Have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to get a message through to your remote and hybrid team members? “I told them.” “I put it in an email last week.” “I know this meeting could have been an email. But nobody reads the darned emails! Then we have to have the meeting anyway.” It can be frustrating when you spend time delivering a message, only to feel like … [Read more...]
Are You Practicing Linguistic Racism?
What is linguistic racism? Of course, racism is such an emotive word, we need to use it cautiously. "Bias" and "racism" share many similarities. I believe that even the most fair-minded of us are biased to some degree - it's an inevitable consequence of our life experiences. But racism takes it a step further by introducing the notion of "superiority." When we're talking … [Read more...]
Giving and Accepting Peer Feedback
When you think about what makes a high-functioning team (whether in person, remote or hybrid) really click, several factors come to mind. In our research for The Long-Distance Teammate, we discovered one of the most important things that contribute to a really solid, trusting, team culture: a constant flow of feedback from and to our colleagues. Giving is as important as … [Read more...]
Picking Alternatives to Email
Maybe the most divisive topic in remote work is whether email is a help or a hindrance to our productivity. It’s fast, convenient and pretty much free. On the other hand, there’s too much of it, our inboxes are inundated, and responding to all those notifications stops us from doing other, more productive, work. There is a whole cottage industry of experts saying we need to use … [Read more...]
Inventing Fire and Getting People to Use Teams
Humans have a love-hate relationship with technology. We curse the need to be tethered to email and Slack for work while not being able to avoid our personal screens for more than a few minutes at a time. Everyone complains about the tools they have at their disposal, but shudder at the thought of learning even one more software package or remembering another password. As we … [Read more...]