I don’t want to alarm you, but for most organizations we have entered the dreaded Q4, the Fourth Quarter. The Year-End. Crunchtime. If you didn’t have time to create a work from home plan before COVID hit, now’s the time to plan for next year. In our work with people and their organizations around the world, we are often asked what 2021 will bring. If the last six months has … [Read more...]
10 Tips for Better Meetings
Entire books have been written about doing better virtual meetings. Heck, I’ve written two of them myself, but if there was a simple list of things you can do better, it might look like this: Clearly identify your objective and desired outcome. Form follows function, and knowing what you want to achieve will determine which tools you use and what form your meeting will … [Read more...]
How Web Meetings Are Like Renting a Car
You’ve been using Zoom (or Skype for Business, or WebEx—whatever) to host your web meetings for a while and you’ve managed to be reasonably proficient. Now your client wants you to use a different platform. How big a deal is that? It’s not as big a difference as you might think, and the analogy I always use is like renting a car at an airport. Stick with me. Most of us have … [Read more...]
What If You Just Want to be Left Alone?
You hear a lot of negative things these days about working separate from everyone else on your team. We’ve all heard the complaints (heck we’ve written enough about them here). Remote workers sometimes feel isolated. They don’t interact with their team members enough. People who work remotely sometimes go down the wrong trail and spend a lot of time on tasks that don’t add … [Read more...]
Is Zoom Fatigue Real?
Forced to work from home? It’s not perfect, but hey, there’s always Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and any number of webcam apps to help you stay in touch with your teammates. Then, just when people start using these tools and getting used to them, we learn about “Zoom Fatigue.” This is a perfect example of why, as my mother said, we can’t have nice things. It feels like every time a … [Read more...]