off things and chat is actually pretty great for that.

Jason: [00:55:12] Yeah, I would just encourage you to turn notifications off for that.

David: [00:55:15] Oh, for sure.

Jason: [00:55:15] This is more like, just go in when you have-when you want to take a break. Like the All Parents team we have here, there are some really wonderful resources being shared and people sharing their stories about boredom. We're only essentially kind of on day two here and people are like oh my God, this is impossible. So, just to be able to say it's impossible out loud and have other people go, yeah, it is fucking impossible. Yes.

David: [00:55:35] Yes. Yes.

Jason: [00:55:35] And that's how I feel in Kentucky, and that's how I feel in Portland, and that's how I feel in Chicago. That really helps a lot. So yeah, I agree with David on that, so.

[00:55:43] This is interesting, "So what technologies are you excited about outside of Basecamp to help support remote?"

[00:55:48] I believe in the simplest possible stack that you can have because I think that... I know I'm a little bit different here than most, but I have a 13 inch laptop and that's all. I don't have an external monitor. I don't have two computers. I have one. Because I want my situation, my setting, to be the same no matter where I go and not feel like I have to adjust to something else because I don't have this or I don't have enough room at home to have two monitors. But now I'm so used to working with two monitors. So in general, almost like a personal, technical hygiene thing. I prefer to keep my setup as simple as possible.

[00:56:19] I mostly use these Apple plug-in things. Sometimes I use AirPods. We'll use Zoom for videos most of the time. Sometimes we'll use Skype. It's mostly Basecamp and Zoom for us. And hardware-wise. I've seen some things. We've tried some stuff in the past where we have this-I forget what the name of the camera was. It's like a camera that shoots 360 degrees. We put it in a meeting room and you can see everyone but it's like, all the stuff is just. It's not really that important. And for example, when we were in the office, there's all sorts of technical white-boarding things that will record your white board to some online thing. Just take a fucking picture of it. And upload it to whatever. We don't need to make this a technical exercise. You probably have everything you need right now if you have a laptop and you're watching this video, or a desktop computer and you're watching this video. Or an iPad or an iPod or an Android phone. You have everything you need to work remotely.

[00:57:09] It's more of a question of software and the right software and the right methods and the right techniques to work together. But you have everything you need. Don't go out and spend-I mean, we need to support the economy right now, but don't feel like, "I don't have enough to do what I need to do." You probably, almost certainly do.

[00:57:23] David, you have a different technical setup than I do. But that's kind of my [crosstalk].

David: [00:57:28]Yeah. It's not even that different. What I've come to realize is I like a computer that lives on a desk so I don't use laptops that much anymore. I have a 27-inch iMac. Phenomenal machine. The longevity of those things is amazing. I work out of a couple different places, and one place I have an iMac from 2013? Whenever the 5K screens first came out. I think it's '13. It's still wonderful. The longevity of an iMac is incredible. And you know what? The fucking keyboard works. For all the years through I've used the iMac, the Apple magic keyboard 2 is the best keyboard I've ever used. I know there's a lot of programmers that use these tactile keyboards that really clackety clack. What a great hobby. I cannot-I'm almost envious I'm not into that because it's just cool. There's lights on some of them, and you configure them yourself. But I just... I use just the standard Bluetooth keyboard and it's great.

[00:58:21] And the iMac, for me, is useful because it helps me separate the work and the home. The computer where I have all my stuff set up on is in my office and when I close my office door, I'm kind of away from that, right. I'm still on my phone, perhaps. Or on an iPad or something. But it doesn't have all my stuff and it's just good for separation. I think one thing, especially when you start working from home, if you just have one laptop and you use that laptop both for all your Netflix and you use it for all your work, and you have all of your notifications, when you're done with work, work is still sort of just piling in, and it's piling on top of you. So you need a little more discipline, I think, if you do Jason's style. If you use your laptop after-hours for home things.

Jason: [00:59:02] Yeah, I should have mentioned, I tend to use an iPad once I'm done with work. I've got the 11 inch whatever with the keyboard and it's wonderful.

[00:59:10] The other thing I want to-this is actually a good way to bring it all home here, because when we first started this conversation two hours ago, we're talking about not trying to simulate the office when you're working remotely. This is not about setting up remote offices where everyone works the same way they used to. And some trend that I'm seeing, that I've heard about. I talked to a journalist about this yesterday and I mentioned this earlier in the show here, is this notion that companies are trying to. They're going to actually notch up on surveillance right now. Which is, I want to know where everyone is all the time. I want to see everybody. I want to take a picture of everyone every ten minutes to make sure they're at their desk. I want to turn on presence so everyone knows, like, is this person available or away or yellow dot or red dot or green dot.

[00:59:49] Because I don't trust anybody and we have to see each other all the time or things are going to fall apart and the whole thing. And I wonder, for the leaders out there, who are able to make these decisions about technology, whatnot. I would really encourage you to not go that route. Do not implement things where you're watching people all day. Do not expect people to be available all the time. You don't want people to feel like they're being watched. You don't want people to feel like someone's looking over their shoulder, virtual or digital or physical.

[01:00:18] You're not going to, to get back to the cultural thing, or to the best out of people. You're not going to get the best out of people if someone's thinking they're looking over their shoulder all the time. This stuff adds up and it seems like it's cool. Oh, it's so cool to know where everyone is all the time and to see everybody's face and the whole thing. But it's really awkward and it's especially awkward for people who are working at home who might be working out of their bedroom because they don't have any other fucking space to work and now the camera is shooting their family photos or the stuff on the bed or whatever because they went to the bathroom and now their face doesn't cover up the screen. It's just a very uncomfortable thing to do and to require people to do.

[01:00:51] So I would pare back on that. Don't try to simulate the physical experience. Take advantage of the advantages of remote work which means distance, time, space, attention, autonomy, trust. These are the things to invest in now and when you get back to working in an office, perhaps, those things are going to pay off. Those are the things that are going to really pay off.

[01:01:13] Anyway, that's my sort of way to wrap up the tool talk and also the general talk. I don't know, David, if you have any final thoughts. But I feel like two hours is probably enough for people to deal with us.

David: [01:01:22] Yeah, I think this is great. So, the Rework podcast is currently taking a little bit of a break, but there's a long back catalogue of great stuff where we talk a lot about these issues about culture and how we work and so forth. And then of course, the Remote book, I heard is out of stock right now at Amazon. When I checked on Indiebound.org, which pulls from independent booksellers, it's selling stock there, so you can buy it from there. The publisher's doing a second run so it'll hopefully be in stock soon. And of course, there's always the digital version. You can buy it on Apple books or Kindle.

Jason: [01:01:59] By the way, the Rework podcast is at rework.fm if you want to find the podcast. You can also, of course, find it on wherever you listen to podcasts, but that's the website with all the show notes as well, and that sort of thing.

[01:02:10] Thanks for sticking with us for two hours, especially the ones who stayed from the beginning all the way through the end, and I hope it was useful, and good luck to everybody and stay safe.

David: [01:02:17] Oh, thanks a bunch.

Jason: [01:02:19] Thanks everybody. Take care.

[01:02:19] Broken By Design by Clip Art plays.

Shaun: [01:02:21] Rework is produced by Wailin Wong and me, Shaun Hildner. Music for the show is by Clip Art. We're still on hiatus for one more week so the next episode will be another rerun. But after that we're going to be doing episodes about how small businesses and other people are adapting to our new reality. If you have a story you want to share, either about your small business, or about working remotely, leave us a voicemail at (708) 628-7850.

[01:03:03] All right. Pretty good.

Wailin: [01:03:03] That went very smoothly I would say.

Shaun: [01:03:08] CO2 levels are now at 1,429 ppm.

Wailin: [01:03:12] Oh no. Is that like a big jump.

Shaun: [01:03:15] Yeah. It's a very small office.

Wailin: [01:03:19] Right, and you're basically just spewing CO2 into the air because you're talking.

Shaun: [01:03:22] I'm talking, right.

Wailin: [01:03:24] Oh, gosh. And breathing.

Shaun: [01:03:24] Oh, it'll be fine. It'll be fine.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is the second part of a two-hour live Q&A on remote work that Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson held last week. Part 2 covers questions about interruptions, mental health, hardware and software tools, and building culture as a remote company. You can find Part 1 on our feed in your podcast app or on our website.

# data[].attributes.headline
Podcast - Making Sense, interview with Matt Mullenweg

# data[].attributes.subject
Podcast - Making Sense, interview with Matt Mullenweg

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Matt Mullenweg about the evolution of distributed work. They discuss the benefits of working from home, the new norms of knowledge work, relevant tools and security concerns, the challenges for managers, the importance of written communication, the necessity of innovating in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, delivery networks as critical infrastructure, economic recovery, and other topics.

Matt Mullenweg is a founding developer of WordPress, the Open Source software used by 36% of the web. In 2005, he founded Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and many other products. Matt has unique insight into running distributed teams. Automatt ic is entirely distributed-with 1,172 employees working in 75 countries.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Making Sense Podcast #194 - The New Future of Work | Sam Harris

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sam Harris speaks with Matt Mullenweg about the evolution of distributed work. They discuss the benefits of working from home, the new norms of knowledge work, relevant tools and security concerns, the challenges for managers, the importance of written communication, the necessity of innovating in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, delivery networks as critical infrastructure, economic recovery, and other topics.

# data[].attributes.headline
Podcast - Making Physical and Virtual Accessible. Distributed Podcast

# data[].attributes.subject
Podcast - Making Physical and Virtual Accessible. Distributed Podcast

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Read more about Lydia X.Z. Brown in "Making Work Accessible, Wherever it Happens."

Because of their background in working with disabled and marginalized people, attorney and activist Lydia X. Z. Brown has a deep understanding of how different workplace environments can best serve diverse workforces. Today they join our host Matt Mullenweg to discuss what distributed companies can do to make workflows and working conditions more inclusive.
The full episode transcript is below.
***

MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy howdy. Welcome to the Distributed podcast. I'm your host, Matt Mullenweg.
Today's guest is Lydia X. Z. Brown, who is a... well, Lydia wears many, many hats - we'll get to that in a minute. Lydia once gave a talk for Automattic about disability inclusion, and today we're going to continue that conversation. Lydia spent much of their life feeling left out, and they've dedicated their career to advocating for marginalized folks of all kinds. As the CEO of a distributed company, I'm curious to know more about how we can make the hundreds of Automatticians across the world more comfortable at work, and I know Lydia will have some insightful thoughts to share about that. Okay. Let's get started. MATT MULLENWEG: Hey Lydia.
LYDIA X. Z. BROWN: Hi Matt. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast.
MATT: You are a multi-hyphenate. It says here you're a writer-advocate-organizer-strategist-educator-speaker and attorney. How did all those things come to be for you?
LYDIA: I have believed from a very young age that every single one of us has a moral obligation to use whatever resources we have - time, money, knowledge, skills, emotional energy, access to physical resources - however that might be defined - that we each have a moral obligation to use those resources in service of justice, and fighting against injustice and oppression and violence in all of its forms, structural and individual, subtle and overt.

And since the time I was young, in grade school up through high school and now as an adult, I have done that. And I have been enormously privileged in many ways, although I frequently talk about experiencing marginalization in others, I have an enormous amount of privilege and I have experienced some of that in terms of access to some resources. And for me that makes the journey quite natural and quite intuitive. It wasn't so much that I chose "I'm going to be this thing, I'm going to be an advocate, I'm going to be an educator," so much as I have to. I have an obligation to, and I have the skills necessary to develop, so that I can be successful in doing it.

LYDIA: The work that I do is deeply personal to me. I am a multiply-disabled person. Most people who know about my work primarily know me from the autistic community. And not only am I autistic but I also live with psychosocial disabilities and other cognitive disabilities. And not only do I move through the world as a disabled, neurodivergent person, but I also move through the world as a queer person and as an openly non-binary trans person, and as an East Asian person of color living in the U.S.

And all of those experiences of marginalization, and what some of us might say is hyper-marginalization, people who live at the margins of the margins where there is so much that is stacked against us, and how society is designed, and who society assumes is normal and healthy and the ideal, and who society decides shouldn't really be at the center, shouldn't be in the lead, should be denied opportunities, should not have access and all of those things, it gives you a very different perspective than when you grow up in the world with access to more privilege and resources in ways that I didn't, even in the many ways that I have had some privileges.

And for me, going through school, targeted all the time as a freak - that was one of the most common refrains of my grade school and middle school bullies - and making it to high school, where I was falsely accused of planning a school shooting because of stereotypes and stigma about people like me.

LYDIA: And then making it through college and law school, where you would think that people might have a more egalitarian approach. Well, that's laughable because sometimes the people that are in what are supposed to be the most progressive kind of spaces - forward-thinking, innovative - sometimes were the most damaging and the most harmful precisely because they already believed that they were incapable of inflicting such harm.

And moving through those spaces, constantly receiving the message that I didn't belong, and at the same time that I couldn't speak for or alongside or even in support of other hyper-marginalized communities, because, well you do have this privilege - it gives you a fire.

LYDIA: For me it starts with recognizing firstly our shared humanity and secondly believing deeply in and being passionate about a commitment to valuing all people and all configurations of people's lives and experiences, and how their bodies and minds work, whether they are like mine or unlike mine.

And if we all start at that premise, that every single human is valuable for who they are in all of their complexities, in their many identities and experiences, not in spite of them, because we are not the same and that's a good and okay thing, but as all of the things that they are, then we can recognize that even if we don't understand intellectually or emotionally what another person's experience is, it doesn't mean that it's not valuable or that they're not valuable as a person, or that that experience or part of their identity somehow detracts from their personhood.

LYDIA: Right now I've been working on developing a project called The Fund for Community Reparations for Autistic People of Color's Interdependence, Survival and Empowerment. We call it the Autistic People of Color Fund for short.

I launched the fund last summer, 2018, using some award money that I had received from a disability rights organization, as well as the proceeds of "All the Weight of Our Dreams," the anthology that I edited, along with two other folks - Morénike Giwa Onaiwu and E. Ashkenazy - featuring 61 writers and artists of color who are all autistic. And we used those proceeds and that award money to seed a fund that provides micro-grants to individual autistic people of color as a form of direct support and mutual aid.

The fund so far has given out over $12,000 in funds in grants of between $50 to $500 each to people from a variety of countries, as young as toddlers and as old as our elders, to help them with everything from accessing mental healthcare to covering a shortage in rent money, to escaping an abusive situation, to buying textbooks for school or art supplies or posters for a protest, and everything in between.

And that project, every several months is reinvigorated with donations from our community because we're always running low on funds. So something that I'm working on today and this week is hoping to gain more sustainable and long-term sources of funding for the fund because right now we are in a place where the vast majority of our donations are small gifts from individual community members, many of whom are low-income or no-income, who are disproportionately unemployed or underemployed or have only precarious access to financial stability rather than having general access.

Every time I open my inbox, there's anywhere from five to 25 emails from people who are seeking to apply for money through the fund. And we never have enough money to meet the need because our community is facing so much. And when you are negatively racialized and autistic - and most of the applicants to the fund have many other experiences of marginalization on top of that - the likelihood that you're facing circumstances that are far beyond your control in terms of access to healthcare, access to safe, affordable and accessible housing, or simply being able to live and enjoy your life, go on vacation, see a movie is just so difficult and so hard to grasp.

And that's something that I'm hoping we can begin to change. I know we already have with what we've done but it's also not enough.

LYDIA: You can donate funds to the Autistic People of Color Fund by sending a check, money order, or PayPal payment to the Autistic Women and Non-Binary Network, AWN. If you donate to AWN, you'll need to include a note that it goes to the Autistic People of Color Fund and they'll include it in our budget.

LYDIA: My current work environment is in a traditional office location in downtown Washington, D.C. As an attorney, I work as a fellow for the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. In our offices there are 12 floors, there's different law firms and organizations, legal and non-legal, who all share the same building. And in our office space, Bazelon is the primary leaseholder for this very large office suite.

We have seven staff currently here and we also have three other organizations, one law firm, and two nonprofit organizations that sublet space from us. So we all share this large office suite together in D.C. I'm sitting in an office right now where I have a very nice lamp that I got to replace the horrible fluorescent lights, I have a door that shuts and it's wonderful because when I need alone time I can shut the door and when I need social time I can walk outside the door and say "Hello, my fellow workers, we all exist here, who would like coffee?"
MATT: Tell me about how traditional co-located office experiences are like for different kinds of disabled people.
LYDIA: For some disabled people, having a traditional co-located office space is a boon. It's a boon to mental health because it enables and provides and a built-in way to connect with and share space with other humans. People were built to be in community, that is how we evolved, evolutionarily speaking, if we want to go to basic biology. And that's true even for those of us like me who are more introverted.

People were built to be in community. And if we don't have access to other people in our daily experiences and throughout our lifetimes we can end up living lives of enforced isolation, and that can be especially true for many disabled people, whether it's someone who is physically disabled or whether it's somebody who has mental disabilities or both.

Having access to a workplace where we can actually see other people, potentially have the opportunity to build social and professional networks, can be great for that reason. It can also be helpful in that if the workplace itself offers features of the building design and of the space design itself, the office layout, that maximizes access for a particular employee, it can make workflows occur better. It can make it more efficient, it can make it more easy to complete. It can enable the employee ultimately to feel better about the work that they are doing and to produce higher-quality work.

So there are a lot of potential benefits to having this type of office location. There are also, of course, downsides. And of course there are many potential configurations to these kinds of offices in the first place.

So here where I am, for the most part, we each have separate offices with separate doors. And for some folks like me that works great. Like I said, it enables me both to have privacy and to be able to work alone when I need to be alone and focus, but it also enables me to connect with others by choosing when to keep my door open and shut and choosing when to move in and out of this office space that was designated for me.

Other people who are in a co-located office location may prefer to have more of an open-office layout where there are multiple desks or workspaces that are not really separated or only have partial walls or partial dividers. It enables that same kind of ratio of having a bit of a dedicated workspace for you but also supports and enables more open conversation and collaboration with people who are physically present with you. Or to give what my partner Shain will often talk about as having a kind of ambient people existing where we're all existing in the same space and that's comforting in a way but it's also not creating an obligation or a necessity to have to engage in conversation if that would be distracting or unhelpful to your workflow.

LYDIA: Everyone is different, whether you are neurodivergent or physically disabled or both. And many people are both, all the time. Your needs are never going to be the same as anyone else's, just like people who are not disabled. There are no two people who function best in the exact same type of environment.

Where disability comes into the picture is thinking about how someone's body or mind might function best in an environment, a built environment or an emotional or communicative environment or infrastructure that perhaps wasn't designed to begin with with that particular person's bodily capacity or neurodivergence in mind when that design was first conceptualized and then implemented.

So when people ask me how do we then design a workplace that best fits people with physical disabilities versus best fits neurodivergent people, my response is [that] there is no one size fits all. So for example, in the autistic community, there are some autistic people who I know who need to have daily access to natural sunlight, and quite a lot of it, in order to function well. And if the room is closed off and there's no windows or there's very few of them, and it's only artificial lighting, that can make it incredibly difficult to function, let alone to get work done.

And at the same time, I know many other autistic people for whom the sunlight is actually physically extremely painful and being around sunlight is emotionally draining, it is sensory overstimulating, and it physically just hurts.

Obviously those two needs are by definition incompatible. Those two people, one from each of those groups, cannot share a workspace in the same room because either one of them is very well supported and is functioning very well with that type of lighting, whichever one is there, and the other one is miserable and/or in pain. For me the question isn't so much, "How do we design a workplace or one methodology of supporting employees in terms of infrastructure," as it is "How do we make sure that each person that is involved with our company or our organization or our community is able to access the type of environment and space that works best for them."

LYDIA: For the people who need to function best having more constant communication, having access to other people around them who are working or certain forms of scaffolded support from their manager, it can be hard to do that in a distributed way.

So, for example, with some people who have ADD or depression, it can be very difficult to manage one's own workflow, which some people might say, "Well that's a prerequisite. If you want to work for a company that has a distributed workforce, you need to be able to self-manage your time, you need to be able to self-manage your workflow prioritization, you need to be able to self-manage how you initiate tasks and follow through on tasks and insure completion. And if you can't do that, maybe this isn't the right workplace for you."

And my response to that would be perhaps for some people that may be true, there may be some people who already know about themselves from their own experience that that's not going to work for them, so those people are probably not in your workforce if that's where you are. They might be and if they are I sincerely and genuinely hope for their sake that they are able to find an opportunity that they are excited about that will support them in excelling in an environment that they would need for them.

But for people who aren't at that point where it's actually an impossibility and completely inaccessible but who would struggle with the lack of formal and physical access to structure that would traditionally come with a co-located office, my suggestions would be to always go to the employee first.

If you believe that someone might be struggling with their workflow management, or they're struggling just in general with their job, or they have already told you, "I'm really excited about this, this has been going great, however I'm beginning to have some issues and I want to make sure we intervene before those issues worsen and affect my work and affect my performance on this team," it's for you to ask them, "What things work well for you, what things don't, and how can I support you in getting the things that work well?"

So, for example, if someone in a distributed company says that they need to be able to be around other people at least during part of the day to get work done, but all your employees are in different locations, then it might be worthwhile for that company to invest in paying the membership of a co-working space for that employee so that they have access to a location that has some of the features of an office - it's a workspace, people are primarily there to do work, there might be some desks and a printer, so it can feel more like a workspace than your home or a cafe might - but it also enables that person to stay where they are and doesn't require the company to make that investment in horrifically expensive real estate, and for a workforce that is primarily not in one location and in fact may have, at most, perhaps five employees in one location, and they don't want to share a space together.

For somebody else it may be not so much, "I need a physical space," but "I need to be able to have regular access to my manager, to be able to have conversations throughout the day." In a distributed work environment, it's not that that's not possible, you of course already know that's very possible, but it may be working with that employee to figure out [if] Slack work[s] for [them]. And if it's not working for you, if it's not meeting your need to be able to pop in and ask your manager questions throughout the day, then what are the other possible interfaces for communication modality that might meet that need instead?

LYDIA: Some people are able to figure it out better than others. And you're definitely right that to be able to express and articulate what you need and what works well for you often requires a level of self-awareness that unfortunately not everybody has. But this is where good management and good team-building comes in.

An effective manager in a distributed work environment needs to develop the skill of asking precise and information-gathering questions to elicit this kind of information. Because even if the employee might not be able to produce this information on their own, or might know it, but not necessarily know how to communicate it in a way that would be applicable and useful in a work environment, an effective manager or an effective supervisor should be able to develop the skill of asking, "Okay, so in your last work environment, let's talk about the setup of your office."

Like you asked me, "Was this a good setup for you or not? What were things that you liked about it, what were things that you didn't like about it? What was frustrating for you? What excited you when you came to work? Can you describe a time when you were really productive? What changes, if any, were made at any point during your time during this other work environment?" Or if they haven't had a work experience, perhaps when they were in school or perhaps in some group that they volunteered with or they were part of in their community, whether it was their softball team or whether it was crochet, whatever it might be.

It's taking some of the kinds of questions that we might ask someone either in an assessment or an evaluation and/or in a job interview, but asking them with an eye to detail, being open-ended but also narrowly defined enough to capture the kind of information that will help the supervisor, the manager, and any HR support staff in figuring out how to then apply that information into the person's current workplace.
MATT: How common is it for people to be neurodivergent but not realize it themselves?
LYDIA: I don't have statistics on that and part of the reason I don't is because by definition it would be incredibly difficult to capture a number or a percentage of how many people are objectively determined to likely be some type of neurodivergent versus how many people know that about themselves.

But what I can tell you, based on anecdote and experience in working with thousands of different neurodivergent people over the last decade, is that it's very common for people to know that they learn in a different way than others, whether that's in a way that got them labeled stupid or in a way that got them labeled gifted.

And it's also very common for people to have received some type of label of disability or giftedness, or both, even if that specific label might turn out to be inaccurate, but it captured some aspect of their neurodivergence that somebody observed that this person didn't fit into the mold of what society assumes is typical of how to learn and communicate and process and deal with emotion and all of those things that make our messy stuff in our brains.

There are folks that discovered they were neurodivergent when they were in their teens, whether or not they had language for it. And there are also people who didn't realize it until their forties, fifties, sixties, and even seventies. I've met some people in their seventies and eighties who figured it out at that late stage in their life.

And it tells you a lot about us as a society of how we simultaneously assume that you don't really count as disabled or neurodivergent if it's not affecting you in a way that we treat you horribly over. "Well you must have functioned fine." They probably didn't, they were just very good at trying to hide it when they weren't. Or that we say we knew about it so we labeled you all kinds of derogatory and terrible things, we recommended you for institutionalization, we assumed that you would never be able to make your own decisions, never be able to choose and form your own relationships, anything like that.

And either way, neurodivergent and other disabled people will find ourselves in the double bind of being expected to overcome and mask being disabled for the comfort and convenience of non-disabled people or of being assumed that we will never amount to anything by any definition, that we are completely incompetent, that we are incapable, that we don't belong and that we shouldn't belong. And it's always one or the other.

But really they boil down to the same kind of ableism and that ableism is the devaluing of disabled people's experience, that to live life as a disabled person of any kind means that we're living a lesser life. But the reality is, is that disabled people have so much to offer ourselves, our own communities and the entire rest of the world because we have lived our entire lives learning how to function and survive and sometimes, when we're lucky, to thrive in a world that was literally designed not for us.

LYDIA: You know, it's really interesting every time we talk about disability-targeted hiring initiatives for me because there's a lot of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, many of us appreciate that there are companies out there that are trying to seek out more of us to hire us, recognizing that we actually do have talents and capacities individually and perhaps to some extent there may be some patterns of some talents among some people, at least sometimes. And that's great, especially given the astronomical rates of un- and underemployment for disabled people, especially those of psychosocial, intellectual, and developmental disabilities.

But at the same time something that really worries me in many conversations around employment and corporate hiring initiatives are that many hiring managers creating these programs will say things like "We love having disabled employees because they're so motivated, they show up to work every single day, they never call out sick, we can depend on them, they'll be loyal to our company forever."

And you know, at the surface level, when you don't really think about that too deeply that sounds great. Like, yeah, that means that disabled employees tend to be really dedicated, we should hire more disabled people. But what that says to me is actually that because of our astronomical rates of un- and underemployment, we have become sometimes an exploited labor force.

Where there are some companies that mean well, they're not necessarily doing this out of malice, but they are aware at least on some subconscious level that it's more risky for many disabled employees to call out more. That it's more risky for us to do anything but excel far above and beyond what our non-disabled peers need to do in order to make sure that [we] keep [our] jobs.

And that makes me really sad and it makes me really angry. Because I don't think we should be hiring disabled either because of stereotypes that might or might not be true, e.g., that all autistic people are savants at math or that all blind people are prodigies at music, when sure, some are. There are some autistic people I know who are math geniuses and there are some blind people I know who are incredible musicians and there's also plenty of us that aren't. Like, I'm autistic and I suck at math. Also I'm Asian so I just broke two stereotypes at once, which is fun. [laughter]

We all have different skill sets and they may or may not be tied at all to our disability but we should be hiring people based on whether that person is going to be able to do the job and do it well, disabled or not. And we should be hiring people because we want them and we believe that they belong in our workplace, we want to support them in being part of that workplace, and as being more than a person who simply does a job but as someone who belongs to the community of people in this workplace. That's what we want to do.

And so if the question is, "What are superpowers that we bring?" My answer is, how about we not talk about superpowers but we talk about why each and every single one of us deserves to be able to do work in a way that's meaningful, that makes sense, that makes us feel good, that is not doing something horribly unethical, hopefully, and that at the end of the day enables us to be able to live in a system that unfortunately isn't really set up for most of us to thrive?

LYDIA: I believe very firmly that every single person deserves to be able to live in a safe community and to be able to live a self-determined life and to be able to live authentically and true to themselves and to be able to live as part of a community where they can receive care, they can receive support, they can receive love, and they can feel a sense of belonging.

And I believe that that is inherent to human dignity. It should never have to be earned. Somebody should not have to earn the right to live without fear of violence. Someone shouldn't have to earn the right to be able to afford safe and accessible housing. Nobody should have to earn the right to be able to receive healthcare.

And unfortunately in the society that we live in our society presumes that those are things that need to be earned and that if we don't think someone is contributing enough or we don't think that they are productive enough, that maybe they don't really deserve those things. And if we're nice, maybe we'll give it to them, at least a little bit or at least for part of the time, but until and if and when society says, "Oh, you're pulling your own weight, we think it's contingent and we think it's conditional." And that to me is incredibly inhumane and unjust.

LYDIA: I just think it's important to note that when we're talking about employment and disability, I believe that the corporate sector has an opportunity to take leadership in fighting for fair and living pay for people with disabilities. Many people don't know that it is still 100% legal in the United States and in many other countries around the world to pay people with disabilities pennies on the hour or the equivalent.

LYDIA: In the U.S. it's emblazoned into federal law, in section 14(c) of the 1938 Fair Labor & Standards Act. Section 14(c) is still on the books today and there are many for-profit and not-for-profit organizations that take advantage of section 14(c) to pay disabled people as low as cents per hour for menial labor and it's 100 percent legal. And this is horrific.

There is a bill before the Congress right now called the Raise the Wage Act, which, if passed, would eliminate the use of what's called sub-minimum wage in the U.S. And that's pretty awful that such a concept exists. If it's minimum, there is supposed to be nothing below it. But in the U.S. we call it sub-minimum wage.

There are other nations in which there are no labor protections at all for people with disabilities, either in terms of non-discrimination or wage protections. And while I'm not an expert on international labor law, what I do know is that companies around the world, all of the folks that are listening here, have an opportunity not only to prioritize and speak publicly on ensuring that you're paying folks a living wage and a fair wage that is not based upon backward notions of productivity, but also to fight for the end of sub-minimum wage and other unfair labor practices that devalue disabled people's work even more.

LYDIA: You can find me on Facebook under the name Lydia X. Z. Brown - Autistic Hoya. And you can also find me on Twitter @autistichoya. All one word. My home page is autistichoya.net. And my blog is autistichoya.com. That should really be reversed but that would require a type of web engineering that I am not capable of doing alone. [laughter]
MATT: Well I'm also very honored that you use WordPress for many if not all of your websites.
LYDIA: I use WordPress for almost all of my websites and I love it.

MATT: Awesome, I very much appreciate that. Finally I will mention as well what you said earlier. Autismandrace.com, which is where they can donate to the project and fund that you mentioned earlier. And there are some instructions on that website for how to do so.
MATT: That was Lydia X. Z. Brown. You can find them on Twitter at @autistichoya. That's @ "Autistic" and then "Hoya," H-O-Y-A. You can also find Lydia blogging at AutisticHoya.com. It's really important for folks who run distributed teams to remember that employees don't fall into binaries of "normal" or "abnormal." We all find ourselves in different spots on different spectrums of ability throughout our careers, and hopefully, with more flexibility around workspaces, work hours, or work styles, we can all feel included and productive no matter what professional setting we're in. On the next episode of the Distributed podcast, I'll be speaking with Clark Valberg, the CEO of InVision, which is a very popular cloud-based design platform that many distributed teams, including Automattic, have adopted. InVision started out as an agency, but after they built this internal tool for their designers, they realized that it was big enough to be a flagship product. InVision is similar in size to Automattic, so I'm interested to hear about Clark's distributed journey. Thanks for joining, and see you next time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Episode 13: Attorney Lydia X. Z. Brown on Making Work More Accessible

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Read more about Lydia X.Z. Brown in "Making Work Accessible, Wherever it Happens." Because of their background in working with disabled and marginalized people, attorney and activist Lydia X. Z. Brown has a deep understanding of how different workplace environments can best serve diverse workforces.

# data[].attributes.headline
Podcast - What’s Going On with the Office & Tech, Virtual Not Distant

# data[].attributes.subject
Podcast - What’s Going On with the Office & Tech, Virtual Not Distant

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Welcome to our monthly What's Going On round-up - coming to you from Pilar's summer home recording booth in Spain, which includes a duvet hanging on a broom handle secured by clamps... The things we do for your acoustic pleasure.

Today we discuss tech, the future of the office, the future of life, housing and work life balance, and an upcoming event.

If you have a news item you'd like us to take a look at please do send it to us, and don't forget you can always...

3.29 Let's talk about some tech

Maya shared this piece that she wrote for UC Today about AI-Driven Accountability, to discuss the way the Callbridge meeting platform AI is turning online meetings into actionable content. By grabbing keywords, agenda items, decisions and frequently mentioned words, it makes meetings far more searchable and indexable than any video file normally is, and is part of a trend bringing new transparency and accountability to meetings and business decision-making generally. This kind of functionality is in emergent stage now but is going to be increasingly important.

Pilar found another product working similarly https://tldv.io/ "too long, didn't view", which lets you intentionally tag and highlight meeting content as you go along, for future actionability - a different approach to the same idea, of making meeting content useful and easy to refer to afterwards.

Microsoft are doing some stuff along these lines too, so we'll doubtless be back to this theme. Will we change the way we do face-to-face meetings in the future, and what does it change, about the ideas of conversations being on the record or not?

SO many unforeseen consequences, to the 2020 remote revolution...

12.20 The future of the office

A couple of articles from The Guardian here: UK office demand 'shifting to the suburbs' amid Covid-19 crisis , highlighting a more flexible approach to office use going forward perhaps, highlighting research from IWG (formerly Regis), who are evidently seeing a local high-street renaissance - working locally could be the new working from home, perhaps. They also provide homeworking packages, of furniture, stationery, etc.

Similarly, The age of the office is over - the future lies in Britain's commuter towns | Simon Jenkins (shared with us by Richard MacKinnon from My Pocket Psych), from which we find the statement: "Morgan Stanley survey shows that even now only 34% of British office workers have gone back to work. This compares with 76% in Italy and 83% in France."

So, people in the UK clearly do not feel safe going back to big city centres despite government urging (but can we start talking about going back to the workplace, because most of these people have been working very hard right through all this, just not from the usual location, and the lazy 'back to work' phrasing negates all of that).

Finally a crazy alternative to working from home you might not have considered... MGM Resorts Rolls Out Ultimate Work-From-Vegas Package At Bellagio And ARIA 'Viva Las Office', if that's what you want. Yes, it appears to be for real. Enough said!

23.06 Work-life balance and boundaries

An excellent series of articles recently in Harvard Business Review, we particularly recommend:

Building Work-Life Boundaries in the WFH Era - which talks about separators vs integrators, as an interesting frame for the extent to which people seek to divide or blend their work and personal lives. Maya and Pilar are very different to each other on this front, and as a lens through which to look at what works or doesn't work for individuals it reminds us that one size does not fit all - we need to tailor remote work solutions to each person's needs and preferences.

Another in this series, Microsoft Analyzed Data on Its Newly Remote Workforce - was a fascinating deep dive into actual data - we love facts, and now that work is digital we can actually measure and analyse interactions in new ways. We invite you to dive in and take a look, at the role of messaging, the role of managers and collaboration, how work is time-shifting in new ways... There is so much in here, such as the insight that managers sent 115% more IMs in March, compared with 50% more for individual contributors. This research also starts to address the behaviours and patterns which we are starting to take back into the shared workspace, and looking at what changes in the way we work might be inclined to stick, for better or for worse.

37.15 Back to tech - well, email anyway, and a cool event:

The Basecamp/Rework team built a new email app Hey, and have been discussing this in their podcast and answering user questions. It's a great story, about bringing an app to market against the app store Goliaths, but is it going to transform email?

Maya got onto the beta, and admired the way they approached organising the messaging flow. If you were new to email this would be a great place to start! But you can't bring in existing POP3 and IMAP addresses - you'd have to forward stuff in and out, and Maya couldn't make it work with her existing workflow (and definitely didn't want a new email address).

Essentially, the Basecamp team built the app they wanted, and fair play to that! They have rolled back on some decisions following user feedback, such as adding signatures. So, it'll be interesting to see how this develops, as there was a lot to like here, and maybe we just need to think more radically about how email COULD be, instead of where we are starting from and what we're used to?

Another company we admire, Buffer, is putting on a 'first ever audio-only conference' for brand builders: Built to Last - Audio Conference for Brand Builders .

We love the idea of this being an audio-only event, and what this means for the differentiation of the overcrowded and screen-driven online event space. So we look forward to hearing how this went!

46.09 What's going in the Virtual Not Distant community

Rowena Hennigan (see episodes and ) and Sandra Thompson have set up RISE Emotional Intelligence - make sure you are subscribed so you don't miss a fascinating interview with them in an upcoming episode.

Brian Rhea (who took part in our 'Connection and Disconnection' podcast series with Shield GEO earlier this year) has written The Manager's Guide to Engaging Remote Employees , about engaging remote workers - do have a look, it's really in depth and comprehensive.

Lisette Sutherland's Work Together Anywhere book is now in Japanese - remote world domination continues - おめでとう, Lisette!

Pilar has a workshop on planned spontaneity on the 3rd of September with Next Stage Radicals , so we'll let you know how that goes/went (depending on when you're reading this.) Pilar was also a recent guest on their own podcast , so that's well worth a listen.

The Visible Teamwork Guide will be published *very* soon - so do look out for that, more news asap, and the full book will follow.

And finally, Pilar has a new newsletter to subscribe to, 'Think, Write, Converse' - sign up on her site, for a glimpse into Pilar's mind!

If you like the podcast, you'll love our monthly round-up of inspirational content and ideas:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
WLP247 What's Going On with Remote Work, Tech, and the Office Space - Virtual not Distant

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to our monthly What's Going On round-up - coming to you from Pilar's summer home recording booth in Spain, which includes a duvet hanging on a broom handle secured by clamps... The things we do for your acoustic pleasure.

# data[].attributes.headline
Video - Catalysing Creativity at a Distance, Nobl Academy

# data[].attributes.subject
Video - Catalysing Creativity at a Distance, Nobl Academy

# data[].attributes.headline
Ted Talk - Be More Creative, Go for a Walk

# data[].attributes.subject
Ted Talk - Be More Creative, Go for a Walk

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
4,108,246 views | Marily Oppezzo • TEDxStanford

When trying to come up with a new idea, we all have times when we get stuck. But according to research by behavioral and learning scientist Marily Oppezzo, getting up and going for a walk might be all it takes to get your creative juices flowing. In this fun, fast talk, she explains how walking could help you get the most out of your next brainstorm.

Become a TED Member

Want to hear more great ideas like this one? Sign up for TED Membership to get exclusive access to captivating conversations, engaging events, and more!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Marily Oppezzo: Want to be more creative? Go for a walk

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When trying to come up with a new idea, we all have times when we get stuck. But according to research by behavioral and learning scientist Marily Oppezzo, getting up and going for a walk might be all it takes to get your creative juices flowing.

# data[].attributes.headline
Ted Talk - Burn Out Leaves Us Less Creative

# data[].attributes.subject
Ted Talk - Burn Out Leaves Us Less Creative

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rahaf Harfoush: How burnout makes us less creative

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Our obsession with productivity -- to-do lists, life hacks, morning routines -- is making us less productive, says digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush. She explains why we need to redesign our workday around creativity -- not just efficiency.

# data[].attributes.headline
Video - Hiring and Onboarding for Remote Teams, Nobl Academy

# data[].attributes.subject
Video - Hiring and Onboarding for Remote Teams, Nobl Academy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hiring and Onboarding on a 100% Remote Team

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Read - Work is no longer a place. Redefining the Office. Pgi Report

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Read - Work is no longer a place. Redefining the Office. Pgi Report

# data[].attributes.headline
Podcast - Setting up Communication Channels. Virtual Not Distant 

# data[].attributes.subject
Podcast - Setting up Communication Channels. Virtual Not Distant 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At the start being a coalition of freelancers, the Doist team found that asynchronous communication was simply what they did naturally - working independently and checking in at meaningful touchpoints to move projects forward. But as they grew in number, so did the noise, and, as with more than one online team we have met, their Slack quickly became unbearable. Continually interrupting deep work with chitchat 24/7, expectations shifted to an immediate flow of conversation, driven by notifications and FOMO... and the deep focused work suffered as a result.

This led them to develop their own collaboration tool, Twist, to enable better organisation of the conversation into nested threads. They wanted to shift the expectation to more considered and asynchronous, long-form written communication which was separate from the surface flow of chat - reclaiming time for concentration and focus, and bringing the best aspects of email back into a chat context. It also helped them focus on internal transformation and reflection on values in an intense way during a period of growth and development, that would have been impossible in a higher noise-to-signal ratio environment.

As part of a deeper need to reclaim attention and focus in the current 'always-on' culture, Gonçalo also mentioned the Basecamp Hey product we have been discussing in our Whats Going On series. We all have devices that can connect us to every communication at every moment of our lives, so we really have to learn how to engage with them selectively and flexibility, in a way that we choose and control.

This has facilitated better decision-making for Gonçalo and his team, decisions with higher-quality inputs and better alignment with their values, and helped them create meaningful checkpoints and connection throughout the business cycle to maintain that sense of convergent thinking.

And their online chat... Remains calm and fluid. It's there if they need it and it has flurries of activity - but people can dip in and out, and the real collaboration takes place asynchronously. The real-time stuff is more about relationship and trust building, than the work itself. The balance has been consciously evaluated and reviewed, and meetings do still happen. But they are a part of, not the entirety of, the conversation.

Of course we have to be careful that the media we use for asynchronous communication does not exclude people, and at Virtual Not Distant we have previously discussed concerns around people who do not express thoughts fluidly in writing. At Doist they contend that every remote worker needs to hone their ability to write clearly and fast, and develop that skill set - but they also use screencasting, like Loom videos, to share ideas and thoughts. They prefer written information though, so that the reader has complete control over the flow of information and the speed and sequencing with which they engage with the content, which also remains searchable and accessible.

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 actions are congruent with his values and intentions to provide an example for the rest of the team.

Do check out the , and keep up with Gonçalo on .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
WLP246 Championing Asynchronous Communication in Remote Teams - Virtual not Distant

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At the start being a coalition of freelancers, the Doist team found that asynchronous communication was simply what they did naturally - working independently and checking in at meaningful touchpoints to move projects forward. But as they grew in number, so did the noise, and, as with more than one online team we have met, their Slack quickly became unbearable.