Chuck Chapman, Author at The Kevin Eikenberry Group

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Author: Chuck Chapman

Communication & Interpersonal Skills, Leadership, Long-Distance Leadership, Long-Distance Work, Teamwork & Collaboration

Treating Remote Workers Equally Doesn’t Mean Treating Them the Same

Does it ever seem like remote workers are excluded from your hybrid meetings?

If you have a hybrid team—one where some of your folks work in a central location and some are teleworking or off-site—you have probably heard your share of whining that you’re treating one part of the team differently than the other. It might sound something like this:

“The people who work from home, have it made. They don’t have to commute, can wear what they want, and don’t get all the dirty jobs like we do when you work with the boss.”

“The people in home office have it so good. They get all the good promotions, they have easy access to the manager, and they have doughnuts at the meetings.”

These perceptions are often inaccurate and unfair to managers, but we know that how people perceive your leadership is as important as what’s actually happening. Paradoxically, one of the causes of these perceived differences is trying to treat everyone the same, rather than equally.

Here’s an example. Say that each member of your team has a weekly scheduled one on one call with you, regardless of where they work. That makes perfect sense, but the people in the office also can see when you’re at your desk and might pop their head in with a question. Or they run into you in the parking lot, or just ask, “do you have a minute?” Yes, they have the same scheduled hour your tleworkers have, but they have an unequal level of access to you.

The way to combat this might be to have more frequent, perhaps shorter, intentional, contact with the remote team members. On Instant Message asking “how’s it going?” is the equivalent of a smile and a nod in the break room.

What creates feelings of inequity?

Poor delegation of tasks

The people in the office are well aware that when you need a task done, or want to delegate something, all you have to do is step out of your office and grab somebody. The perception is that the people who work from other locations are left alone to do their work. This can cause some resentment—especially if it’s true. The best way to combat this is to be mindful of assigning tasks fairly. It’s also important that when you delegate a task, you let the rest of the team know that you’ve done so, and why you chose that person.

Poor hybrid meeting set-up

Hybrid meetings, where part of the team is in the conference room with a speakerphone in the middle and some people are dialing in from elsewhere, are common causes of resentment. The people in the room often get to talk first, talk over each other (which means the remote folks don’t always hear what’s going on) and generally dominate the discussion. As a leader, it’s important that you create opportunities for the remote team members to contribute equally and get a chance to contribute. Sometimes that means stopping the discussion in the room and calling on those from elsewhere. You might even consider holding the meeting entirely online on occasion, so that there’s a level playing field.

Missing out on celebrations

Celebrations such as work anniversaries, birthdays, and project completion are easier to conduct when everyone’s in the office and can get a slice of cake, and those at home might feel left out. Make sure you’re including remote members in your celebrations. Send a Starbucks card, or have the birthday girl dial in by webcam so everyone can offer their good wishes.

Delays in communicating important team news

When making announcements about people leaving or joining the team, or changes in company policy, it often feels logical to get everyone onsite together, then send the news out to the field. Unfortunately, the jungle telegraph works faster than you do. When the remote members are “always the last to know,” it creates resentment and a feeling that you are taking care of the office team first.

Again, we are going to assume you aren’t intentionally creating these awkward situations. They are the logical result of one group being right there, right now, and another requiring more work and thought to contact. But ignoring these dynamics can cause more disengagement in the remote team than the folks you actually see all the time, causing low morale, lower productivity, and higher turnover.

Remember, treating people equally doesn’t necessarily mean treating them exactly the same.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wayne Turmel
Co-Founder and Product Line Manager

Wayne Turmel is the co-founder and Product Line Manager for the Remote Leadership Institute. For twenty years he’s been obsessed with helping managers communicate more effectively with their teams, bosses and customers. Wayne is the author of several books that demystify communicating through technology including Meet Like You Mean It – a Leader’s Guide to Painless & Productive Virtual Meetings, 10 Steps to Successful Virtual Presentations and 6 Weeks to a Great Webinar. His work appears frequently in Management-Issues.com.

Wayne, along with Kevin Eikenberry, has co-authored the definitive book on leading remotely, The Long-Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership. Wayne and Kevin’s follow-up book, The Long-Distance Teammate, offers a roadmap for success not just for leaders, but for everyone making the transition to working remotely.

Coaching & Developing Others, Long-Distance Work

How to Find the Right Mentor

by Chuck Chapman, Content Strategy Coordinator

On the road to success, there are very few “Lewis and Clark” situations any more. Like geography, there aren’t many professional frontiers where you will find yourself treading in uncharted territory. For most if not all of your journey, there are others who have gone before you who can help you navigate the tricky parts…if you’re willing to ask them.

Finding the right mentor can be one of the most important professional decisions anyone can make. That’s especially true for remote workers who can feel pretty alone and isolated to begin with. Finding a mentor to guide you not only reduces that sense of isolation, but offers you the opportunity to learn from their experience.

The difference between a coach and a mentor

First, let’s define exactly what a mentor is. He/she is NOT a coach. Both mentors and coaches can be people you report to within your organization, or they can be people from the outside. Coaches, however, tend to be more focused on performance-related issues. The relationship dynamic with a coach also tends to be more transactional. The coach is either a direct superior or is hired to help improve a specific area.

Mentors, on the other hand, have a more holistic focus and the relational dynamic tends to be focused on the long-term rather than short-term gains. Mentees may offer gifts or show their appreciation to their mentors, but by and large, it’s not a “for-hire” relationship.

So how then should you go about finding the right mentor for your professional career? Here are some guidelines to follow to help you enter into a satisfying and rewarding relationship.

Don’t be afraid to ask.

Fear of asking (or being rejected?) is the biggest reason people don’t have mentors. Keep in mind most people consider it an honor to be asked to be a mentor. The individual may or may not have the time to commit or feel like it’s a good fit, but no one is going to be offended if you ask them to be your mentor. For some tips on how to ask someone to be a mentor, check out this video from Kevin Eikenberry.

Know what you want to accomplish.

As we mentioned, mentoring is a more broad-based relationship than coaching. Even so, as a mentee, you should have an idea of what you want to accomplish from this relationship. Is your mentor someone who is only going to help you improve a certain skillset? Or is this a person you hope can help you move in a positive professional direction (e.g. learning a new industry or moving into a management role). Knowing what you hope to achieve will help you select the right person and ensure your time together is productive.

Find the right fit.

Not every mentor has the same approach, and not every mentee has the same needs. This is where some honest self-reflection is in order. Are you someone who needs a “kick in the pants” or a “pat on the back”? Pick a mentor who’s willing and able to provide what you need.

You should also find someone who understands how you communicate. It might be a good idea to match up based on DISC personality styles.

Respect your mentor’s time.

As I mentioned above, mentoring is generally a volunteer role. As such, the mentee needs to be cognizant of the time the mentor is committing. That’s why it’s important to have a focused idea of what you want to accomplish. It’s also considered good form to cover any ancillary expenses your mentor might incur while your meeting. If you’re meeting face to face, is their parking, or are you meeting for coffee? If you’re meeting remotely, is there any cost for the platform you’re using? In short, your mentor is already freely offering his/her time and experience. Don’t make this something they’ll grow to regard as too big of a sacrifice.

Finding the right mentor or coach is an important pursuit. Here are some things you should consider as you make this important decision for your career development.

Teamwork & Collaboration

Share the Learning on Remote Teams

One of the most important functions of a team is to share knowledge and learning. Whether you’re determining the fastest way to solve a customer problem or where the the creamer is in the break room, we all have a constant need for new data in our lives. When we work apart from each other, that information sharing may not happen without a little nudge. As both a leader and a learner, it’s critical to share the learning with your teammates for a number of reasons.

The easiest place to find something is in somebody else’s brain.

We can Google, look up, search databases, and generally dig around for almost anything these days. But isn’t it easier to just ask someone else? In the office this happens all the time. People lob questions over cubicle walls, get the answers quickly, and apply the knowledge right away. It might be less simple when we work apart, but between email, instant message tools, Slack or Teams, and the good old telephone we have multiple ways of asking for the information we need.

The problem is that we often are hesitant to take advantage of them. Maybe you’re afraid of bothering someone else, or interrupting their work. It could be that you don’t know these people well and don’t want to look like you don’t know what you’re doing. Or maybe it just never dawns on you that Josephine has been with the company since it’s founding and might possess the information you need faster than you can find it yourself.

Somebody just spent two hours researching that answer. Why should you?

If you have a problem or question, it’s not unreasonable to assume someone, somewhere has had the same question and gotten an answer. On a remote team, the challenge often is to access the knowledge on demand. Fortunately there are lots of ways to capture knowledge and make it accessible to the rest of the team.

Taking advantage of tools like SharePoint, creating Frequently Asked Questions on your intranet or team communication platform, or even creating special channels in Slack can limit the amount of time you spend seeking answers someone else already found.

Sharing knowledge is a great way to build relationships.

We build trust by getting to know the talents, personality, and knowledge level of our teammates. If someone answers a question for us, we think favorably of that person. If we don’t know them before and they save our bacon by getting us critical information, we’re likely to be grateful and return the favor if possible. Understanding each person’s level of expertise also makes our job simpler (If you want to know about Excel, ask Alice. If you want to know what we sold to the Jackson account in 1998, Bob’s your guy) Knowing that you have help can also make it less frustrating when you feel isolated and the more you share information, the more comfortable you are admitting that you don’t know something.

Every member of the team knows something that somebody else doesn’t know. Whether that’s a piece of pop culture trivia or a hack for getting the most from your software. Sharing that information can make the whole team more efficient and effective.

Creating a learning culture has great benefits beyond problem solving.

When the members of a team are encouraged to share information with their teammates, it encourages a culture of curiosity, openness and faith in each other. It can also be fun. Not everything you learn has to be immediately relevant to the task at hand. Create places in your collaboration tools for the sharing of knowledge and reward those who contribute to the combined wisdom of the team.

If you take training, share the tools with our teammates. Set up a place on Slack or Microsoft Teams for cool articles and websites. The team that learns together earns together. (I learned that in a seminar once, and thought I”d share it. See how easy that is?)

What are some of your best practices for sharing information and learning together as a team?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wayne Turmel
Co-Founder and Product Line Manager

Communication & Interpersonal Skills, Long-Distance Leadership

Is Business Communication Evolving or Devolving?

Has communicating over distance, especially since so many of us work remotely now, really changed over the past few years? My previous post about the use of emojis at work raised some hackles among readers. Some fell into the camp of “They’re cute and help create an informal, friendly relationship, stop being such a fuddy-duddy.” The other group (and I’m paraphrasing) believes that “emojis are part of the dumbing down of business communication and spells the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it.” How we communicate has definitely changed.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It’s both… and neither.

I was reminded of this as I was speaking to a very bright young woman, who happens to be about half my age, about what work was like a long time ago. It was 1996, the first year I had a big-boy office job. Here are some of the things that have changed on a daily basis in the way we work in the last 23 years:

Email has become the dominant form of business communication. In fact, between email, Instant Messaging and texting, over 70% of business communication now takes place in writing. That’s never happened in the history of human communication. In the year 1900, nearly half the working population in the “developed world” was functionally illiterate.
Over 50% of “knowledge workers” work from home at least occasionally, and 90% of project teams have a least one member who works the majority of the time away from the rest of the team. Do the rules of “the office” matter when you’re not there?
Dress codes have gone from “casual Friday” to business casual most days. How many places do you know still require a necktie/ panty hose/ skirts on women/ sports jackets?
Sales people and managers seldom wrote their own communication to outside customers. We had “admins” or even “secretaries” (like my mother) whose job was to make sure that the chicken scratch and insane ideas the others wanted to put in writing looked professional. Spelling and grammar mattered. Tone was checked for professionalism.
The fear of the dangling participle has disappeared. Many editors and writers couldn’t even tell you what I’m referring to. (and if you noticed nothing wrong with that sentence, you graduated high school after 1979.)

So, are these changes in style, tone, and language a natural evolution in human development or a sign that the barbarians are at the gate?

I am a big believer in proper grammar, word usage, and that there’s a “work style” and a “personal style.” To some that makes me an old crank, to others it means I believe that words and manners maketh man. Yes, I judge you by your communication—especially in writing.

Let’s look at an example. When I wrote my first “how to use email,” class, the biggest problem was the length of emails—they were too long and formal. Really, stop laughing. We were still in the age of the formal, written, letter: “To whom it may concern, it has come to our attention that the issue of May 7^th has yet to be resolved…”

Now if we asked about the length of emails, we would say that they are often too short, come across as terse, or rude, and don’t contain enough relevant information because they rely on long threads to contain the necessary information.

Many believe that the formal rules of business were snobbish at best, classist, ageist and racist at worst, and there’s some validity there. But isn’t there also room for formality and what some of us still call “professionalism”?

The answer is that some of these questions are dictated by society as a whole. You might not like the fact that you can’t tell the employees from the customers when you walk into a business, but that’s how the business world is changing. Not adjusting runs the risk of appearing out of date and stodgy.

On the other hand, your organization can make decisions about the way you communicate both internally and to the outside world. If you don’t make these decisions intentionally, they will be made for you.

We have a wider age and experience gap in our workplaces than at any time before. Are you and your team talking about the rules of engagement, or just letting everyone do their own thing? Are you helping people adjust to your culture or just expecting them to magically understand how you do things there?

As always, let’s hear what you have to say on the matter.

This course on Writing and Managing Email is a part of our Remote Leadership Certificate Series. You can sign up to earn your certificate (Don’t wait. The limited spaces are filling up fast), or you can register for course individually.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wayne Turmel
Co-Founder and Product Line Manager

Long-Distance Work

Are Digital Nomads the Future of Remote Work?

As more kinds of work move online, more workers are becoming digital nomads.

Even those of us who love our jobs may occasionally find ourselves less than enthusiastic about heading into work on a beautiful day, or fantasizing about white sand beaches during a meeting. And the FOMO is real: digital nomads are all over social media, sharing photos of their laptop and a beer posted up before the backdrop of some exotic locale.

We can’t all be freelance digital marketers and web developers, free to roam the globe and work from wherever there is a wifi connection. But it may just be a matter of time before digital nomadism, or at least a lite-version of the lifestyle, is a possibility for professionals in almost any line of knowledge-based work.

The trend towards remote employment

While being confined to your office Monday-Friday, 9-to-5 was once the most typical scenario for white collar work, more employers nationwide are beginning to embrace flexible working arrangements in varying forms. This could mean letting employees work from home a few days a week, leave early to beat the rush hour and finish their work at home, or work offsite as often as is needed.

And the benefits are noticeable. Three quarters of employees who are granted flexible and remote working arrangements say that the policy improves their productivity and sense of job satisfaction.

Nearly half of U.S. based employees already work remotely on the regular in at least some capacity, and the number of regular work-at-home employees has increased 140 percent since 2005. All signs point to this trend continuing in the coming decade.

But flexible working arrangements aren’t only on the rise for digital-based positions and start-up employees. They’re also becoming increasingly common among small businesses. An estimated 77 percent of people employed in small businesses enjoy flexible and remote work opportunities.

Between the rise of “there’s an app for that” business models, the gig economy, and influencer marketing, digital communication is fueling location-independent work the world over. With this change, remote work is steadily losing its status as a privilege and becoming a standard working arrangement for a wide variety of careers in a wider variety of industries.

Digital nomadism: the future of work?

Some 4.8 million Americans self-describe as digital nomads, and another 17 million aspire to this identity. Embraced as a way to work while seeing the world, digital nomadism has evolved into a lifestyle enabled by the normalization of remote employment.

But are we all eventually going to trade in our offices for a one-way ticket to Bali?

Digitalization is sweeping, but as it stands, the fact remains that not everyone’s job can be attended to 100% remotely. In many industries, customers still value and may even be willing to pay a premium for face-to-face interaction.

And for many employees, the thought of combining full-time travel with full-time work, isn’t appealing even if it were theoretically possible: many people still want to own a home and plant their roots to raise a family.

Furthermore, there are valid critiques about the negative impact that growing populations of mostly first-world digital nomads can have on the often post-colonial nations to which they flock.

Digital nomadism may be on the rise, and it may look super glamorous, but it would be rash to say that all work is heading in this direction. The growing number of digital nomads, and the growing number of industries for which digital nomadism is now an option, is better understood as the exception that proves the rule.

Remote work is among the most powerful trends shaping employment; digital nomads are simply a community within this larger trend who are the most eager to engage in location-independent work from as far away as they can.

And if this lifestyle is one that you find enticing, the market forecast looks good for you. No matter what industry you work in, there are a growing number of roles where full-time globetrotting is becoming a distinct possibility. Here are eleven job titles that are becoming increasingly compatible with digital nomadism:

About the Author: Alex North is an American content marketer and translator living in Germany.

Communication & Interpersonal Skills

Should Grown-ups Use Emojis at Work?

are emojis appropriate for professional communication — Are these cute little creatures appropriate for professional communication?

Email, text, Instant Messaging and other text-based communication has changed the way we work. It’s allowed us to work remotely in ways never imagined only a generation ago. It also has changed the tone, style, and professionalism of that communication. So before you answer the question in our title, here are a couple of other questions for you.

What is your reaction when you receive an email with a winky-face emoji attached? Does it matter more or less if it comes in an instant message from someone you know? If you don’t know the person sending it, do you feel friendlier or frostier as a result of getting the big smiley emoticon?

An article in New Zealand’s HR Director magazine surveyed 2000 people in that country and found some interesting changes in attitude over the last few years:

People between 16 and 24 have an overwhelmingly positive outlook on the use of emoticons, while nearly half the people over 55 think they are unprofessional, weird, or indecipherable
Things are changing though. 59% have received email or messages containing a thumbs up or a wink from their boss
Over 40% of respondents say they’ll send an emoji to a co-worker if they think it will get a smile out of that person

That last one is really the key—we send emoticons in order to elicit an emotional response from the other person. If you are of a (ahem) certain age, that may rankle at first; I know it did for me. I was a late adopter of emojis but have grown to like the little devils in small doses. Here’s how I came to change my tune.

Emojis can actually enrich our communication

When Microsoft Lync came out, one of the features that had me scratching my head was the sheer number of emojis and symbols available in the chat. The grumpy old man in me said, This is ridiculous and childish. This is work and people should be professional. Oh, and get off my lawn.

But as I taught more classes using that tool, I realized that people were desperate to connect and have fun with each other. They gave people a thumbs up for making a good point, or teased each other—often using words that might seem harsh or be misinterpreted without the little laugh/crying guy to take the sting out. At first I was disdainful, but after a while it dawned on me that this is the same behavior we engage in when we are all together in the conference room: we tease, we make jokes, we support people with smiles and body language. By limiting the use of these in online communication we are limiting the ways we can connect and build relationships. Now I tell people to have at it. I have yet to have to chastise anyone for going too far or becoming an annoyance.

People are using these little symbols (and there are more created by the day) as a way of overcoming the isolation and limitations of online—particularly text—communication. We want to help create and maintain relationships through empathy, humor, and supporting our message with non-verbal means.

All communication has rules and group norms

That doesn’t mean we have carte blanche to use them any time, in any communication. Just as the words we choose should be appropriate to the message and the audience, the same is true of pictures and symbols. These little pictographs can undercut the importance of your message. And if you don’t know your audience well, you run the risk of appearing unprofessional, immature, or inappropriate. The easiest way to judge is to take the other party’s lead. If they send you a smiley face, they’ve given you permission to do the same. If the wording and tone of the message are formal or extremely business-like, it’s probably wrong to answer with the crying/laughing guy, just as it would be to laugh when the boss is chewing you out in person.

Use your head, people. But also, don’t be so mired in the old ways of communicating that you miss out on a chance to humanize yourself to you co-workers and colleagues.

But seriously, stay off my lawn.

What about you? What’s been your experience with emojis and trying to connect with people you don’t work with physically? Successes? Horror stories? Let’s see them in the comments.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wayne Turmel
Co-Founder and Product Line Manager

Long-Distance Leadership, Long-Distance Work

4 Conclusions about the Future of Remote Work

by Chuck Chapman, Content Strategy Coordinator

A recent study by social media scheduling platform Buffer delivered some fascinating data that leads to some inescapable conclusions about the future of remote work. Buffer surveyed 2500 remote workers and business owners from the US, Canada and other countries about some of the most common issues facing remote workers.

Here are four truths that are borne out by the information collected by Buffer:

Remote workers are extremely satisfied.

An amazing 99% of respondents said they were satisfied with their current remote work situation and would like to continue working remotely (at least in part) for the remainder of their careers. 99 per cent! I can’t imagine another question that would elicit such a degree of agreement among workers other than “Would you like to continue to get paid for your work?”

Not only were the respondents in lock-step with regard to their satisfaction, 95% indicated they would recommend remote work to someone else. Taken with other results that show companies are mostly satisfied with the results they’re getting from their remote teams, and it’s safe to say remote work isn’t going anywhere and will likely only grow.

Remote workers struggle with boundaries.

It’s much easier leaving work at the office when the office is in a different physical location. You leave the stuff you need to do work at the office and the commute serves as a time to “log out” of your work mind and prepare for re-entering the atmosphere of home.

For those who work from home, not having those built-in barriers between home and work can make it difficult to truly “clock out.” According to the Buffer survey, 22% of respondents confess to having difficulty unplugging from work or establishing firm boundaries between work time and personal time.

That’s the flip-side of the flexibility coin Kevin and Wayne talk about often. A continued inability to establish these boundaries will lead to burnout, dissatisfaction and a loss of productivity.

Home is where the work gets done.

Despite almost limitless flexibility in where to work, 84% of the respondents said they prefer to work from home. This is despite a Starbucks on almost every street corner, countless local coffee shops and restaurants catering to business professionals, and co-working facilities popping up in every locale and community.

It makes sense, though. There’s no commute to the home office and there’s every degree of convenience and flexibility. The real question (which isn’t answered by the survey) is whether home is actually the best location to work. Many might still answer “yes,” but for some getting out of the house might actually be more productive and limit the sense of isolation that can affect remote workers.

Remote work isn’t all or nothing.

The vast majority of organizations employing remote workers are doing so as part of “hybrid” teams that utilize both remote workers and office-located staff. That finding is consistent with what Kevin and Wayne found when researching for The Long-Distance Leader.

That dynamic creates some unique demands for leaders, which Kevin and Wayne address throughout the book. The Buffer data doesn’t suggest any change in this dynamic or any increase toward totally remote teams. That’s true for a number of reasons, chief among them the nature of work. Many organizations have (and always will have) roles that cannot be performed remotely.

Reading Buffer’s findings only reinforces the value and practical wisdom in The Long-Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership. In there you’ll find research that confirms much of what Buffer has found as well as solutions for many of the problems the survey uncovers.

Remote work is indeed here to stay, and leaders who want to remain relevant will adapt to this change in the workforce.

Communication & Interpersonal Skills, Long-Distance Leadership, Teamwork & Collaboration

Are You Taking Too Many for the Team?

As leaders we know we are expected to work at least as hard as the people we work with. That’s a given. But today we want to talk about costs of constantly sacrificing yourself. This is relevant to any leader, but when you lead remote teams, there are additional stressors and reasons managers wind up burning out by “taking one for the team.”

Ironically, those who take the role of leadership seriously are the most likely to suffer burnout and stress. Why are leaders of remote teams more likely to exhaust themselves than other managers? That’s why in The Long-Distance Leader- Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership, we talk about the 3-O Model: Outcomes, Others and Ourselves. Yes, the work comes first, along with the needs of your team and customers. But we can’t ignore ourselves or we risk not being at the top of our game and burning out.

Here are a few of the reasons remote leaders get exhausted and what we can do about them:

Time zones mean longer days for the boss.

When part of your team begins their day earlier than another it can complicate scheduling meetings and serving clients. Servant leaders often sacrifice their time to be available to team members no matter where they are. But it often means that the manager, in an effort to be available to all team members equally, can have a very long day. Try setting boundaries around your time, letting the team know when you’re available and when you’re not. If you must be up late on a call for one person, don’t expect to be up early for the next one. Manage your time.

Team members often go to the manager rather than their teammates—and we let them.

One of the unintended consequences of having people who work alone is that they need contact with others. They have questions, concerns, and sometimes just need to talk. The first person they often turn to is their manager. After all, this is the person they most need to have a good relationship with if they want to keep their job. Often, they go to their leader first, instead of to their teammates.

This doesn’t seem like a big deal until you realize every remote team member is doing that, and the boss is suddenly overwhelmed. Be mindful of what type of communication and questions your’e receiving from your team. Are you the only person who can answer that question or provide that service? Delegate to other team members, and don’t be afraid to coach your team to talk to each other before coming to you. This feels like you’re shirking your responsibility, but is actually being intentional about team building.

If we don’t have explicit rules about communication, people will decide for themselves what’s appropriate. If you’re buried alive in cc:ed email, that’s why.

There are plenty of reasons people copy the boss on every email. Sometimes it’s to prove that they are working. Sometimes, it’s to document a discussion with another team member or customer, and sometimes it’s just habit. It’s important that you and your team have open, candid discussions about what’s appropriate, what you need to be kept in the loop, and what you don’t need to be brought in on. A simple solution is to have them put you in the address line of emails you are expected to respond to, and in the CC line if they are just keeping you in the loop. If you let someone else set the criteria, don’t be surprised if it means more work for you.

Your high expectations for yourself may be too high over time.

Good leaders pride themselves on not asking anything of their people that they wouldn’t do themselves. The question is, what are the limits of what you’ll do, and would you expect the same of your team? Give yourself a break. If you really can’t take on that additional assignment, or you’ve missed dinner four days in a row and need to reschedule that conference call, do it. When you’re overwhelmed, ask yourself: what would I tell an employee to do about this? Why am I any different?

Leadership is hard, and leading a remote team is more complicated, if not tougher yet. If you don’t stop and analyze what you’re doing and its effect on you, it’s easy to burn out and become less effective than you should be.

Taking one for the team is great, as long as you take care of yourself as well.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wayne Turmel
Co-Founder and Product Line Manager

Wayne, along with Kevin Eikenberry, has co-authored the definitive book on leading remotely, The Long-Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership.

Communication & Interpersonal Skills

When to Invest in New Virtual Team Tools

If your virtual team is resistant to using new technology, or you’re suffering update fatigue, (I’m looking at you, Microsoft Lync/Skype/Teams/Whatever’s next) I want you to think about this quote from the head of the Roman Empire in England in the year 80:

“I lay aside all hopes of any new works or engines of war, the invention of which has reached its limit and in which I see no hope for future improvement.” Because, you know, once you had the gladius what other weapons would you need? Stop inventing and finish building that wall, darn it!

Now, I understood what Sextus Julius Frontas meant. He had the best army in the world. If his men would just use the weapons they had well, they wouldn’t need new ones, so stop whining. The same is true in today’s business world.

As the leader of a remote team, you rely on the team tools you are given to get your job done, and just when you get everyone on board, there’s something new happening. Worse, it feels like the upgrades are disruptive but not necessarily an improvement.

We find ourselves asking: Why are we getting a new version of Teams when we are using only 20 percent of the tool we have now? Is the time spent learning a new tool going to be worth the short-term lost productivity and chaos?

Yes, there are communication challenges that need to be met, and somewhere a software engineer is locked away pounding pizza and energy drinks trying to upgrade Slack so it does something slightly better than it did yesterday. That’s as it should be. But let’s acknowledge something else. It’s exhausting.

Here are some guidelines for overcoming update fatigue and deciding when you need to invest the time in new tools. You may argue with these, and I’d love to hear your logic in the comments.

Are you leveraging the existing version of the tool?

If you’re not using the tools at your disposal well, will an upgraded tool make much difference? Honestly assess if what you’ve got now could get the job done, assuming you actually used it properly.

Do you know what the upgrade/change is supposed to accomplish?

When you’re exhausted and cranky and you suddenly have to stop what you’re doing for an upgrade to take place, remember this: They upgraded this for a reason. Sometimes it’s a good reason (security, functionality) and sometimes it’s more trouble than its worth (hey, we’ve added a new font!) Is there a compelling reason to make the change? Ask yourself (or your IT team) this question: How will this change impact the work we’re doing?

Is the upgrade “before the dot or after it”?

This sounds geeky but this one really matters. In the world of software development, you often see version 2, but then there’s 2.1, 2.2 ad infinitum. A change “after the dot” indicates small changes which might be important but don’t radically alter the look, feel, or functionality of the technology. A change from version 2 to version 3, though, usually involves significant changes (whether they are upgrades is open to debate) but it will look and act different in some important ways.

Does the rest of the world need you to adapt?

Individual people and teams can make anything work if they are motivated and develop work-arounds. But if your customer relies on outputs in a specific version of the tool, or your organization is rolling out the latest version and your refusal to change will impact the work flow, suck it up buttercup.

Do you have someone on your team who can be the guinea pig?

Most teams have that person who loves new tools and can’t wait to play with all the latest gadgets. Rather than inflict unwanted change on everyone right away, perhaps have that person try out the new version and identify the really important information their co-workers should know. If there’s an improvement to work flow, or a trick to speed up the work, people should know about it and will probably embrace the change more willingly than if you all have to do it at the same time because you were told to.

Since it’s unlikely that “they” will stop inventing new tools, we need to be smart about how much effort we put into adopting those changes, and make them work for us instead of driving us crazy.

What’s your take on this? We’d love to hear it in the comments.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wayne Turmel
Co-Founder and Product Line Manager

Wayne, along with Kevin Eikenberry, has co-authored the definitive book on leading remotely, The Long-Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership.

Communication & Interpersonal Skills, Leadership

5 Simple Improvements for Your Webinar Presentations

I have been teaching online presentation skills for a very long time. Since I led my very first WebEx Introduction class almost 12 years ago, a lot has changed. Technology is better—I can’t remember the last time someone joined a webinar on a dial-up modem, and it’s actually harder to find a computer that doesn’t have a webcam than one that does. Here’s what hasn’t changed: most online presentations still aren’t very effective.

The reason is that technology was only ever part of the problem. Like presenting in person, you can control your physical environment only so much. The vast majority of the success or failure of any talk lies within the control of the speaker.

Here are 5 very simple (I didn’t say easy!) things you can do to help yourself succeed and not get between your audience and your message:

Determine what features you’ll use as you’re planning your presentation, not as an afterthought.

80% of web presenters use only 20% of the tools available to them. This means you’re probably not doing something that could help drive your message home or engage your audience. The simplest way to think about this is: “What would I do in a regular presentation to make this really work, and how can I replicate that online?”

If you are the kind of presenter who uses a white board or flip chart, are you planning to do the same thing online, or are you intimidated? If you’d ask for a show of hands to assess their knowledge, you can do that in plenty of ways (including having them use the “raise hand” button on some platforms, chat on the others). Form follows function. What would make a great presentation, and is there a way to do that online? The answer is probably yes if you take a deep breath and think about it during the planning stage.

Involve your webinar audience early and often.

The level of participant interaction will naturally depend on the size of your audience (the larger the audience, the less interaction as a rule). But here’s something to remember about human beings: the longer they are passive, the harder it is to stir them to action for Q&A or discussion. If you engage them early by using polls, chat, or even allowing them to post their questions as they think of them instead of waiting til the end, they are more likely to stay engaged.

Have everything set up and ready to go before you begin.

We know that people don’t like to speak in public. They really hate presenting using technology. So when you combine them, you get a fear of speaking on webinars. (The word Glossowebinaphobia actually appears in the Urban Dictionary) Make things easy on yourself by having all the tools set up so that you’re not trying to open a whiteboard, or change the color of your market, or trying to create a poll while trying to remember your content—or your own name.

It’s better to leave something for Q&A than to try to pack everything into your allotted time.

The most common challenge for people putting together webinar presentations is cramming too much information in. We are so afraid that we will leave something out, or that there is some obscure piece of data that one person might care about, that we put everything we can think of into our slides.

The problem is that online we actually have a smaller attention span online than we do in person, so presenters are doing the one thing guaranteed to overload: bore or otherwise torture your audience. You may be giving them too much information in a short time. If you find yourself saying, “Oh by the way…” or “Some of you might be wondering…” a lot, you’re probably putting information upfront that could be in Q&A rather than the body of your presentation.

Your audience’s eyes are where the camera is, not where their picture is on the screen.

We know that in a face to face presentation, eye contact is critical. If you’re using a webcam, you’re making an effort to replicate that experience. One of the things that undermines our credibility though (and it’s a hard habit to break and will take practice) is when the presenter is obviously looking somewhere other than at the audience.

Here’s the thing to remember: The light that tells you the camera is on is where your audience’s eye-line is. The picture of someone on the screen is not. Talk to the camera, not the little box in the corner of your meeting screen. That doesn’t mean you have to stare blankly into the camera the whole time (it looks unnatural and creepy). But when you want to make a point, or really connect with your audience, look them in the eye as you would in person.

There are plenty of other tips for good online presenting, but if all webinar presenters did these simple things webinars would be much less painful for all concerned.

If you want to dig deeper into this subject and become an expert at presenting online, check out our online course on delivering online presentations. We’ll even come to your organization and train your leadership staff. Imagine how that would revolutionize your team’s online meetings!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wayne Turmel
Co-Founder and Product Line Manager

Wayne, along with Kevin Eikenberry, has co-authored the definitive book on leading remotely, The Long-Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership.

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