As a leader, odds are you keep a lot of running lists. Without them, a lot of us wouldn’t be able to prioritize tasks, remember who is working on which projects, or whether we need to pick up milk before dinner. For those of us who are chronically absent-minded, they can be life savers. But

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Is it okay to turn your webcam off in the middle of a team call? That seems like a reasonable question, but it always seems to get people worked up. It should be a binary answer: yes or no. But the real answers are “sometimes,” and “it depends.” We all know the pros and cons

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Imagine being the people at Zoom. Eighteen months ago, few people had heard of you. Then the COVID lockdown begins and suddenly you’re the most popular new software in the world. Then, just as suddenly, you’re the cause of something called “Zoom fatigue” and people hate you. Hardly seems fair. But to remote workers around

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One of the great paradoxes of remote work is that it requires a lot of trust, yet that trust is hard to build at a distance and easily damaged. Most of us start out assuming positive intent, and that we trust in people until they show us they’re more deserving of mistrust. At worst, we

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According to several sources including the Wall Street Journal, most organizations are looking at late summer or even September for a full return to the workplace. Between vaccination roll-outs, local ordinances and internal logistics it will take that long to implement their plans. That means a mass of people who work from home returning to

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Are you training your remote teammates to get in the way of your productivity? Of all the discussions we have in our classes with long-distance workers, one of the most fruitful is when we talk about how we teach our coworkers and manager to work with us and help us succeed. Sometimes, however, they learn

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When the rush to work from home started, most people assumed it was a temporary measure, and the world would somehow right itself in time. While many people are looking to return to the office later this year, nobody can quite agree on what that will look like. One thing is more likely than anything

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All companies worry about employee engagement, especially those who work remotely. There are books written (see below) about what a problem it is, and how to better engage with your people. It’s a big deal that will cost you if you ignore it. Turnover and lost productivity are just two of the problems you’ll have

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Alice had a nice little career track going. When she worked in the office with everyone else, she took part in a lot of training, got promoted regularly, and managed to find lateral promotions that offered new challenges and opportunities to feel challenged. That began changing two years ago when she started working from home,

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Are your people taking the time off they have coming to them? Are you? Something happened over the end of December this year that highlighted the importance of that question, and why organizations and their leaders need to be vigilant on behalf of their people who work from home. This all arose because I noticed

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