There’s a lot of conflicting news about when, how (and if) people are going to go back to working out of offices like they did before the pandemic sent everyone home. Some people can’t wait for any semblance of normalcy. Others have discovered the advantages of remote work. Some organizations are throwing themselves into remote work by shrinking their office space, while others … [Read more...]
Let’s Not Forget Hard-Learned Lessons
By Chuck Chapman, Content Strategy Coordinator To say this last 12 months has been a struggle would be one of the bigger understatements ever. This pandemic has quite possibly been the greatest challenge our world will ever face in our lifetimes. The good news is that all indications point toward lower case numbers (and with that, fewer hospitalizations and fatalities). … [Read more...]
What Nobody Says About Inclusion on Remote Teams
Prior to the COVID pandemic, there was a movement afoot to intentionally enhance diversity and inclusion in organizations. For many companies, those efforts then took a back seat to just staying in business, helping existing employees work remotely and keeping the business afloat. Now, as they take a longer view, they are once again thinking about how to create workplaces that … [Read more...]
Is It OK to Turn Off Your Webcam?
Is it okay to turn your webcam off in the middle of a team call? That seems like a reasonable question, but it always seems to get people worked up. It should be a binary answer: yes or no. But the real answers are "sometimes," and "it depends." We all know the pros and cons of using webcams: The human brain is wired for visual communication. We crave seeing the other … [Read more...]
Where Does Mistrust Come From?
One of the great paradoxes of remote work is that it requires a lot of trust, yet that trust is hard to build at a distance and easily damaged. Most of us start out assuming positive intent, and that we trust in people until they show us they're more deserving of mistrust. At worst, we take a wait-and-see attitude. As we point out in both The Long-Distance Leader and … [Read more...]