I don’t want to alarm you, but for most organizations we have entered the dreaded Q4, the Fourth Quarter. The Year-End. Crunchtime. If you didn’t have time to create a work from home plan before COVID hit, now’s the time to plan for next year. In our work with people and their organizations around the

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Leading a remote team is not easy. One of the most difficult things is knowing what, and how well our people are doing at their jobs. This impacts everything from the daily affirmations and “atta girls” that keep people engaged and motivated to year end performance reviews. The biggest question many managers ask is this:

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Would you really yell at an employee for missing a deadline? Do you swear at people who blow off meetings or forget about appointments? Hopefully, the answer is no. Now, let’s ask another question. Would you talk to or treat an employee the way you speak to yourself? That’s always a good question to ask

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A client of mine recently started talking to his project managers about getting their “Remote MBWA.” I had never heard of this particular degree, so I asked him what that was.  He said it wasn’t some new kind of MBA, rather it means Management By Walking Around. Here’s how he described it to me: “Management

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I live in Las Vegas, so I follow the comings and goings of the hospitality industry like those of you in small towns follow your top employers. It didn’t come as a huge surprise to me to find this article making the rounds here.  At first, I laughed, because “Viva Las Office” is the most

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Of all the people predicting doom and gloom when entire organizations began to work from home, none were doomier or gloomier than CEOs. Many had resisted implementing wide-ranging work from home options. They had to implement remote work in practically no time, often without a real plan, and hope the company didn’t implode in the

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There are better ways to learn how to swim than being thrown into the deep end of the pool. That said, should you find yourself in the deep end, you’ll learn how to keep yourself afloat or, well…the alternative. Do you notice anything missing in this analogy? If the goal was to learn to swim,

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What do monkeys have to do with successfully working from home? A recent article from Harvard Business Review online studied how the COVID-19 inspired surge in working from home has impacted business. We’ll probably do a better examination in  a future article, but one of the things that surprised the authors was this: Despite all

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You hear a lot of negative things these days about working separate from everyone else on your team. We’ve all heard the complaints (heck we’ve written enough about them here). Remote workers sometimes feel isolated. They don’t interact with their team members enough. People who work remotely sometimes go down the wrong trail and spend

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If you lead a team, odds are you’re exhausted. Helping your people stay productive when working from home or under other kinds of constraints hasn’t been easy. Add to that here in the US (and in large cities around the world) a year full of elections, protest and civil unrest and the flood of news

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