Debunking Remote Work Myths with Jennifer Britton | DistantJob - Remote Recruitment Agency

Debunking Remote Work Myths with Jennifer Britton

Gabriela Molina

Jennifer Britton is the founder and owner of Potentials Realized, an award-winning Canadian Performance improvement company, focusing on coaching, leadership, and team performance issues. She is the recipient of the 2016 Prism award for excellence in coaching from ICF Toronto and the 2017 award of excellent curriculum design award. She is also the author of several books about remote leadership and the Remote Pathways podcast’s co-host.

Succesful remote leader

Read the transcript

Luis:

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of the DistantJob podcast, your podcast about leading and building remote teams. Not just any remote teams, awesome remote teams. I am your host, Luis, from DistantJob. My guest today is Jennifer Britton. Jennifer is the founder and owner of Potentials Realized and a recognized expert in the area of group and team coaching. She’s the author of several books about remote leadership, teamwork and performance. Also, the recipient of the 2016 Prism award for excellence in coaching from ICF Toronto and the 2017 award of excellence in curriculum design. She also co-host the Remote Pathways podcast. Jennifer, welcome on the show.

Jennifer:

Thanks, Luis. Great to be with you here today.

Luis:

It’s awesome having you. We were talking a bit off camera, off recording of something about your background in remote work. These days, I need to stress for future historians that this has been recorded in Corona times, in the year 2020, the year where remote coaches are popping up like mushrooms. It really is impressive. The amount of people that know everything about remote right now, but it’s not your case. As we were talking, you have been doing this for quite a while, much before the remote expression existed. I feel some solidarity for that because as an editor, I have been managing remote teams so much before remote was a thing. I guess that my first question to you is, considering your start in managing remote teams and now that we see that everyone is all about remote even before COVID, we had a big push for remote in the past two to three years, what has your mind changed the most about in the last two to three years?

Jennifer:

Such a good question. Not to date myself, but as I was sharing with Luis, again, my experience as a remote leader and a remote manager started in the early 1990s even before the internet. In those days, remote meant having to travel upwards of five days to see the teams that you were managing. Really having to look at how do we build team culture? How do we create health and safety? How do we have the most important conversations with the tools available to us? To what you’ve just said, Luis, today, everyone is becoming an expert around virtual remote. I think, actually, it’s calling us forward as professionals of all kinds to do better work and to get a little bit more explicit on what does excellent work look like in any context, whether it’s by choice or just by design.

What shifted, for me, I think I’ve been talking lot about this in my writing. I published, back in 2017, Effective Virtual Conversations. I really saw that as a legacy book for myself as an author to really say, in the remote and virtual space, we have so many different types of conversations each and every day. We are in an era, right now, of words like Zoom Bombing and Zoom Fatigue.

Luis:

Yeah. That’s amazing.

Jennifer:

Being on calls from dusk till dawn has had an impact of all kinds. Well, when we really look at what an excellent conversation means, well, the technologies have changed over three decades, the principles remain the same. I guess I’d ask listeners to think about the best conversations they’ve been on recently and to think about what made those conversations really work, to think about as a member of a team or a leader of a team, how do you do your best work? What helps keep you motivated? What keeps you really energized to bring your best work in an environment which is disruptive? Yes, the disruption has definitely magnified in recent months, but also, just the complexity of having to always balance these different hats and rules that we, as remote workers, have found ways to manage. I guess the key thing is, in the last few years, how do we continue to appreciate the principles of excellent remote work and leadership and teamwork? Well, change happens in our context and to our tools.

Luis:

Yeah. You talk about appreciating the excellence of remote work. What’s your benchmark there? Considering your experience, what are your expectations? I used to see a lot of people going to remote work with decreased expectations. They used to think, well, productivity will go down, people will slack, people will be lazy, et cetera. I use to fight those expectations because I actually see, and there’s a decent amount of white papers published that say that, obviously, after a period of adaptation, productivity actually increases. Today, I’m a bit less sanguine on the productivity aspect just because the exit is to remote work in 2020 has been very unprepared, right?

Jennifer:

Yes.

Luis:

It was a sudden thing. Obviously, productivity will suffer. What do you think, in regular times, what should be the expectations? What is the benchmark for that excellence that you talk about?

Jennifer:

Yeah. Again, as a leader, as an author, as a researcher, I think leadership and team experiences need to be exceptional at any time, whether we’re face-to-face or other. I’ve always been really fortunate in the teams that I’ve led and been part of to work in very extreme environments, right? I used to work for the United Nations. I led teams there. I led teams for the Canadian and British NGO sector before I founded my own organization. Given the mandate of our work, really, a lot of times, the mandate of our work really shapes, what does our work look like? Are you ready to really give it your all or not? I think, what’s been interesting, right, I think too, in recent, bring it to the current COVID times, we’re now seeing some really interesting research like what I would call the myths. In fact, back in February, I think I did a community call around busting the remote working myths.

Luis:

That’s so funny.

Jennifer:

A lot of these boundaries. Boundaries are like remote equals disconnected. Think about the amount of connection you’ve had or felt in recent months. A lot of these things that we’re often thrown at remote work, and I really mean thrown at remote work, because they were often not spoken to by people who had had experience working remotely. We are now seeing, some of them don’t hold true. There was some recent research here in Canada which actually showed, even in COVID times, remote workers are more productive. I’m just North of Toronto, many businesses are not going back to the downtown core anytime soon. Even if when they do, if they do, they will be in very different working arrangements, which will probably be a hybrid or a full remote work process anyways.

Yeah. I think it’s a very interesting time. I’d love to continue to see continued research, which helps to debunk or maybe validate some of the myths that have been toted about remote work for many, many years.

Luis:

I want to dig a bit deeper into this because I find it so funny that I use that exact same wording, debunking the remote myths, in a two-sided pamphlet that I use to bring in conference. Remember when conferences were a thing.

Jennifer:

Right.

Luis:

Remember those times like 100 years ago when people used to go to conferences for work.

Jennifer:

Fly around the world, right?

Luis:

Yeah. I had this whole shtick in the pamphlets where the remote employee had the swords and there was a dragon that was supposed to be the myth. The dragon was dressed like a middle manager. I try to make it a very funny discussion. I’m wondering what are the myths in your … Let’s see if our myths match up. What are the myths that you find that prevent people from trusting or fully being onboard with remote work?

Jennifer:

Yeah. Well, I think there’s a myth that people won’t work, right? There was really a big one like “Oh, they’re going to show up to work everyday in their pajamas.” I think, well, people might have done that, perhaps, for a few weeks early on in March.

Luis:

Yeah.

Jennifer:

I think people realize, you know what, like “I still need to do my work and we are professionals.”

Luis:

We do.

Jennifer:

Clothing choice aside-

Luis:

I’m going to try to come to work with super Mario T-shirts, but I’m still doing my work.

Jennifer:

Still doing your work, right?

Luis:

Yes.

Jennifer:

I think what’s really important to any employee, and this is what we want to tap into as leaders is, what motivates our staff? How do we help our staff bring their best work everyday, whatever the context is? Now, that’s a whole other conversation. I said it a few minutes ago, the remote equals disconnected. That’s a big phrase that I use a lot, remote equals disconnected. I think the challenge is, when we are operating in a system where we may not feel seen everyday, we need to be more proactive, more proactive in our communication, more proactive in our outreach, more proactive in our teaming and team events. That is just a different way of working, right?

Leading in a remote space is not necessarily the same as leading in a face-to-face context. We’ve seen this for decades. It’s not just been in recent years. It really is needing to use a skill of influence. We need to equip everyone in different ways. You cannot lead by command and control. We really have to work through others. That means, from a myth perspective, what I say is what I’m going to get, right? No, that doesn’t work. You need to be really checking in, doing a lot more coaching, doing a lot more one-on-ones and team meetings and peer support as well, right? Really, I think remote work is about the team and leader plays a key role. Don’t get me wrong there, but our role as leaders is really to empower the team so the entire system can do their best work.

As leaders, our role may shift from more of the command and control to troubleshooter, liaison. Really, I saw huge part of my work for 15 years is about that networking and helping even team members network with each other so that we could get our best results. Because if you’re leading a team of 30 people, you don’t have time, right? I don’t have time. I used to lead teams. My last team, 30 people, 26 nationalities, 10 countries, 24 technical areas of expertise. That is not what a typical span of control would be in a face-to-face environment.

Luis:

Yeah. Let’s be real. That’s a point that I make when people bring the control, the command and control issue. To me, it’s like, let’s say that you have a team of 30 people in an office. How much easier is it to just have 30 people all around the world and you can send them a slack message or set up a Zoom call rather than trying to ask them to go to your office or to go to their cubicle or whatever, right?

Jennifer:

Yeah.

Luis:

As long as you have expectation of time zones and what time people are supposed to be available, it seems to me that communication should be easier than in a physical location. Not harder.

Jennifer:

Yeah. Well, again, I think people are seeing the ways that this is a paradigm shift. This is, really, back to myth, back to paradigm shift. Yeah, do we really need to physically jump in a car in my former world of work, get on another flight. One year, I spent almost 180 days in hotels and on planes. I got very sick in my early 30s because of it and lost some vision in one of my eyes, which you know what, that, to me, was the prefaces to … When I established Potentials Realized, we’ve been primarily a virtual business for 16 years. That’s where we really focus is, how do you virtualize? How do you take your classroom-based training and put it into a digital environment? Still interactive, synchronous, so that you’re actually probably having better conversations without the fatigue that people used to come with. It’s like “Oh, I’ve traveled for a day.” Or “My flight was delayed three times.” Think about all the things that we’re not having to work with.

Now, there is a flip side. If you’re not set up for remote work, then we have multiple hats, multiple rules that we’re juggling. Luckily, my son is in the ninth grade now. He’s got a pretty good routine, but I’m a mom. I’m a business owner. I’m showing up to do work everyday with teams that are all over the world. Very much, I think you’ve heard my appreciation, my framing of, we’ve got to be proactive, right?

Luis:

Yeah.

Jennifer:

As the remote worker leader business owner, we really want to set a frame, set systems, so that this lifestyle works for us because another myth is, there are boundaries. If you’re part of a global team, you quickly realize boundaries are pretty fluid. If I don’t get to my desk by 5:30 to reach someone hours ahead, the work is not going to get done. We’re at choice, but that’s the trade off. Perhaps, we enjoy the flexibility, which is something I love about my work.

Luis:

Yeah. I want to go back, eventually, to the way you built your company, but I want to talk about another myth that comes up to me. I’m sure it comes up to you in one form or another that people think that, “Okay, so I have an existing company. I don’t want them to go remote in an existing business. I don’t want them to go fully remote, but I do want to enhance my business by hiring remote people.” The myth is that, it’s hard to mix remote and local people, especially for meetings. There’s no way to make the remote people be integrated.

Jennifer:

Yes.

Luis:

Now, your company is fully remote. You don’t have that problem, neither does DistantJob, but I do think that it’s possible to have that everyone at the table factor, which part of the team in office and part of the team doing remote. What do you think?

Jennifer:

Hybrid meetings. Very common. It’s been common for many years. Ultimately though, we want to make sure that we are doing all that we can to really vary things up. Let’s call it Country A. The headquarters country is not the one that’s always leading the table. As I said, we want to bring people together to also cultivate those relationships. I think one of the most challenging things in our work is, how do we create informal moments for people to get to know each other? We know that teams that excel have a solid focus on results, but also know each other. There’s a relational area to high performance. Within a country context where we have remote and in-person team, how are we just watching for people to really integrate with each other? That may also happen through like special committees. Are we making sure that people are really getting mixed up that way?

Again, former experience, technically, we typically will bring lots of variety of experience. How are we mixing that? Finding collaborations across the silos that inevitably exist.

Luis:

Awesome. That’s a good observation on how to deal with it. I want to talk about your business. As you said, you founded your business. You’re the owner. You mentioned that due to your previous experience, you really wanted to make sure that this was a business where you could lead a healthy lifestyle, when you’re in place, it could lead a healthy lifestyle. Did that automatically equate remote or would you spend some time trying to figure it out? Take me through the thought process of how you came to decide that your business was going to be remote. Once you decided, how did you structure it, initially?

Jennifer:

Yeah. Well, I think that the first thing was, I thought as I returned back to Canada, having not lived here for 15, 16 years, that I would still like to travel the world. Actually, 13 months later, I gave birth to my son. Once he was born, I realized-

Luis:

There goes the traveling blends.

Jennifer:

The traveling was like “Yeah, I just don’t want to do this.” One of my first post, his birth consultancies took me to Haiti. As I was given my bulletproof vest and helmet, I realized that, you know what, “Now I’m a mom. I really should not be doing this work. I think this is the last posting that I’m going to do.” No humor there. It really forced me to review where I was focusing my time. The other piece was, what does this business look like, right? I had led teams. I love leading teams, but in the world of Potentials Realized, I haven’t wanted to build out a mega organization. Part of why I love being an author, being a consultant is, I can collaborate with other bigger businesses, bring my expertise in and scale work that way. Because things are digital as well, there’s a scalability that wouldn’t have happened if everything was physical.

Early on in this business, we just turned 16, really on in the business. It was like “Oh, it could be a blend of in-person and virtual.” When, in fact, what I’ve realized probably more in the last five, six years, there are shoulder seasons where I still physically travel to see people. Those being the months when we don’t have snow. Really, it’s-

Luis:

That’s what? One month a year?

Jennifer:

Well, yeah, end of March through June. Sort of September, October, but now, and I think one of the only barriers had been people going, “Oh, but can’t we have you? Really, can’t we have you?” There’s only so many hours in a day that I can be moving physically from location to location. Now that people have the tools and experience in working remote, I think that’s actually going to create just a much easier way. Because certainly, here in Toronto, it’s got one of the longest commute times for several decades now. A lot of organizations are just saying, “We can get as much done even more so virtually.” With some of my business here, much of my business, also global, just when it comes to time zones, it’s too difficult, right?

Luis:

Yeah.

Jennifer:

It’s much more easy if we bring people together. Key to making this all work is clarity of vision, right? It’s just what we know about teams. What is your vision? What do you want to create? What’s the lifestyle? What do your clients want? Ultimately, we are needing to be shaped by our clients, which is why I have “shoulder seasons.”

Luis:

All right. Tell me a bit more about the management part. How many direct reports do you have? What’s the interaction with them like? What’s your typical day and typical week look like?

Jennifer:

Yeah. There was the before Potentials Realized and there’s a now. I just work, now, with a series of different subcontractors on a project by project basis. Again, I was a program manager for many years. I always say project management is projects on steroids. With that in mind, every week in this business looks very different because it is so project based. In a span of a week, I will work on everything from how do we digitize in-person learning events, how do we virtualize those, too, on a leadership lens, how do we build team lead capability. I’ve spent a lot of time when I was in the role of team lead. Going back to the 1990s to now, how do we really help people in that first step up getting into leadership, whether they have only worked in the remote space or transitioning to remote. Really, how do you lead teams in an exceptional way?

I think with that, it really does nicely dovetail with a lot of project based work, because leadership academies, leadership programming always has a fixed start and an end. To my own experience, let’s capitalize on the expertise that’s in the room. That’s how technology has really enabled us to change the types of conversations we have. The big challenge I see, right now, is people are moving between call to call to call at a much more rapid pace than even a few weeks ago or months ago. Whether you’re in a learning environment or you’re in a leadership environment, how are you tracking who you’re speaking with, right? The diversity is immense. Once again, it brings us back to relationships. Are you spending enough time building relationships with your team, with your direct reports, with your subcontractors, so that you have the necessary level of trust and connection, so that you can keep things moving.

Hopefully, back to earlier point, people are going to bring their best self to work because they love working in whatever culture they’re in.

Luis:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s a good point. Thank you for sharing that. I do think that the relationship piece is essential, right? The keeping track of your conversations, it sounds very mechanistic when we talk about it, but it’s so much value. It’s so valuable to just take notes as you talk with someone. Maybe it doesn’t even have to be work related, but just something that so and so mentioned this about something that’s going in their life right now. Just that. That’s so important in establishing a connection. This, really, shouldn’t even be remote related, right? This is good. This is-

Jennifer:

Good leadership across the board.

Luis:

Yeah. Exactly.

Jennifer:

It’s more augmented, right?

Luis:

Exactly, but this thing that-

Jennifer:

I think that’s what people are commenting on. It’s like, I feel isolated. I feel remote, right?

Luis:

Yeah.

Jennifer:

Really, let’s take time to get to know our folks to really check in because we might be the only live conversation. Back to conversations. We’re communicating all the time in the remote space. How are we doing that? Is it Slack?

Luis:

Exactly.

Jennifer:

Is it a text? Is it a verbal call? Is it a Zoom call?

Luis:

Yeah.

Jennifer:

Being, also, very clear as a leader, what are the preferred channels? What are the preferred channels for you? What are the preferred channels for the team members, individually and collectively? How are we reinforcing messages? Reinforcing it so that it’s not noisy, but that it’s coming at people in a way that is being absorbed in ways that people are listening for.

Luis:

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s very important. I am consistently impressed by the amount of leaders and managers that go through an entire day of calls without opening a notepad or a note block or something like that. They tell me, “Well, but I’m paying attention to everything. I’m getting the bird’s-eye view of what’s happening in the company.” Yeah. Sure. I believe that. You have a project management system like Basecamp or Trello or Asana or whatever you use. That, usually, starts the business part, but it doesn’t really start the people part.

Jennifer:

Yeah. To that point, I’ll just say one other thing, because when I work with a lot of leaders and I work with virtual facilitators to become more fluid and masterful in this space, what a lot of people say to me is, “Jen, the one thing that I remember from our conversations is, you always talk about how things get magnified in the remote space.” In my writing, in my training, it really is what’s getting magnified. Is what you want magnified the thing that is getting magnified? Because if we are not taking notes and we’re not tracking those details of our staff’s lives, lives and our worlds are continuing. We may only see each other through these little windows once a week. What’s happening outside of the rest of the context? It’s really important that we have high trust, high connection and great systems to keep information flowing because I know you’re in Portugal. I’m in Canada, right? Your day is wrapping up when I’m kicking into high gear.

Luis:

Yeah.

Jennifer:

How are we keeping ourselves communicating? Let alone, the lead in the room.

Luis:

Yeah. All right. I know we have a hard stop. I want to be respectful of your time. Usually, by this time in the show, what I do is, I ask some rapid fire questions. The questions are rapid fire, but the answers don’t need to be. Feel free to expand as much as you’d like. Are you ready?

Jennifer:

I’m ready, Luis. Bring them on.

Luis:

Okay. First question, what browser tabs do you have open right now?

Jennifer:

Good question. I have Mentimeter open right now. I love Mentimeter as a learning tool where we can actually collaborate real-time and see on the screen what we are thinking. We were talking this morning in some virtual facilitation training. What are the different tools we want to use to signal that this is a wow call? This is an interactive working, co-working virtual call. We can’t do that when people’s videos are off and everyone’s on mute. We want to use tools like Mentimeter. Long answer for a short question.

Luis:

No, that’s fine. If you add $100, usually, US dollars, but I guess it can be Canadian, to spend-

Jennifer:

I’ll take you as they do. I take it both.

Luis:

… with each person working for you, what would you give them? A couple of rules, you can’t just give them the money and you can’t ask each person what they want. You need to buy in both.

Jennifer:

Okay.

Luis:

It can be physical. It can be virtual, but you do need to give everyone the same thing.

Jennifer:

Okay. I’d give them a new … Does it have to cost $100 or it can go towards their next phone upgrade?

Luis:

Sure.

Jennifer:

I’ll say, let’s go to the next phone upgrade, right? Back to making this work work, we need good technology. I say that as someone who’s been in the space. We need the tools that will allow us to have the best conversations in the moment. It would be a phone upgrade, $100, wherever you are.

Luis:

Okay. Awesome. What about you? What purchase has made your work life easier or more productive in the past year?

Jennifer:

A new laptop. A new laptop that is touch screen that I can move around. I think back to my first laptop that I carried around the world that weighed 20 pounds, and the cell phones. I was in the day when a satellite phone and a phone had to fit into a backpack.

Luis:

Yes. I remember that. It was both a phone and a self-defense weapon.

Jennifer:

It was an interesting time when I was in my 20s-

Luis:

Yeah. You could clobber someone with-

Jennifer:

… to go out on-call to a bar or a dance hall.

Luis:

You could clobber someone with that thing. It does-

Jennifer:

Yeah. It’s a safety device.

Luis:

Yeah. It was impressive. Okay. What brand? What kind of laptop?

Jennifer:

Let’s see. It’s just an Acer. It’s a Spin Acer. It weighs really light. It’s got the touch screen, which in my work and in meetings, it’s really useful to zoom in and out.

Luis:

Interesting.

Jennifer:

I think that is the fun part of it. I can take it anywhere, right?

Luis:

Interesting.

Jennifer:

I could be in my office. I could be on the road. I think the weight issue is really key as well as I use it for podcasting, right?

Luis:

Right.

Jennifer:

You mentioned, I’m a co-host at the Remote Pathways podcast. That’s coming out of some writing work that I’m doing under the Remote Pathways brand, which follows the adventures of 12 different types of remote workers known as the Digital Dozen.

Luis:

Nice. Okay. What book or books have you gifted the most?

Jennifer:

What book? Well, beyond my own, and I could give them one.

Luis:

Yeah. Yeah. I was going to add that. Beyond your own. That would make it very-

Jennifer:

Beyond my own. I still love giving people a physical journal. That’s not a book, but it’s a resource, right?

Luis:

Yeah.

Jennifer:

What we see is, digital retention is not the same as the analog retention. How are we helping people create focus, create white space for them to work on. I was a tree planter as a university student. I feel like I can give away some more trees when I was planting 1,000 a day for four summers of my life, but I just think, really, books, I think most of us are going to the digital space but a journal is a journal. We may use it for planning, dreaming, conceptualizing and taking those notes as we talked about.

Luis:

Yeah. Plus, when you’re done with it, you just digitize it and recycle. It’s not so bad.

Jennifer:

Yeah. Exactly.

Luis:

Yeah. That’s great. Final question. This one has a bit of a longer setup, but let’s go with it. Let’s say that you are hosting a dinner where there’s going to be a round table about remote work and the future of work. You’re inviting people from tech companies from all around the world and important decision makers; hiring managers, VPs of operations, CEOs, et cetera. Now, here’s the twist. The dinner is held at a Chinese restaurant. You, as the host, get to pick the message that comes inside the fortune cookie. What is your fortune cookie message?

Jennifer:

Great question. I think one of our themes today is, what are the myths you want to bust, right? Work innovation is all about revisiting what we do, what we hold is true. Sometimes we’re forced to do that. Sometimes it just naturally happens. I think there would be a fortune cookie conversation sparker, as I like to say, what’s the remote work myth that you want to bust right now or bust this year.

Luis:

Sounds good. That’s a good question to put to people. Actually, to whoever is listening, to all of your listeners, feel free to answer this question when this podcast comes out. You listen to it and see it on social media. What’s your answer to Jennifer’s question? That’s what I’m asking. All right. Jennifer, this was an absolute pleasure. Now, I’d like you to tell people who want to continue the conversation, where can they reach out to you? Where can they have a conversation with you? Where can they learn more about your business and what your business can offer to them?

Jennifer:

Well, thank you, Luis. Again, if you’re interested in support for your virtual remote business or team or leaders, reach out to me under my main company umbrella. That’s Potentials with an S, potentialsrealized.com. If you’re interested and you’re one of the Digital Dozen that’s listening in and would see yourself more as a remote project manager, a remotepreneur, check out our podcast at remotepathways.com. I’m still old fashion. I love a phone call. Can I give out my business phone number? Is that applicable?

Luis:

Sure.

Jennifer:

If you want to pick up the phone.

Luis:

It’s yours.

Jennifer:

Yeah. People want to pick up the phone because I’ll pick up a phone call more than I’ll read email these days. 416-996 Team. That’s 416-996-8326. It’s been a pleasure. I’m going to be meeting with Sharon next week at the Remote Pathways. He’s going to be one of our guest coming up. Really, this is an important space for us to be collaborating within, learning from each other. Luis, thanks for spending time with me this afternoon.

Luis:

It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for being a guest, Jennifer.

Jennifer:

Thanks everyone. Let’s hear from you around the conversation sparker. What is your remote myth that you would like to be busting or you are busting right now?

Luis:

All right. This was Jennifer Britton on the DistantJob podcast. I am your host on the DistantJob podcast, Luis. Thank you so much for listening, everyone and see you next week. We close another episode of the DistantJob podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please, you can help us out by sharing it on social media. That would be great. It’s how we reach more listeners. The more listeners we have, the more awesome guests I can get in touch and convince to participate in these conversations that are a joy to have for me and I hope they’re a joy for you to listen to as well. You can also help a lot leaving reviews on iTunes or your podcast syndication service of choice. Reviews are surprisingly helpful in helping the podcast gets to more listeners.

Now, another thing that you might want to do is go to distantjob.com/blog/podcast. Click on your favorite episode, any episode, really, and subscribe. By subscribing, you will get a notification whenever a new episode is up and whenever we get the transcripts off the episode up, so you can actually peruse the conversations in text form. Of course, if you need to find a great employee for your team, a great remote employee, you should take the whole world into consideration and not just look to hire locally, not just look to hire in your country. Look around the whole world because that’s the talent pool that contains the best talent. To help me with that, again, distantjob.com is the perfect place to start. You will tell us who we meet and we will make sure that you get the best possible candidate, 40% faster than the industry standard. With that, I bid you a deal. See you next week on the next episode of DistantJob podcast.

 

Managing a team in an office is not the same as managing a team in a virtual context. Remote leaders need to have the ability to connect their teams, breaking the distance ”boundary”.

In this podcast episode, Jennifer Britton shares her experience leading and working with distributed teams for more than 16 years. She debunks many myths regarding remote work from her experiences managing teams in both face-to-face and virtual contexts. She also shares how building her organization, Potentials Realized, lead her to discover that remote leaders need to be proactive to succeed.

 

 

Highlights:

  • How to get rid of the zoom fatigue
  • Busting remote work myths
  • How to motivate your team remotely
  • Tips for proactive management
  • How to deal with hybrid teams
  • Her experience as the Founder of Potentials Realized

 

Book Recommendation:

No book recommendation this time. She recommends getting a journal book for “Planning, dreaming, and conceptualizing.”

 

Don’t forget to SUBSCRIBE so you won’t miss all of the other interesting episodes that we have coming up in the next few weeks!

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