Podcasts about century work life

A very short episode where I (Pilar Orti) share the reasons why the 21st Century Work Life podcast is going on pause. Stay subscribed though, as you never know when new episodes might drop! Thank you very much for listening and all the best for 2025.  Get in touch: https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/contact-us 

Many thanks to Catherine Nicholson from Virtual Training Team for sharing her thoughts on emotions at work and anger, after listening to the first episode of the manager emotions series.  We share her comments directly from her LinkedIn posts, and expand on them.  https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pilarorti_we-kick-off-our-series-on-management-emotions-activity-7211065541115953152-75df If you have any feedback, we'd love to hear from you! https://managementcafepodcast.com/contact/  00:30 mins Our hosts discuss the most popular episode of the “manager emotions” series: episode #81 on Anger. They speculate on why it resonated. 1:45 Pilar shares some great feedback that came in from Catherine Nicholson of Virtual Training Team. She shares that emotional regulation has been a recurring theme in her recent manager workshops. 2:15 Catherine poses the question, is it ok to show frustration at work? And talks about the “delicate connection between having an emotion, recognizing that emotion and then knowing what to do with it.” 3:35 She also talks about the balance between anger and passion. Tim reflects that it took him a long time to understand that sometimes people show frustration when it's something they care deeply about. 4:30 Tim (badly) paraphrases Stephen M R Covey's famous quote from The Speed of Trust “…we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior…”. 5:15 Pilar points out that it is more acceptable to show passion than anger. Someone once tried (incorrectly) to reframe her anger as passion. 6:15 Pilar also thanks the wonderful Theresa Sigillito Hollema for recommending the Management Cafe to the listeners of the 21st Century Work Life podcast. And also a shoutout to Pilar's mum who enjoyed the episode on anger! What about you, dear listener? Do you have any feedback or thoughts you'd like to share? We'd love to hear from you! Get in touch through our Contact Form https://managementcafepodcast.com/contact/ 

I'm back!(Hi, I'm Pilar Orti if we've never met before.)In this episode I talk about:01.36 minsThe new type of episodes I've come up with for the 21st Century Work Life podcast06.29 mins The new season for Management Café09.25minsDifferent ways of running an interview. Contrast:Always Take Notes 19 March 2024#182: Nicholas Shakespeare, novelist and biographer with Kevin Tumlison in the Writers, Ink PodcastEpisode 246 with Carol LaHines,  10 June 202413.05 minsWhat happens when your guest decides to interview you!Check out my episode 360 from the 21st Century Work Life podcast for an example. (13 June 2024)Do get in touch with your comments and questions:https://www.adventuresinpodcasting.com/contact/ If you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.

In today's episode, tech journalist Jennifer Riggins talks about the impact of generative AI on the world of software development, focusing on the challenges faced by DevSecOps teams in keeping up with the accelerated pace of code creation enabled by GenAI tools. She raises important questions about the potential risks posed by generative AI, such as the introduction of vulnerabilities and intellectual property issues, and emphasises the need for organizations to establish clear AI governance policies to mitigate these risks. You can read the full summary and show notes (created by GenAI) here: https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/ai-developers   Connect with Jen on LinkedIn. Read the article: Will Generative AI Kill DevsecOps? Read Jen's other article: The AI governance policy engineering managers needed yesterday Check out the State of OpenCon 24 sessions on YouTube. You can also check out Pilar's post on her Spiralling Creativity blog, describing her recent experience with GenAI creating this episode's show notes. https://spirallingcreativity.substack.com/p/gen-ai-helpful-assistant-or-clown  If you enjoy listening to the 21st Century Work Life podcast, you might also enjoy Management Café - look for it wherever you are listening to this. 

How do you go from teaching leaders how to lead to hosting a popular podcast about remote work? That's the fascinating story of Pilar Orti, the founder and host of “21st Century Work Life,” a show that explores the trends and challenges of working in the digital age. Pilar opens up about her diverse and dynamic podcasting journey. Pilar reveals how she experimented with different formats, topics, and co-hosts, and how she learned from her hits and misses. She also shares her insights on how to manage multiple podcasts, how to collaborate with co-hosts, and how to keep up with the changing podcasting landscape, especially with the emergence of generative AI. This episode is not only a showcase of Pilar's versatility and passion for podcasting, but also a treasure trove of tips and tricks for aspiring podcasters who want to create their own unique shows. Listen and learn how Pilar Orti mastered the many faces of podcasting.Chapters:00:00:00 Introduction - Welcoming listeners and introducing Pilar Orti.00:01:10 Launch of '21st Century Work Life' - Insight into the podcast's inception focusing on remote work.00:03:28 Mastering the Podcast Craft - Exploring the creative and technical sides of podcasting.00:06:49 Balancing Multiple Projects - The complexities and rewards of running several podcasts.00:15:33 AI's Impact on Podcasting - Reflections on generative AI and future possibilities.00:18:25 Keys to Podcasting Success - Pilar shares her secret ingredients for a successful podcast.00:19:35 Wrapping Up - Concluding thoughts and farewellLinks And Resources:Pilar Orti on LinkedInPilar's BooksAdventures in PodcastingVirtual Not DistantHector Santiesteban LinkedInHector Santiesteban TwitterThanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Marketing Your Podcast? Have some feedback you'd like to share? Connect with us on iTunes and leave us a review!

Hello dear listeners of the 21st Century Work Life podcast. This is a little bonus episode, what some would call, a piece of content marketing, as I've put it together to introduce you to our audio-first course, for managers and leaders of remote teams: Navigating Asynchronous Communication. And in this episode, I've selected three sections to share with you, to give you a flavour of the course - in case this is something for you, or your colleagues. If you want to check out the copy, head over to our website. https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/audio-first-course I've talked about the format before - but in case you're new to the show, it's a course to help you lay down the foundations of asynchronous communication in your team, and it's narrated by my colleague Simon Wilson and myself. It has nine modules, formal modules with title and everything, and some reflection questions at the end, and then it has three informal conversations between Simon and myself, like those you might find on this podcast. Before I go into the content, I'm experimenting with the delivery of this course, as to how YOU access it. And at the moment, you can take the course in two ways: one is through an app, which is actually designed for Audiobooks. And you can mark the audio if you have favourite bits etc, and also, you get a the text version of the course and the transcripts of the conversations. That's it. (And for those of you who are used to buying online products, that's being delivered through Gumroad.) Now, we've also got a more traditional way of laying out an online course, through the platform Thinkific. It's still audio only, but everything looks more like an online course, and you have a few worksheets you can download and fill in in PDF form, plus some quizzes, which are a way of getting you to think through the material, although to be honest, they're mainly for fun, because it's difficult to create multiple choice quizzes that really test you. But, for testing you, we do have a certificate option. And for that we have a choice of assessments that you can take, and then send to us for marking. This can be text, audio or video even. And all of that is explained in the course - but if you want more information on that, le me know.  Before I move onto the sections from the course, let me tell you some of the topics we cover. Coffee Break Conversation 1: Introduction - to your tutors and the material Module 1: Benefits and Drawbacks of Asynchronous Communication Module 2: Foundations of Asynchronous Communication Bonus: Psychological Safety in Asynchronous Communication Module 3: Different Conversations at Work Coffee Break Conversation 2: Why is Asynchronous Communication so Hard to Get Used to? Module 4: Collaborating on Tasks Asynchronously Module 5: Decision-making and Alignment Module 6: Capturing Your Team's Knowledge Module 7: Integrating Meetings into Our Process Coffee Break Conversation 3: Working with External Parties Module 8: The Technology and the Team Agreement Module 9: Your Next Steps Right, if you're still with me, let's move onto a section from module 2, foundations of async, a segment of the coffee covnersation about how hard async can be to get used to, and then, I've included most of the module on Capturing your team's knowledge, as this is one part of remote teamwork that those relatively new to remote work miss. Do get in touch if you need anything from me - thank you for listening. https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/contact-us

Pilar pops in for a quick solo show to let you know how the focus of the show is changing. 

Should we edit less to be more human, in podcasting?Pilar thinks so, and it's starting to edit out less bits from her recordings. At 5.16mins, Check out the one with guest of 21st Century Work Life podcast, Valentina Turner, whose episode will come out on 7th December.Recommended podcast:Deep Questions with Cal NewportRemember Steph Fuccio and I are going live to share our NaPodPoMo lessons on 30 November at 7pm UK time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsz9zb9MC4YIf you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.

This episode should have gone out yesterday but it's going out today...Pilar talks about past episodes for Spain Uncovered, 21st Century Work Life and Facilitation Stories. If you want to check out her blog post about editing a roundtable type episode check out: https://www.adventuresinpodcasting.com/turning-live-events-into-podcast-episodes/Recommended podcasts: Books and AuthorsPodcasters' Roundtable (not longer broadcasting) If you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.

This is episode 50!So it's all about milestones.Pilar has hit a few milestones with 21st Century Work Life podcast. In 2015, Pilar recorded episode 50 with Lisette, asking if anything had changed in virtual teams? It still hasn't! https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/world-of-virtual-teamsEpisode 100 was all about the future of work and had many guests. https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/episode100 Episode 200 was all about celebrations, with contributions from guests in writing and audio.  https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/200The celebrations for episode 300 were wild! The episode was in three parts! And Pilar set up a whole new podcast with the whole interviews. https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/300-part1 Episode 50 of the Management Café podcast was also about celebrations! https://managementcafepodcast.com/2023/03/20/50-celebrating-big-or-small/You can also see what others are doing: Craig Wealand and his co-host on La mansión del inglés hit 400 episodes last year, and you can hear him talking about that and building community in episode 20 of Adventures in Podcasting. Today's recommended podcast is No Stupid Questions, by one of the authors of Freakonomics. If you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.

In the third day of NaPodPoMo, I talk about why I started 21st Century Work Life and how it has evolved in format and content. If you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.

After taking part in NaNoWriMo quite a few times, this time I'm taking on the challenge of National Podcast Post Month by publishing an episode every day. I'll be talking about my experiences in podcasting, from my longest-running show, 21st Century Work Life, to my first, Spain Uncovered. I'll also share stories and insights from my journey, discuss the changing definition of podcasts, and explore ideas from my Trello board. Join me as I navigate this Adventure, sharing lessons from over a decade of podcasting experience. And if you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount...If you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.

We're trying something different for the next few months for the 21st Century Work Life podcast. Rather than commenting on recent news and articles, Maya and Pilar will look at What's Going On by commenting and expanding on the themes brought up by the monthly guest-driven episodes. Please let us know what you think of this new format. In today's episode, Pilar and Maya reflect on the previous episode where guest Jan Nieuweboer, senior consultant of the future of work at Rabobank, shared the bank's journey in implementing a hybrid work model. (If you want to listen to or read the summary of the conversation between Jan and Pilar, look for episode 335 on your favourite podcast app, or follow this link.) For the show notes/summary, visit  https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/commenting-on-hybrid

Today's guest is Lisette Sutherland, host of the Collaboration Superpowers podcast, a show about people doing great things remotely. (And she was also Pilar's first co-host on the 21st Century Work Life podcast, back in 2014!)You can find the full show notes over at https://www.adventuresinpodcasting.com/ep36/If you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.

Happy Facilitation Week everyone!  We are releasing this bonus episode to celebrate all things facilitation.  In this episode, which we've borrowed from the 21st Century Work Life podcast, Pilar talks to Simon Wilson about how he incorporates asynchronous communication into his facilitation processes - and the challenges this brings.  You can see the full show notes over at https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/asynchronous-collaboration-facilitation To get in touch with the team behind Facilitation Stories, head over to https://facilitationstories.com/ or you can follow the podcast through @Fac_Stories on Twitter. 

Our last interview features Caggiati - who was the host of the Connection and Disconnection in Remote Teams series, released on the 21st Century Work Life podcast at the beginning of 2020. Bree is a writer who mainly writes about remote teams. You can find her over at LinkedIn. Find out more about the company behind this show over at virtualnotdistant.com

Those of you who regularly listen to the 21st Century Work Life podcast will be familiar with today's guest Maya Middlemiss. She is a freelance commercial writer, and founder of Healthy Happy Homeworking and co-host of the 21st Century Work Life podcast. You can find more about her work over at healthyhappyhomeworking.com. Find out more about the company behind this show over at virtualnotdistant.com

Our guest today is Tim Burgess, co-founder of Shield GEO. He was an essential part of the connection and disconnection in remote teams series that we ran over at the 21st Century Work Life podcast, as it was his idea! You can find him on Twitter as @planetburgess Find out more about the company behind this show over at virtualnotdistant.com

In this episode, we focus on the 21st Century Work Life podcast: how it's evolved and what it could cover in the future. And our guests have come wise words for you, our listeners. 00.00 mins Pilar shares how the show has evolved over the last 100 episodes. Some of the episodes she mentions are: episode 209 The Journey of the Remote Leader, episode 263 “Remote” is not the Only Challenge, episode 282 Asynchronous Facilitation and Online Collaboration, episode 286 The Challenges of Adopting Asynchronous Communication. 09.05 mins Bree and Pilar talk about the Connection and Disconnection in Remote Teams series and how the conversations around remote work in general changed during the pandemic. 15.39 mins We hear some general suggestions from guests about what they'd like a podcast like ours to cover in the future. Tim Burgess is first, he's been leading a distributed company for a few years - he would like to hear more “secrets” from people who are in the remote space. Then we hear from Theresa Sigillito Hollema, who as a guest has talked about leading global teams, her speciality. She's interested in the psychology of working away from each other. Theresa refers to My Pocket Psych, so its from its host, Dr. Richard MacKinnon, who we hear from next. He's also appeared on this show as guest, and as part of the Connection and Disconnection series. He would like the show to cover the “how to” for those new to the space (especially if it's evidence-based). He's followed by Mark Kilby, who's also been on this show a lot, (and who Pilar got to meet in person, in London!) and would like a mix of the “how” and the “why”. Then we hear from Pinar Akkaya, it's the first time she's guested on this show. She's looking for inspiration and “what if” scenarios. 24.49 mins Other guests have more specific suggestions. Simon Wilson kicks this bit off. He'd like to hear more - and be involved in conversations - about what asynchronous communication looks like in those teams embracing it, plus deep conversations about organisational culture. We then hear from Ross Winter, our podcast polisher, who would like to hear answers to questions like, Why are we spending so much time looking for connection online? Eva Rimbau Gilabert suggest we cover the transition to hybrid (of which there are many versions), especially when we can back it up with academic research, while Bree encourages us to continue with the diversity of perspectives and deepening the conversation about the future of work. 31.32 mins Finally, the guests have some final words for listeners of the show, and Pilar. We hear from Maya, Simon, Eva, Pinar, Richard, Tim, Ross (and cat!), Bree, Mark, and Theresa, who leaves us with an inspiring aspiration. And thanks to Anish Hindocha, for contributing to the two other parts of this episode! (By the way, Pilar has “podcastinitis” and hosts many shows!) And we have some outtakes from 40.03mins for your amusement after our MANY THANKS to all of you!

Today's guest is Mark Kilby, “remote work guy” and co-author of From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams. You can find out more about him over at markkilby.com Find out more about the company behind this show over at virtualnotdistant.com And don't forget to check out the 21st Century Work Life podcast.

In today's episode, Pilar shares her process in creating a 3 part episode 300 for the 21st Century Work Life podcast.This is another solo episode, but I've started interviewing again. And I have you, the listeners to thank for this. In voicing in the last episode my inability or reluctance, to reach out to podcasters I wanted to talk to, I realised how silly that was, so I reached out to one of my favourite podcasters, he replied within minutes, and I'm recording with him in June!04.10 minsYou might remember that I recorded the last episode in both Audacity and Zencastr, to generate a transcript in Zencastr. I published that with the show notes so that you can have a look. It's not bad at all, but the main thing is the lack of punctuation. So it's not bad if you wanted to publish it, though you would need to do a bit of work on it, maybe an hour or so, for the half hour audio. Let me know if you are using any transcription tools and how that's going.06.02 minsIn the last episode, I shared how I was preparing to record he 9 interviews of 21st Century Work Life. Now I've released the first two parts of that episode but I still need to work on the third.Recording those interviews was like being at a party, so something to consider when doing something like this, pick people you like!The interviews were so interesting that I decided to release them as a different show, as a different podcast. So in the end I didn't use the transcripts from the conversations. As I was going to release the interviews, I needed to edit them. So as I did that, and picked up the bits I liked as I went along.I opened different Audacity projects for each of the six questions, and cut and pasted 30sec- 2min segments.I worked with a Google Doc, making notes and writing bits of script.When that was done, which took about 2 sessions of 4 hours, I went through all the bits and pieces and found the ones that went better together. I laid them out one after the other.Then I wrote the bits of script in between. I recorded those bits and then cut and posted those into the projects. Part I went quite well as I'd put everything in one project, and it lasted about 45min .11.10 minsBut episode 2 was a different story. I had 3 projects for the episode, each covering one of the questions that made up that part. And when I listened back to it, to make some show notes and check I hadn't made any mistakes, I found out I had jiggled things around and was introducing the wrong guests. So that was fun!But I've really enjoyed it. I do enjoy editing, playing with people's words and creating new sentences. In putting together a show like this, with different voices, you need to develop a sense of rhythm to gauge how long the pauses between guests should be, when you have a series of them speaking one after the other. As one of the questions in the interviews was what they would like to see in a show like 21st Century Work Life, it's made me rethink my approach to the show after hearing 10 people give me feedback!Get in touch if you would like some coaching and advice yourself or connect on Twitter If you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.

In today's episode, Pilar shares some of what she's learned from the first three interviews for this show, and how she's getting on with episode 300 of the 21st Century Work Life podcast. Plus ,she's got a book recommendation for you. I'm pausing the interviews, but will be recording more in June. But I think I'll have enough adventures of my own for at least another three episodes, so I'll hope you'll stay with me until then. And it's also an opportunity for you to get in touch with your questions and even, hey, why not, if you're in podcasting, maybe you can come on the show as a guest. Just drop me a quick note.06.37 minsFirst I'd like to thank all three guests,So the three conversations are very different, and so are the points of view. For example, both Myriam and Bernie interview guests and have a completely different idea of how to interact with them.Myriam talks about how she's learned to "bring more of herself into the space", by contributing to the conversation with her own opinions, examples, etc. This helps the guest to have someone to bounce off of, and releases the pressure of them creating most of the episode content.On the other hand, Bernie prefers to stay out of the conversation as much as possible, to give the guest as much space to share.One thing that struck me about Craig's interview, is how he plans for spontaneity with his co-host. Have a listen to his interview in Episode 20 for more on this. 14.40 minsI'm starting to record the guest contributions for the 300th episode of the 21st Century Work Life podcast. As I'm recording this episode, it's the 23rd April and the show comes out on 5 May. I've overdone it! 12 guests! I've recorded 3 so far. Plus Ross, the podcast polisher for that show.I set up a Calendly for guests to book themselves in, and one of them even changed the dateI'm using Zencastr to record with and gave each person their individual link. This means I'll have transcripts to work from. For episode 300, I'm thinking of putting together three parts: general thoughts, personal thoughts and thoughts about the podcast. I'm also thinking of releasing all the interviews as a separate show. There are lots of free platforms now - Libsyn Studio and Buzzsprout have an option for a free show. 28.12 minsToday I'd like to recommend the book Big Podcast by David Hooper, which is mainly about mindset. I'm finding it similar to Julia Cameron's The Artist Way, which I read on Saturday mornings at the Riverside Studios Café.In David's words,"This book isn't a series of techniques, it's a philosophy." So my kind of book! Here's a quote I like:"Softening your message is disrespectful to your audience because it doesn't allow them to hear who you really are."And this is so true. And remember that I too have a book: Plan Your Podcast or if you prefer to be prompted by email, I have an email sequence to help you do just that. You can find the link at the end of the Resources pages. If you want to support this show and are looking for a media host: I recommend If you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.

In this bonus episode of the 21st Century Work Life podcast, Ana Neves talks about how she's structured the conference Social Now, which covers how enterprise social network tools can help organisations in the day to day, ”rather than being an extra thing we have to do”.Your code as listener to get the early bird discount until 8 April is WCL21.The conference started in 2012, and has a fictitious company at its centre. The people in the company have challenges that will resonate with most employees in organisations, and the conference is structured around helping people in the company. Ana blogs as a new employee in this organisation, so that attendees have a background on the case study through the blog http://houseofcables.socialnow.org/ Many organisations have implemented these tools, but are not making the best use of them, being used at a superficial level. Pilar was under the impression that online tools are being used efficiently and deliberately at a team level, but this is not the case.  Ana talks about Social Collaboration Maturity Benchmark Report 2021, which shows that teams are still using online tools for videoconferencing and direct messages, but not for what the tools are best, which is working out in the open and documenting. The concepts of “working out loud” or “working in the narrative” are still not being adopted. Eg from I've done this document vs I'm working on this document. Work in progress can be useful to others in your team or the organisation, but of course to share this requires a lot of psychological safety. For example, if you're writing a report over a month, even the first sentences that you write down could already be of use to others. It's all about having the right culture, not just the right tools. Before the pandemic, the number of direct messages was smaller than during. Before the pandemic, the teams and people using these tools were already behind the concept of working out loud, whereas now they've adopted them because that's all they had. People are afraid of having their work in progress visible to all. At an organisational level, Ana has seen orgs try to compensate for the lack of being together in the physical space. However some of these ways of keeping employees “engaged” sometimes seem purposeless, and focused on the social. If this is not consistent with the organisation's culture, it jars with people and can be worse than doing nothing. These tools work best when they are used to listen to people and what they have to say, around topics that link back to business. What brings people together is their work, not just their social ties. Creating organisation-wide dialogues about things linked to work eg internal processes, new products is where these tools become valuable. For some employees, it's difficult to think about some of these spaces where we can have important conversations, not just “watercooler conversations”. The spaces are informal, but you can have good conversations. The key is to evidence that you have been listening, else there's no point. These tools work best asynchronously and are great for documenting thoughts and ideas that don't get implemented. For example, “we've made this decision, and if you want to look at other ideas that were generated, have a look at this conversation”. This also helps to see who was part of the conversation. It also helps to support the concept of “peer assist”, where people learn from others when they're kicking off a project. Asynchronous conversations stay as a record for others to 1) identify the people who can help them, and then have a conversation with them and 2) to access thoughts of people who have left the organisation, through their posts19.30 mins  Ana talks about the conference Social Now, on the different ways in which these tools can be weaved into how the day to day looks like in organisations. The focus this year is about enabling engaged and high performing teams, aligned with the organisation's values and culture.  The conference is centred around the fictitious company Cablinc, and Ana is blogging as the Head of Marketing & Internal Communications at Cablinc. Through the blog http://houseofcables.socialnow.org/ she covers the challenges a new employee might have when joining a company, especially around the issues of knowledge management and communication. Regarding the content of the conference itself, Ana talks about the focus of some of the sessions, including Pilar's. You can find the whole agenda here: https://socialnow.org/agenda/ Some examples, how to run great hybrid meetings, and how to draft some of the posts to facilitate conversation in the enterprise networks. The conference will kick off with a “liberating structure”, tapping into the knowledge of the attendees straight away. The attendees share common context from the beginning, with the case study providing a common language for all. And the names of the characters are memorable, so they become part of the conversation.  This is a good example of using an external (and fictitious!) focus to talk about our own issues, even something that we can use in your own teams. As well as advice from the consultants for the fictitious company, there are also live demos of some online tools, showing how they can be used in the day to day. This helps participants to get a sense of the impact these tools can have in the day to day. (And if participants feel like they're being sold to, they can raise their flags!) The blog http://houseofcables.socialnow.org covers the challenges of the access and retention of critical knowledge, employee engagement, internal communication and teamwork & collaboration. Presenters, vendors and participants of the conference have access to these fictitious (but based in reality!) challenges, and on what everything is anchored. There is also a session which follows the format of “peer assist”, whereby people in one part of the organisation can benefit from the experience of others in the organisation with similar experiences, or with experiences with transferable learning. The Social Now conference is taking place on 19 and 20 May 2022 in Lisbon. You can find all the details and book tickets here: https://socialnow.org/agenda/ And you can connect with Ana on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ananeves/ And Twitter: And if you speak Portuguese, you can listen to the podcast that Ana hosts, KMOL: https://kmol.pt/category/podcast/  

In today's episode, Pilar talks about meeting listeners, recording and tech problems xxx and I've shared a couple of things that are happening outside the English-speaking market. The other day I went for lunch with my friend Pinar, who has a podcast in Turkish and has recently received some great feedback from listeners, asking her when she was going to release more episodes. She felt guilty... This is a great motivator isn't it? And interesting that although we do podcast for ourselves, we do feel accountable to those people out there who enjoy the content. Her wine podcast in Turkish is  Juliette'in Kadehi.It's important to find something we enjoy during the process to drive us through creation. Pick topics you love, take this into account when you plan your show. You'll need these moments to drive you through the quieter times and keep you podcasting. Pilar met a listener of the 21st Century Work Life podcast the other day, and she recorded with someone who listens to the show, and referred to what she'd learned from it during the interview. It's great to be reminded that what we put out there will be of use to someone else, that there are people who have never heard what we have to say. 07.51 Adventures with the tech (of course!)During our first recording with a guest for Gastronostalgia, my guest stopped being able to hear me. So any time I wanted to ask a question, I had to do it through my co-host Tomas, as if he was an interpreter. It was not very enjoyable. By the way, it's interesting to know what kind of interviewer you are. I'm a conversationalist, that is, I aim to have a conversation with the guest; Tomas is more of an interviewer, with questions leading the piece. We've started bringing guests in to be able to reach more listeners, and freshen up the show a bit, and reward our listeners with a bit of variety - and different kinds of recipes! As podcaster, Pilar doesn't like using video during the recordings, but it's important for some guests, and co-hosts. Ask your guests, but also communicate your preference. It was also great to go to a studio where they're not using cameras when the client is dialling in - just like in the good ol' days, when this was being done via ISDN (not Zoom or Teams) and we didn't have to worry about the camera pointing at us while we tried to immerse ourselves in the audio medium. 19.04 mins A couple of news itemsThe Ondas awards for podcasts took place in Spain, and most of them come from the big producers like Podium, Spotify, Audible... however, there was also a special award for a podcaster that's been around for a while. Here's the list: https://www.premiosondas.com/premiados_ondas_podcast_2022.php?utm_source=podnews.net&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=podnews.net:2022-02-25 If you want to listen to some Spanish, Pilar and her friend Craig have a show that's now ended, called En clave de podcast.There's also a podcasting conference in Cairo on 5th March. Any questions and comments, do pop over to https://www.adventuresinpodcasting.com/contact/ or connect on Twitter @InpodcastingIf you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.

If you want to hear from me (Pilar) in between episodes, you can sign up to the Adventures in Podcasting newsletter here: https://www.adventuresinpodcasting.com/newsletter/I recently interviewed an "unsolicited guest" for the 21st Century Work Life podcast, who was also the founder of a product.  As a podcaster, you might want to check it out, it's a way of communicating via video, text and audio asynchronously. I said I wouldn't put the link in the show notes, but I've changed my mind, here it is. https://zipmessage.com/I've become quite choosy in who guests on the show, so I've even turned down (with a heavy heart), some high profile people in our industry.The more specific and narrow the topic is, the more I can avoid tangents, and the shorter I can keep the conversation. Tthe more it turns into a conversation rather than an interview. 08.40 minsAs a podcaster, I thought I could drive a conversation about anything, but that's not true. I recently realised how much it helps when I really understand a topic. I was caught short in an interview for the Next Stage Radicals podcast, when I was interviewing someone who amongst other things, coaches people at work who are autistic.This episode was the first of a "chain reaction' that will drive the Next Stage Radicals podcast from now on, so the person I interviewed will bring in a guest for the next episode, who will the host for the episode after that, etc.  I'll be preparing a short document on how to host the show, but this document is for non-podcasters, so I have to keep it really simple! I've suggested that every episode is run through Auphonic so that all the episodes have the same sound level. 17.30minsI've been using the free trial of Zencastr. Even if a guest has used the platform before, ask them to try to log in before the recording time, as one of my guests recently had problems logging on, maybe due to how the permissions were set up in Chrome.  Zencastr records each person's audio locally, and then they're uploaded to their servers. They also produce a transcript which, although they're not ready to be published, they can be useful for people writing the show notes, or for reference if you want to share the content with someone, who might just want to browse through it, rather than listen to the whole episode. Talking of transcripts, we've released the first one for 21st Century Work Life, for episode 293 and I'll see what the feedback is, as in, is it useful to anyone. With a limited budget and team, creating transcripts that make for a good reading experience is still costly, so I'm going to see how they go down. I'll be asking the audience for around 10 episodes.  23.47Yesterday I ran a Meetup for the London Podcasting Community group . It was a "build your own dilemma" session, which allows both beginners and seasoned podcasters to get something from it, as both people seeking advice and giving it.https://wwwIf you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.

 Just finished editing the bumper episode of Gastronostalgia which incorporates the 4 episodes from the month, plus the aperitif. The episode is  1.5hrs long (!) and it took me about 2.5hrs to put together, including editing of the aperitif.This show is hosted on Buzzsprout (affiliate link) and I have a max. of 3hours in my plan. But Gastronostalgia is hosted in Anchor, which is free, with no limits. So something to check out when you're choosing a media host: how much audio can you upload a month.   This month I released a short episode for Facilitation Stories letting listeners know that we are still around but are having to skip a couple of episodes because we're way behind. Let your listeners know, but don't stress if you have to miss an episode. We had some tech problems with the recording app for Gastronostalgia again, including Tomas' file not recording at all. I've decided that when possible, I'm recording a back up with zoom, but record locally at each of our ends, with Audacity or even just QuickTime on the Mac. I'm reading  Known, which talks about how to be known in your field through the production of online content. So far, all the examples are about people who've created short videos, blog posts, artwork on Instagram... The author talks about finding "your space". Before I forget, did you how I have a blog? The latest post is an attempt to link a well-known motivation theory to the new podcaster's priorities. Let me know what you think if you read it.And by the way, did you know I have a newsletter too?15.20Mins What's going on in the world of podcasting?Apple Podcasts now has a form for you to submit your show to be featured.If you're new to podcast ad here no attachment to traditional audio editing, and look at different ways of sharing your content, you might want to look at Descript. One bit of research worth paying attention to: in the Uk, 94% of listeners listen to podcasts alone, which is not surprising, but a good reminder of the nature of our relationship with the audience. It's a one-one experience, but you can also decide to remind the listener that there are others listening the content with them. It's a matter of choice for you, the podcaster.Finally just wanted to remind you of how invested our audience can become in us. I've been listening to Rachel Herron's How Do You Write podcast for a few years now. It reminds me of how important we can become to our audiences.20.49 mins Adventures in planning the show I'm having problems planning the next 8 or so episodes of 21st Century Work Life as I get to episode 300, so I just went down the list of contacts, and picked some I wanted to record again with, or some that I'd been planning to bring to the show for a while. For some reason, I can't get myself to record solo, on Visible Teamwork, something's stopping me... I rarely bring in people that have products to promote, buIf you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.

As I share my recent adventures in editing episodes, I hope there will be plenty for you to take away. In this episode, I talk about why I make  certain editing choices, the minimum you need to learn if you want to edit yourself, or the different ways in which you can work with an editor. There are even some real-time examples recorded as I went along. I've started a new format for the co-hosted episodes I do with Maya for the 21st Century Work Life podcast. https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/rethinking-digital-workspaceI'm also mindful that episodes can probably be shorter now. When we started, we were one of the few podcasts in the space, but now there's a lot more choice.Got a fab piece of feedback for the first time in a long while, saying how much they enjoy that show because it's like overhearing a conversation, that you want to know more about. It's important to know what reaction you want your listeners to have to the material. However, many people like myself still enjoy long-form content. Episode 159 of podcasts roundtable is one hour 43 minutes longhttps://www.podcastersroundtable.com/ads-for-everyone/They only release about once a month, so the audience, and producer can take it!We've reached 100 episodes for My Pocket Psych! If you are considering starting a show, you might want to listen to find out what Richard, a coach himself, has learned through the process of podcasting, and working with me.  https://www.worklifepsych.com/podcast/100/I mention two apps:https://www.notion.sohttps://trello.comI managed to get back to editing an episode of Gastro, I love listening back to those episodes, they remind me of the true spirit of podcasting. My main concern there is to remove the mannerisms from co-host and myself, arm, arm, and myself getting tangled sometimes not being able to find the right words. It's nice to leave mistakes in sometimes. 13.20mins(To see some screenshots go to https://www.adventuresinpodcasting.com/adventure-of-editing-a-podcast-episode/) I also enjoying putting sound effects in, something I can't do in any of my other shows, except this one, hence why you might hear random sound effects, I'm still playing and seeing what works.I mention Audacity, Auphonic and other resources. You can find the full list here:https://www.adventuresinpodcasting.com/resources/Should you hire an editor, I talk through the levels of help you can get with editing.Talking of editing, three phases:Editing the conversationBuilding the episodePolishing the sound to exportHow much should you edit yourself: Learn to silence bits, to cut bits, or to duck music, and check the specs for exporting or you something like Auphonic. The more prep you do, the less you have to edit, believe me I know this.You cannot remove sounds from under your voice.When you listen to other podcasts, pay attention to the editing. Sometimes you can tell when something has been stitched up, sometimes you can tell that there has been no editing, listen with a podcasters ears.BONUS info: The original recording was 35 mins, the final episode, with all the special effects is just under 33 minutes. It took me 1.5hrs to edit it.If you have If you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.

In this episode I cover a few updates and then cover some updates that all have to do with Recording. I hope you can learn something from them. I've signed up to Storyblocks to access sound effects.I've also added 21st Century Work Life and Management Café to the Virtual not Distant Facebook page. At the moment, only US-based listeners can listen through the mobile app. The 21st CWL podcast episodes now involve FOUR people in their creation .And final update: the Adventures in Podcasting website is coming along nicely. Take a look: https://www.adventuresinpodcasting.com/06.20 minutesIn this episode we'll cover the next stage of the episode creation process: recording. The most important thing is to find a room with good acoustics - and if you're recording with someone else, use headphones. Soft furnishings are great too, as well as carpeted floors. Make sure you're comfortable. I stand and face the microphone, but keep the camera off. Many guests prefer the camera on, even if we're not looking at each other. With some co-hosts I record with the camera off, but some prefer to have it on, even if it's just for presence, or to gesture to each other if we're going on for too long, or speaking too fast. For a list of tech to record with, check out the Resources page: https://www.adventuresinpodcasting.com/resources/15.25 minutes Recording with a guest Pick your guests carefully. As your show grows, you'll get lots of requests to be on your show - pick guests carefully, have fun with them. Recently I recorded with someone who had a relatively high profile, even though she wasn't 100% sure he was suitable. Turns out he wasn't... And then there was the time when myself and Lisette recorded with someone who would not share anything on the show... plus didn't know who he was recording with (as his follow up email of "when are we recording" showed...)In this episode of the Self Publishing Show, there's an example of when a guest almost takes over the show: https://selfpublishingformula.com/episode-295/24.50minsRecording with a co-hostI recently recorded episode 100 of My Pocket Psych, with co-host Richard!!!! Our roles are defined, and he lays down a really good plan of each episode, with just a few bullet points to guide us through. With other co-hosts, I prefer a more spontaneous approach, but then it's easy for us to take the episode in different directions. If you have any questions, let me know and feel free to get in touch! https://www.adventuresinpodcasting.com/contact/If you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.

Today I share what's involved in the podcast episode production process: from having an idea to appearing in listeners' ears. Facebook continues to play strong in audio, with an "audio hub", which includes not just podcasts, but also "rooms". This is one space to look out for, thinking about different ways in which us audio people can find new audiences. Much of this is still only relevant to the US, and to mobile apps, but worth keeping an eye out on.  Audio continues to be strong, and it looks like podcast listening is back up to pre-pandemic levels. Another recent piece that's important to us, not as much regarding information but because it raises some important questions: Spotify is breaking podcasts. Even though as indie podcasters, we're unlikely (never say never!) to be poached by Spotify, it's important to consider whether at any point we should go exclusive with only one platform, and when we should offer podcasts behind some kind of paywall. There is also a parallel with the indie author industry, where writers make a decision between being exclusive to Kindle Unlimited, and not publishing more widely, vs not being part of that membership programme, through which they could make some royalties. (By the way, you can find the ebook Plan Your Podcast on all online bookshops and libraries.)12.24 minsMy own adventuresThinking of restructuring 21st Century Work Life: there are loads more podcasts now and these episodes are loooong. Shorter episodes do better and My Pocket Psych is proof of this, as the new shorter episodes are getting more listens than our previous one.General shows about leadership also have content about online collaboration and leading remote teams. So I'm thinking about how to make the show work more for the business - I know, a bit late, isn't it, after more than 284 episodes! But I love doing the show so much that I've gone for enjoyment over ROI! Every now and then, it's worth reviewing your content strategy to change with the times - general context and podcasting.Adventures in Podcasting - I launched into the podcast, ignoring my plan which is around 2 years old!.Quite pleased because original plan didn't include all these industry updates - but the space was smaller when I made that plan. The plan was also to interview others, for the book, and so I'll start that around episode 20. I'll start with my friends!20.06 minsThe "helpful section": a quick overview of the podcast episode creation processIn a nutshell: Preparation- Decide on the topic/angle of the episode.- Prepare an outline or a script.- Schedule the recording.Content Creation- Record the audio.File Creation- Edit the audio. (Chop out any unwanted bits; move around sequences.)- Stitch the different audio parts together.- “Polish” the audio and make it podcast ready (I mention Auphonic).- Create mp3 file. Publishing and Consolidation- Publish your file through your podcast media host. (If you sign up for Buzzsprout, use this link to support this show. Thanks!)- Create show nIf you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.

Even though I've been trying to keep these episodes short, the last episode was 30 minutes long. I'd like to keep them short as a challenge for myself, and also, because there are so many shows out there that you might want to check out quite a few!Today I'll talk through my adventures, with reference to 3 pieces of news:- Did you know that  YouTube is hiring its first executive focused only on podcasts?https://www.slashgear.com/youtube-podcast-plans-could-muddle-things-over-at-google-again-06694220/I've been posting episodes of 21st Century Work Life on YouTube, with no joy, but many people do listen to audio only podcasts there. Now that YouTube is  going to be opening up that space it's worth considering it as a destination. Are podcasts becoming a commodity, the same way as sometimes we search for information, find a blog post, read it and never come back to it. The same might be happening with podcasts. Something to bear in mind. And audio search is growing, so worth bearing that in mind when you create your episodes. For example, I've been giving a clear headline summary at the beginning of each episode of 21st CWL for that reason. - Anchor has introduced polls and listener questions, so that they show up in Spotify. https://www.theanchorshow.com/spotify-adds-polls/This is great because it's difficult to get listeners to reach out, so it's great if they can do it straight from the app. I'm trying this for our new show, Gastronostalgia, in Spanish, so I'll keep you posted. - Descript has added loads of new sound editing features, becoming a really strong contender in the editing spacehttps://www.descript.com/blog/article/new-in-descript-studio-sound-overdub-model-pro-audio-effects-and-moreI don't use it myself, but from what I understand you can edit in there in the normal way, by tweaking the sound waves, or you can edit like in a text document, by editing the transcript it generates. Remember that if you're looking for a media host and you decide to go with Buzzsprout, you can support Adventures in Podcasting by using this affiliate link. My personal updatesWe've published the first couple episodes of Gastronostalgia and would you believe it, I still forgot to carry out some of the steps, so I'll be putting together a checklist for launching a show. Luckily I have my co-host Tomás who looks after show notes, social media and lots of other stuff, so it's a joy to only look after the audio. We've recorded the first eight episodes and we'll be releasing one a week. We need to re-record the intro and outro for sound quality, but I'm going to leave the first 4 episodes as they are, or else we'll never get the show off the ground properly. Not many people listen at the beginning anyway, so it's the time to experiment to get things right. If you need help with your podcast, maybe I can help you, especially if you're a coach, trainer or facilitator. If you're thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host - click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.

For Market Researchers being offered a long-term WFH option: should you? Many Market Research & Insights professionals are being offered the work from home or hybrid work from home/in office scenarios as long term options. What's the career-oriented market researcher to do? Would choosing a 100% work from home scenario impact your career? Your visibility with upper management? What tips and tactics can you use to make sure that the choice you make will be right for you both personally and professionally? Check out the current episode of Conversations for Research Rockstars with special guest Maya Middlemiss, for some practical tips that market researchers can use, whether they choose to work from home fulltime or parttime. Check out her related information: https://healthyhappyhomeworking.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-dreading-being-summoned-back-office-maya-middlemiss/ About Our Guest: Maya Middlemiss is a freelance writer and consultant, specializing in future-of-work and collaboration themes. Passionate about inclusivity in location-independence and the social impact of technology, she is the creator of the Healthy Happy Homeworking community and book series, and the Successfully Securing Your Remote Job training programme. Maya is an associate with Virtual Not Distant (and the 21st Century Work-Life podcast) in London, a regular contributor to a range of collaboration technology publications and operates her Estonian-based e-business as a British immigrant in Spain. Prior to freelancing full time, Maya created and led a fully remote international research fieldwork team, from 2000-2017, managing recruitment and logistics for thousands of qualitative research and UX projects.   Conversations for Research Rockstars is produced by Research Rockstar Training & Staffing. Our 25+ Market Research eLearning classes are offered in both real-time and on-demand formats, and include options to earn Insights Association Certificates. Our Rent-a-Researcher staffing service places qualified, fully-vetted market research experts, covering temporary needs due to project and resource fluctuations. ***We believe it: Inside every market researcher, is a Research Rockstar!*** Hope you enjoy this episode of Conversations for Research Rockstars. http://www.researchrockstar.com/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ResearchRockstarTraining Twitter - https://twitter.com/ResearchRocks LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/2038750 877-Rocks10 ext 703 for Support, 701 for Sales Info@ResearchRockstar.com

For many years, Pilar Orti  has run her voiceover career in parallel to all her other ventures. She ran a small theatre company for ten years, and then became a trainer, facilitator and consultant. Her voiceover credits include the Spanish voice of the WiiFit and GoJetters' Xuli. She's now also a podcast host, having been hosting the 21st Century Work Life podcast for Virtual not Distant for five years, and co-hosting My Pocket Psych and Facilitation Stories (IAF England and Wales). Pilar's now looking into how in-house podcasting can help companies create a sense of community amongst their dispersed employees.  Find out more: https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/ and http://www.adventuresinpodcasting.com/   Katelyn Dawn, as well as being a singer-songwriter who has been performing and recording her own songs since 2004, also has a background in digital media design  including web & graphic design and film and has been a freelance designer for years. Katelyn decided to combine all her interests and dive into a career in voiceover in 2019. She built her recording studio in 2019 and sought out training at Edge Studio who are industry leaders in voiceover training. With over 16 years of experience recording and editing vocals, Katelyn has thousands of hours at the microphone singing and voice acting. Katelyn is interested in narrating eLearning because it is a unique area of voiceover where one can actively help people learn. Website: https://www.katelyndawnvo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katelyn-dawn-%F0%9F%8E%99-voice-over-525b521ab/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katelyndawnvo/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/katelyndawnvo Twitter: https://twitter.com/katelyndawnvo Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-INNeAAS5gGnJkAh4JTglw Music: https://www.katelyndawnmusic.com/   Episode Links: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1075547018759345 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5132380/ https://www.world-voices.org/ https://theelearningcoach.com/elearning_design/the-art-of-writing-great-voice-over-scripts/ https://www.voicecrafters.com/blog/how-to-format-a-script-for-a-voice-over/ https://womentalkingaboutlearning.com/2021/02/23/the-passion-one/ ========================================================= You can contact Women Talking About Learning through our website, womentalkingaboutlearning.com We're on Twitter @WTAL_Podcast You can buy us a coffee to support Women Talking About Learning via Ko-Fi. Or you can email us via hello@llarn.com.

In today's episode, Pilar shares what she learned from the 21st Century Work Life series on Connection and Disconnection in Remote Teams.  (Episodes WLP221, WLP223, WLP225, WLP228, WLP231, WLP233, WLP235 - summary here: https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/reflection-connection-disconnection ) This episode is based on the article written for HRZone back in May 2020: Five Steps to Preventing Isolation and Disconnection in Your Remote Team The five steps for managers looking to reduce the risk of isolation in remote teams are:   1. Understand what loneliness is, what is causing it and how it manifests itself in individuals  2. Unpick the effects it's having on team members and their work 3. Design communication practices and role-model behaviours that nurture a sense of belonging in different ways 4. Recognise that it is part of an organisation’s duty of care to mitigate the risk of loneliness and address it as part of the overall wellbeing strategy 5. Equip individuals with the tools and skills to help them understand what makes them feel connected to others, and how to proactively find that connection You can download our free guide on Leading through Visible Teamwork by signing up to our newsletter: https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/newsletter If you are looking for more inspiration on leading remote teams and online collaboration, check out Virtual not Distant's flagship podcast 21st Century Work Life.

Hello and welcome to episode 262 of the 21st Century Work Life podcast, brought to you by Virtual Not Distant in London. Before we dive in the interview a quick reminder about our Podcasting for Connection service - podcasting is a great asynchronous tool that can help maintain a sense of belonging.  04.29 Chris Coladonato Chris Coladonato works in learning and development at a large insurance enterprise, and is a great advocate for remote work. She is very active on social media and we’ve long enjoyed the insightful content she shares and discusses, from virtual commutes to networking and connection. 17.00 Teamwork and staying connected 35.45 External social media Connect with Chris on LinkedIn, Twitter and her blog. Speaking of LinkedIn, we had a great conversation over on our own page, about getting started with working remotely… And if you love podcasting as much as we do, you’ll want to follow Adventures in Podcasting, for news about a new book from Pilar coming soon.  

In this very timely episode, Pilar Orti, an expert in how to transition teams to remote or distributed working, talks about the challenges and opportunities presented to us by the explosion of remote/home working due to COVID.   She shares her insight and advice on how we can best help team members to feel connected and engaged to each other and their organisation, think about collaboration in other ways rather than just back to back meetings on Zoom and offers her views on the future of remote working.  She challenges us to think creatively about the needs of individuals and the myriad of options that will be available to us for the future.  About Pilar:Pilar's journey in leadership training and team development started at the beginning of the century. Having worked as a theatre practitioner and director of an independent theatre company, she discovered that many of the exercises used to build theatre ensembles were perfect for helping teams and managers reflect on their current practices and identify new ways of working together. Short academic and vocational courses, conversations with people in the field and reading many, many books gave her additional knowledge to the one she had gained first hand leading teams and cohorts. Pilar set up Virtual not Distant in 2016, in order to facilitate the journey for managers, teams and organisations towards “office optional”. She has worked with small teams helping them set up their online ecosystems, delivered training both online and off, and piloted new ways of working. Pilar is the host of the podcast “21st Century Work Life”, and co-host of “My Pocket Psych”. She is an Affiliate Member of the CIPD, a member of the International Association of Facilitators, and alumnus of London's Imperial College. She is also the voice of pilot Xuli in the BBC's GoJetters.  To contact Pilar: http://www.virtualnotdistant.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pilarorti/Twitter: @PilarOrtiJoin the Love to Lead Community at Blue Bottle Coaching: https://bluebottlecoaching.vipmembervault.com/products/courses/view/1057468

Welcome back to the Teammate Apart Podcast. This week’s special guest is Pilar Orti. Pilar is a well-known part of the remote work landscape and one of the masters of it. She is the director of Virtual, not Distant, a consultancy that helps teams adapt to new ways of working through webinars, management coaching, and direct work with your team to establish processes and modify behaviors to foster a happier and healthier work life.She is also the host of the popular 21st Century Work Life podcast where she interviews the biggest and best names in remote work.Here to talk about the mindset shifts required to be successful in remote work, “visible teamwork” being seen when working apart, the importance of community for virtual workers and so much more, please join me in welcoming to the show, our guest, Pilar Orti. Pilar OrtiEmotional intelligence expert and founder of …https://www.virtualnotdistant.com21st Century Worklife Podcast: https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcastsAbout Pilar OrtiI help organizations and teams make the transition from being in the office together all the time to a more "office optional" approach. (Or "smarter working", or "agile working", even "flexible working"...)I deliver online and face-face workshops, coach managers and leaders and facilitate the transition from collocated to flexible/remote through collaborative consultancy.To find out more about how I view the world of work, check out www.virtualnotdistant.com and listen to the podcasts: "21st Century Work Life" and "Management Café."Podcasts:Management Café - all episodes touch on virtual aspects, and currently we're repurposing Oh No My Team's Gone Remote segments21st Century Work Life - check out episode 227 segment on Visible Teamworkhttps://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/technostress-and-visible-teamworkFacilitation Stories - I co-host this podcast designed for community buildingI'm a facilitator and trainer (and a consultant using co-creation as a process) helping teams and organizations adopt online collaboration practices - and improving how they work together in the process! I run training sessions on leading remote teams and facilitate team-away days.The conversation about "remote work" keeps expanding and getting deeper and deeper...===

We're re-purposing the segments Oh No My Team's Gone Remote, for managers and leaders of remote teams, from our flagship podcast 21st Century Work Life. Find us over at virtualnotdistant.com

We're re-purposing the segments Oh No My Team's Gone Remote, for managers and leaders of remote teams, from our flagship podcast 21st Century Work Life. Find us over at virtualnotdistant.com

We're re-purposing the segments Oh No My Team's Gone Remote, for managers and leaders of remote teams, from our flagship podcast 21st Century Work Life. Find us over at virtualnotdistant.com

We're re-purposing the segments Oh No My Team's Gone Remote, for managers and leaders of remote teams, from our flagship podcast 21st Century Work Life. Find us over at virtualnotdistant.com

We're re-purposing the segments Oh No My Team's Gone Remote, for managers and leaders of remote teams, from our flagship podcast 21st Century Work Life. Find us over at virtualnotdistant.com

En este episodio conversamos con Pilar Ortí, directora de Virtual not Distant, firma de servicios profesionales dedicada a ayudar a los equipos de las empresas a “adaptarse a una nueva forma de trabajar donde no necesitamos estar juntos en una oficina todos los días para hacer un gran trabajo en equipo". Hablamos con ella de un tema de la máxima actualidad: los desafíos a los que se enfrentan las numerosas personas que, como consecuencia de la pandemia de covid-19, se han convertido en teletrabajadoras de la noche a la mañana sin estar preparadas para ello. En la entrevista, Pilar nos da distintos consejos para conseguir adaptarnos rápido a este nuevo escenario. Además, nos explica algunas cosas que podemos hacer si lideramos un equipo que se encuentra en estas circunstancias, y también nos da algunas ideas de cómo pueden ayudar los profesionales de RRHH a sus organizaciones a superar este reto. Pilar está basada en Londres, es anfitriona de los podcasts “21st Century Work Life” y “Management Café”, que desde aquí os recomendamos, y también es autora de Online Meetings that Matter y Thinking Remote.

We're re-purposing the segments Oh No My Team's Gone Remote, for managers and leaders of remote teams, from our flagship podcast 21st Century Work Life. Find us over at virtualnotdistant.com

We're re-purposing the segments Oh No My Team's Gone Remote, for managers and leaders of remote teams, from our flagship podcast 21st Century Work Life. Find us over at virtualnotdistant.com

This is Virtual Not Distant's third podcast episode in our special series with ShieldGEO, and you can catch the first and second one if you missed them (and subscribe to them in our main feed wherever you get your podcast).   We’re thrilled with the feedback received on this series from our listeners, including from many of our previous guests (and Pilar’s mum :-) ). We love the way it’s helping us think about the way podcasts themselves build connection, so we’ll return to that theme very soon. But today, our guest host Bree Caggiati explores what happens when we find ourselves disconnected, from the people we work with and the work we’re doing? Dr Julianne Hold-Lunstad reminded us that humans have evolved to be social animals, and that kind of collectiveness has helped us survive - so loneliness is a similar biological drive to hunger or pain, we crave its resolution.  But we don’t always follow our best biological imperatives, and Brian Rhea talks about how easy it is as an introvert to avoid meetings and encounters when inconvenient, and therefore to avoid investing in the networks that can support you when you really need it. And Marcus Wermuth reminds us that we all need different levels of interaction with others anyway, especially when it competes head to head with focused working time. Collaboration promotes creativity, Julianne points out, so it’s worth all of us being aware of its value in terms of our output as well as our mood and well-being. And Richard MacKinnon agrees, that we should not see social contact as subtracting from productivity in a zero-sum game - instead, it’s an important investment in the success and performance of the team as a whole. He reminds us that feelings of loneliness have very little to do with actually being alone - instead it’s all about the perceptions of the quality of relationships and the social connections we have, and it has a direct impact on the engagement of the whole team. ShieldGEO’s Tim Burgess agrees, and has that employee engagement builds commitment which helps overcome the inevitable bad days and bumps in the road that we all experience at work. And when you work from home in particular, bad days and bad moods can do more extended psychological damage, with the absence of the decompression buffer zone a commute represents. Emotional contagion can impact on your household and community too, spreading ripples outward in unexpected directions. Julianne’s research has added to the growing evidence that our relationships influence our emotional well-being, but also affect our physical health - a connection which is often poorly recognised and understood. More socially connected people actually live longer, on average, and loneliness has similar mortality risk factors to obesity and air pollution. ONS data suggests that 2.4m UK adults suffer from chronic loneliness, so we need to deal with this on a societal level, not least as it has measurable economic costs. So, the next episode in this series (21st Century Work Life episode 227, releasing on 19th March 2020), will start exploring some of the remedies and strategies to try and fix this problem, which goes way beyond the remote work sphere. But we’d love to know what you think about these vital issues, and anything else. Please contact us, or you can tweet Virtual Not Distant, or Pilar and Maya directly, with any of your thoughts and ideas.

Welcome to episode 218 of the 21st Century Work Life podcast, which is actually a bonus episode, made up of my conversation with Laila von Alvensleben from Mural. mural.co https://twitter.com/lailavona LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lailavon/ https://lailavon.com/ If you're a regular listener, you will know that the last batch of guest episodes have focused on a topic, with contributions from different guests. And the way in which I have been working on this has been by recording full interviews with them, and then finding the bits that went together best. What this has meant is that I've got some longer pieces with some guests that I'd quite like to share with you. And what better way to do this than at the beginning of the year, while we wait for the first episode on our schedule to be released on 16th January 2020. So remember that this show is brought to you by Virtual not Distant, a London-based company helping managers and their teams transition to an office-optional approach, and my name is Pilar Orti, and I'm the Director. You can find everything we do over at virtualnodistant.com and you're welcome to get in touch with me on Twitter too @PilarOrti

Welcome to episode 217 of the 21st Century Work Life podcast, which is actually a bonus episode, made up of my conversation with Marcus Wermuth from Buffer. Find out more about him over at www.marcuswermuth.com and follow him on Twitter https://twitter.com/mwermuth If you're a regular listener, you will know that the last batch of guest episodes have focused on a topic, with contributions from different guests. And the way in which I have been working on this has been by recording full interviews with them, and then finding the bits that went together best. What this has meant is that I've got some longer pieces with some guests that I'd quite like to share with you. And what better way to do this than at the beginning of the year, while we wait for the first episode on our schedule to be released on 16th January 2020. So remember that this show is brought to you by Virtual not Distant, a London-based company helping managers and their teams transition to an office-optional approach, and my name is Pilar Orti, and I'm the Director. You can find everything we do over at virtualnodistant.com and you're welcome to get in touch with me on Twitter too @PilarOrti Let's go into the conversation, I hope you enjoy it.

Brought to you by Virtual Not Distant Looking back at 2019, it’s been a busy year - we’ve a lot to look forward to in 2020, but first it’s time to reflect on a transformational time for remote working. We discuss research, infrastructure, technology and wellbeing issues and how they have shifted through the year - while we also look ahead at what's to come. For full shownotes please see https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/remote-now-what, where highlights include: 22.46 interview with Rowena Hennigan, remote work advocate. https://www.rowenahennigan.com/ 22.45 tech round-up - what a lot of changes we have seen, in the tools available for remote working and 59.15 loneliness and mental health in remote - an issue we'll surely hear more about in future. We have lots more to bring you in 2020, including a new podcast mini-series with a brand-new collaborator to share with you. We also want to answer YOUR big questions about work/remote work in 2020, so please contact us. Or you can tweet Virtual Not Distant, or Pilar and Maya directly, with any of your thoughts and ideas And meanwhile, we wish you a very happy end of year break however you are celebrating, and every good wish for 2020 - from Pilar, Maya and Ross at the 21st Century Work Life podcast.

We have two interesting guests for you to meet today, and our first conversation is an excellent example of some of the things you might not obviously know about people when you work with them remotely, as we delve into some of the non-work things which make our associates into whole people. But we do talk about creativity, 21st century careers, and content marketing too and the way everything is evolving. We’re making lots of changes to our content at Virtual Not Distant - have you checked out the website lately?  Plenty of new things to see, we would love to hear what you think about all of it, and changes in the podcast too... including our new section: 03.49 What’s going on! This will be a regular round-up of news, events and issues in the remote space. Right now: Pilar is discovering the joys of unplugging, and going properly ‘out of office’ - which you still need to do in remote. Just because you can stay in touch constantly, it doesn’t mean you have to, and stepping out of the conversation for a while brings many benefits. This article from the BBC in July made the headlines for not having an office… and it turned out to be our friends from Automattic (see episode 136). They’ve been around since 2005, but for the Beeb ‘Wake Up to Money’ programme this was big news! Good to see the mainstream catching up... A great conversation on LinkedIn recently (in Italian, sorry!) spoke up for the potential of collaborative creativity in remote, delving into the difference between individual and group creativity in an interesting way - and they really understand the name of our organisation, which was highly gratifying. More on sychronous/asynchronous collaboration, something we talk about a lot - here’s a thoughtful piece on creative ideation in remote, and another great take on this from Buffer - lots to think about, but the main thing is that it’s possible Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter - for a regularly monthly shot of inspiration and ideas And do send us YOUR ideas, about what’s going on in remote work!   16.56 21st Century Work Life - with Luis Magalhaes It doesn’t get much more ‘21st Century’ than Luis Magalhaes’ CV, where his portfolio of roles includes marketing, podcasting, dentistry and gaming… His main activity for the past couple of years though is being Director of Marketing and Editor In Chief at DistantJob. The company promotes remote work as a solution for companies who want to scale and grow, and they specialise in recruitment from a global marketplace. For businesses it means hiring the best person wherever they are located, and DistantJob deals with all the contractual and logistics complications which may arise from hiring outside of their own location and jurisdiction. Content marketing helps DistantJob target their sweet spot of medium-sized businesses - ready to hire, but not to open international branches - and they test and iterate and keep doing more of the things that work. They develop their content strategy collectively and transparently as a team, and constantly review their own practice and thinking, based on the people they talk to. Everything they learn, and reflects their values and culture in hiring - hiring for themselves and their clients. DistantJob create 3 pieces of quality original content each week, two articles and a podcast, and it works. Inbound marketing is the ‘karma based economy’: provide valuable information, and people will come to you when they need what you’ve got to offer.  Luis rarely practices dentistry these days, but always loved the intersection of science, medicine and diagnostics - and his evident passion for helping people clearly has parallels here. He also enjoys the synergy of using his hands and brain together, to make things better. Helping people find the best job of their lives has more in common than we might have thought, with fixing their toothache. Luis also loves videogames, and attributes much to that passion, from writing and creativity, to co-ordination, even the spatial awareness needed for dentistry. He podcasts and writes about gaming from time to time, to try and offset the bad rap they get in popular discourse. He writes fantasy fiction too (and is a best seller in Portuguese, while also releasing his new novel The Silvery Moon this summer in English).  Amazing insights were generated in this conversation with Luis, and reflected and expanded upon by Pilar, about the impact of language and bilingualism on creativity. We should bear in mind the impact of this in our global teams, and remember that real time video might not always be ‘the best’ - remember Allon Shevat’s comments in our last episode. Check out Luis’ podcast at Distant Job (on which both Pilar and Maya have guested), and check out their blog too. Luis tweets as well. And talking of content and creation, here’s further insight about SEO and how content gets found in the first place...   59.01 Jeremiah Smith founder and CEO of SimpleTiger A specialist in SEO for software-as-a-service companies, Jeremiah has seen 2 decades of trends in search engine optimisation, which is now being transformed by more intelligence: AI is superceding traditional algorithms, and handling content very differently. This trend will deepen, and search will get ever more prescriptive, as we provide constant feedback on its success.  And Jeremiah reminds us that search does not just mean Google - Amazon is one of the world’s biggest search engines, for example, just specialised in products. Creating authentic and high quality content which creates a good user experience throughout the customer journey, should continue to be rewarded by search traffic - whether you’re an SME startup or a Fortune 500 company. Keep up with Jeremiah on Twitter for further thoughts. --- What do you think about quality content and conversation in remote work? Do you have a view you’d like to share, on this or any aspect of 21st century work life? We now have a podcast guest application form, and really welcome your ideas and contributions for the show

Welcome to episode 202 of the 21st Century Work Life podcast from Virtual Not Distant, where today we’re revisiting the roles of tech - particularly chat-based platforms - in teams, and the relationship between tech and strategy… Interestingly much of which also applies nowadays within organisations we don’t think of as ‘remote’, and depends a great deal on how we agree to use the tools at our disposal (including our expectations regarding speed of reply) Don’t forget to come and say hello to us on Twitter, @VirtualTeamW0rk and @PilarOrti… we love to talk to our listeners, and we talk about all sorts of interesting things, like a new feature in MSTeams which Pilar had a strong reaction to… Maybe there are some situations where text is better than a call, even when it’s urgent? Do join in and tell us what you think.  And please bear with us as our website is being updated, we’re bringing you a refreshed look and feel and some great new content - in particular look out for more about our self-paced learning programme to accompany the Thinking Remote book, if you’re serious about improving your remote leadership practice. 21st Century Work Life: Chris Slemp, Customer Success Manager at Microsoft Today’s guest Chris actually introduced us to one of our favourite phrases, ‘Office-Optional’, so it was great to talk to him for the third time on our podcast.  Moving from a small consultancy to Microsoft gave Chris and his wife a chance to relocate to Scotland, and his work involves helping people to be more productive with the tools they already own. To support customers they use a blend of face to face visits but also online, and of course they use Microsoft Teams. Clients include organisations like police forces and local councils and other workplaces we might not think of as ‘remote’, but actually involve people in many locations, including many non-office situations, and reminding us that it’s not only knowledge workers who can benefit from these tools. The work is not location-dependent, so the communication should not be. From a customer support point of view, it’s essential to understand and relate to roles outside of the IT dept, even if that’s the first point of contact. Technology needs to be a partner, not a supplier, to realise its potential these days, and help businesses solve their problems effectively. We should be driven by the need, not by the tech. Even within their own team they had to evolve the way they used their own tools effectively, and improving meant an ongoing blend of coaching individuals and moderating and managing the conversation itself. Perhaps the problem is that the tools now look and feel so similar to those we use in our personal lives, where we’re used to pleasing ourselves what we do with them, and we really need a team agreement or a ‘collaboration constitution’ to nail down the way we’re going to do things. In a flattened organisation, tools enable visibility which enhances influence. Different communications styles may be advantaged by different modes, and we need to learn new ways of engaging effectively. TL;DR - the person posting the right gif might get more engagement than the one with the long insightful text. Teams need different kinds of social glue, and the asynchronous space is still overly text-heavy, to its detriment. MSTeams is bringing functionality to record and stream voice calls and meetings, which creates automatic transcripts and even translations - AI is making this doable with increasing accuracy, and it means that audio becomes searchable on a par with text. The future role of AI is a fascinating area, and at Microsoft they are talking deeply about the ethics as well as the enablement it can bring. Intentionality solves a lot of problems, as machine learning frees up a lot of time from administrative tasks, and might help us avoid repeating the mistakes already made in social media. But what about areas like sentiment analysis? Yammer is looking into this functionality, as well as a bot to recognise and respond to FAQs, for everyone who would rather ask than search. Have a look at Chris’ site http://whichtoolwhen.com/ for more insight, into this and other ongoingly essentials questions. And keep up with Chris on Twitter to join the conversation.   48.08 Tools: Otter.ai Maya and Pilar talk about text into speech, using this AI-driven tool, which also works well with multiple voices too.   Instead of detailed notes on this segment, here’s the full transcript of our conversation instead, courtesy of Otter! And a brief after-word: We did some research about the privacy angles of using Otter and similar apps… Here’s one take on it from Zdnet which was unsurprising, and the main thing is that you need to read the small print and make your own mind up, whether use of any given tool is inline with your objectives and stated policies as an organisation. This does also remind us why many organisations are choosing to keep their entire digital workspace within a single ecosystem.  This is an important issue to which we shall doubtless return. 54:00 Wellbeing: Transitioning to remote as a journey of discovery At Virtual Not Distant we see this transition as an opportunity to dissect and discuss our teamwork, the ways we interact and work together - has this evolved unconsciously, or is this what we want to be doing? Have we got the courage to really examine this, and make bigger changes if we need to? This is much bigger than which tool we use and how, and we should be scrutinising this on a regular basis, not just when things go wrong. What do we each value about each aspect of our work?  It’s easy to assume others think like we do, and for both physical and digital workspaces to reflect the preferences of a minority. You can’t really enter into this discussion without some self reflection on what helps YOU do your own best work. If you are very specific and clear about what you do and don’t like, what you value and enjoy about your work, then you can think about how best to replicate this online. Transitioning to remote is a chance to reassess where we want to invest our energies and attention, as individuals and as a team.

Today we’re going global! With two great guests, collaborating remotely between the Netherlands and New York. Don’t forget to check out everything we do, over at the Virtual Not Distant website (including our new podcast guest submission form, and new formats in which Thinking Remote is available). Thank you for all the feedback on our milestone celebration episode all about celebrations! Shout-out to Jeremy and everyone in our community who commented and chatted and twittered about this one, we are so glad that this topic resonated (and we have a related blog post on celebrations ready for you now too). 06.30 21st Century Work-life - Theresa Sigillito Hollema and Surinder Kahai Theresa is the Director of Interact Global, a Netherlands-based consultancy supporting multicultural virtual teams and the organisations they belong to, and no stranger to the 21st Century Work-Life podcast.  Surinder is a Professor at the Binghamton University, in upstate New York. They met through online discovery, Theresa was drawn to Surinder’s academic work on remote team leadership, and contacted him to propose writing together.  In his turn he was keen to see more non-academic dissemination of the growing body of research on virtual teams, and a lasting collaboration was born. The interview explores in detail their approach and the rhythms of communication that they developed, and how they learned about each other and their motivations and interests and built the shared purpose and trust needed to write together. They reflect on different styles of leadership and motivation they have both observed in the workplace, and which personal qualities are demanded of a good leader for virtual teams.  Theresa and Surinder agree that a transformational style of leadership combined with a genuine care and regard for the other yields the best balance for success, but that this is definitely more difficult to do at a distance. However, distance can be used to advantage to overlook superficial differences (such as appearance and race, as well as behaviours which can lead to conflicts), to focus on the vision for the work and what you truly have in common.  It’s surely time we started to talk more about the advantages which come from not being together, advantages for the team and the work, not just the preferences of the individuals involved.  But leaders can struggle to understand and care, especially on globally distributed teams. Caring from a distance is harder, but it must be role modelled by the leader. As Surinder says, "I'm a key believer in relationships as productivity".   33.57 Tools: everytimezone.com There are many websites which help us work out timezones, but Every Timezone is a nice visual way of seeing different timezones in relation to each other on a map and slider, so that you can really picture them clearly in terms of being ahead or behind each other. The paid version is great for remote teams particularly as you can put your team members into their timezones - and don’t have to worry about what the zone is called or whether or not they’re on daylight saving, you just know that ‘Alex Time’ is 2 hours ahead, or whatever. A nice touch, particularly if you are dispersed in different parts of the world, and you can update your location when travelling - where is Alex time this week? Ah yes, Alex Time is presently 4 hours offset. This version has meeting scheduling tools as well, letting you pick and choose who should be in your meeting and invite them - assuming its at a good time for them of course.   38.32 Wellbeing - Timezone stress Do we overlook the cognitive load, of taking account of timezones in our virtual teams? Recent research from TinyPulse has examined this, and found that it does cause some stress. But a lot seems to depend on whether you have a ‘main’ timezone, relating to a headquarters or centre - which does suggest some kind of a hybrid set-up, in which those who are more than 3 hours away from that can indeed feel distant emotionally from their teammates.  And they might end up having to work hours which they find antisocial, indeed they can end up working extra hours to accommodate meetings and things which are outside of their typical day, - as Human Made found in recent research, even the stress of scheduling can make things harder on the outliers in particular.  A day is only 24 hours long, so surely no-one should have to attend a meeting any more antisocial than 8am or 8pm, for example? It’s unsurprising that results from the TinyPulse research suggest that a truly distributed team with no central zone to organise around leads to better relationships for everyone, and remember that people can choose to work in any segment of their own local day.  Your team could also be over-reliant on synchronous communication anyway - remember what we learned from Marcus Wermuth in episode 195 for inspiration here. But it’s vital not to cut off the flow of information from anybody, wherever they are located. Maybe we need to take a better look at what flexibility really can mean, and what each of us needs in order to do our best work in our best way.  What do YOU need? Tell us, via our contact form or tweet @Virtualteamw0rk.

We have reached episode 200! We are celebrating… and we invite you to celebrate with us. Many of our listeners and guests responded to our call for contributions for this episode, and it’s wonderful to reflect the diversity of teams and people working in various ways virtually and remotely and flexibly, as expressed in the variety of ways we celebrate together. Because 21st Century Work Life is about choice and the way you want to do things. Maya and Pilar may have celebrated this milestone by connecting with listeners and how they celebrate. Sometimes it’s the smallest things - like the way emojis can convey so much emotion, in so few pixels.  (And if you’d like to communicate more with fewer words, send us your favourite emoji as a celebration of this episode!) Larger teams might create more formal ways of using their regular communications channels to celebrate in a slightly more structured way, such as Morgan Legge (interviewed in Episode 146) at Convert.com who sent us a screenshot of their Slack, where they have created channels for #humblebrag #gratitude and so on - things that are outside of the everyday work but weave the recognition and acknowledgement of each other throughout the working day. Gant Laborde (Episode 174) at Infinite Red have a #kudos channel for similar effect, and also have internal ‘ask me anything’ sessions to wrap up successful projects - which often take on a celebratory tone. Tim Burgess from ShieldGeo share that they go further and prompt all team members to contribute to a weekly round-up of shout-outs for colleagues - a lovely way to encourage people to reflect on who has helped them and how, and all interesting uses of asynchronous communications from all these teams: you don’t need to be in a special meeting or conversation, to recognise a job well done. When new people join a team that is also a cause for celebration, and Marcus Wermuth from Buffer (Episodes 188, 195 and more to come!) shared how they have a GIF party in their Slack to welcome new arrivals (because if an emoji speaks a thousand words, how about one that moves..?) Marcus also shared he likes to celebrate work things with his wife, do something out of the routine in the working week, it doesn’t have to be with his team to be a celebration. Jamon Holgrem ( Episode 183) from Infinite Red does something similar, ‘pelting’ new hires with GIFs in a special channel, while at Buffer they use an app called thread.com for calling out more business-related achievements for specific recognition and attention. Employees who are around long term can be acknowledged in other ways: 17.57 Teresa Douglas (Episode 193) from Kaplan (author of Secrets of the Online Workforce) On their 10 year anniversary with the company they celebrate with a professional caricature portrait of their team-mate, reflecting aspects of their interests and personality in a unique way - Teresa got hers last year. They also celebrate in more ad-hoc ways, including ‘secret’ team happy hours over video where all of the Canadian team got together to celebrate with one another, on the day that all their US colleagues were enjoying Memorial Day - being a multicultural team means you can enjoy each other’s local holidays in creative ways. Meetings are often the focus of team celebration of course Alison Jones (Episode 173) of practical inspiration reminded us to look beyond the work in hand, and they have a quarterly team meeting in which they ask each person to reflect on their high spots for sharing and validation - bringing a great positive energy into the meeting from the opening. (Talking of books - Maya and Pilar’s book Thinking Remote: Inspiration for Leaders of Distributed Teams is now available in audiobook. Message us for your FREE copy before the 1st July 2019, so you can celebrate with us!) 22.09 Vladimir Smolyakov Vivify Ideas As an Agile company Vivify Ideas use their cyclical retrospectives to present their projects to the wider organisation, in the presence of refreshments and a celebratory atmosphere which also helps share information within the larger group They also celebrate personal achievements and accomplishments, which is really motivating, to feel that a team of 100 people is behind you and encouraging your work. 25.00 Mark Kilby, Agile coach at Sonatype, (and veteran guest of episodes 73, 95, 175, 197... ) On Mark’s teams they use celebrations to maintain connections and also to reflect the characters of different team members - not everyone is comfortable being called out directly, or indeed doing that calling-out themselves. Some retrospectives might be very celebratory and full of appreciation, and we have to be sure to loop in the right people if they’re not in the room so they are included in the acknowledgement. Mark also shared with us how their teams all went out for, or stayed in, for lunch - including a colleague who joined them from a restaurant via webcam! In global teams, practicalities can prevent some kinds of celebration In hybrid teams it’s important that celebrations don’t take on a ‘them and us’ quality, also to acknowledge that not everyone can easily get themselves to a central location even for an epic party, so those at the greatest physical distance could feel excluded. But it does take a lot of planning to celebrate well together in a dispersed team. Jane Hatton (Episode 180) from Evenbreak used to buy donuts and icecream when their colleagues were colocated, and recognises that this is harder to replicate in remote. Their work meetings online tend to be about work - but, as they’re all friends too, they connect more informally on social media as well, reminding us that we can use the whole internet to support our teamwork relationships! 40:13 Luis Magalhaes at the DistantJob podcast Luis shared that they use Zoom calls to celebrate birthdays, which felt a bit awkward at first, but with the founder’s determination and persistence some flow was instigated (including a flow of liquid refreshment), and the team now looks forward to these friendly gatherings. ____ 42.34 And finally we had to celebrate with Ross and Maya, just getting the whole Virtual not distant team on one call for once - complete with outtakes and rustling! And we also happened to be recording on Maya’s birthday. We all enjoy doing different things on the anniversary of the day we are born, including recording podcasts.  Ross prefers to get away offline and go camping, but is planning a party this year for his birthday, and Pilar recently celebrated going out to eat with friends. We wrap up with some quick celebrations from even more previous guests, including Paul Read’s new online course, Robert Glazer making team-member’s dreams come true, Richard Mackinnon’s 40th podcast episode (featuring Pilar), and let’s remember to celebrate Pilar’s other shows Management Cafe and Wordmaze, and Maya’s Crypto Confidence show. Finally from Pilar, Maya and Ross - from our three different countries - we’re celebrating all that podcasting means to us, and celebrating each one of you wonderful people who listen to us every week. Thank you!

Nearly 200 episodes in, we have seen plenty of our own transformations both at Virtual Not Distant and the 21st Century Work Life podcast - and today we explore how organisations are adapting and changing, as the digital landscape does the same. First, a quick follow up from previous episodes - we found this great article about one of our frequently-used collaboration hubs, so make sure you check this out: 30 incredibly useful things you didn’t know Slack could do. And Pilar has been tweeting a lot lately, which was how she connected with today’s guest Euan Semple via his book Organisations Don’t Tweet, People Do. Within this book she found many resonant quotes, including “where possible sharing as much as you can when you are able to do so means that people are more likely to respect you when you say you cannot share some information,” and “Blogging can help people to understand themselves and their work better and by doing so help them to change at a profound and fundamental level” - these words were written in 2013, but resonate so well with our visible teamwork approach in 2019! Do look out for our anniversary episode up next, where we celebrate 200 podcast episode by exploring celebrations in remote teams! And look out for a special offer just for our listeners then. 09.55 21st Century Work Life: Euan Semple, author and speaker on the impact of technology at work Euan has been blogging for 18 years, and shares his words on LinkedIn, Facebook and Medium. He started blogging as a ‘memo to himself’ about the impact of technology at work, but found it resonating with a wider audience. Back in the day you had to know how to use Moveable Type in order to blog, but much has changed in the blogging world, and Euan’s career has spanned most platforms in this fast-moving landscape’s history! He now writes and speaks globally on the impact of digital transformation in the workplace. As Euan says, "It's easier to digitise our dysfunctions than to deal with them." Sometimes we need to fix things at a more fundamental level, before trying to find the right app and fix the tech, and you can’t simply leave it to the IT department to sort out organisational issues.  Consumer technology preferences are very personal but organisations make broader choices, and Euan talks about ‘shadow IT’ and how fragmented the work IT landscape has become, with individuals and teams going around official procedures to get things done, and the unforeseen consequences of change. Many users too are struggling to keep up, it’s not generational, it’s about individual transformation and development, and lots of organisations don’t help people enough - then limit the extent to which they can take initiative for themselves.  Euan’s work at the BBC has exposed him to a wide range of platforms and apps and the way they are marketed and implemented, and finds it unsurprising that people sometimes buy overpriced and over-engineered systems and then try to fit the organisation to the platform instead of the other way around. An ecosystem approach empowers the user and the organisation, putting the tech in its proper place - and we usually get this right more often in personal tech than at work, where we don’t like to question the way things are done. Hierarchies are inevitable in organisations, but decentralisation is an important trend, and designing that ecosystem requires input from those actually using it, a group which may be forever in flux anyway. Euan likes the phrase ‘an ephemeral meritocracy’ - power and influence in organisations should be relevant and timely, rather than acquired for all time. Changemakers can come from anywhere, and any level. Embracing the advantages of remote work and digital collaboration can also be overlooked, such as the effectiveness of online communication in overcoming introversion and social anxiety. The online conversation can become very polarised, but, it can also be enlightening and amazing, representing the very best of human nature. And we’re all fully rounded human beings with more to us than our online personas… which is why Euan also drives trucks as a sideline (while listening to podcasts and generating creative ideas of course) - giving him a different perspective on roles and authority and collaboration for sure. Ever an optimist, Euan likes to leave people with a sense of infinite possibility - there are opportunities everywhere, so grasp them while we can!  So do connect with euansemple.com, @euan on twitter (a handle that length is proof of an early adopter!)   42.49 What do you mean by that? Ethical Walls We spoke to Justin Morris, global strategy director of Modality Systems, to explain this idea: Sometimes in business there can be conflicts of interest when two parts of an organisation talk to one another, and this might apply particularly in highly regulated industries. This might have been managed physically in the past - such as by keycard access. Now this phenomenon is mirrored in the online workspace in Microsoft Teams, where information barriers called ‘ethical walls’ can be inserted, to stop specific teams and individuals communicating with each other. Pilar’s initial reaction to this update was instinctively negative - what about trust, integrity..? However as Justin points out in this conversation, there are very real compliance needs in many circumstances, to avoid possibilities of breaches like insider trading or client confidentiality, and organisations have to be able to demonstrate they have addressed the problem structurally to the best of reasonable ability.  The flatter hierarchies that Euan talked about above can over-facilitate conversations which are not appropriate to specific kinds of highly regulated work. Creating a trustless environment actually protects the individuals as well, both from temptation and easy accusations - while such barriers can presumably be circumvented, this would have to be deliberate and overt. Look out for a bonus episode with Justin shortly for more on this subject, and meanwhile you can connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn, and his website Digitalteamwork.tv   49.33 Wellbeing: Beyond work-life balance Knowledge workers have so many tools and devices, it can be difficult to disconnect and unplug. It was easier when we could leave it all behind in the office, as we did a generation ago. But do we feed that always-on mentality, and risk becoming addicted to our continual conversation with and about work? Does it make us feel valued and connected? How easy do you find it to avoid checking your phone in the evenings or at the weekend? Are you the master of your alerts - or is it the other way around? Everyone finds their own preferred balance, but you need to decide for yourself and be intentional about it, instead of letting default notification settings or the expectations of collaborators dictate what you are thinking about and dealing with in your own time? We need to talk about how we feel as well as what we think, and be conscious about our boundaries. Don't forget to check out Virtual Not Distant, for our newsletter, blog and services, if you enjoyed this podcast.

Is it possible to have your team members work visibly and still respect their own individual processes? Pilar Orti says “yes” - but only if you are willing to have some hard conversations - and ask the right questions! Join us for a diverse conversation with the co-author of Thinking Remote, the latest book that should be part of every remote leader’s library. Welcome to the DistantJob Podcast, a show where we interview the most successful remote leaders, picking their brains on how to build and lead remote teams who win.Pilar Orti is a voice actress, a coach, a writer, and a speaker, as well as the host of the 21st Century Work-Life podcast. She is one of the most prolific producers of content covering both remote working and managing remote teams, and her new book, Thinking Remote, was released just last month.In this episode, we discuss topics such as how the concept of “Visible Teamwork” beats “Working Out Loud,” how to coach incredible employees that are having trouble adapting to the remote work-style, and the value of understanding that no tool was made specifically for you, so you shouldn’t be committed to letting them dictate your processes. And we also ask the taboo question: how can remote work go terribly wrong?————————Want to continue the conversation with Pilar? Find her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PilarOrtiPilar’s Work:Training, Coaching, Podcast & Blog: www.virtualnotdistant.comBook - Thinking Remote - https://amzn.to/2FR2j3wRecommended Books:Team of Teams: https://amzn.to/2FWQ2dRUnder New Management: https://amzn.to/2FVF34c————————As always, if you enjoy the podcast, we humbly ask that you leave a review on iTunes or your podcast syndication service of choice – and if you could share it, that would be even better!Need that one incredible employee to bolster your team?  Get in touch at https://distantjob.com/contact/  and we’ll find you who you need. 

Welcome back A small correction to a recent discussion, when we look at Dr. Heejung Chung’s research about gender and remote work – we’re glad to point out that the work we’d referred to as UK only actually had much broader scope, and we strongly recommend checking out the twitter thread with links to the original research: https://twitter.com/HeejungChung/status/1106489489998991360. We love our Twitter community  - and glad to shout out a few more of our friends on this episode, with gratitude for making us think and grow, always. And we have had some great conversations on LinkedIn too – so many ways of connecting in in our 21st-century work.   12.38 21st Century Work-Life: Nick Steenhout Speaker trainer and consultant on web accessibility Web accessibility is the practice of making web content and apps accessible to all users, regardless of ability /disability. It covers so many things from colour to responsiveness to keyboard-accessible elements… And for developers, there are so many things which can be done, all of which make sites better for people without disabilities too. And when Google remains the biggest screen reader for every site, it’s definitely a win-win. After a quarter of a century of the internet, the same accessibility issues come up time and again - and new frameworks still get developed and released without these considerations built-in. It can be an unknown unknown, which nobody addresses due to lack of foresight, through to tagging the idea on as an afterthought… ‘oh, a third-party plugin can handle that’.   But none of it is rocket science (and some good baking analogies help make accessibility very accessible). And advances in tech such as voice recognition, and the cost of assistive devices, make things better all the time. For all of us. And Nic has a very 21st Century Work Life of his own, living in a 40ft RV – when we spoke he was in national parkland in British Columbia, enjoying the digital nomad life with his partner, despite Canadian winter temperatures and rationing mobile data. He doesn’t find work-life balance to be too challenging, as a wheelchair user on wheels, and has more space in the RV than some city apartments – space guaranteed to be available and accessible, and often with a lovely view. Check out Nic’s podcast, A11y Rules https://a11yrules.com/ Twitter @vavroom And his website https://incl.ca/  31.29 What do you mean by that? Welcome back workplace psychologist Richard McKinnon, with some great definitions for us: Personality: Your way of looking at the world, the lens through which you make sense of it all. We all have a comfort zone and a preferred pattern of communicating and interacting. But it is plastic and subject to evolution. Psychological flexibility: A set of thinking and behaviour skills supporting good coping and adjustment to the world around us, resilience in the face of change. The ability to put a bit of space between stimulus and response. We can learn and develop improved psychological flexibility. https://www.worklifepsych.com/psychologicalflexibility/ Locus of Control – Defining how we ascribe our influence and impact on the world, and the extent to which we attribute things that happen to ourselves, or to external factors. Developing a strong internal local of control puts you in charge of what happens to you! Learn more in Episode 3 of My Pocket Psych https://www.worklifepsych.com/podcast/ep003-psychological-flexibility-paying-attention-to-now/   47.40 Recommended Tool: Calendly A simple scheduling tool which works with Gcal and other calendars, to enable 2 more people to fix up a meeting when they’re both free. An easy way to avoid the endless emails back and forth about availability, and you can choose different appointment types to book (eg by length), and it also magically takes account of different time zones neatly for you. A range of paid tiers gives you access to group scheduling too – plan meetings with groups of people, wherever they are. Which is very powerful for distributed teams, and anyone working with clients and associates anywhere in the world. Just remember to block off all your unavailable time, so no one fixes a meeting with you!  

Today’s episode was the direct result of a Twitter conversation, in which Pilar mused about the distinction between collaboration and co-operation https://twitter.com/PilarOrti/status/1095252618941734914, and Matt Ballantine was among the people who responded – thank you to everyone who joined in this fascinating discussion, and it’s great to have been able to continue it on the podcast – how much more 21st Century Work-Life can you get? And speaking of social media, the warm reception to Thinking Remote: Inspiration for Leaders of Remote Teams has been a joy to read – thank you everyone for the great feedback and reviews, we’re so glad that this Virtual Not Distant publication has struck a chord. If you’ve read it, don’t forget to let us know what you think (and if you’re waiting for the paper version, it’s coming very soon) https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/books 05:01 Voice Behind the Blog, Matt Ballantine, “The Collaboration Cheat-Sheet” Matt Ballantine, cohost of the WB40 Podcast https://wb40podcast.com/, created this amazing ‘cheat sheet’ for some UK government consultation work last year, looking at the meaning of collaboration. https://mmitii.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/collaboration-cheat-sheet.pdf It’s an amazing document which generates as many questions as it answers, because making change in the first place requires commitment and engagement and very clear understanding of the purpose of changing. Why improve collaboration, and what would that look like? And how much responsibility lies with organisations rather than individuals?  If collaboration is not happening, then the problem is probably not technological – so how can you address the systemic barriers and better align the incentives for all? Matt breaks down these barriers one by one, and challenges organisations to address the issues presented. Looking at issues of trust, access and the way we frame our work social environment creates powerful new frames through which to look at ways to collaborate, and reminds us that our teams and enterprises do not exist in isolation from the rest of the physical and virtual world. His 7 Team Persona model is a powerful way to consider your team as an entity, in ways you might never previously have considered.  It can help you choose the kind of structures and set-up you need for your digital workplace - and the assumptions behind the design of collaboration tools and software are also very interesting to unpick, because the type of team who builds an application might be very different from those who need to use it. Also a fascinating dissection of the difference between behaviour and culture within organisations, and which you should attempt to change and why. Changing behaviour within cultural context is far easier. Either way, who really owns and takes charge of the change? Get ready to deep dive down the rabbit hole with Matt and Pilar, and afterwards you’ll want to keep up with Matt’s work at https://stamplondon.co.uk/ and on twitter https://twitter.com/ballantine70 "Good practice when it comes to interaction and collaboration comes from learning how to get there not from being told what best practice is".   51.24 Recommended Tool: Google Docs  Does anyone need an introduction to “Gdocs”? Well yes, because not everyone appreciates the flexibility and powerful collaboration tools built into it. And also because it has improved a great deal in recent years, to now offer word processing capabilities easily on a par with Word or Pages.  Maya and Pilar work on lots of written projects together, and find it a great way to connect and communicate as they edit, comment and even discuss a shared document in real time. You can collaborate with just about anyone, even if they’re not logged in to Google or part of your team (though you might find them anonymised to a strange animal!)  And you can even create tasks and tags for other users of the document. With a range of integrations and add-ons, you might find Google Docs the free and platform agnostic tool you’ve been looking for all along – but if you prefer something different, then please tell us all about it – via our Contact Form or social media @Virtualteamw0rk  

Today Pilar interviews her colleague and co-host Maya, who is wearing her ‘non – Virtual Not Distant hat’, and speaking in her role as CEO of BlockSparks OÜ. This business has some unique 21st Century Work-Life aspects, which we felt it was time to discuss. 06.30 21st Century Work-Life: Maya Middlemiss, CEO of BlockSparks ÖU – “your creative communications partner for the blockchain world” Apart from Maya’s passion for remote working and location independence, she’s really excited about blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. Earlier this year she was ready to formalise her status of freelancing with a small group of trusted associates by forming a limited company - but despite being a Brit living in her adopted home of Spain for a decade, she decided to constitute the company in the small Eastern European country of Estonia. Estonia offers a unique e-residency programme specifically aimed at location-independent entrepreneurialism, and an entirely digital identity. And once Maya had set herself up as an e-resident of Estonia, it was easy – with the help of business service specialists LeapIn, to set up BlockSparks as an Estonian limited company.  Later in the year she did visit Estonia to open a proper business bank account, but she ran the business for several months without visiting her new e-domicile. She wrote a blog post about the experience, and the rationale behind this decision https://www.blocksparks.io/why-blocksparks-chose-estonia-for-our-business-incorporation/ An Estonian location based on digital identity was a great fit with the BlockSparks business activity of providing marketing communications services for blockchain and cryptocurrency startups.  So of course we had to get Maya to briefly define and describe how blockchain works – though she only had a few minutes, and if you want to understand in greater depth you can check out her own podcast, The Crypto Confidence Show, https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/crypto-confidence-podcast/id1435700693 to dig into the details. We did touch briefly on some non-currency application for blockchain, for example for storing academic records – imagine being able to prove that the person you were hiring actually had the qualifications they stated they had, because the record was embedded permanently in a publicly-accessible, tamper-evident distributed ledger? This is just one example of the innovative projects being tackled using blockchain technology, that Maya is so excited to be writing about. You can find out more at https://www.blocksparks.io/ and follow them on Twitter at @BlockSparks  42.52 Oh no, my team’s gone remote!  And we’re going to spend all of our time in online meetings! Working away from the office isn’t the peaceful isolated place it used to be, with the array of communications tools at our fingertips. So there’s a real danger we can end up in endless meetings and video conferences, instead of doing the work. If we’re clear about when we are around to talk and interrupt each other versus when we’re engaged in deep concentrated work, we can communicate as we go along – saving our meetings for important strategic matters and decision-making. And if we use our collaboration tools appropriately, we can make our work visible and shared whilst we’re doing it, instead of having to report on it in our face-time. Even when we have our meetings, we do need to be able to question whether we all need to be 100% attentive, all of the time. If we trust each other and our motivations and roles, we can connect and attend when it’s needed and relevant to the work – rather than trying to replicate the way we work in the colocated space at all times.  50.29 Tool: Remarkable tablet Pilar is in love with her new tablet, which combines the free-flow creativity of handwriting with being able to store and search that digitally afterwards. It has an e-Ink screen (like the kindle), making a change from looking at backlit screens, and she uses for editing and note-taking, as well as brainstorming and note taking. It also lets you draw beautifully. Recent software updates include optical character recognition, which has provided the only ‘missing link’ in the creative workflow, and made her fall even more deeply in love with it. Maya wonders whether it software would be able to read her own writing though, when frequently she herself can’t… How interesting that the range of preferred tools continues to diverge and offer something for everyone.  See you next time, and do keep in touch with us at Virtualnotdistant.com!            

A bit of a different show for you today. We share a glimpse behind the curtain, in the production of the 21st Century Work Life podcast, and also tell you about our new in-house podcasting service. 3.08 Helping organisations create their own podcast. Having an in-house podcast not only shares information and updates, it’s a great way to ensure continuity in connectedness and communications, making sure the teamwork flows at every level. It’s especially helpful when transitioning to a more flexible way of working.  It helps everyone learn about each other’s roles, and how we all respond to the same challenges and issues at work. And whilst there can be barriers to approaching people to chat for the first time over purely online tools, if you’ve heard that person’s voice it can really help with overcoming that.  Speaking is so much more rich and intimate than a typed chat message, and a podcast is also a great way to learn and keep up with information from the organisation, without always sitting in front of a screen. With help from Virtual Not Distant – at any level from initial consultation through to full management and production – you can easily design and create your unique in-house radio show.  (And if Maya can launch the Crypto Confidence Podcast https://www.blocksparks.io/category/podcast/, this is proof that anyone can learn this stuff and get it done. Not an in-house show, so if you’re curious about blockchain or cryptocurrency stuff, or Maya’s “other hat”, then do check it out) BTW special hats are not essential for creating YOUR podcast, and the entry-level hardware and software is very accessible. We’ll help you every step of the way. Learn more here. https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/inhouse-podcast/    15.20 Learning Out Loud – Creating a Podcast For Your Team If you really want to learn something, or simply to grow as a team and create something together, then why not make a podcast about it?  Sharing the process, improvising, having a go… It’s a great experience, and you can do it entirely remotely or in a colocated space, as you choose. The process of planning and chunking your content, of structuring the episodes and putting it all together, is incredibly insightful. And at the end of it, you’ll have a set of episodes you can use for training, on-boarding, or presenting your work externally. And of course Virtual Not Distant will be there for everything, from facilitating the initial discussion to helping you produce and share it however you like. Find out more! https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/learning-out-loud   24.40 Behind the Scenes: How We Create The 21st Century Work Life Podcast In this segment we are joined by Ross Winter, our very own Podcast Polisher, who helps us sound at our best every time. https://podcastpolishing.com/ As we’re all in different countries, we work through Trello, sharing checklists and links to content, so we all know what our different roles and deadlines are.  And once the recordings are in, Ross does his thing – cleaning up the audio and adjusting the levels, making sure we all sound like we’re in the same conversation. He gets rid of our clips and clicks, our hisses and pops, to make it all sound professional. And he also magics away the background noise, that always happens however carefully you prepare the environment – every room has echoes and reverb, laptops have fans, and so on. It makes the sound a lot cleaner and sharper, once all this is removed. Once he’s finally cleaned it all up, he can compile the episode itself, from all the different recordings and music/effects, mixing and editing to put it all together and create the finished podcast. It all ends up a single audio file which Maya then listens back to, in order to create the shownotes (that’s what you’re reading now).  Rather than a transcript, these are intended to act as a kind of teaser for the show, as what we really want you to do is listen – for all the reasons above, the podcast itself is the aim of the game. It also has to work as a standalone bit of content for itself. We make sure those notes are tagged into the podcast syndication tool, as well as published on this website, for the date the podcast goes live. 52.27 Recommended tool: Alitu We welcome Colin Grey, to introduce this great tool for getting started with podcasting. Alitu https://alitu.com sounds like ‘Ross-as-a-service’  – an automated way of transforming your raw audio into a clean and podcast-ready file. Not everyone wants to learn to edit and produce their episodes, nor invest in professional outsourcing. And now there is a middle ground, which can help make podcasting truly accessible and affordable to anyone - you just need to get your content out of your mouth, and into a mic! Alitu will then do all the work to convert it to a finished show, even uploading it to your host of choice. Colin also runs thepodcasthost.com, where he teaches podcasting, from all the geeky technical stuff to extensive resources to help people learn about podcasting from choosing equipment to planning a schedule. There’s a free newsletter and a ton of great resources, so if you’re curious about this space at all, do check it out! @thepodcasthost          

Have coworking spaces lost their initial purpose? Maya and Pilar discuss three recent articles about co-working: the diverse types of co-working spaces available, the move of corporations into the co-working space and whether blockchain might well bring back the original spirit of co-working. visit www.virtualnotdistant.com We love co-working spaces because they allow people to choose to work in spaces that inspire them. To drive the conversation, Maya and Pilar have focused on three articles: Part 1 https://styleblueprint.com/everyday/coworking-spaces/  We talk about the different type of coworking spaces, how some of them mirror what you would expect what you go into a corporate office. Now we can find a place to work in that suits us. We can even belong to a coworking space that matches our values/personality, while working for an organisation where we don’t feel so attached to their physical space. There are even now women only coworkind spaces… http://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-wing-allbright-women-coworking-spaces Part 2 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/307085 Big businesses are taking over some co-working spaces for their own employees. So should we still be calling them “co-working” spaces? IBM has taken over a space for 600 of their employees, vs Microsoft that has provided co-working passes to some of their sales force. Mingling of employees with entrepreneurs: is it about checking out the competition? And are we in danger of new businesses getting mentored into the traditional way of doing business? Part 3 How are Cryptocurrencies Changing Coworking?  http://newworker.co/mag/how-are-cryptocurrencies-changing-coworking/ Maya explains what how blockchain works. Is blockchain the way in which technology can reignite the original spirit of co-working? Other episodes in the 21st Century Work Life podcast on co-working: Episode 83 The Spirit of Co-working with Alex Hillman Episode 30 Co-working at Impact Hub Episode 158 (to be released on 22 February 2018) Building Community in Co-Working Spaces with Bernie Mitchell    

Fernando Polo describes his company’s journey towards salary transparency, and tells us why they’re moving towards self-setting salaries at Good Rebels. visit www.virtualnotdistant.com Pilar mentions this article about millenials and their attitude towards salary transparency: https://amp-businessinsider-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.businessinsider.com/millennials-are-breaking-the-one-big-salary-taboo-reasons-why-2017-12 She recommends this episode from Ted Radio https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/567499335/transparency And also episode 137 from the 21st Century Work Life podcast with David Burkus. We start at the beginning of Fernando’s journey, when he joined the company during a very difficult period. The present Good Rebels structure, company make-up, locations, etc. Fernando mentions the book “The Future of Management” by Gary Hamel. How he shifted his mindset, from a hierarchical mindset to self-management after reading that book. Fernando’s own book, which he co-authored with his brother: “Lidertarios”. The journey begins: according to the values of openness, engagement, commitment, etc, they decided to transform the company from a family owned business company to a co-operative partnership, there are now 12 partners, “and growing”. The titles the company uses internally, eg Knights. The company is structured as Client Squads, autonomous client teams. The “Hubs” are centres of excellence to spread best practice throughout the company, eg data hub, technology hub, creativity and design. They have Hub co-ordinators, who are voted in. “Rebel ships” and “Basecamps”. Using a language that allows for remote operations and remote client work. More on the role of the co-ordinator. How difficult it is to define the role of a manager, or similar – a good one, that is! Basecamps, not “implants” in client offices. Manifestos, instead of rules and procedures. How Good Rebels work with a client remotely. Offices in big cities are less used to working with agencies remotely than those in small cities. First steps towards Salary Transparency, stemming from the value of Radical Transparency. “The Outlook” was the first meeting to be opened up to all employees. The “In Progress” ranking and what happened when this was opened up. (Hint: not pretty.) The “In Progress” has now been split into two: feedback mechanism and self-setting salaries. The question of privacy laws when publishing salaries (internally). “Transparency builds honesty.” It’s difficult to have inequality when you have salary transparency. How this affects recruitment. No longer about “owners and employees”, but more about a group of entrepreneurs. Your salary depends less on your relationship with your boss. https://www.goodrebels.com/why-an-open-salary-policy-will-make-our-good-rebels-stronger/ Research around salary transparency. https://www.worldfinance.com/strategy/pay-secrecy-could-soon-be-a-thing-of-the-past The potential to reduce gender gap by introducing open salaries! Not all organisations are ready to introduce open salaries – just notice the long journey Fernando has been talking about… A new way of deciding / formula who gets a raise in the company. A system that takes into account that some people know better than others the quality of the work of others. Twitter: https://twitter.com/abladias

In this episode, Pilar talks about the importance of thinking holistically about introducing “remote” into an organisation: how will it change a company’s culture? How will it challenge people’s identities? Visit www.virtualnotdistant.com  It’s the summer, and things have slowed down, which I really appreciate. London is quieter, the internet is quieter, which means I have more time to think and to write. But I’ll tell you about the writing a little bit later. Today’s episode: well, I’d like to dedicate it to people in organisations who are in charge of implementing remote working (or some other way of working that involves working away from the company’s premises) or indeed, if you are championing this kind of work in your organisation. Last year, the Work Foundation predicted that 2017, this year, would be the tipping point for 50% of the UK’s population to go “mobile”. And indeed, it’s really felt like that this year. (To hear more on the Working Anywhere report, have a listen to episode 72.) More organisations – both in the public and private sectors – are introducing “agile working” which means different things to different people, but which always integrates some sort of remote work. So there is a lot of potential for individuals to organise their lives around their work, for getting rid of unhelpful processes and work habits that we’re used to in the collocated space that get in the way of people doing great work, of concentrating on the work that needs to be done, rather than worrying about whether people look like they’re working at their desks, all those things that we talk about on this podcast… At the same time, I worry that this change is being introduced without understanding the profound change that it will have on people’s lives and ways of working… In some cases, the change is happening because organisations want to retain their employees by giving them more autonomy and flexibility, but in some cases, it’s being introduced to reduce the real estate bill, and for some employees, it might not be a welcome change. So, I thought I’d have a reflective episode on all of this: whatever the reason for the change, it’s worth remembering that remote work is not just supported by giving people laptops, it needs a lot more support… So I think the first thing to consider is that introducing remote work should give employees more flexibility around where, when and how they do their work. It’s a shame to enable remote working and then restrict this freedom. And this involves seeing whether there are more options beyond 1) working at the same desk every day and 2) working from home. It’s worth remembering that people working from home, especially if it’s for the first time, might need help and practical support. Some will love it, they will be happy to check emails on their sofa and work on the kitchen table. Others might have a dedicated room they can use as an office. But some people might just not have the space, or they might have conflicting schedules at home which means that they long to get out of the house to have some time to themselves. If the ability to do this by going to work is removed, we might be taking away something valuable to them. So, if your reason for introducing remote work is reducing office space, then make sure your people have the necessary alternative spaces where they can get their work done. If, on the other hand, you are introducing remote work to give your people flexibility, make sure that no-one feels like they are expected to start working away from the office – just because they can, doesn’t mean they should. We really need to remember that not everyone wants to work from home, that not everyone CAN work from home. However, some people might be able to use alternatives, like coworking spaces, or maybe there are spaces within your organisations’ building where they feel most inspired, or where they just feel more connected to the work. There might be ways of rearranging the space you already have to create different types of spaces to accommodate more people (rather than the one fixed desk per person); there might be ways of partnering with other organisations to offer your employees spaces that are more convenient for them – think broad, think beyond fixed desk space or home, there might be more alternatives… (I talk more about this in episode 131, Office Optional) Sometimes having people work away from the office – away from their desks – is met with resistance from managers, from colleagues, and I think this is often because we’ve lost our connection with the work; its nature; its purpose. It might be necessary to stop and reflect on what is the work we do? What do I do at work? Why do I need to work with others? I can’t give you an answer to any of this because it will be really specific to your work and situation. It could be that what you do at work is answer questions from visitors to your website. That type of work can be done from anywhere where you are comfortable at a computer. But you might feel like you need to be with others, for troubleshooting, for moral support, because the work itself is actually quite monotonous, or unrewarding, and being with your colleagues is what keeps you engaged. How will you make sure those people in the organisation who need that social contact continue to get it? At an organisational level, you need to have an idea of the kind of work people do and whether it’s location-specific or schedule-specific; that will help us decide whether the work can indeed be done from anywhere and how. In addition to this, you need to understand the environment you want to offer your people, and make sure that introducing some kind of remote set up is not going to remove what you most value. But in order to do that, you need to be able to break down the experience your people have at work and what they need to be happy at work; not just how much more productive they’re going to be because they’re not going to have interruptions when working separately from others – if that’s the case. Sometimes transitioning to a remote setup, or even just a more Office Optional approach can seem like turning everything upside down, but it could well be that in looking at our work, we realise that we’re already using technology in a number of ways and that we might need to preserve many of the ways in which we currently work. And then we might also see that the work we do actually can take a lot of flexibility regarding when and where, and even how we do it, even though at first it looked like there was only ONE way of doing the work, the way in which we’d been carrying it out until now. But finding this out will take time and some thinking. It could well be that “going remote” starts to throw up questions about how the whole organisation is working. This is where the whole discussion around introducing remote work in an organisation can start to get quite broad. There might have been an emphasis on team members sitting together, on different functions being located on different floors, increasing the separation between different parts of the organisation and maybe even, without realising it, nurturing a culture of competitiveness. This might have been deliberate, or actually, it might have been a practical decision that had unforeseen consequences. Now that we understand that tools, processes and environment can affect workplace culture, we can’t overlook that introducing “remote” can have positive and negative consequences. Going remote could mean that you think about how to enable connections between everyone in the company, regardless of function; knowing that collaborating across functions can lead to innovation, and that to get things done in a company it often helps to know people outside of your team. Instead of thinking how you can enable people “bumping into each other” in the corridors and breakout areas, think about how you can enable this through technology. As people get used to using technology for every day communication and to enable collaboration, why not incite people to broaden their network, beyond their team members? On the other hand, remote can lead to isolation and even more separation between different parts of the organisation, as communication can become more segmented because exchanging a few words around the coffee machine, or in the queue to get your food becomes quite difficult. Unless you plan for it, informal exchanges between people not working directly with each other can become less frequent. This is something we need to think about: how will the company work as a whole, rather than just how will people work in virtual teams? If you want people’s networks to strengthen within your organisation, you need to plan for that. So, on the point of reducing silos, I’ve been talking for a while here now- it might be a good point at which to introduce a new voice.   Those of you who have been listening to this podcast for a while might remember that a few episodes ago, in episode 127, Brie Reynolds joined me to talk about career progression in remote work and her own work in FlexJobs. I preparation for the interview, I downloaded the 2017 State of Telecommuting in the US Employee Workforce. As a result of doing that, I then got an email through inviting me to request an invitation to the TRaD works Forum. With a lineup of speakers from Dell, Gallup and Harvard Business Review, I thought it would be interesting to have someone tell you a little bit more about the event – one, in case you are interested in attending, it’s an in-person, in the flesh event taking place in Washington DC at the end of September and two, I always like to share events I come across about the world of work. So here’s Mike Gutman, Director of Marketing from Flexjobs telling you a bit about the company, and a bit about the event.   Well, thank you Mike for adding a different voice to this solo episode. And the url for that event is trad.works and of course, check out flexjobs.com or their sister site remote.co I think that the focus that the event has on making remote “scalable” and something that is seen as an organisation-wide programme reinforces what I was saying earlier, so that’s another reason why I wanted to include the segment here. So, back to introducing remote in an organisation, I’ve mentioned understanding the type of work we’re doing and its flexibility, as well as understanding the Culture of the organisation and the effect that can have on how remote is implemented, as well as the other way around of course. And it will also work the other way round: Going remote will have an effect on culture, whether we like it or not. If the transition is planned and deliberate, we can strengthen those aspects of the current culture that are helpful; but if we leave it to chance, we could well end up with a culture of people disappearing at home behind their computers or, at the other end, we could end up with a culture of people constantly checking up on others. In addition to culture, there is the question of individual identity. Just something like not coming into the office every day to be with colleagues can challenge someone’s identity. For example, if you are someone who prides themselves in being the person others turn to when they need cheering up and you think that your optimism and ability to help others to see things in a positive light is the main thing you bring to your team, you might have trouble adopting to a new way of working when you spend a lot less time in person together, and where connecting with others takes that little bit more effort. Or, if you are a manager who sees themselves as approachable, and enjoys having “lightning coaching chats” in the corridor with people and always being available when people spontaneously ask if you’ve got five minutes, it might take a while to take the more deliberate approach to these conversations that is necessary in the remote space. And in the beginning, it can feel that the essence of what makes you special and valuable, that approachability, is being overlooked or even undervalued. These are all subtle consequences of starting to work in a more location-independent way, and they are usually overlooked… Some people, some teams, even some companies will be able to adapt to a location- independent, even schedule-independent way of working quite quickly. But in other places, we might actually be asking people and teams to change how they see themselves, not just how they work. And that is hard and takes time. So to wrap up this short episode of the 21st Century Work Life podcast, I suppose what I’m advocating for here is a deeper approach to changing the way in which we work when going remote or mobile.., that goes beyond training people in the new technology and making sure they have the right equipment and set up. Although maybe I still need to highlight the importance of doing all that too – I run the danger of taking for granted that that will indeed be the very first step… So let’s remember that we also need to provide the right equipment, some way of people to assess whether they are being productive in the new set up, whether they’re adapting ok, how work is affecting other parts of their lives, etc. Then keeping an eye out on culture, work satisfaction etc, especially if you have introduced new tools, as these might well change the dynamics and quality of how people communicate and collaborate… This is not something that will take a month or two to implement, it’s something that is worth introducing slowly, monitoring, evaluating, adapting, because the short-term effects might be different to the long-term effects. It’s a change programme, so as well as looking after the tech, you’ll need to look after the people… I’m probably preaching to the converted, but I just hear more and more stories of managers, specifically managers, being told that people can now work from home, without providing them with the support necessary to make the change successfully. We’ve developed strong habits around how we do the work, about what working feels like and looks like; while some people can adapt incredibly well, for some people, it challenges the core of how they see themselves as professionals and how they view the world of work. To sign up as a Beta reader for Online Meetings that Rock, click here: http://bit.ly/betameeting

Welcome to a special episode of the 21st Century Work Life podcast, where I share with you my main reflections after attending the Work 2.0 conference last May 2017, in London and where I bring in the thoughts and opinions of other attendees. Don't forget to visit www.virtualnotdistant.com   Thank you too to everyone who very kindly agreed to taking part in this episode, it means that listeners get a much more varied view of the world of work, and it’s always great to hear different voices.   Work 2.0 consisted of the Future of Work conference and the Wellbeing conference. I attended mainly sessions on the Future of Work track – but I also managed to pop into a couple of sessions of the wellbeing track. I won’t go into the content of everything I heard, but I just wanted to give you an idea of what the main themes were. The first thing that I noticed when looking through the programme was the focus on Activity Based Working. Now, I hadn’t really heard of this in the context of organisations, but it’s basically about designing the office so that people can choose where they work from depending on what they’re doing – the activity they’re doing.   https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/blog/four-cs-teamwork https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/favourite-tools   I really enjoyed the presentation by Dr Nicola Millard from BT who talked about people needing to do four types of activities. Those involving Collaboration, Communication, Concentration and Contemplation. I love this last one, it really acknowledges that part of our work is to think.   Dr Millard presented a few numbers, including the percentage of people at companies who work from the office. Some interesting differences and I’m very biased in the numbers I took down: UK, 48%; Spain 53% and Germany 61%. This is a similar distribution to the recent Eurofund study on working from anywhere. Another interesting number: 82% of high performance companies provide anytime/anywhere collaboration tools, which also raises the question, probably for the less high performing companies, do we know what the tools are for? And talking of tools, while I was wondering around the exhibition floor, I came across the team from Sapenta, an ‘All-in-one’ software for getting work done.” , where they are paying attention to Contextual Communication. Guest segment: Colm Digby from Sapenta www.sapenta.com   Other stuff I jotted down in my notebook (thank you Podcast Website for the freebie last year at New Media Europe, by the way) : Shoulder bag workers   Isolationists in a company,   Echo chambers forming around teams where there is no cognitive diversity.   Getting the balance right of We/Me; yes, we need people who are different, but there also needs to be some commonality, as we tend to gravitate those we can identify with. The first panel session was around How workplace design can meet the needs of tomorrow, and because it was in the main hall, it was difficult to take questions from the audience, the whole audience was there, so the organisers used Slido, www.sli.do an app where people can post their questions and they are then shared on the screen, and other people can vote on the question too. I’ll share some of these questions with you in a second, but what I found most fun is that it can quickly become the way in which audience interacts with organisers or presenters, so at one point someone posted, Hey, we can’t hear at the back. It was really quick adoption of tech to suit the user, don’t you think? Guest Segment: Paula and Eduardo from Schneider Electric   David Fano from wework.com really highlighted how we’re moving away from the workplace as somewhere where we go to work and start to focus on the place where we create relationships – this comes very much from the coworking space point of view, where you go to be with other people out of choice.   Technology has given us this choice and I’ll bang on another drum to say that Flexible working is not working from home – a lot of the time it is, because some people like that, but sometimes it’s about not working in close proximity with your team, but you might well be with other people. Or you might even be with other people inside your organisation, or with clients, but there is an element of choice in how or where you do that from.   It’s time to share a story with you – I was just going to share it with you myself, but I thought I might as well bring the person who told it into the episode.   Guest segment: Katharine Metters from Posturite www.posturite.co.uk I have to say, that’s the most extreme story I’ve heard about not supporting your employees when you need to work from home. I would have loved to know more about why on Earth somebody needed a photocopy in their home to do their job in this day and age, or why such person was being forced to work from home… Anyway, I hope you chuckled, or cried… Ok, let me share now a more thoughtful approach to designing how people work, and a wonderful example of how tech can be used to fuel that intrinsic motivation that lurks inside all of us.   Case Study from Heathrow’s Innovation Department on their Enterprise Mobility Programme.   Neil Usher, who was Workplace Director at Sky. I really enjoyed hearing about taking into consideration the diversity of the workforce, depending on the type of work they need to do and how they go about doing it. There was also a separation between different types of workspaces that people might need access to: primary workpoints, like desk or a teamtable; alternative workspaces, I imagine, like a café or a quiet office from which to make a call; and ancillary spaces, like amenities, place to eat. Long are the days when everyone just has a desk at the office. In Sky, there are 3,600 people but only 2,500 desks.   Guest Segment: Andrew Spence @AndySpence on Twitter http://www.glassbeadconsulting.com/hr-transformer-blog/   The company we were talking about that does sound insulation and other stuff is Echophon Saint Gaubin. http://www.ecophon.com/uk/products/

Hoy tenemos el placer de charlar con Héctor Socas sobre el podcast Coffee Break: Señal y Ruido http://vivaldi.ll.iac.es/proyecto/coffeebreak/   La primera conversación Cómo surgió el podcast, por iniciativa de Héctor y cómo el Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias lo apoya. Las aventuras de Héctor con el equipo de podcasting. Los componentes de Coffee Break: Señal y Ruido y cómo se organizan. Banda sonora - la música que hace Héctor: http://vivaldi.ll.iac.es/proyecto/coffeebreak/?page_id=549 Audacity: http://www.audacityteam.org/download/ Google Docs: https://www.google.com/intl/es/docs/about/ De vez en cuando hacen un streaming en video del episodio y forman parte de programación de radio. Los oyentes. Craig pregunta cual es el mejor modo de nutrir el interés sobre la astrofísica en los niños. Vivimos en una época muy bonita porque con internet podemos tener acceso a una cantidad enorme de recursos. Pero tambien hay muchísimo ruido; saber distinguir el ruido de la señal puede ser complicado. Buscando el nicho. La reseña del "futuro joven científico". Científicos de nombre que han aparecido por el programa y con los que Héctor ha contactado. Héctor nos cuenta su intercambio de emails con Dr Gerard ‘t Hooft, Premio Nobel de Física: http://vivaldi.ll.iac.es/proyecto/coffeebreak/?p=318 ¿Star Trek o Star Wars? El libro que más ha influenciado a Héctor. Carl Sagan - Cosmos: https://www.amazon.es/COSMOS-EVOLUCION-COSMICA-Fuera-colecci%C3%B3n/dp/8408053043/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1486729101&sr=8-1&keywords=carl+sagan+cosmos Unlocking The Secrets of The Cosmos(full documentary)HD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-ymk-uqvdg Isaac Asimov: https://www.amazon.es/Isaac-Asimov/e/B003RY2ISS/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1486729161&sr=8-1 Frank Herbert: https://www.amazon.es/Frank-Herbert/e/B000APO5OM/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1486729345&sr=8-1 Greg Egan: https://www.amazon.es/Greg-Egan/e/B000AQ3HJA/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1486729435&sr=8-1 Miguel Santander: https://www.amazon.es/costilla-Dios-otros-relatos-final-ebook/dp/B00W1X92W6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1486729507&sr=8-1&keywords=miguel+santander Héctor recomienda: Radio Skylab: http://radioskylab.es/ Los Tres Chanchitos: https://3chanchitos.es/ Las Noches de Ortega: http://cadenaser.com/programa/oh_my_lol/la_noche_de_ortega/ Y Héctor recomienda este documental: Carl Sagan - Un pálido punto azul (Subtitulado): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3bJ1OWZpDg Wikipedia reference in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot Podéis encontrar el podcast Coffee Break: Señales y Ruido en www.señalyruido.com   Post-interview Discussion Involving colleagues from both inside and outside the Institute promotes a healthy exchange of ideas and opinions, and a forum in which to discuss topics that they are all passionate about. Being frank and honest and expressing opinions that may be controversial on your podcast creates interest and attention around your topic and your podcast. People love to talk about subjects they are interested in and will often happily appear as a guest on your podcast if you tap into their passion. Somebody recently declined to guest on Pilar’s 21st Century Work Life  podcast because she saw Pilar as a competitor. Microphone headsets are a good solution for people who are not used to speaking into microphones. The microphone always stays at a fixed distance from the mouth and they allow co-hosts to ‘forget the tech’ and concentrate on the content of the podcast. If you are interested in this solution, here is an example of a decent headset: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sennheiser-PC-USB-Internet-Telephony/dp/B005HWEZGG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462957667&sr=8-1&keywords=+Sennheiser+Pc8 Mindset is important, especially in respect of an approach to education. Storytelling is a very powerful way to engage listeners. It’s amazing how diverse and interesting the world of podcasting is and the wide range of topics covered. Space opera: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=space%20opera Nestor’s podcast: Luces Extrañas: http://nestorgm.com/ The Great Indoors: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5485566/ Blog: https://enclavedepodcast.com/ Twitter: @clavepod Learn about virtual teams, management coaching and much more with Pilar on: http://virtualnotdistant.com/ http://www.futureworkcentre.com/what-we-do/education/evidencetalks/ Pilar is @PilarOrti on Twitter Improve your English with Craig: http://www.inglespodcast.com/     http://www.mansioningles.com/ Craig is @mansiontwit on Twitter

Atención, hoy es Craig el que introduce a nuestro invitado, ya que lleva tiempo queriendo hablar con él. Hablamos con Daniel Aragay, podcast veterano que de vez en cuando, se hace el sueco... En Haciendo el sueco, Dani cuenta su vida diaria en Estocolmo. Habla sobre su trabajo y también de su vida personal.  http://haciendoelsueco.com/ La primera conversación Daniel lleva desde el 2005 haciendo podcasts - nos cuenta por qué empezó "Haciendo el sueco" y por qué se fue a Suecia. El trabajo de Daniel con video. Siete años en Suecia: cómo ves la vida diaria y su integración en la sociedad sueca. Craig le pregunta a Daniel cómo se traduce la letra de la canción que introduce Haciendo el sueco. Por qué Craig y otros oyentes escuchan Haciendo el sueco. https://www.acast.com/haciendoelsueco/490.porquemeescuchas-relato ¿Con quién habla Dani? El podcasting a diario. ¿Tenemos todos algo que contar? El secreto de un podcast está en el tipo de contenido. No importa a veces ni el  micrófono, ni a qué hora lo grabes, sino que lo cuentes, lo disfrutes y lo transmitas a los oyentes Techy talk. (Hablamos de micros...) La plataforma que usa Dani para colgar los episodios: Acast. Te tienes que sentir a gusto con la temática. Alguien que quiera hacer un podcast se tiene que parar a pensar, "qué es lo que me gusta  y de qué disfruto hablando". Ese es el podcast. Cómo empezó la Asociación de podcasters. Las asociaciones en Suecia, qué chollo! The Tuning Fork: el cortometraje de Dani. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3957454/ "Lo que queda por venir." Dani nos desvela sus próximos proyectos. El apoyo de su pareja. (Y el pad thai...de pollo, porfa.) Dani recomienda: Amañece, que no es poco: https://amanhecequenoespoco.wordpress.com/  Ondas Revueltas: http://ondasrevueltas.blogspot.com.es/   Ciencia Es: http://cienciaes.com/ Post-Interview Discussion Pilar: Dani is a considerate podcaster. He describes what’s happening to his audience, filling in the gap between the visual and audio world. Craig: Dani shares a lot of personal details in his podcast. As podcasters, how much of our personal life should we be sharing with our audience? Pilar: How much of your personal stuff and opinions you share with your audience will depend on the type of podcast you´re doing. Craig: Some podcasters speak about themselves too much in the beginning, especially when they have an informational ‘how to’ podcast. Pilar: If you’re doing a self-development podcast, the natural thing to do would be to put yourself out there and share personal stuff with the audience. We should be aware of the effect of what we say on our podcasts, especially when talking about sensitive issues like politics. (And the story of how Pilar lost a listener...) Craig: Be prepared to polarize your audience and lose listeners if you share strong views on politics, religion etc in your podcast. An example of a podcast with strong political views: http://www.noagendashow.com/ Pilar: There was a podcast ad on British TV for A Stab in the Dark. http://corporate.uktv.co.uk/podcasts/a-stab-in-the-dark-podcast/   Si os ha gustado, if you liked this, déjanos una reseña en iTunes o tu podcatcher preferido. Blog: https://enclavedepodcast.com/ Twitter: @clavepod El podcast de Craig: Inglés Podcast http://www.inglespodcast.com/ Y los de Pilar: 21st Century Work Life, Management Café, Evidence Talks https://pilarwrites.wordpress.com/podcasts/

Get in touch through www.virtualnotdistant.com/contact Coaching was almost a buzzword a decade ago – we started to realised that one size of training doesn’t fit all and that a really personal approach to development was probably a better investment of organisation’s money. Better to employ a coach to help with behaviour change (especially at the senior level, when it’s more difficult to identify the problems we need to address), than send everyone on a course. Now, during today’s coffee, I’m not really interested in talking about employing external coaches or even how to work with internal ones, that’s a different conversation. What I wanted to share with you today is whether it would help us to create a coaching culture in our teams and organisations. “Ok, you’re almost creating another annoying buzzword”, I hear you say. Sorry, yes, you’re right. I’ll explain what I mean by that. And though the Learning and Development world uses ‘Coaching Culture’ to mean the use of external coaches and coaching practices and tools by managers, I’d like to go further than that – further and broader. I suppose I’m talking about building an environment where we are all encouraged to solve problems ourselves, by taking the time to reflect, by asking ourselves and others questions, instead of immediately looking for answers from others. And let me be a bit more specific on this too. Rather than looking for quick fixes which actually, might not even be addressing the real problem, because we haven’t even had time to identify what the real problem is, we should be asking the right questions. (For more on coaching, check episode 8 from the 21st Century Work Life podcast.) So for me, taking a coaching approach as a manager, or a team member, means asking questions before coming up with solutions to other people’s problems. And that is really hard. Especially if you are in a management position where you have been traditionally led to believe that you are there to make sure everyone does a good job and solves everyone’s problems. And if you’re someone used to working in a very hierarchical organisation, then you’ll be used to managers solving your problems for you and you might have heard “that’s management’s problem”. Asking Questions Now asking questions is not easy. For one, I’ve come to realise that people sometimes are suspicious of questions. I’ve run workshops when I’ve asked after an exercise,”Ok, how was that, how did that make you feel?” And people have indeed, told me whatever and then they’ve followed their answers with, “Is that what you were looking for?” To which my answer was, I wasn’t looking for anything, I just wanted you to share how you felt, that’s why I asked. But we are way too used to leading questions, when people who know they can solve our problems pretend they are asking questions, when all they’re doing is leading us to verbalise what is actually, in their heads. So that’s the first barrier to a coaching approach to management: on the whole, we’re not used to being asked questions, real questions where our answer is not right or wrong, is just our answer. And asking questions takes time of course. What’s faster to say, “Oh yes, if it’s not working for you in that way, try this, that’s how I do it.” In some situations, that might be the best course of action, but in others, it might actually be better to stop and ask, “So why do you think it’s not working?” or “What exactly is not working?” etc you see what I mean. It will take ages, won’t it… But if you never take time to help people identify themselves how they can move forwards (and “they” is very important, it’s about how they would move forwards, not about how you think they should) if you never take the time for people to figure it out for themselves, then you’ll end up as the problem solver – and then when you go on holiday, you’ll be checking your emails every day. Now, before I carry on, I know that sometimes we want people’s opinions when we ask for help. There is nothing more annoying than asking for someone for help and them replying, “Well, how would YOU do it?” “I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking you! But I hope that you know what I mean…” As always, if you are in a position of formal authority, you will be role modeling behaviour in your team. Group norms will form around what you are perceived to be doing ,like it or not and no matter how flat your organisation is or how much of a “non bossy boss” you are. So if you are seen to be asking questions and you are really interested in supporting people to find the answers for themselves, people will start to do this. And yes, I know that there will be many instances when this approach will not work, because not everyone is perfect and although most people do want to do a good job, some are just problematic, so feel free to share your concerns around any of this or even better, share your stories here in the Comments section. So, coaching culture, all about asking questions, about probing to identify the real problem before jumping in to give advice. A quick reminder of open questions, they’re preceded by What, How, When, Who and Why. And this last one is the most difficult one because Why sometimes feel like we’re accusing someone – Why are you doing that? Why did you decide to go down that road? But we can change all that, can’t we? [PS that’s not a real question either, just trying to get you to agree with me…] So why is a coaching culture useful to have in your team? [Now, I could pause this and let you answer it for yourself, go on, give it a try… Although really, this is a rhetorical question because I’m about to give you the answer, or at least, my opinion…] Unfortunately, you’re going to have to trust me on this one because for the life of me, I haven’t been able to find any data on this. I found some stuff on the coaching culture I was mentioning earlier, which is all about bringing in external coaches, but nothing around what I’m talking about here – so if you do have the data handy, either way, because if I’m wrong I also want to know, then let me know. But let’s see what you think of my argument. Things are changing faster than ever before. Processes that we have been using for ages start to become irrelevant. Surely you want people to stay nimble, to be trusted to solve their problems, to innovate? You don’t want people to think that only managers can identify problems, see opportunities to improve things. But people need to be trusted. And now that we’re starting to work from anywhere, or that we’re able to not be office bound for work, this becomes even more important. A Story from Work Rules (Recommended Reading Bonus) I’ll tell you a bit about the coaching approach in virtual or hybrid teams in a moment, but before I do that, let me just share a quick story from Work Rules. I love this story by Laszlo Bock from Google – if you had coffee with me last week, you might remember me recommending the book. It’s not at all a story illustrating a coaching conversation, but I think it illustrates where we want to get to. Laszlo Bock talks about a time at McKinsey & Company when he had a manager, called Andrew. I’ll read the story to you: “In 1999, we were serving a financial services company and doing one of the first e-commerce projects our firm had ever done. (Remember “e-commerce?) I brought a draft report to him and instead of editing it, he asked, “Do I need to review this?” I knew deep down that while my report was good, he would surely find some room for improvement. Realizing this, I told him I wasn’t ready and went back to refine it further. I came back to him a second time, and a second time he asked, “Do I need to review this?” I went away again. On my fourth try, he asked the same question and I told him, “N. You don’t need to review it. It’s ready for the client.” He answered, “Terrific. Nice work.” And sent it to the client without even glancing at it." Now wouldn’t it be great if we all worked with people like that? With managers who trust us and with people we can trust? Of course, there are many other things that need to be in place for this to work – good recruitment, great skills etc etc But I hope you see my point. It would have been very easy for Laszlo’s manager to pick up the report, make lots of corrections to it and then send, here you go. But isn’t this a much better way of working? What signals does it give out? What kind of behaviour does it encourage? The Virtual Team Bit Right, I won’t pause too much here because my cup of coaching culture is getting cold, so let me move onto why this kind of team culture is becoming even more important now, why as managers, we have to stop trying to solve problems for everyone and support people to learn by themselves, on the job. Now that people are starting to work from home, now that it’s more normal to work with others across the globe, now that “virtual teams” are becoming so common that I can just see we’re going to drop the word “virtual” very soon, we have to find ways of people working independently. I don’t mean in isolation, it’s very different, I do mean that our interactions become more purposeful and our teams and organisations become flatter. Everything I’ve been talking about so far can be done online too. Your emails can have more questions in them – next time you’re commenting, giving advice on something in writing, read through and ask yourself, what kind of behaviour am I encouraging here? Is there a different way of approaching this? What questions are going to help them, or even help us, to come to a better conclusion? And if you’re posting on a collaboration platform, this becomes even more important, as your behaviour is then public, and therefore, you’ll likely be role-modeling. And as you can see from my suggestions, ask yourself lots of questions too. Take a breath. The most important thing about this “coaching stuff”, whether we’re talking culture, management style or even working with external coaches, is that we actually stop to think, to reflect, to ask, to correct or to sustain. That is the most important thing. Everything else, the questions, the tools (if you must use them!) even the coaching sessions if you want to make them more formal, that all comes later. The first thing you need to do is acknowledge that stopping is important, that giving space to your team members to grow is important. Then the difficult part comes, which is figuring out the kind of questions that are going to help the person to figure out and understand the nature of the problem. Recommended Reading Well, I think the café is getting busy, so I’d better go. But if you’d like to keep the table, I can recommend you grab “The Coaching Habit” by Michael Bungay Stanier. He talks through the kind of behaviours that will help to make asking questions a habit, and he makes the case for this really well. In all honesty, it’s not the kind of book I usually recommend (a bit too much “this is how you do it” for my liking), but if this is something that you would like to explore, then it’s worth reading. So, I’d love to know what you thought of this episode, I’d love to know what other topics you’d like me to cover in this podcast. And, I might as well say this now, Virtual not Distant has indeed been set up to help managers and team leaders of virtual teams, or those in transition , through training, coaching – yes, the external coaching type – and team facilitation, which is like team coaching. The idea is we help you to sort it out for yourselves, because you’ve usually got the answers, you just need the space and permission to work them out, and then, we move on. It’s a terrible business model, we come in, help, make you self-sufficient and move on, but hey, I have to practice what I preach. So, my little management challenge today is to keep an eye out and see if you can catch yourself trying to solve other people’s problems, when actually, it would be better for them to solve it themselves. Let me know how you get on and I hope you’ll join me for another coffee soon.

In today's episode, Pilar shares a piece of research that looked into the patterns of communication of high performing teams and she asks you some questions to help you review how your own team is doing. I’ll start with an apology, or a disclaimer, I’m not going to tell you how to turn your team great in 20 minutes. What I would like to do is to dissect what communication in great teams might look like. “Teamwork” and “communication” are words that are often used vaguely, we need better communication, teamwork is really important… what does any of that really mean? Professor Sandy Pentland and his team at the MIT media lab gathered data which showed the patterns of communication in great teams. For a start, it turns out that 50% of the variation between low and high performing teams is accounted for by these patterns of communication, so I definitely think it’s worth looking at. So, what did Professor Pentland and his team look at? By putting a gadget on team members, they were able to measure how people were interacting. These gadgets measured the Energy behind the interaction, the body language, tone of voice, who you were facing, how long you were talking to them for – and whether they were in your team or not. The one thing they didn’t capture was the content of the conversation. I will tell you what they found in a moment, but I’d like to point out that these conversations included informal communication. And by this, I don’t mean when we are just chatting away about non-work related things but also about when we talk about work casually – when I ask you whether you have met one of my potential clients before, when I shout across the room to see whether you know when we’re likely to receive the next report; when you offer to help me with the new software. So the data from the sociometers was grouped into three components: Energy, how team members contribute to the team, Engagement – whom was talking to whom – and Exploration, how much team members talk to those from others teams. It’s probably not surprising that in the lower performing teams, the contribution of some people was much larger than others – and we’re talking about the contribution in face to face meetings. Let me just stop for a moment here, think about the times when you meet with your team informally, or even formally. Say at the coffee machine, water cooler, on the way from the office to the car park or the train station. Who contributes more to the conversation? Quite often, those further up in the hierarchy might be given more space, so if you are one of those, just beware. So, the informal energy we bring to the group seems to be important, as does how even this is throughout the team. The other thing measured in this study was Engagement, that is whom is talking to whom. Especially in new teams, we have to be aware that we don’t always end up having conversations with the same people. That we establish a relationship with everyone in the team. Once more, this is of special importance if you ‘re in a leadership position – you should make sure not just that you interact with everyone in equal measures, but that people don’t end up talking just to YOU. The third factor that affects team’s performance is exploration, how much teams look outside for inspiration, information and connection. The most creative teams in the study seemed to seek information and inspiration from a range of outside sources, not just when they needed help or advice, but constantly. If we are in charge of structuring team processes, or let’s face it, if we just care about our team and want to do something about it, these are three things that are worth thinking about – Energy (by which I don’t mean that everyone is moving their arms around, but rather what people are bringing from themselves to the conversation, the quality of our interactions), Engagement and Exploration And, even though this large study, carried out over seven years in a range of organisations, even though it was carried out in the collocated environment, where team members were together in the same location, there are still some very valuable lessons we can also take to the online space. For example, people like communicating in different ways – formally, through agendas in meetings; through structured emails; informally, in the corridor, over coffee, on a chat, with emoticons. What’s your preference? This is always important because we’re only human, so we tend to organise communication around us in the way that suits us most. But if you really prefer structured conversations and don’t pay attention to the fact that your team rarely gets to have informal conversations, you’re going to miss out on important communication – and not all your team members will be engaged. So how about this: carry out a small audit of the types of communication you have in your team. You should also do this even if you’re working in an office based team. You can do this now over coffee, you can even just do it in your head… How do your people exchange ideas in real time and asynchronously? If you are a virtual team or have a mixture of work patterns, try to have a healthy mixture of video, audio, and written communication. In the office, you can have structured meetings but how about also leaving time for new conversations to emerge? And you might have to make an effort to make sure that there are opportunities for informal communication too. How about engagement, whom is talking to whom. Think about how communication is flowing through your team – both when you’re in a meeting together and when you’re getting on with the work. Does everything go through you? Do all help request go through you? I suppose the easiest way to formulate this question would be: Are people in your team talking to each other? While I don’t want to put all the responsibility on you to enable this, there are some things you can do. You can encourage people to work on tasks together – or you can help to break down projects in ways that mean team members have to share information or solve problems together. By the way, this is what team building is about… If your team has some sort of flexible set up or if you are in a virtual team, it becomes even more important to talk about your communication arrangements together. To make sure that everyone can get hold of everyone else at some point so that people don’t start just communicating with you. Have you got an instant messaging system? If your people travel a lot, are your communication systems or platforms or apps, mobile friendly? Is there a way for people to communicate in different ways, to make sure nobody is being left out of the loop just because they find communicating in a certain way difficult. For example, if you have people who struggle with writing in the language your team uses to communicate, make sure you have video calls often. Or if some in your team need time to reflect on their thoughts and prefer to put them in writing, make sure you have an easy to use collaboration platform and that it’s being used. You will have to lead by example and even broker some of these relationships. Finally, exploration. Don’t forget to look outside your team for inspiration. How are other teams in the organisation operating? Who is responsible for what in the organisation who can provide you with useful information? How are people in your industry innovating? As a manager you probably have access to a range of people in the organisation who can help you not just when you need to reach out but also, who can help you to see things differently. If your team is dispersed, or not located in the office, you might need a strategy to continuously encourage your team members to explore (to use Pentland’s terminology) what other people are doing. So, communication – how many times have we heard that things went wrong due to lack of communication? We’ve broken down team communication here into energy (the quality of interaction), engagement (the patterns of communication within a team) and exploration, the connection of the team to the outside world. If you want to review how your team is doing, then here is a simple framework to double check whether your communication is conducive to being a high performing team. Recommended Reading Team of Teams by Coronel Stanley McChrystal, which is all about creating an organisation where transparency and ongoing communication is the norm. McChrystal shares the process of how he had to change how they operated in one part of the US army to keep up with terrorists in Iraq. It’s one of my favourite books – not just because of what he says, but how he says it. It’s full of wonderful examples throughout the story of management – and comes to the conclusion that we’re better off trusting people to do their best work. And I can’t leave you with a better thought than that, can I? So, I’d love to know what you thought of this episode, I’d love to know what other topics you’d like me to cover in this podcast, so if you want to say hello or if you’d want to subscribe to this podcast, go to managementcafepodcast and you can find me there. Twitter is also a good place to connect, I’m @PilarOrti and finally, if you are making the transition to virtual or hybrid, then check out the website virtualnotdistant.com and the 21st Century Work Life podcast. And, I might as well say this now, Virtual not Distant has indeed been set up to help managers and team leaders of virtual teams, or those in transition , through training, coaching and team facilitation. So my little management challenge to you today is to observe how people are talking to each other within your team and outside it and see whether there is anything that you can all do to improve communication. Let me know how you get on and I hope you’ll join me for another coffee soon.

I’ll start with an apology, or a disclaimer, I’m not going to tell you how to turn your team great in 20 minutes. What I would like to do is to dissect what communication in great teams might look like. “Teamwork” and “communication” are words that are often used vaguely, we need better communication, teamwork is really important… what does any of that really mean? So I’ll share with you my favourite piece of research, from 2012, on high-performing teams, where the authors present the communication patterns of high performance teams. I hope that will help you to evaluate your communication processes and habits, to see whether there’s anything you might be missing. Now the research was done on collocated teams, that is those in the office together, but, here, as we now need to cover both collocated and virtual or remote or even hybrid teams (a bit of virtual, a bit of collocated) I’ll also share with you some thoughts on all this can be transported to the virtual world. Are you sitting comfortably? (Actually, this is a podcast, so you could be anywhere, anyway…) A couple of years ago, in 2012, I came across an article which made me say, “Finally! We can dissect “great teamwork’.” If you read regularly read about leadership in organisations, and specifically if you read the Harvard Business Review, you’ve probably heard about this piece of research. Professor Sandy Pentland and his team at the MIT media lab gathered data which showed the patterns of communication in great teams. For a start, it turns out that 50% of the variation between low and high performing teams is accounted for by these patterns of communication, so I definitely think it’s worth looking at. So, what did Professor Pentland and his team look at? By putting a gadget on team members, they were able to measure how people were interacting. These gadgets measured the Energy behind the interaction, the body language, tone of voice, who you were facing, how long you were talking to them for – and whether they were in your team or not. The one thing they didn’t capture was the content of the conversation. I will tell you what they found in a moment, but I’d like to point out that these conversations included informal communication. And by this, I don’t mean when we are just chatting away about non-work related things but also about when we talk about work casually – when I ask you whether you have met one of my potential clients before, when I shout across the room to see whether you know when we’re likely to receive the next report; when you offer to help me with the new software. This is an important reminder, because it’s, unfortunately not unusual for people in offices to keep their heads down at work – and if this happens, no matter how many productivity tools we use or how many lists we make, our team is not going to fly. We’re never going to be great, just coast along. So it’s important that we don’t lose those times when we’re all together, or when we interact in the corridors – that we give space to those interactions as, as we shall see in a second, they’re important. And if you are in a virtual team, then you have to be deliberate about this and come up with processes that make this easy. And if you’re a hybrid team, this is even more important – because if not you might easily get an us and them mentality, as the people in close proximity get stronger as a subteam, while those away from the office do not. (By the way, I’d love to know how you encourage informal communication in your team or how it happens, or how it doesn’t happen, which is also interesting… do let me know through the blog managementcafepodcast.com/communication) Right, Let’s carry on with the research. So the data from the sociometers was grouped into three components: Energy, how team members contribute to the team, Engagement – whom was talking to whom – and Exploration, how much team members talk to those from others teams. It’s probably not surprising that in the lower performing teams, the contribution of some people was much larger than others – and we’re talking about the contribution in face to face meetings. Let me just stop for a moment here, think about the times when you meet with your team informally, or even formally. Say at the coffee machine, water cooler, on the way from the office to the car park or the train station. Who contributes more to the conversation? Quite often, those further up in the hierarchy might be given more space, so if you are one of those, just beware. So, the informal energy we bring to the group seems to be important, as does how even this is throughout the team. The other thing measured in this study was Engagement, that is whom is talking to whom. Especially in new teams, we have to be aware that we don’t always end up having conversations with the same people. That we establish a relationship with everyone in the team. Once more, this is of special importance if you ‘re in a leadership position – you should make sure not just that you interact with everyone in equal measures, but that people don’t end up talking just to YOU. How many times have you observed in a conversation, people talking just to the chair, or the manager, or the teacher, in educational settings. I notice it quite a bit, mainly in training situations. We’re having a discussion but I might have the focus, being in the higher status role, and so many people tend to direct their thoughts and speech at me, whereas it’s important that they distribute their eye contact amongst everyone else. In these cases, I have to directly ask them to share their thoughts with everyone else, and I do this usually with a hand gesture which reminds them to open up to everyone else. Once one person does it, others tend to follow. The third factor that affects team’s performance is exploration, how much teams look outside for inspiration, information and connection. The most creative teams in the study seemed to seek information and inspiration from a range of outside sources, not just when they needed help or advice, but constantly. If we are in charge of structuring team processes, or let’s face it, if we just care about our team and want to do something about it, these are three things that are worth thinking about – Energy (by which I don’t mean that everyone is moving their arms around, but rather what people are bringing from themselves to the conversation, the quality of our interactions), Engagement and Exploration And, even though this large study, carried out over seven years in a range of organisations, even though it was carried out in the collocated environment, where team members were together in the same location, there are still some very valuable lessons we can also take to the online space. For example, people like communicating in different ways – formally, through agendas in meetings; through structured emails; informally, in the corridor, over coffee, on a chat, with emoticons. What’s your preference? This is always important because we’re only human, so we tend to organise communication around us in the way that suits us most. But if you really prefer structured conversations and don’t pay attention to the fact that your team rarely gets to have informal conversations, you’re going to miss out on important communication – and not all your team members will be engaged. So how about this: carry out a small audit of the types of communication you have in your team. You should also do this even if you’re working in an office based team. You can do this now over coffee, you can even just do it in your head… How do your people exchange ideas in real time and asynchronously? If you are a virtual team or have a mixture of work patterns, try to have a healthy mixture of video, audio, and written communication. In the office, you can have structured meetings but how about also leaving time for new conversations to emerge? And you might have to make an effort to make sure that there are opportunities for informal communication too. How about engagement, whom is talking to whom. Think about how communication is flowing through your team – both when you’re in a meeting together and when you’re getting on with the work. Does everything go through you? Do all help request go through you? I suppose the easiest way to formulate this question would be: Are people in your team talking to each other? While I don’t want to put all the responsibility on you to enable this, there are some things you can do. You can encourage people to work on tasks together – or you can help to break down projects in ways that mean team members have to share information or solve problems together. By the way, this is what team building is about… If your team has some sort of flexible set up or if you are in a virtual team, it becomes even more important to talk about your communication arrangements together. To make sure that everyone can get hold of everyone else at some point so that people don’t start just communicating with you. Have you got an instant messaging system? If your people travel a lot, are your communication systems or platforms or apps, mobile friendly? Is there a way for people to communicate in different ways, to make sure nobody is being left out of the loop just because they find communicating in a certain way difficult. For example, if you have people who struggle with writing in the language your team uses to communicate, make sure you have video calls often. Or if some in your team need time to reflect on their thoughts and prefer to put them in writing, make sure you have an easy to use collaboration platform and that it’s being used. You will have to lead by example and even broker some of these relationships. Finally, exploration. Don’t forget to look outside your team for inspiration. How are other teams in the organisation operating? Who is responsible for what in the organisation who can provide you with useful information? How are people in your industry innovating? As a manager you probably have access to a range of people in the organisation who can help you not just when you need to reach out but also, who can help you to see things differently. If your team is dispersed, or not located in the office, you might need a strategy to continuously encourage your team members to explore (to use Pentland’s terminology) what other people are doing. So, communication – how many times have we heard that things went wrong due to lack of communication? We’ve broken down team communication here into energy (the quality of interaction), engagement (the patterns of communication within a team) and exploration, the connection of the team to the outside world. If you want to review how your team is doing, then here is a simple framework to double check whether your communication is conducive to being a high performing team. Recommended Reading Well, I’d better go… but if you have a bit more time, I’m sure it’s ok for you to stay at this table. And if you would like something to read, then I recommend Team of Teams by Coronel Stanley McChrystal, which is all about creating an organisation where transparency and ongoing communication is the norm. McChrystal shares the process of how he had to change how they operated in one part of the US army to keep up with terrorists in Iraq. It’s one of my favourite books – not just because of what he says, but how he says it. It’s full of wonderful examples throughout the story of management – and comes to the conclusion that we’re better off trusting people to do their best work. And I can’t leave you with a better thought than that, can I? So, I’d love to know what you thought of this episode, I’d love to know what other topics you’d like me to cover in this podcast, so if you want to say hello or if you’d want to subscribe to this podcast, go to managementcafepodcast and you can find me there. Twitter is also a good place to connect, I’m @PilarOrti and finally, if you are making the transition to virtual or hybrid, then check out the website virtualnotdistant.com and the 21st Century Work Life podcast. And, I might as well say this now, Virtual not Distant has indeed been set up to help managers and team leaders of virtual teams, or those in transition , through training, coaching and team facilitation. So my little management challenge to you today is to observe how people are talking to each other within your team and outside it and see whether there is anything that you can all do to improve communication. Let me know how you get on and I hope you’ll join me for another coffee soon.  

A bit of news on a new podcast about podcasting in Spain, but mainly a re-release of the special on Federico Garcia Lorca, with three guest contributions.  Show notes here:  http://www.spainuncoveredpodcast.net/federico-garcia-lorca-special/   Link to Huffington post article: http://www.huffingtonpost.es/2016/06/11/podium-podcasts-cadena-ser_n_10372974.html Subscribe to the new podcast En clave de podcast.  https://enclavedepodcast.com/  Pilar's other podcast: 21st Century Work Life via Virtual not Distant http://virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/

How trust is earned in the workplace, why it's most often missing, and what we can learn from coworking spaces to make better coworking spaces and more productive, innovative, powerful organizations.“Organizations have many examples of when people need to be working together in order to accomplish their goals, but they don't work together and in some cases, they work against each other.Then you have examples in coworking places when people don't need to work together, but they do.”Special thank you to Pilar Orti for allowing me to re-publish this episode from her show "21st Century Work Life". I had a ton of fun recording this episode.Let me know what you think!Save $10 on the Indy Hall Community Building AudiobookBefore I started Indy Hall, I had nothing. No experience. No money. Almost no network in my city.Today we've created a world-renowned community with hundreds of thriving members. But how?Find out: http://www.theindyhallway.com/ten/ and use the code "virtualnotdistant" at checkout to save $10.Subscribe to the show to get a new episode every MondaySubscribe in iTunesSubscribe in OvercastGet the RSS FeedSubscribe via emailAnd don't forget you can also follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/alexhillman :) Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

visit www.virtualnotdistant.com Hello and welcome to this extra episode of the 21st Century Work Life podcast, I’m Pilar Orti. If you’re a regular listener and managed to listen to last week’s episode, you might know that I was not going to release an episode this week, as I needed to catch up with myself and also, I’m in Madrid at the moment, where my set up is not ideal for working and also, not great for recording, so excuse the audio quality of this impromptu podcast. So today it’s Monday and I never release an episode on Mondays and this week I wasn’t suppose to release any anyway. But, Brexit happened and, almost against my reserved nature, as in, I’m very careful with what I release on social media, and a podcast is considered social media, almost against my reserved nature I do want to share my reflections on this whole… let’s say, situation. But I’m not just talking about Brexit, also about the political situation in Spain and also about the importance, more now than ever as the political class is crumbling, the importance of creating a world of work that makes people’s lives better.   As I said, three parts to this episode and the first is Brexit. On 23rd June, 52% of 71% of the UK’s British nationals aged 18 and over – and you do the math, voted for the UK to leave the European Union. So, the first thing I’d like to say is, if you’re British and are ashamed of being British right now, of which there are many, I’ve heard it first hand and second hand, don’t be. Because 48% of the population voted remain. Not just that, I was actually incredibly touched by how much people, in my circles, put themselves out there showing support for the Remain vote and even asking others to do the same. And remember, foreigners residing in Britain like myself, couldn’t vote. So these were British people making it very clear that they wanted to remain in the European Union. More about that later. In contrast to the couple of posts I saw during the campaign by foreign residents in the UK saying they didn’t feel welcome, I’ve been really touched by people speaking against the xenophobic vote. And hang on, I’m not saying that everyone who voted to leave was xenophobic, but there was a proportion of the vote that certainly was. So, I’m not angry at the fact that people voted Brexit. In fact, pretty much like the lovely Bernie who writes a newsletter every Sunday (as opposed to myself who is just incapable of doing one every month) I was actually very surprised at the amount of people who turned up to vote – 72%! Considering that the turnout for the last set of local elections was under 40% and I think the same for the last general elections, not bad at all. So, I’m not angry at that. I’ll tell you what I’m angry at. Two things in fact. This morning on Spanish radio I heard one of the journalists say, “ There’s something I don’t understand. David Cameron calls a referendum to see if people want to leave Europe. And then he campaigns to stay. So why did he call it then?” Ah, of course what this very insightful Spanish journalist didn’t know was the context in which the referendum was promised. The UK Independent Party was promising to do quite well in the last general elections, until Mr Cameron and friends, because I very much doubt that Cameron has been ruling the country on his own, they decided that they couldn’t let their votes go to UKIP. UKIP had done really well in the European Elections, when their flagship promise in their manifesto was to get out of Europe. So, as the Tory votes, and politicians, started to migrate (ha ha, I thought I’d use that word), as the Tory votes began to migrate to UKIP, Cameron needed to do something drastic. And that something was promising a referendum. I need to say here too, that a few years ago, I heard Cameron say on Radio4 that Britain would never leave Europe. It wasn’t a reporter summarizing what he’d said, it wasn’t even a soundbyte. I heard the interview live on Radio4. Liar.   So I’m angry at that. At the fact that someone or someones wanted to be in power so badly that they promised something they knew would throw the country and our relationship with the European Union down the drain. The other thing I’m angry about of course, is that I’ve lived 26 years in London. (And yes, only London, which is an entity in itself). I’ve lived 26 years in London and yet I couldn’t vote in a referendum which, let’s face it, is going to affect me more than it’s going to affect many people who could vote. And no, I didn’t ask for a British passport in 26 years. What for? Didn’t need one. Now we shall see. Everyone is asking me, what will you do? Will you become British? I don’t know. We’ll see what the options are and then we’ll see. In all honesty, if I could become a Londoner, I’d do it tomorrow. Which brings to me to a couple of other reflections from the past few days. If you’re in Europe, you might have heard that there’s been a petition on the internet for London to become independent. That’s nice. Whereas I understand the anger of Londoners, which is probably the place in the UK where there are indeed more Europeans and the numbers were more or less 70% in favour of remaining, whereas I understand that I also say, come on… Think about it, what would happen if London left England? (And I’m saying England, because if we did move towards making London independent, it would be more or less at the same time as Scotland and northern Ireland left, yes, they’re pretty angry too…) But if London left England, the rest of the country would probably not do so well. So really? Do you really want London to be independent? Well, maybe you do, it depends on how pissed off you are… And there’s of course that other petition asking for a new referendum if either vote won by less than 60%... Over a million signatures in like 24 hours… a lot of which were fake…. If you believe the Twitter stream of the Petitions Committee, about 20,000 came from North Korea and about 40k from the Vatican. What a laugh. Not just that – I came across the petition on Facebook , by the way, everyone in my stream was so angry with the result…, anyway, I came across the petition, went to the website and of course the website was down. When I finally was able to read it properly, I thought, 60%... say this petition went ahead, how are we going to get form 48% to 60%? Say there’s another referendum, then Remain wins, by 55% to 45% and then… well, you need another referendum, because we didn’t get to 60%... and meanwhile, no one is paying attention to the nhs, to education, to Syria, Turkey, the threat from Isis and oh, immigration. Oh, and Donald Trump. OMG. So I didn’t sign the petition because I thought, well, we’d never get to 60% remain. But, oh, was I wrong. Was I wrong because I thought people had brains. And here’s the third thing that’s getting me angry. Well, not really angry because there’s no point in getting angry. So today I came across a new word: Bregret, what people who voted Brexit are now feeling. I’ll give you some anecdotal examples. On Facebook, when I made the point about the petition putting us in perpetum referendum, someone said, well, four of my very informed friends had voted Brexit but they never thought it would really count if the majority was so near 50%. Well, you should have informed yourself a bit better, didn’t you. Or another one, Oh, I only voted Brexit because I wanted to scare off Cameron. Well guess what, a vote is not a suggestion that you are behind something, a vote counts people. And now the Bregret is also increasing as you know, and you’ll be surprised at this, apparently the Leave campaigners were lying. According to an article in El Mundo, which I think has been taken from the Independent, Johnson and Farage were lying about what Brexit would mean for the NHS and immigration. Yes, my friends, this is the problem with democracy, An informed vote counts as much as an uninformed vote. And this goes too for parents of expats in Europe wanting to vote Brexit and children of immigrants in Britain voting Brexit.   Aside from all this, and the other repercussions like the mess that Labour is now in, Scotland and Northern Ireland now threatening with having referendums themselves to leave the UK.   While I’ve mentioned Labour, I know that Jeremy Corbyn has been given a really hard time about not backing Remain earlier or more vigorously but, you know what, his words after the results were the most sensible. This result reflects the divide in society in the UK. It reflects inequality. It reflects a system that focuses on the short terms and doesn’t look at the long term consequences. In one way, it’s no wonder that most of London voted to stay. Those that have been pushed out of London because of the housing prices are probably not that happy. Luxury flats continue to pop up all over London in all sorts of areas. Why are we obsessed with having luxury flats? How can normal people afford to live in London??? And that’s just a small example. In a way, I can’t even blame some of the British for being scared of uncontrolled immigration – did you know that you can get the leaflets that come through your door from Hammersmith and Fulham in, I seem to remember, 17 languages? And you can choose to have the website translated into over 20 languages? Another anecdote, a friend of my husband’s went to take the UK citizenship test and apparently, you had access to a translator. What? In the Netherlands you need to pass a Dutch test if you want to become a national. I know I’m privileged and have never had problems with the language but, you really don’t want immigration without integration, because this is what you get. The UK has always been so tolerant, so welcoming and so afraid of being intolerant that they’ve gone too far in that direction, forgetting that unless you have integration of all the different nationalities, you can’t live as one. So I’m with Corbyn and many others, thinking that this Brexit mess is unfortunately a symptom of a lot of what’s going on, on many levels and in many different places. Some of it is completely irrational (like those people voting Brexit without knowing it would have consequences like, oh, leaving the EU…) but others, well, there’s a lot that the UK and the European Union need to be looking at, before the whole thing crumbles.   Now before I move onto Spain, where does the world of work come into this? Ok, pause and disclaimer. I can only talk about this form my point of view. From a knowledge worker, middle class European. (Ha ha, I’ll say that again) European. In fact Western European, because the differences between West and East are still quite noticeable. The political class seems pretty much rotten. I’m not saying that they horrible individuals but they’re a little bit out of their depth, some more than others. They’ve got challenges they never thought they’d come across. A flood of immigrants running for their lives, kids who feel like foreigners in their countries of birth but who are looked as foreigners also in their countries of ethnic, who finally find a place to belong to under the wings of terrorists. And economically, let’s face it, we’re not doing that well… So, ok, I’ll speak for myself. I don’t feel like I can do much about who’s governing the country I live in. We seem to be constantly let down by every political party. So where can we gain a bit of control? Well, I think at work. It’s no coincidence (even though I know it’s not the direct result) but it’s no coincidence that the whole rise in self-management is happening now. Maybe finding more autonomy at work is really what we need. I’m not going to go as far as saying that we have to have a purpose (although some of you will say that that is important), but that at least, we have some sort of control over our destiny. This is where I bring back the world of work. I feel like we need to think of companies and organisations as places where we can belong to; places which we can shape through our actions. It will need a change of mindset, but to me, it seems the only way forwards for now. Make a difference at work and through work, because making a difference in society seems to be getting harder and harder. But work is connected to society, who makes up the world of work if not?   This was the end of the script, I adlibbed after that. I talked about how people looked miserable in Spain in the voting queue on Sunday and how many of my friends just didn’t know who to vote for. Wherever YOU are, whatever you’re doing, please enjoy.

Pilar and Lisette talk about the farewell process in a virtual team. 48:27mins Introduction Pilar had a full on day, which she shares with you... Nothing incredibly exciting, but very varied! Thanks to Saros Research for sponsoring the 21st Century Work Life podcast!   Click on this link to register with Saros: https://www.sarosresearch.com/participate/join-saros-research/?id=100243    Virtual Coffee with Lisette: Exit Interviews or Farewell Chats 08:45 mins. Lisette and Pilar talk about the Virtual Team Talk Internal Affair - our first shared experience as a community. What need to happen when someone leaves your team? What do you do with the information you gather from the chat? When might be the best time to have the exit interview? Pilar makes reference to this article Making Exit Interviews Count HBR April 2016  

On 21 April, Pilar attended the E-Resilience Conference, organised by the Switched On Culture Research Group. In this podcast, she shares her thoughts. Short introduction, with reference to: RSA Fellow's Reinventing Work Network 24 May London: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/rsa-fellows-reinventing-work-network-the-metrics-of-reinventing-work-tickets-24564810008?aff=eac2 Link to the blog post on how moving to virtual can change our identity: http://virtualnotdistant.com/virtual-challenges-identity/ If you're looking for the link to the Virtual not Distant ® 7 part email series, here it is: http://eepurl.com/bViJ85   Thank you to the organisers of the conference: Dr Christine Grant,Dr Almuth McDowall,Professor Gail Kinman,Dr Cristina Quiñones-García and thank you to Anna Meller for letting me know about it! Find out more: https://alwaysonculture.wordpress.com/ 07:20 mins Some of the things that Pilar found most "interesting": David D’Souza, Head of CIPD London. "The Future of Work." David talked about many things, including the question of why people, instead of growing at work, are becoming lesser beings than they are at home? Are we discriminating when we introduce "remote"? The question of ethics: "Just because we can, doesn't mean we should" Jean François Stitch, PhD Student at Lancaster University. "Virtual Interactions at Work, Wellbeing and Performance: The Importance of 'Person-Environment Fit’". The Person-Environment Fit with relation to email overload. Whether you feel overloaded by email or not really depends on how you view email overload. Interesting, eh? Dr Richard A. MacKinnon, Insight Director, The Future Work Centre. "Technology at Work: A Systems Perspective." Understanding your own preference is key: "General advice about the use of tech is pointless."   Alison Maitland, author of Future Work. "Leadership and Self-Leadership in the Digital Age." "The industrial age work model remains intact..." "Future work is a place where flexibility is the norm and not the exception and where autonomy replaces permission." Does it matter if our work eats into our personal life, if we don't experience work-life conflict? Advice to those leading virtual teams or teams with mobile working: Be open to change yourselves. Let go of control. Coach and support, rather than micromanage. Focus on relationships, not just tasks. Carve out time for individuals. Use the time in the workplace to build relationships. Work in different places to gain different perspectives. Take responsibility for each other's wellbeing. Find time away from your team members! (That's Pilar's advice...)   Dr Emma Russell, Kingston Business School. "Individual Differences in Dealing with Email at Work." Should countries bring in legislation to reduce email? How people under the different Big Five personalities react to checking email? The importance of self-awareness. "We should be given control about how to deal with our in-coming email because on size does not fit all." The 21st Century Work Life podcast is sponsored by Saros Research! https://www.sarosresearch.com/participate/join-saros-research/?id=100243 Join us for Virtual Team Talk! Use this contact form to tell us you'd like to join us. http://virtualnotdistant.com/contact-us/

In this episode, Pilar talks to Izabela Russell, co-founder of New Media Europe about what it takes to organise a conference and her search for the range of ingredients that make up entrepreneurs. 48:54mins  Introduction Twitter list for guests of the 21st Century Work Life podcast. https://twitter.com/PilarOrti/lists/guests-podcast Check out Sococo. https://www.sococo.com/ - the tool that brings proxemics into virtual relationships. People at Work Summit, Pilar will be speaking there on 22 April. https://www.peopleatworksummit.com/ She'll also take part in the UK Podcasters Blab marathon, also on 22 April! https://blab.im/mike-russell-uk-podcasters-online-conference-ukpod-2016 12th April Reinventing Work Network - Creative Gatherings Virtual not Distant Academy Leadership and Motivation in Virtual Teams - Webinar http://virtualnotdistant.com/leadership-and-motivation-in-virtual-teams-webinar/   Saros Virtual Team Practice @11:50 mins To give your opinion on products and get paid for it, follow this link to register for Saros. First of all, if you are in London over the weekend 18/19 June, join us for Virtual Team Talk at New Media Europe. If you use this link to book, you'll get free access to the dinner!   The Conversation with Izabela Russell, co-founder of New Media Europe @15:40mins. Episode 16 with Mike Russell (Izabela's husband) about New Media and Music Radio Creative. http://virtualnotdistant.com/new-media/ It all began with UKPodcasters... Link to the UKPodcasters website. http://ukpodcasters.com/ How do you market a conference? Connections! The structure of New Media Europe:Day #1 Inspiration (Lisette and I will inspire you!) , evening gala, New Media Europe awards and Day #2 Information and Practical advice. Who is the conference for? How did Izabela end up "doing this"? Organising a conference, the importance of connections. What is the New Media Europe Show podcast focusing on? The personality of entrepreneurs! http://newmediaeurope.com/2016/category/podcast/ (Lisette and Pilar will soon be on that podcast!) Izabela's Twitter @IzabelaRusell

In this episode, Pilar talks to Brian Cervino, the Community Manager of Trello, about how this online tool is helping people work together and how it's used within Trello itself to create a healthy company culture. 48:37 mins Introduction Pilar thanks all guests and talks a bit about trust and transparency in companies. Here are some links to posts on Trello by Pilar. How I'm Using Trello for the 21st Century Work Life podcast. Tips on using Trello from Trello's blog. VirtualTeamTalk blog Leila's post How to Disengage Your Employees   Virtual not Distant Bitesize - sponsored today by Saros Research 07:30mins The Dark Side of Using Collaboration Tools.   To give your opinion on products and get paid for it, click here through to Saros. The Conversation with Brian Cervino, Community Manager at Trello 13:50 mins How Trello evolves. The story behind Trello. Location - people working in office and remote. Trello Business Class and The Freemium model. The concept of PowerUps. "Calling all Developers". How Trello uses Trello! https://blog.trello.com/how-15-minutes-each-week-keeps-our-distributed-team-connected/How others are using it http://blog.trello.com/curriculums-collaboration-and-reinventing-the-classroom/ ? http://www.happymelly.com/how-trello-can-help-your-team-self-organise/Brian's music. Making coffee and creativity. Tweet Brian @briancervino Do send us your feedback through Twitter or the Contact Page on Virtual not Distant.

Pilar talks to Andrea Darabos and Ryan Behrman form the London Management 3.0 Meetup Group. 00:10 Pilar recommends some podcasts. 09:55 Why they set up the meet ups. Link to meet up. Their favourite meetups. How the Meetups have evolved and the different formats they take. 21:10 Advice for people who want to start a Meetup. Meetups in other cities when you're traveling. 30:45 Agile moving into the mainstream. Using agile terminology with a range of teams. 36:50 Their own companies, their philosophy and why they set them up. Andrea: Lean Advantage. Ryan:  Touch Think. 42:50 How do you become a Management 3.0 facilitator? If you want to listen to the interview with Jurgen Appelo, listen to Episode 4 of the 21st Century Work Life podcast. Ryan and Andrea are running a course on 17 & 18 September 2015. leanadvantage.co.uk/?portfolio=management-3-0-2-day-course Connect with Andrea and Ryan: Andrea's Twitter: twitter.com/adarabos   Andrea's Linkedin: uk.linkedin.com/in/andreadarabos Ryan's LinkedIn: uk.linkedin.com/in/ryanbehrman Join the Management 3.0 London Meetup!

I’ve created this very short extra episode of the 21st Century Work Life podcast, just to let you know that registration is now open for the course Virtual not Distant and that I have a little discount for listeners of this show.     Virtual not Distant, which is an online course for managers and leaders of virtual teams, and indeed anyone who wants to improve how their virtual team works, will run on 21 September, until 22 November. The course is timebound because I want us to have quality online discussions and quality online events and also, because I firmly believe that you have a greater chance of completing and, more importantly, applying what you’ve learned if you’re timebound and in a small group. So, there are only 12 places available. Plus, if you want to obtain a certificate endorsed by the ILM, you will need to complete a small number of assessments, which have actually been designed for you to help you think about how to apply what you’ve discovered to your own team or your own situation. You will have until February to submit the assessments and, if you don’t think you’re going to have time to take the assessed option, you can opt for a Development Certificate.     Now, I’ve already talked about the course content in the podcast before, so if you want more details, do head over to virtualnotdistant.net,     And if you like what you see there, then,  the code PODCAST you can get 10% off both the normal price £450 or around $690 US Dollars, or, if you book before 31 July you can get that same discount off the early bird price which already has a 20% off. If you don’t feel like doing the maths right now, Just head over to www.virtualnotdistant.net and on the registration page, you can enter the code PODCAST and the system will calculate the exact amount for you.     So that’s my little thank you for spending an hour, more or less, with me and my guests every week.     If you are not quite ready to commit to a nine week course, with hangouts, online discussions and coaching, then feel free to try out a mini-course I’ve created which incorporates some of the materials of the module on Visibility. You can just register on that straightaway by going to the same website www.virtualnotdistant.net/free     If you do register on that course, make sure to drop me a line at some point and tell me what you think.     And talking of getting in touch, I’ve decided to set up an email address for you to get in touch about this podcast. I’ve decided to go down the gmail route because I find it incredibly useful in many ways, including the fact that it can then link to Google Drive, a calendar etc So, the new email if you want to get in touch with me, is askingpilar@gmail.com     So you can use that address to ask any questions about anything you hear on the podcast, about anything related to virtual teams etc. I think it’s time for me to open up a bit more the podcast, now that I feel like I kind of know what I’m doing. So, if you want to get in touch, askingpilar@gmail.com     And there’s always twitter, which I love, my handle there is PilarOrti     So, many thanks for listening. If you check out virtualnotdistant.net and have any questions, however small, or however big actually, about the course then do get in touch.     Have a lovely rest of the day.      

For more on 21st Century Work Life and working in virtual teams, visit www.virtualnotdistant.com00:30 Pilar talks about her own experience running a theatre company and how she ended up helping virtual teams. (You can check out Theatrefolk's podcast where todays guest, Lindsay Price interviews Pilar. http://www.theatrefolk.com/podcast/devising-physical-theatre/)08:45 Lindsay Price, Partner at Theatrefolk, talks about how and why the company was set up and how they built a global business. www.theatrefolk.com14:40 How Theatrefolk works and how they provide support to drama teachers, especially those isolated. 17:00 The importance of not remaining anonymous in an online business. How Theatrefolk communicates with its community. 20:00 The Theatrefolk podcast. http://www.theatrefolk.com/podcast/ 22:25 The Drama Teacher Academy. www.dramateacheracademy.com 28:50 Lindsay shares those projects that didn't work out. The importance of failing and making time to rest. 32:18 The future of Theatrefolk and Lindsay's own writing. 34:00 Lindsay's thoughts on how the new way of doing business presents many opportunities for artists to make a living from their craft. 36:06 Pilar shares her thoughts on writing on paper and gives a short overview of the course on managing virtual teams VirtualnotDistant.net http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/23/reading-writing-on-paper-better-for-brain-concentration   Do send your feedback and connect via Twitter @PilarOrti

Welcome to a tiny episode of 21st Century Work Life. I was actually just going to release a note saying that there wouldn’t be an episode today, but as I was about to do that, I got thinking about some work life related stuff and I thought, why not share some of it with you and make a mini-episode out of it. I’m currently away from my usual base but I’m still able to have a presence in social media for example, thanks to the way that some of these applications allow us to create content one moment and release it the other. Blog posts can be scheduled, podcasts can be pre-recorded and scheduled in advance so that they come out when I want them to, I can automate my tweets so that it looks like I’m active, when I might actually be completely unplugged and doing something completely different… To be honest, I didn’t schedule many tweets during the Christmas period, and that also made me think, I don’t really celebrate Christmas, I’m self-employed, and the kind of work I do means that I can pretty much set my own hours, and yet I still seem to follow conventional working patterns. If I don’t do any work over these days, I don’t feel that guilty and I just say to my employees, that’s myself, it’s fine, take a break, everyone else seems to be taking time off. What’s even more baffling to me is that even though I’ve been living in the UK for more than half my life now, I still take the Christmas period as ending on the 6th January, which is when it ends in Spain, on epiphany. So for me, I think it’s all right to take a break until then. Again, even though none of my clients expect me to work all the time, and even if I schedule a lot of my own work, there is this voice in my head that keeps saying, there’s a time to work and there’s a time when it’s ok not to work. Maybe it’s because still, the majority of the workforce works for 8 hours a day, on 5 days of the week, that the self- employed also seek some kind of structure by following the more conventional timetable. For example, yesterday I was listening to a podcast, the Rocking Self Publishing podcast (which by the way if you’re a writer or inspiring one, is well worth a listen) and the guest, Libby Hawker, said that every day, she sits down and writes for eight hours, as it’s her job. Very interesting that she didn’t say, I aim to write 5,000 words a day as that’s my job. Or, I work 2 hours in the morning, 2 in the afternoon and 2 in the evening. And it’s true, that I’ve heard many writers, especially those who’ve moved from full time employment, saying this kind of thing. There are also those who have a more flexible approach of course and in the end, everyone finds different patterns that work for them, but I find it interesting that even when you follow what might be considered a less conventional career, you still, or should I say, I still, follow the more conventional work patterns. I suppose, it’s still what I grew up with and it’s still how most of the world works, so it’s easier to find some kind of structure to adapt to it. So this is probably as much as I’m going to say today. I just wanted to say hello as it’s Friday, and I do like following a schedule with my podcasts, as in, the podcast comes out on Fridays, as is the case with this one, or Tuesdays, with the Spain Uncovered. This gives me a deadline, and so gives my work structure which is even more important when you’re organizing your own work. It also means that you listening and looking forwards to the podcast, know when to expect it. Of course, last week was a bit different as I didn’t want to release a podcast on boxing day for some reason (I suppose I’m going back again to conventional schedules) and so I released the retrospective on Tuesday. And talking of this episode, which by the way was great fun to record as it was only myself and Lisette talking about certain aspects of work and the future of work that had caught our eye during 2014, talking of this episode, thanks very much to David Roswell for the comment on the blog and also, thanks to Robert Svenson for the lovely tweet about that same episode. He described it as “an engaging conversation on workplace dynamics and trends” – I really liked the way you summarized that, Robert, thank you. So, see you next week. If you don't fancy popping onto this site every week to listen to the podcast,  just look for the 21st Century Work Life on your podcast app, iTunes, Stitcher, whatever you use and Subscribe. Over the next few weeks, look out for interviews with Marta Texidor from Yammer and Shannon Hughes from Udemy, and of course, for more virtual coffee with Lisette. Have a great start to 2015!

Welcome to the first episode of the 21st Century Work Life podcast, a show created to look at how the world of work,and our attitudes to work are changing. In this first episode, I reflect on how much how we talk about work has changed - we are now ok with placing the words "happiness" and "work" in the same sentence! I also share with you Mark Trezona's thoughts and some tips on how we can move towards Happiness at Work. (Mark has made this subject his mission and he now delivers a Happiness at Work newsletter weekly.) For the second part of the episode I have virtual coffee with Lisette Sutherland. I met Lisette on the Internet, when she interviewed me for her site (and now podcast!) Collaboration Superpowers. Lisette will be making an appearance in this podcast every other week and in today's episode she shares her tips on how to create the best Work Holiday. Yes, you heard right. 00:30 Introduction02:50 Changes in attitude to work - talking about happiness at work. What does happiness at work mean?11.15 I read Mark Trezona's view on happiness at work and Martin Seligman's PERMA principles.20:40 Virtual coffee with Lisette: Work Holidays Pilar Orti blogs at virtualteamleadership.co.uk