The rise of hybrid work arrangements has further complicated life for today’s up-and-coming managers. As a newly promoted leader, you not only have to master the skills you need for face-to-face oversight, but you must also be able to organize remote workers and learn how your team members perform and interact in both online and in-person environments.

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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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By Guy Harris One fairly common question I get from Bud to Boss workshop participants is: How do you deal with a persistently or aggressively negative team member?” While the full answer in a given situation depends on many situation-specific details, there is a thread of common themes that applies to almost all of my

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When joining or bringing people onto a hybrid team, you encounter all the challenges associated with an office-based team, as well as many of the challenges that come with a fully remote team. There are also nuances because the new team structure will be neither of those things, but something new and often unprecedented. Specifically,

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Whether or not you grew up watching The Flintstones, you can probably relate to Fred’s famous “Yabba, Dabba, Doo!” scream at the end of his work day. We can all relate with Fred because, for better or worse, the workplace is associate with stress. But what if Fred worked remotely? What if instead of leaving the quarry,

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A few weeks back, we wrote about how showing your pets on Zoom meetings, or at least not hiding them like guilty secrets, can help the team bond and get to know each other. But can it go too far? Here’s the other side of that conversation. Apparently, some people make their pets too central

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It’s NCAA Tournament time again, which means nothing to 90% of the civilized world. But here in the US it means three weeks of drama, gambling, and well-intentioned foolishness.  It’s also a good time to examine the role of creatively “wasting” time with social activities at work. First, we’ll start with the supposedly bad news.

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Remember back before we got sent home for having cooties? Two or three years ago, when the workplace was as it had always been, we hated meetings. We complained constantly about them:  A waste of time. Productivity killer. Boring. Remember? Now, when we ask people what the biggest reason for returning to the office is,

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