The Prime Minister of England is not a great fan of working from home. We know this, because in a recent interview, he said so. Boris Johnson said, “My experience of working from home is you spend an awful lot of time walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese,

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Maybe the most commonly stated paradox in remote work involves meetings. A paradox is defined as,  “A situation, person, or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities.” So. what’s the paradox when it comes to meetings in a team of any type? The contradictory ideas at play here are: Meetings (in-person, online, or blended) are

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It’s the time of year when people start to talk about vacations. For too many of us, all we do is talk.  Fifty-five percent of Americans do not use all their vacation time (Those of you in civilized countries feel free to smirk and berate us. We deserve it).  In fact, we collectively leave 768

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How eager are you to get back to the office? The answer might depend on where you live. An interesting article on the BBC’s Worklife website discusses how different cultures embrace (or don’t) workplace flexibility. Some of the statistics are enlightening (numbers quoted the article): By the end of the year, 25% of professional jobs

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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

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There’s a lot of talk about helping form relationships on virtual and hybrid teams. We want to build trust, help people get to know each other and get to know and like each other. Here are some questions for you: What movies do your teammates watch? What are their favorite TV shows? Video Games? What

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Do you find yourself using emojis, GIFs and other electronic symbols in your writing more than you used to? Do you love them or hate them? Have you ever sent an emoji or GIF and it didn’t mean what you thought it meant? (Eggplants mean what?) Like it or not, the way we communicate is

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“I don’t know what I’m doing half the time,” “I have to look strong and in control for my team. If they ever find out I’m a fraud, it will all fall apart.” “Any day now, they’ll figure out I don’t know what I’m doing and fire me.” Odds are, most of us have said

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How can you help new hires to a virtual or hybrid team connect and learn about the company culture faster? That’s a question we get a lot, and there’s no one simple answer. That said, one solution is to resurrect the idea of cohorts. How cohorts used to work By definition a cohort is a

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A few weeks back, I was leading a class on How Leaders Create and Manage Remote and Hybrid Teams. Two of the participants got into a heated exchange that was very instructive. It raised a good question: When does empathy toward your team members get in the way of managing performance? One of the participants said

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