Tis the season… Relax, this isn’t another “prep for the holidays” blog post. It’s worse. Because while everyone around you goes into holiday mode, you have to prepare for the worst thing about the end of the year—performance reviews and development plans for yourself and your people. If you lead a long-distance or dispersed team, this can be even more stressful. As with most … [Read more...]
Why Remote Workers Need to Be Continual Learners
by Chuck Chapman, Content Strategy Coordinator Are we there yet? This anxious question from the impatient child doesn't really go away once we grow up. Instead of the family vacation and wondering whether you've reached Disney World, as adults we apply this question to our careers. We want to know if we've arrived, if it's time to relax. Maybe once upon a time workers … [Read more...]
When Labor Day Means More Labor
If you’re like me, you approached your computer Tuesday morning with a little trepidation. Maybe you picked up your phone with one eye closed against what awaited you. The reason is that it’s the first Tuesday in September, the day after Labor Day and for many of us who work away from the office the dam burst. Depending on the business you’re in, summer is often a slow time of … [Read more...]
5 Wrong Assumptions HR Makes about Remote Work
I feel sorry for HR people. They are responsible for the least predictable and most combustible resource a company has: human beings. They are often the last to be consulted when a business problem faces a company and the first to be called on for answers. This is true when it comes to setting remote work policy for your company. We’ve said many times that remote work and … [Read more...]
Coaching and Feedback at a Distance
When we talk to leaders of teams, the one part of the job most feel they could do a better job of is coaching their people. This feeling of “not quite being as good as we could be” is heightened when we work remotely from the people we should be developing. On the surface this requires frequent, targeted, purposeful conversations. You can have those remotely, so why does … [Read more...]