Category: hybridWorking

Holiday ‘reflect-along’: Hybrid Working Wheel
According to Spotify Wrapped, the most popular episode of my podcast for the year is this one, about the Hybrid Working Wheel. If you haven’t come across this before, have a quick look at this blog post from last yearn which provides a bit of background. Simply put, I adapted a popular coaching tool for reflection, the Wheel of Life, for hybrid working.
- Download PDF
- Access Google slides version
The purpose of the tool is to help you reflect on different aspects of how you work, including your working environment at home, at the office or on campus, communication & collaboration as well as social interaction and wellbeing.

Holiday ‘reflect-along’

One of the questions I get asked the most is how to reflect in practice. Many of us find it difficult to sit down with a blank piece of paper and jump straight into focused reflection.

Hence, in this podcast episode, I offer you the opportunity to see how the tool is used in practice and to reflect along with me as we progress through the episode. Let’s have a bit of fun at the end of the year, and try out something a little different. Use this episode to “reflect along” with me as part of your run up to the holidays (and hopefully a well deserved break!) or as you prepare to begin the new year.

How to take part

I have made an updated template especially for this reflect-along episode, and you are welcome to use this if you’d like to jot down your own scores and notes.

Find a cosy spot and get yourself a hot drink or take the episode outside and listen along as you walk. The important thing is to bring some curiosity to this exercise, and to be open to discovering something new.

Listen to the episode

My completed wheel

If you’d like to take a look at the completed template that I used during the episode, here it is:

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17/12/2023
Re-inventing Mondays… 2 months in

It’s been a month since I last updated on my progress with the new chapter in my working life, free-lance working life, and my mission to re-invent my week, starting with Mondays.

Unfortunately, as I type this, I am still recovering from a cold, and so podcasting is on hold for this week and instead I get to write this blog post. Blogging is, still, where it’s at.

Beach/work balance

One of the goals in my strategy for my business for this year is to achieve a better work/life balance. I am not sure how common a goal that is for a business plan, but my thinking is that work/life balance is one of the key goals of my career change. Being a CEO made work/life balance hard, partly because everything that goes really wrong eventually lands on your desk and partly because running an organisation always involves a crisis or three. Over time, you find strategies to set boundaries, but ultimately it’s a responsibility that is part of job and it’s hard to leave that behind even when you are not working.

Although I loved it, one of the reasons why I chose not to pursue another CEO role is that I want to give myself the chance to explore a life with less responsibility for a while and to see if I can find a work/life pattern that is better for me in every sense. When it came to it, sitting down and trying to define what that would look like in practice, I didn’t really know what the answer would look like.

Over the past couple of months I have come up with a practical metaphor: beach/work balance. To me that means that I am prioritising getting to the beach during the week every other week, and my partner and the dogs and I can enjoy a couple of hours where we love being the most.

It’s a good measure for how much my life goes to plan, and how much scope I have to plan in an afternoon or a morning away from my desk and for it to actually happen, too.

The picture at the top of the post is from last Friday, when we managed to get to the beach an hour before sunset, watching the wintery sunset as the week wound down. For me, that’s a huge win.

So, at least for now, beach time is one of the indicators that help me assess whether I am finding the right balance.

Doing enough of what gives me joy

I don’t want to give the impression that all my days are spent doing yoga with my dog or going to beach. Far from it. Since the start of October I have been working hard and I have been doing a lot of hours.

In these first two months I have been dividing my time between working as a consultant and a coach, doing both paid and pro bono work.

It’s been great to continue the work with ALT and AmplifyFE, a partnership project around a growing network of 2,700 professionals in FE and Vocational Education for which I am the Strategic Lead. Alongside the day to day work on the project this past month has been a busy one of travel and talks for AmplifyFE, including launching new research.

I’ve also continued my work with Reclaim Hosting, where my official title is now Asana Overlord. I love working with Jim Groom and his team on strategy, business development and team coaching. Alongside the work we do which is focused internally, I get involved in some of our community activities, which are hopping into festive mode this month. Karaoke for Christmas? Yes, please!

The work I do with Reclaim is closely related to my interest in hybrid working, and this past month I have done a lot on that front as well, running a session for Oxford University, delivering my second free and open hybrid working course and marking a year since the publication of my Open Access book on the topic.

Coaching groups or teams has become a much greater part of my practice than I had anticipated, and I have some new projects in that space planned for early 2024 which I am excited about. In the meantime my coaching for individuals is also continuing to develop.

Coaching is a fantastic tool that I hope more people, particularly those of us who are juggling a lot whilst also achieving a lot, will make use of. I know just how hard it can be to find time and funds for professional development. That’s why I offer 10% of my coaching sessions pro bono and over the past month I have been able to offer pro bono sessions to four new clients.

Auditioning days

In the midst of working on a lot of different projects and with a whole host of people and finding time for the all important beach visits, I have noticed that I have started to reflect a bit more on what I enjoy doing the most. Subconsciously, I am ‘auditioning’ days, checking in with what I want to do more of and what I will say no to and refer to colleagues instead.

When my former mentor Margaret and I discussed my free-lance venture, Margaret said something that really stayed with me. She said that it’s easy to re-invent your job without noticing and that it’s even easier to forget to say no when opportunities are on the horizon. Feeling the precarity of giving up a permanent role and worrying about where money to pay the mortgage was going to come from, I didn’t really get it at the time. Don’t get me wrong, the precarity is obviously still very much on my mind, but I find that being a CEO and being responsible for the annual turnover and salaries of an organisation was good preparation for managing income generation for myself as a free-lancer. There are always risks.

However, what I am learning at the moment is that I need to manage my capacity carefully and to not commit to too many things just in order to hold my financial worries at bay. Instead, I am looking for things to do that are the best fit, and stretch me in ways I find rewarding.

It’s a privileged position to be, and it’s an opportunity I don’t intend to squander. This is my time to evolve in my working life, and the sense of reinvention that comes with that is very precious to me. Over the past twenty years I have gained a lot of experience and skills and I am very good at many things. Right now, I am becoming better at figuring out where I can make the biggest difference and what I find most rewarding. Every day is an opportunity to figure it out.

One of the things I am planning to do is a day out later this month, to give myself space to think and plan for 2024. A retreat for one, if you like. If you are interested in having one of those for yourself, look out for the next blog post 🙂

Thanks for reading and thanks to all who’ve helped me along the way .

Listen

All the podcasts about my fresh start in order:

Listen to Leading Virtual Teams on: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify

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08/12/2023
Leading Virtual Teams Revisited – with Martin Hawksey

This week we are going back to the origins of Leading Virtual Teams! Join us, Maren Deepwell and Martin Hawksey, in this joint blog post and special podcast episode:

Maren: Hi Martin! Been a while since we last blogged about leading virtual teams and hybrid working. So… I have lots of questions to get us started: tell us a bit about what your current work set up is like, and what you are particularly interested in when it comes to all things virtual/hybrid working.

Also, I am curious to hear how you think things have changed since the dark days of lockdown working. I have been doing some research into the data around home-working and evolving policies here in the UK (for example this 2023 report and the flexible working bill and this WIRED article provides a helpful insight into what’s not being tackled). What’s your take on the evolving picture of hybrid working?

Martin: Hi Maren, thanks for having me back! For just over the last year I’ve been working for a UK based Google Partner. We have offices in Manchester, Edinburgh and Utrecht, but the focus is very much on remote working. Even in a post pandemic world I see many businesses still trying to find the right fit around hybrid culture. One of the key challenges I see is how to replicate the benefits of being co-located when employees are hundreds of miles apart. For now let’s put these benefits in the broad bucket of ‘watercooler moments’, ad-hoc opportunities for social interaction as well as work discussions. Seemingly effortless and tricky to measure the benefit. It’s something I remember us talking a lot about and I know you’ve shared a number of approaches and strategies which can help. Where I work a recent internal ‘pulse’ survey has highlighted a desire for increased opportunities to work collaboratively. The business is exploring various approaches, including one of the skeuomorphic virtual office spaces, Kumospace. This pilot highlighted there could be real benefits in restructuring the way teams work, a virtual focal point with awareness mechanisms like location, icons, and camera status making it easier to immediately speak to someone if they are available. The challenge was the price point. It was interesting to read the surveys you highlighted which include data on the overall economic benefit of hybrid working. Whilst we had many anecdotal examples of conversations that unblocked issues or identified business opportunities it is hard to put a value on them. The other challenge was there was low engagement across the business in the pilot space. So while we could see benefits for our team, but possible to justify for the business. Does this example resonate with what you’ve seen? Do you get a sense that organisations are still trying to work out how to make hybrid working work?

Maren: It’s clear that businesses are still on a learning curve when it comes to hybrid working long-term. In the media, there is a lot of debate on whether or not there’ll be a big return to the office, but I think recruitment and retention without a flexible offering will be so challenging, that organisations won’t have a choice. There are a lot of parallels between the use of technology in education and training, and the use of technology in the workplace. Similar to how student expectations have shifted when it comes to digital, so have employee expectations, too. Organisations who don’t offer flexibility or effective hybrid working won’t be able to recruit or retain the diverse talent they need without entrenching structural inequalities further, for example disadvantage employees with care responsibilities. A few years ago we talked about the effort it takes to create and sustain employee engagement online, and your experience with the skeuomorphic virtual office space really chimes with me. Anecdotally it feels like ‘everyone’ wants more connection and collaboration, but at the same time they’d like that sense of connectedness to be maintained by others, so that they can dip in and out as they wish. Even something as simple as internal chat channels require a lot of effort to maintain. If you are using something like Slack or Mattermost to coordinate customer support tickets, then every support ticket becomes a reason to engage (and the value proposition is clear). However if you are in a water cooler or social space there is usually no external prompt to engage and someone usually has to take responsibility for kick-starting engagement by posting something. What are your thoughts on this?

Martin: The term ‘effort’ resonates with me. Internally in our department we’ve switched to using an all day Google Meet with breakouts for individual teams. In a recent conversation with a colleague about using this space effectively we talked about how it takes effort to join the virtual office, similar to the effort it would take to get to a physical office. I would also agree it requires someone taking responsibility for the use of virtual spaces. I would go even further and say it requires leadership. Similar to having an office manager it needs someone to take responsibility for monitoring and supporting the online office. Something I remember us discussing previously was effort in terms of cognitive load. Part of this is the brain doing overtime trying to analyze micro movements in facial expressions. Looking towards the future I think this could get a lot easier with the next generation video conferencing hardware. I recently had the pleasure to have a short demonstration of Google’s Starline immersive conferencing solution. This combines technology that can scan a face in 3D, and present this to the viewer maintaining a depth of field without the need of special glasses or headsets. The result is incredibly impressive. It was only a brief experience so I can’t talk to the long term effects. Two things I did learn was that maintaining a realistic 1:1 scale was important, so it’s unlikely we’ll see this technology on smaller screens. The other detail was for this solution they are focusing on capturing and displaying detail in the face. For example, when the person on the call held up an apple there was a strong 3D effect, but I could see some fragmentation in the detail between the apple and the person’s fingers. Still lots of unknowns with this type of technology including whether it will ever be affordable for the masses, but interesting times!

Maren: It’s really interesting to look out how technology might shape things in the future and what sort of skills and capabilities folk may need to develop to effectively deploy more advanced solutions. One thing I have been thinking about a lot recently, and also a topic I covered in the hybrid working course I ran recently, is increasing productivity whilst stepping away from the screen. There are a lot of reasons why we are glued to our screens, but the longer I work in a hybrid or fully remote setting the more I realise that I need to design my days to be a lot less desk based in order to be at my most productive. From getting more movement in and giving my eyes a break, to finding new ways to connect and communicate without staring at a screen I am interested in how we can mix things up a little more.

Listen to the full conversation in the podcast 🙂

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17/11/2023
Reclaiming Halloween Radio
Earlier this week I got to join the folk from Reclaim Hosting for a spooky radio extravaganza! Across a couple of different timezones and radio stations, Reclaim Radio and DS106Radio, we ROCKED the airwaves.

I love radio as a medium to have fun for virtual teams. It’s super engaging, not screen based, it’s synchronous and at the same time gives everyone space to do other stuff whilst listening. It’s also, when you have a team as capable as this, a pretty easy thing to do 🙂

When we started planning for this, we offered different ways to get involved:
- Share your favourite halloween tunes and we’ll play your tunes
- Get on the radio with other Reclaim folk, chat about what you are working on, share scary stories.. And have fun!
- Get on the radio as a host, spin up the tunes and invite special guests to chat with on air.
Not everyone wants to hear their own voice on air after all, and the whole point of doing something like this is that everyone can join in and have a bit of fun without feeling that they need to commit to a whole hour.

Here is the programme we ended up with as a result:
- 8:00am ET – Halloween Tunes with Meredith
- 9:00am ET – Scary Special: Jim & Maren
- 10:00am ET – Pumpkin Hour with Maren & Meredith
- 11:00am ET – Halloween Tunes from the team
- 12:00pm ET – Old Time Radio Hour: the Scary Stories of Suspense
- 1:00pm ET – Radio Roundup with Amanda & Pilot
- 2:00pm ET – Halloween Tunes with Jason
- 3:00pm ET – Scary Tech (and Non-Tech) Stories with Amanda & Jason
- 4:00pm ET – Halloween Tunes with Taylor
- 5:00pm ET – Fright Night: Tunes from the Infrastructure Team
The weird and the wonderful

What I loved about the radio day was the variety of things that happened: from Italian horror movie soundtracks and The Cure to low-fi listening tunes, and from vintage story telling to news about what’s happening across the community, it was simply awesome!

Folk joined in as they started to listen to the programme, saying hi on Mastodon and Discord, and sharing pics and stories along the way.

I loved the radio shows on DS106 radio during the dark days of 2020 and 2021. Obviously my personal favourite was the Sunday Special that I was part of with Anne-Marie Scott and Tannis Morgan, but although a lot of fun was had, and at the time fun was a very scarce ingredient in life, it was very much radio of its time. Pandemic times.

I remember hearing Jim and his family broadcasting from Italy, and us listening here in Wales, feeling like we were able to connect despite the long periods of lockdown.

Our spooky Halloween radio show this week helped me reflect that whilst we still need to connect, and share and be present with each other, it is a huge relief to be doing so in context less dominated by the pandemic. We’ve learnt to value opportunities to have fun and be together more, I think, than we did before 2020.

Just like the excellent GIF game that makes the Reclaim Roundup a must read each month, the radio brought together all the weird and wonderful scary tech (and non-tech) stories and tunes for a day to remember.

What you didn’t see

Part of my work with Reclaim as I see it, is about finding pockets of space and time in which this team of people who work so hard and who practice such heartfelt care about all they do, from answering support tickets to developing new products, get to have a moment to take a breath and revel in their achievements.

Reflecting on success, feeling proud…, those things can be a lot harder to do than moving on to the next task, or pick up the next ticket. Just like in every other organisation I have ever worked with, here, too, is a never ending list of things to do. There is always pressure, always more that could be done, and new, exciting ideas on the horizon. I love seeing those glinting in the distance.

What I have also learnt, however, is that there is ALWAYS something glinting on that horizon, and ALWAYS a long list of tasks and that it’s up to us to make the time and hold the space to say “YAY! WE ROCK!” every once in a while.

I missed some of the Halloween fun (because timezones), but the next day I spent some time looking at the chat behind the scenes, the chat you didn’t see, and I was thrilled to see folk sharing photos of their front doors, ready for trick or treating, the chat, the banter and the GIFs. Those moments are what makes a team thrive, and they are what makes the memories that we will still recall long after the routine of weekly meetings is forgotten.

It was a privilege and an awful lot of fun to be part of our Halloween Radio programme, so you won’t be surprised to hear that there might just be some more in store come the end of the year. Maybe there will be an opportunity to make a song request, or send in edtech holiday greetings… whatever we decide to do – I hope to see you on the airwaves.

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02/11/2023
Happy Hybrid Halloween… or the spooky side of virtual working.

It’s my third week as a hybrid organisation of one, and I am enjoying the new working routine! It’s very busy and also tiring to have so many new things to deal with each day, but it’s very much what I was expecting.

What I am missing at times is of course the colleagues I have worked with for many years, and in a more abstract sense, a bit of fun and interaction that comes with being part of a team. From the research I have done about hybrid working and virtual teams, I know that it takes a lot of effort and intention. So I set about making my own fun.

Regular readers will be very familiar with Posey, my dog, who for the past three years (well, nearly) has kept a faithful vigil next to my desk. Together we get through long conference days, difficult meetings, research reports and course design. And Posey is a dog who knows how to make her own fun. Sometimes just by rolling round on the carpet in the sunshine, or with her favourite cuddly toy.

But back to Halloween and hybrid working. In case the connection seems tenuous, I think Halloween is a good example of the kind of thing that in a co-located working environment is hard to miss. Cafes and canteens may have seasonal treats or pumpkin flavoured everything. There is likely to be talk of trick or treating… plans for the holidays and so on. Interaction like the ‘Secret Santa’ gift exchange is hard to replicate when you are in a team that’s distributed across the globe or when, like me, you are a team of one.

The ‘spooky’ side of home and hybrid working is that it can often feel quite lonely or isolated. Sometimes you don’t talk to another human being all day, and when you finally step away from your desk it’s dark outside. Days can easily blend into each other into one long grey slog.

Marking days like Halloween or a change in season provides me a bit of inspiration to have some fun, be silly and join into activities that I wouldn’t usually, and which can make my day more memorable.

This year, I am organising some radio with the wonderful folk at Reclaim Hosting, as part of my work with them. Get ready for Reclaim Halloween Radio on DS106radio come October 31st! I have some small decorations in my office as well, some autumn blooms and a small pumpkin and… fun tights to wear in orange and purple. Some of you may roll their eyes here, but those of us who appreciate those things will understand. In my mind, everything that helps inject some fun into my day is fair game.

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24/10/2023
Step away from you screen…

… and come walk with me. How about a day along the windswept West Wales Coastal Path? The title image for this post is taken at the tip of the St David’s peninsula around this time of year. Let’s have a day buffeted by autumn winds surrounded by colourful heather, looking out to the endless horizon. I would love to have a day like that today.

In reality, although that part of the Coastal Path is only just over two hours from my desk, I am much more likely to take a walk along the Taff Trail with the dogs today. Not quite as dramatic when it comes to scenery, but my daily miles are a wonderful daily escape, a practice for my body and mind that benefits my wellbeing as well as my productivity.

Walking is a big part of my life. It’s a necessity when you have two big dogs that want to cover 3-5 miles a day. It’s a hobby, as I walk, jog and run my way to greater physical fitness. It’s also where I like to think, reflect and have important conversations. Over the past ten years, it’s definitely become a kind of superpower that gets me through tough days.

I like walking on my own, with the dogs, with someone else, sometimes with headphones in, sometimes in my head, alone with my thoughts. During my postgrad years I developed an academic interest in walking, and some of my PhD thesis was based on ethnographic walking and a phenomenological exploration of place and landscape, so it’s fair to say that I’ve read quite a lot a about walking as a practice, as a method of enquiry, as a way of life.

It’s always inspiring to read of great explorations or long walks, spanning a whole country for example. My own walking has stayed at a much more quotidian scale. I don’t really care whether I’m taking turns in my local park, walking through bustling city streets or trudging along the Coastal Path. What is important to me, and what makes it work, is that I get to reflect and process whatever is on my mind that day. If I have the company of a coach or a friend (or most commonly my partner), I have the added benefit of someone else’s perspective and the principle remains the same.

When I worked with my mentor Margaret we used to meet up every few months for a longer session, and we always tried to make it a walk. Between these meetings all our work happened online, via email or a phone call, but whenever I really needed to think something through, figure out a new vision for the next three years or confront a difficult situation in my role as CEO, we would walk together and talk it through.

Parenting books often suggest that the best way to have conversations with teenagers is not to sit around a table, facing each other, but to create a less confrontational atmosphere when you are side by side, driving in a car or walking somewhere for example.

In a work context, particularly if you work virtually, there’re many situations in which you face each other, or a whole screen or room full of people. You face each other, stare at your own reflection, at someone’s bad hair day and so forth. It’s not often conducive to focusing on thinking and reflecting. Screens are distracting.

Stepping away from the screen can feel hard. Technology is sticky, capturing our attention, and removing yourself from its constant nudges is a key reason why taking a walk is helpful. Walking is an embodied experience, you are moving through the world, experiencing it with your senses. All of which is helpful for getting a fresh perspective and to gain clarity.

Of course, it’s not often possible to head out for a whole day on the Coastal Path. More often, a walk around the local area has to suffice, and in my experience it works just as effectively. With a bit of forethought you can even gain some of the benefits of a walk indoors. Whenever I don’t have the time to actually go outdoors, and I have a call I really need to focus on, I put my headphones in, put the screen to sleep and pace up and down in my office. Sometimes with my eyes closed, sometimes looking down at the floor or nowhere in particular. I am still moving, focusing, and not distracted by screens. It does take some practice and discipline to make this work, and it’s much easier to give yourself the benefit of actually going for a walk, but on days when you have 10 back to back meetings it may be the only option.

I am really looking forward to exploring how to step away from the screen in my upcoming course on hybrid working. I am not sure if many people realise that walking can be a hybrid working superpower… but we’ll have fun finding out. Incidentally, I designed the course to be podcast based, focusing on audio rather than video content, so that folk who would like to walk along with me could do so as they work through the course. It’s free, so why not register 🙂

Some of my coaching clients, for whom I also offer walking sessions, really enjoy having a session talking on the phone whilst exploring their local park and pathways. And sometimes, when we are able to meet in person, we get to walk and talk together. Those are always the most exciting days for me.

I haven’t done any coaching on the Coastal Path as yet, but I have had many, many excellent conversations whilst exploring that beautiful part of the world. So.. if you are ever in South Wales or if you have a path near you that would make for a good place to think, get in touch.

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17/10/2023