Is your IT department your savior, your enemy or something in between? It might be all those things, but have you ever compared your Head of Technology to Sauron, the bad guy from Lord of the Rings? I was talking to a client the other day about the challenges remote workers face and the subject of IT came up. The client made an observation that I hadn’t heard, but it struck a … [Read more...]
Team Collaboration Tools Prove We Don’t Deserve Nice Things
When you were a kid and you broke something, or treated your parents’ property with disrespect, were you told, “This is why we can’t have nice things”? It’s the same idea with technology and team collaboration tools. The tools are (mostly) fine. People are the problem. When we talk to our clients about the challenges to team productivity, there are a lot of complaints about … [Read more...]
Teaching Remote Teammates How to Work with You
If your remote teammates are driving you crazy by constantly interrupting, sending messages and emails at all times of the day and night, or dragging you into too many meetings, there is definitely a problem. Contrary to what you might think, that problem may be you. Whether we are aware of it or not, we teach people how to work with us and what to expect. It sounds … [Read more...]
A Curmudgeon Looks Back on Email
When people complain about email, I get it. You’re working from home and the barrage of pinging, flashing icons and messages piling up never seems to stop. We hear all kinds of moaning about the volume, lack of clarity, and just plain rudeness in people’s inboxes. Those are all legitimate complaints. But I am old enough to remember the “before times.” I was around before … [Read more...]
Put it in Writing: The New Generation Gap?
For the first time in human history, two-thirds of our daily work communication and a growing amount of our interpersonal and social communication is being done in writing. Texts, e-mails, and collaboration tools are asynchronous and ubiquitous. How you respond to this probably depends on how old you are. Is this good news, since electronic text can cover time, space and … [Read more...]