Maren Deepwell

Author: Maren Deepwell

  • Virtual Team Adventures in Asana

    Our team is currently moving to Asana. “Asana is a web and mobile “work management” platform designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work.”

    This is a big moment, as we have tried and not adopted various other similar tools including Basecamp, Trello, Google Tasks and Project Management tools within Google Workspace.

    However, things are finally moving into place, and with a couple of colleagues alreday familiar with and/or inspired by the platform, we are embarking on the long road to embedding new ways of working in our virtual team.

    To say that I’m excited is an understatement. (and a big thank you to Lauren Hanks for extra inspiration).

    Training

    One of the joys of adopting a new tool for me is the training. I love the process of learning about a new platform from the ground up, and there is plenty of support available in the form of online documentation, courses and online sessions.

    I found the online training really helpful, and also completed the self-paced courses. It’s good to get the basics right and I want to get a good feel for what everyone in the team is learning.

    Topics like:

    • Create Projects and Tasks
    • Keep work on track with clear Due Dates, Assignees, and Custom Fields
    • How to manage your own to-dos with My Tasks
    • How to effectively manage communication with teammates with Comments, Notifications, and Inbox

    can open up great opportunities for discussing how we collaborate and work on projects as a team.

    Re-imagining my to do lists

    I recently blogged about winding down work for 2022 and part of the post was reflecting on and revisiting and pruning my to do lists.

    Enter Asana.

    I really found it helpful to have to revisit not only what’s on my to do lists but also how they are organised and what I keep where.

    As part of my coaching with clients I often work through different models of prioritising work but I haven’t reviewed this for myself recently, so this is definitely going to be a priority as part of my transition.

    I am considering some new lists, dedicated for things I want to do less of or stop all together as well as lists of things I want to do or need to track.

    … getting everyone on board

    Time to learn and embed a new platform like this is always a challenge. No matter what tool you use, it will take longer to transfer workflows and processes than just doing the established/familiar thing.

    Also, it takes time for everyone to get a feel for why we are using this tool, why we are making this change, instead of continuing to use the established ways of working.

    In our team we are not finding that too difficult at the moment, primarily because we are all agreed that things have to enable us to have a better overview of what we are all doing and where progress is being made.

    It’s also a bonus that Asana offers lots of different ways for individuals to manage/view their own tasks in whatever way they prefer. That is popular with everyone.

    Next steps

    As well as my own to do lists and general projects, we are going to be moving 1-to-1 meetings into the new platform from January, which will support our use of Asana regularly. We are also moving our overall business plan, which is due to be updated in February, and again, supports regular use.

  • Blogging about blogging

    It’s Monday and the temperature outside has plummeted to (for UK standards) freezing temperatures. Since the start of this month I have blogged more often again, aiming for a post on most weekdays. In the best tradition of the medium, I am going to blog about blogging today.

    Why now?

    During the recent [insert your own word here] on Twitter, and a subsequent re-activation of my Mastodon account, I was reading some really interesting reflections on what folk were hoping to leave behind (on Twitter), what they were hoping to find and contribute to (on Mastodon) and what they aim for overall with their digital presence.

    It made me feel both sad and hopeful. Most of all, it made me consider what it is that I WANT from my time here on the internet.

    Not the activities that are part of my day job for which I need to maintain profiles on particular platforms, but those parts that are shaped by what I want to do and who I want to interact with.

    Which brought me back to my own domain, this space, that for many years has been my own platform, unchanged by the ebbs and flows of digital fortunes.

    Thanks to Reclaim Hosting (#4life) I have long been able to administrate and safeguard my own space, giving me a channel for my own voice, my things, my creativity and projects.

    What am I hoping for?

    My blog has a regular readership in the hundreds, so not particularly huge, and I mostly blog for myself. Sometimes to curate resources to refer to, sometimes to share practical tips, but largely it’s a space for me to think about what I am interested in and share parts of that.

    In 2020 I really struggled for what to say. Work kept going, but my professional practice was so dominated by the crisis response, that I found it hard to articulate anything.

    Since then, I have published a lot on different platforms, but most of it is very much directed at the work I do, focused on projects like my book or specific events.

    More recently, with the Twitter/Mastodon conversation in full swing, I came to the conclusion that I need to blog more. To hear my own voice represented here. I am not sure yet whether I really ‘need’ another social media platform, federated or otherwise, but I do want my own space to be alive and kicking. I started blogging more than 20 years ago (and I can’t believe that I am old enough for that to be true) and I am grateful that I can continue that practice here, on my own domain.

  • Leading Virtual Teams: Book launch in a post

    Leading Virtual Teams: Book launch in a post

    It’s been such a pleasure to celebrate the launch of the Leading Virtual Teams book last week, and a special moment for me as it is my first solo book publication. This post brings all the resources and information about the book together in one place, so whether you’d like to catch up or take a deeper dive, jump right in:

    About the book

    Leading Virtual Teams – Field Notes from a CEO by Dr Maren Deepwell, published in 2022 as an open access publication by the Association for Learning Technology, UK. 

    What is it like to manage a virtual team and to lead an organisation from home? How can you not only meet budget targets and KPIs but balance business needs with employee happiness and wellbeing?

    Leading Virtual Teams explores current practice in succeeding in a virtual workplace and questions what the future may hold.

    In 2017 I set out to find creative and fun ways to work and build meaningful relationships in a virtual team. To find ethical ways to work online, respecting employee privacy and building trust between the organisation and its staff.

    This book provides practical advice and case studies as a source of inspiration and a prompt for reflection for virtual teams and their leaders. From recruitment and induction to establishing effective and sustainable ways of working in the virtual workplace for small and medium sized organisations, Through case studies and practical advice this book explores the highs and lows of what it means to work from home long-term and sets out a new kind of professionalism for virtual teams.

    Book launch recording

    It was great to see so many of you on 1 December 2022 to celebrate the launch of the book. You can now access the recording of Professor Helen O’Sullivan and Dr Maren Deepwell in conversation, sharing insights into ALT’s journey to becoming a virtual organisation and the story of how this book came to be. 

    Free to download

    You can read and download a free digital edition, published as an Open Access publication by ALT in partnership with Open Academia. The Open Access print edition, published by Lulu.com, will be available to purchase soon.

    Digital edition – out now

    Leading Virtual Teams is licensed under a Creative Commons licence CC-BY-NC-ND, copyright Maren Deepwell 2022.

    Order your printed copy

    More stockists coming soon. For now, you can order a printed copy from:

    Explore resources, blog posts and podcasts

    There is a wealth of resources and inspiration in the Virtual Teams blog posts, more recent blog posts and resources and podcasts .

    Sign up for the free Leading Virtual Teams course

    If you’d like to learn more about leading virtual teams, join my free course starting in spring 2023. This course translates key parts of the book into practice:

    • Onboarding and setting expectations
    • Fostering a shared team culture
    • Managing people and processes
    • Strategies for succeeding in hybrid workplaces in the long term

    This course offers a unique blend of inspiration, practical support and resources. Join us to explore ways of working in the hybrid workplace that are aligned to your goals and values and how to lead with agency and authenticity.

    Sign up now

  • Leading Virtual Teams: Missed moments

    With the holiday season coming up, our team has had a long overdue in person Team Day and we are also planning a virtual get together in a few weeks. These social activities are important to virtual teams, and I really value the opportunity to spend time with colleagues in a more relaxed way.

    Blended approaches to working together can help shape the dynamic of the year, and punctuate long periods of remote working with new inspiration and energy connecting with colleagues in person can bring.

    That said, this year it’s proving hard to make that actually happen. A mix of post-pandemic factors, cold + flu season, taking long overdue leave and simply bad luck have resulted in many of us missing one or more of these important moments.

    Does it really matter, though, that we are not able to all meet together? Does it make a difference that I miss a Team Day or a get together?

    Here are my thoughts on this:

    Yes, it does…

    In our team we set clear expectations that we meet in person 3-4 times a year. In 2022, thanks to train strikes and various other factors, our meet up got delayed and rescheduled several times, and it really had an impact. Relationships can change if you lack an expected amount if in person interaction.

    Touch base: One of the aspects of being in an organisation in which everyone works from home that I find challenging is that I can easily forget how different an experience home-working is for each of us. What you see on a video call is only a small sliver of colleagues’ reality. Meeting in person really helps me touch base with colleagues and get a different perspective on how everyone is doing.

    Joining in: We often have a social focus for meeting in person, and we have tried out a lot of different activities over the years. I enjoy joining in those activities, and being part of everyone interaction in a different way. The recent activity I missed out on was an escape room, and I am sorry I missed it!

    Getting a sense of things being ‘normal’: This is a clumsy way of putting it, but I am not sure how else to express it. What I mean is that, our team met 3-4 times a year in person in 2019 and it matters to us that we are back to meeting in person in 2022. Things are not the same as in 2019, but we aim to have a blend of working from home and meeting in person, and it feels reassuring (and fun!) to get back to that schedule. Care

    No, it doesn’t, if…

    It’s a reality of any virtual team that someone is off or unavailable and thus misses out on a shared experience. The larger the group of people trying to get together, the higher the chances that people are missing out. There are plenty of ways to make up for the missed interaction, such as:

    Share what happened: in the case of our Team Day, colleagues took photos and shared these with everyone afterwards, and also shared their stories at the next virtual meeting. We talked about what happened on the day and included everyone in the conversation.

    Make it clear what others got out of it: we had planned to swap Secret Santa presents on the day, and these swaps largely moved online. We also went through some training for a new productivity took we are trying out, and that, too, continued virtually so that everyone could take part.

    Encourage alternative forms of engagement: in the weeks after the event, we offered other ways to engage, and continue to conversation even though we were busy and had a lot of other things happening at the same time. That’s a crucial point for me: if it was important enough to spend time and energy to bring a group of people together, then there should also be an emphasis on afterwards including everyone who wasn’t able to get there.

    Care goes both ways

    During this year, I have been thinking a lot about the boundaries between work and personal space, about finding balance between the needs of the employer and the needs of the individual. In my context, working for a small employer with fewer than 10 employees, even a very small number of colleagues being unavailable as planned has a huge impact.

    Today, for example, out of 6 employees: 33% are on holiday, 16.5% are off sick, 16.5% are not scheduled to work, and 33% of us, two people, are working.

    When you are working in a team or organisation of a small size, balancing the need to work together on things and share experiences with the needs of each individual can be a difficult balancing act. Care goes both ways. We want to show care for each individual and their needs (take leave, be off sick, work flexibly) and also the needs we have as a team (collaborate in real time, meet to discuss new plans, spend time together).

    Those missed moments can add up. In order to have good cohesion as a virtual team, you need to have enough of them with enough of your team to benefit long term. Which is why I am already looking forward to our next get together 🙂

  • Hacks for Hybrid Working… flex course reflection

    In the past couple of months I had the wonderful opportunity to work on a project outside my day job. Together with the awesome folk at Reclaim EdTech, and working closely with Lauren Hanks, we embarked on a journey to design and run a four week flex course all about hybrid working.

    It was interesting to learn more about the format of flex courses, which are run regularly each month in the Reclaim EdTech community (check out the events calendar). I have experience of different formats of courses, but I hadn’t come across one yet that uses this format, combination of Discord, blog posts, videos and interactive sessions.

    With a blend of synchronous and asynchronous element, I love that these course fit around busy schedules, and are available to offer expertise and support when needed.

    What the course was about

    This particular course focused on a different topic each week, and here is a quick overview quoting Lauren Hanks’ post:

    EVENT SUMMARY

    For many of us in Higher Ed, hybrid working is here to stay. So whether you’d like to create a better work/life balance juggling being on campus with working from home, or you are looking to move from crisis mode to a way of working that is more sustainable, healthful or simply a little more joyful, this course is for you. Join us to explore hacks to create a better hybrid workplace for everyone.

    We are excited to join forces with Dr Maren Deepwell, author of Leading Virtual Teams and each week features ideas to try out, prompts to reflect on and resources with a host of community voices. Here’s our topic list:

    • Week 1: Hybrid Working Unpacked
    • Week 2: Digital Tools in the Virtual Workplace
    • Week 3: Exploring Hybrid Working Hacks
    • Week 4: Complete your Hybrid Working Roadmap

    The final post we published at the end of the course gives you a bit of a flavour of what it was all about in practice.

    Week 5: Checking In

    What I learnt along the way

    What I enjoyed most about the course are two things: firstly, it was super stimulating to work with Lauren, who, like me, lives and breathes the reality of leading a hybrid workforce day in, day out. We had a lot of fun running sessions, designing activities and reflecting on the questions from our participants.

    It was a huge learning curve for me to work with a different team, in a new environment, and having such experienced collaborators made it all feel easy and interesting. You can always tell when you are working with folk who know how to work together virtually, and it was impressive to experience that as a ‘newbie’.

    The other aspect of this project I really got a lot from was the input from everyone who took part. As well as synchronous conversations happening around live sessions, we had an ongoing chat for the course which brought up thought provoking points every week and activities like a splot site that gave us a glimpse of what other people’s homeworking and hybrid working spaces look and feel like.

    We do something similar in my own team each year, and it never stops being useful to see what others’ day to day looks like in reality.

    A highlight of the four weeks was definitely a hybrid working radio show on DS106 radio, for which we were joined by Jim Groom. Chatting hybrid working hacks for an hour was definitely too short!

    It was also stimulating for me to step into a different role professionally, and getting to focus on the design and delivery of a course. It’s been a few years since I last did that and it was useful to flex those muscles once again.

    Look out for a podcast coming soon, in which Lauren and I will reflect together and share our perspectives on Hacks for Hybrid Working 🙂

  • Getting back to running.

    I miss being a runner. It’s been more than two years since I ran Half Marathons, and whilst I have never been particularly competitive, I miss the balance and headspace running used to offer me.

    For 2020/21, I am definitely giving myself a lot of grace. Running was not a priority as life imploded. I had a lot going on that year besides COVID. For the past 14 months, running had to take a back seat as I recovered from a serious shoulder injury. It started as a frozen shoulder and then turned into something the consultant called a 1% chance injury. Only 1% of people who get frozen shoulder go on to develop what I had. It wasn’t fun.

    So now, I need to do strength training to get more left side back to full strength and yoga, to get some flexibility back and a full range of motion (I am still a little removed from where I want to be). What I am most looking forward to however is getting back to running, or rather feeling like going for a run.

    Couch to 5k

    When I asked my physio for advice, he gave me a great 5k programme to try. It’s designed to enable me to get back to running without risking injury to the precious shoulder. This week, I am starting with 30 min, 4:30 min walk, 30 sec run, repeated 6 times. Each week, the run duration gets a little longer, so that I am moving from running 1 min per every 5 minutes, then 2, then 3 and so forth.

    I am not going to do more than 30 min until I can run the entire time, and I am hoping to just get back to 5k by spring.

    Fitting running back into my life

    One of the biggest problems I have is fitting running back into my life. I know I have the time, but FINDING the time is harder than it looks.

    Avoiding dark runs and runs when it’s too cold (asthma), and also work, dog walks and so many other things I am doing each week.

    I love home-working and hybrid working, but one of the challenges for me continues to be getting enough exercise in, even with our daily dog walks. But running before or after work in the darkest weeks of the year is a mixed bag.

    That is one of the biggest advantages of the plan I am following. It’s always 30 mins, and at the moment I am trying to fit it into my lunch breaks.

    Wish me luck, and see you out there!