By Wayne Turmel I don’t know exactly when it happened, but very early on in telecommuting and having people work from home, there arose the myth that, “They’re sitting at home in their bunny slippers…” This raises two important questions: Who actually owns bunny slippers, anyway? So what? That’s not being facetious (well, not for

By Kevin Eikenberry Leading a team for the first time undoubtedly comes with a slew of challenges. On top of handling your new responsibilities and priorities, you have to build trust, manage conflicts, boost morale, and motive employees from afar. While the basic leadership principles remain the same, how you apply them varies depending on

By Jaimy Ford When you lead a virtual team, one of your biggest challenges is assessing each employee’s engagement level. After all, you can’t monitor body language during meetings for clues that employees are bored. Because you likely communicate via email most of the time, you can’t rely on employees’ tone of voice to determine if they are

Is leading a remote team really that different from leading a team where everyone works in the same place? Of course: Informal communication with remote employees is not nearly as easy as it is with on-site staff. Technology plays a pivotal role in communication, and learning how to use it and maximize the benefit of

By Wayne Turmel Should virtual meetings be fun? I think so, and in fact, I think fun during meetings should be a priority. Not everyone agrees. In fact, some people downright hate that idea. After all, they say, meetings take too much time as it is. Fun just wastes time. People should do what needs to be done,

By Wayne Turmel One of the joys of email is the ability to send a single message to multiple people at the same time. I mean, it’s not like the “reply all” button invented itself. It’s often useful. Often… but not always. So the supposedly simple question is: When do you hit ‘Reply All’ and

This is the first post in an ongoing series where we interview experienced leaders of virtual teams and share their insight with you. First up, is Stan Kimer, founder and president of Total Engagement Consulting by Kimer and a long-time leader at IBM, where he managed virtual teams. Below we share four pieces of advice he wants

By Wayne Turmel We know that a big part of working remotely and managing teams is to set clear goals—people need to know what they’re supposed to do, by when, and to what standard. That’s great, but there can be an awful lot of drama before it’s all over. Between assigning tasks and checking them