Now displaying: August, 2021
Aug 26, 2021
Show Notes:
- [0:01:12] Intro
- Brief Recap on the Last Episode of AIB
- [0:02:05] “How to not turn your coworkers into your crazy Facebook uncle.”
- In a polarized world where everything is extreme, our society has a habit of pitting us against each other on most topics and issues.
- We evolved to be able to read body language and in-person communication.
- But now we need to adapt to modern technologies and to the landscape of changing industries, and distributed workforces.
- Unlike Facebook, you can’t just turn off your coworkers.
- How we humanize each other goes a long way toward creating a healthy and safe work environment.
- [0:06:03] Things we can do to humanize our perceptions of others and eliminate our own biases:
- Give people spaces to discuss things that aren’t work-related.
- Find out where you all have common ground.
- Avoiding apathy out of anger, frustration, or as a symptom of poor communication.
- [0:12:06] Things you can do to ensure broader interaction between coworkers:
- Personality Profile Workshops & Team Discussion
- Enneagram
- Strength’s Finders
- Etc
- All-Team Video Calls
- Cross-departmental discussion encouraged.
- Don’t mandate or assume you’ll have every person on the team for every call.
- “Off-site” Events
- Company Retreat/Summit
- Sporting Event
- Etc
- Any & All Common Ground Interactions
- Experiment.
- Find what works for your teams and company culture.
- Friendly Unmandated Coworking Calls
- Automated Check-ins Unrelated to Work
- E.g. “What’s something you saw recently that you found interesting?”, or, “Have you read any good books you’d recommend of late?”
- Regularly Recorded and Publicly Shared Shoutouts
- Hearing someone praise your work, or the work of others makes it really hard not to like them. :)
- [0:25:50] Parting Words & Last Minute Insights
- Take the time to get to know your coworkers, beyond just their roles and opinions, political or otherwise.
- You don’t have to be friends with everyone you work with, but there is no harm in liking everyone you work with.
- And that is more on you than it is on them, so put forth that effort to get to know them.
- At the end of the day, the choice is yours.
Aug 19, 2021
Show Notes:
- You have found it!
- Jeremy messes up Kevin’s ‘flow’.
- Very Brief Last Episode Summary
- [0:2:23] Decisions We’ve Made to Set Up for Success for Distributed Work
- Rule #1: Experiment!
-
- Rule #2: Test what works for you, throw away the rest.
- Categorizing our decisions by clarity, connection, and collaboration.
- How transitioning to distributed, at first, brought teamwide clarity to a halt.
-
- Being colocated for so long was our crutch, the one that made us think we were better at clarity than what we actually were.
- Looking back, we also confused in-office distraction and being “busy” for solid communication and real progress.
-
- Which is certainly less than ideal.
- If Slack communication is the main way you run your business (like ours was), you may find clarity, quality communication, and work/life balance to be suffering.
- Distributed isn’t isolated to software.
-
- Jeremy elaborates on his time with bankers and his remote experience regarding his own work in distributed banking.
- [0:09:52] Your location does matter.
-
- Whether that be from your home office, kitchen table, porch, coffee shop, etc.
- You probably don’t need a “private space”, but you definitely need a “dedicated space”, or spaces.
- Long term distributed success justifies routine and normalcy, strengthened by your own personal dedicated workspaces.
- Some of the business owner tips and tricks to enable a successful transition to distributed work.
-
- Thoughts on automatic check-ins.
-
- Heartbeats and Cycle Kick-offs
- Friendly nudges.
- Leading by example.
- You don’t actually need long recurring meeting to build clarity.
-
- How you’re probably doing meetings wrong.
- You might just need an internal organization specific podcast.
-
- How a weekly internal podcast improved clarity and communication.
- If a piece of information is important, you should be communicating the same information across all your channels (at relatively the same time), be that via message board, email, podcasts, etc.
-
- If you’re tired, and sick, or bored of saying the same thing over and over, keep in mind that you’re just at the point of the entire team having absorbed and registered that information.
- Infrequent coworking calls-- consider them.
- Personality tests and discussions.
- A place for water cooler discussions and hobby chats.
-
- It might go without saying, but coworking call, water cooler & hobby talk should always be treated as optional, not mandatory.
- Have some back-up plans so that poor internet connection and other obstructions don’t ruin your work day.
- Good camera, lighting, etc.-- all welcome additions.
- If you don’t have a private workspace: a good pair of noise cancelling headphones.
- Find the right space for your team, whether that’s Slack, Basecamp, whatever-- experiment and find what works for you...not all of them will.
- Consider any special needs of individual employees.
-
- Vision, hearing challenges as an example.
- Don’t expect to go into distributed work high performing.
-
- There will absolutely be a challenging (though ultimately rewarding) transition time.
-
- Give yourself and your team/s plenty of grace.
- Patience is the key!
- Create a framework for solid communication.
Aug 5, 2021
Show Notes
- [0:00:00] Episode Summary | Intro
- [0:02:25] Remote Work: Pros/Cons
- How we’ve done it, and how you can learn from our mistakes.
- There are options.
-
- The pandemic has made a huge portion of people realize their jobs can be done from home.
-
- Not everyone is going back to the office, and for valid reasons.
- The pros far outweigh the cons.
- Comfort and convenience go a long way toward being productive.
- [0:06:40] Why We Chose Distributed
-
- We started as a completely co-located business.
-
- Think 1/3rd....or 1/10th of Silicon Valley and you have the right idea.
- In late 2019 we decided it was time for a shift.
-
- Being pre-pandemic, the thing that made us kick-off a new normal was quite simply that our office became less desirable.
-
- And inconvenient parking (aka no parking) led to distributed considerations...seriously.
- We were always remote friendly, but more people started working off-site: from local coffee shops, gastro-pubs, their homes.
- We misunderstood business for productivity.
- Being co-located was actually instigating poor communication.
- Jeremy’s 15+ years of Distributed Work Experience
-
- How his experience encouraged a dramatic change in where and how we conducted business.
- We also brought on a new team through an acquisition, which only further exemplified the need for this change.
- We chose distributed over hybrid for a reason.
-
- We did attempt a hybrid approach for a brief time, but we were slowly learning that even it wasn’t the best People First fit for our business.
- [0:18:34] ...and then the pandemic happened.
-
- Converting processes, communication, and our approach to clarity and collaboration had to be rethought and reconsidered from almost every angle.
-
- And we continue to refine and iterate even now.
- There was a huge mental shift for James and Kevin in how they had to think about what they were doing, and how to lead a distributed team-- simply how to make it work.
- The dangers of the hybrid space stem from communication issues.
-
- The people not co-located often pay for this by not receiving the clarity and collaboration that co-located team members were.
-
- The answer was moving to 100% distributed.
-
- Which we’ll unpack in the next episode of Adventures in Businessing.
- [0:24:31] Closing Thoughts, and one additional thing to NOT do if you plan to shift to distributed work.
- Don’t jump the gun, and try to plan out a timeline for what going distributed could/would look like, and how it might affect individuals, and teams, for better and worse.
©https://ciircles.com/copyright-notice-and-disclaimer/