hybrid-remote-facilitation

When Hybrid-Remote, Help Community Care For Community

Many experts recommend that hybrid remote events succeed when we separately handle the needs of colocated individuals and the needs of dispersed individuals. This may get you through the event, but it introduces long-term problems in the organization. Any sense of us-vs-them becomes amplified when we take care of the

hybrid-remote-facilitation

Remote Facilitation: Being More Inclusive

What do you do when you facilitate online with high-quality visual whiteboards like Mural and Miro and then are asked to facilitate a group with some vision-challenged participants? You throw away the whiteboard. This was not the conclusion I was expecting when I was recently given this problem, but researching

Artificial Intelligence

Remote Facilitation - Dancing with AI at Scale

I just finished an engaging and energizing conversation with hundreds of employees online. This would have been unheard of in the past as most online discussions felt disconnected without a highly orchestrated plan and facilitation team. I had two assistants: one running the “tech” and another was an artificial intelligence

hybrid-remote-facilitation

Remote Facilitation - The News Team Pattern in Large Hybrid Meetings

A colleague (let’s call her Rose) recently reached out with this question: “I’m going nuts trying to figure out decent ways to make big-room planning work in a hybrid model where some people are actually in the big room, and others are working remote. I’ve been accustomed

hybrid-remote-facilitation

Remotely Facilitating for Connection: A Manifesto

The last two years of being remote gave us isolation, distraction, rushed meetings, repeat meetings (because we didn’t finish the work) and lost participants. And it doesn’t have to be like that. It can actually be better than in person. Working remotely for the last several years brought

hybrid-remote

The key to better hybrid-remote work environments

In my prior posts, you may get the impression I don’t see hybrid remote as a viable path. You would be partially correct. As I stated in a past blog post, many people now see hybrid remote as THE solution to moving back into offices after the pandemic. They

hybrid-remote

Is hybrid-remote going backward or forward?

As new vaccines emerge and political transitions move forward (deep breath), I still hear many talking about “going back” to the way things were. Instead, I suggest we might look at what opportunities 2021 will provide us. Are you hearing “going back” conversations? The “going back” conversations take many forms.

hybrid-remote

Your Next Workplace - Any, all or inclusive remote?

We are all ready to go back to the office. Or are we? As mentioned in my previous post on resilience, your next workplace may adjust work hours and workspaces to help “keep our distance”. Hygiene may influence office schedules and space layouts next. But what will teamwork look like?

hybrid-remote

Buddy System, Copilots, and Async for Hybrid Remote Work

You may have heard of the working agreement that “when one is remote, all should be remote”. This agreement applies to remote hybrid teams where some team members may be in the office and some team members are either working from home or other locations. Such working agreements encourage all

hybrid-remote

Your Next Workplace - Office, Remote, or Resilience?

2020 presented many twists and turns for all of us, and there are more to come. In August 2017, I began to co-author a book on successful distributed agile teams with Johanna Rothman. Our first chapter was titled “Distributed Agile Teams Are Here to Stay.” We did not realize how

hybrid-remote

Remote Amplifies

Over this first half of 2020, most of the world now knows what long-time remote workers have known for years: Remote amplifies. Remote does amplify some obvious things like distance. But until the last few months, only a few realized that distance is a lever, not the outcome of being

Facilitation

Exploring Who Controls Your Meetings by Process and Tools Used Online

As people moved to completely online and distributed work in the early part of 2020, interesting patterns in training and collaboration tools emerged. While many trainers have focused on tools and process and the best way to keep teams connected online, it seems we slipped into a control trap for

Coaching

A Distributed Team Stroll Through Agile2019

Agile2019 showed a subtle theme of supporting distributed teams this year. As you may have heard in some of the podcasts I’ve joined, our book on successful distributed agile teams was inspired by a stroll on the last day of the Agile2017 conference. On that day, Johanna Rothman and

Facilitation

Why You Want a BackChannel in Distributed Meetings

When I started facilitating my first distributed meetings, I ran into a problem that many encounter: my primary collaboration tool would fail. It usually involved one person “losing connection” or in some cases the whole collaboration software system crashing for everyone. Regardless, it meant that someone in the conversation was

hybrid-remote

Remotely Agile: The Buddy System

Over the last 10 years, while learning how agile methodologies can work in different industries and organizations, I also discovered how I could help distributed teams work as if they were face-to-face teams. So I am starting a series of posts where I hope to share some practical tips for

hybrid-remote-facilitation

Deep skills not soft skills

Something that always makes me wince is the term “soft skills”. Dictionary.com gives the following definition of soft: yielding readily to touch or pressure; easily penetrated, divided, or changed in shape; not hard or stiff: However, when many people talk of “soft skills”, I get the impression they find

Agile Florida

Serving Lean Coffee to build a Learning Community

Lean Coffee is a lightweight way for self-organizing a group of people together to share information. Originally started by Jim Benson and Jeremy Lightsmith in 2009 in Seattle, I have found it can be a very simple way to bring together or build a community. I have been running lean