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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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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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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Is working from home working smoothly for you and your team? Or is it causing all kinds of drama, delay and frustration? If we’re honest, it’s probably a bit of both.  A recent article in the Wall Street Journal illustrates the point well. One of the most anticipated video game releases of the year is

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With a remote team, you can’t just cast an eye over the office and see how things are going. We get visual (and sometimes verbal) cues that things are progressing nicely. Or not. But when you work apart from the members of your team you are running on a mix of trust and assumptions. Trust,

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Long before we could spell COVID-19, or knew a pandemic would ever affect us, we were helping remote leaders and remote teams succeed through the work of the Remote Leadership Institute. With the upcoming release of our newest book, The Long-Distance Teammate, we have created two new free webinars to share ideas and strategies to help

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Most of what you read about (and we write about) remote work is for employees: people who have a boss, who work for the organization that pays them, and do as they’re told in exchange for a steady paycheck. But as the world of work changes, more and more of our teammates may be contractors

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Long before a pandemic, when many of our meetings were in person, meetings were often riddled with inefficiency and frustration. The shift to virtual meetings hasn’t made it better. While there are many causes of the challenges, it is possible to have productive virtual meetings that are highly collaborative and stay on track. Making that

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For many people, working from home during COVID has been a big success. At least it’s worked better than many people anticipated. But the longer it goes on and the more uncertainty there is about what the return to the office will look like, or even if it will occur, the more we have to

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We all know that when we work remotely it can be both a blessing and a curse. It’s good that we can (to some degree) set our own schedules, put our heads down and work without Bob from Accounting stopping by our desk to bemoan the state of his Fantasy Football Draft. On the other

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