Maren Deepwell

Category: jointposts

  • Virtual Teams: CPD and CO2

    Welcome to this month’s post (cross-posted here) in which we, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team. 

    If you haven’t come across our work before or like to find out more, you can catch up on earlier posts on our blogs, podcasts or find out more about ALT, the organisation we work for.

    This time we talk about staff benefits and CPD opportunities for virtual teams, the environmental impact of work travel and discuss the advantages of connecting both virtually and in person. 

    November

    Maren: we’ve done two new pieces of work recently: creating a new guide about what benefits our organisation offers to staff and running the first couple of team sprints. Before now, the information about staff benefits was in quite a few different places and drawing it all together into one doc really brought home to me how much there is! What’s particularly interesting is to look at it from the perspective of leading a virtual team. Funding staff to attend training or CPD events for instance doesn’t in essence change – but it does make a difference where an individual lives, and subsequently which activities make for viable choices in terms of logistics and/or offer opportunities for meeting up in person for a catch up and so forth. Another realisation for me was how much more we now offer in contrast to a few years ago, when our organisation was still hosted within a university. As a team of less than 10 people, being hosted within a large building, a big institution, there was a much stronger reliance on whatever was already being offered, and often that did not meet our requirements. Subsequently a lot of the mandatory CPD felt a bit pointless but used up time. Something you added to the guide was how ALT supports staff to undertake mentoring. I was lucky to have an amazing mentor for many years and I really valued the work we did together. Looking back I realise that my mentor’s support was partly so essential because our internal set up didn’t actually offer what I really needed in my role. Much of what my mentor and I worked on was to navigate the structures we were working within and ultimately to move our organisation away from them. Now, I feel, we offer much more relevant benefits and flexible opportunities such as our weekly show & tell sessions at team meetings, CPD at team days, in-house training and recently virtual team sprints. 

    Martin: Your comment on staff attending CPD opportunities and where the person lives got me thinking. October/November turned out to be an exceptionally busy month for me in terms of travel. As well as our two day staff and Board meeting in London we were also at OEB in Berlin. In terms of my personal CPD I also had a weekend in Sunnyvale, CA for the Google Developer Experts Summit and various weekend excursions to present as part of DevFest. My Summit attendance was supported by ALT with time off, Google picking up the bill for travel and accommodation. I was embarrassed to tell people I was jumping on the plane for California for the weekend and in my heart felt it was the last time I could make that particular trip given the environmental impact it causes. The thought I have is with the predicted increase in flexible working are virtual or hybrid events becoming more feasible. With a growing proportion of the population confident with a virtual presence what does this look like in terms of conferences? You could perhaps argue it both ways, whilst traditional conferences have greater environmental impact when incorporated into a virtual teams calendar they provide opportunities for social interaction at the levels you can’t currently achieve with technology. ALT has personal experience of a range of delivery modes, both live streaming and supporting remote participation at our face-to-face events as well as fully online events such as the ALT Online Winter Conference, which starts next week and is free to attend. At the end of the day we are incredibly social animals and sometimes you can’t beat just hanging out, in the physical sense, with others. Something to also remember is ALT has a UK wide network of regional members groups and I wonder if there is more we can do to either support these by shifting the balance away from one big annual conference to regional events with an emphasis on allowing those from further afield to fully participate?   

    Maren: Reflecting on my personal experience, I’ve been on five long(ish) haul flights in the past ten years if you count flights within Europe, and since I started working for ALT in 2008, I’ve attended fewer than 15 events outside of the UK, on average 1-2 a year since I became CEO. Nearly every journey I take is by train and the majority of our team never travel outside of the UK for work. In contrast to countries like the US or Canada, the distances we generally have to manage are tiny and more often than not the majority of us can avoid air travel all together. So from the perspective of our team, I feel we have the right balance … When it comes to larger events, we only run 2 international face to face events a year and probably 50-75 regional or online ones – both centrally and locally organised. Whilst our biggest event of the year does attract an international audience the majority of participants come from the UK and travel by train. The OER conference is probably the event with most air miles to its name, with maybe 50-100 international travellers. And just like you and many of the participants I value that opportunity to connect in person very much. Some of the people who influence my thinking most I might only see once in a blue moon and whilst I share the environmental concerns you highlight, I think there are other strategies to address that at the scale on which we operate … My thoughts are now turning to planning for 2020 and making the most effective logistical plan for meeting in person as a team is a big challenge. Wherever possible I try to plan in such a way so as to save extra travel and combine trips, eg board meetings and site visits or conferences and team catch ups, appraisals and strategy days and so forth. The blended approach we have means that we can find affordances for both modes of working, rather than having to rigidly stick to one way of doing things. On a personal note, I have lived in a different country or far away from most of my family and friends for all of my adult life. For me, being able to connect in person has always been important and whilst I am now more capable than ever before to do so virtually, it doesn’t mean the same to me, neither in a personal context nor at work. I am not sure I would say one is better than the other and I would regret having to give up either. 

    Martin: I thought I’d do some maths – so working from home rather than my nearest city is approximately 1 tonne of CO2 (according to carbonfootprint.com) which is almost the same as 4 return flights from Edinburgh to London. I’m probably a couple of return flights over in terms of zero gain, but if I opt for rail I could reduce my personal carbon footprint substantially. One of the reasons I often end up on a flight is a combination of needing to be somewhere for an early start and unable to travel the day before as it’s an extra day we have to work out childcare cover. Anyway, this is all very much an aside, but discussing this has made me realise that I need to consider how I travel in 2020, but perhaps there is also something we can agree as a team to make rail travel easier like agreeing a later start time for staff days? Sometimes the small things can make big differences. If we agree on this it will be another detail in our staff handbook which after two years still feels like a robust document without getting lost in bureaucracy. Recently following a request that came into our inboxes I published the ‘ALT Virtual Teams Stack’, which summarised some of the main technology and services we use as part of our distributed team. Again it’s nice to start thinking beyond 2019 knowing we have a well established set of technology and services to build on what we do in 2020 and beyond. As part of our discussions for our next strategy for 2020-2025 one of the questions raised was evolution or revolution. With our infrastructure I feel it’s in a good place so I feel it makes more sense to continue to evolve (our decision to predominantly use Chromebooks also make us more energy efficient). Looking to 2020 and beyond I am looking forward to getting us on the Eduroam network and larger monitors, energy efficient ones of course. Next month we also have a podcast special where we had a chance to speak to Olaf Hubel who is a team leader at Google for the G Suite Developer Relations team, which has thrown up lots of useful guidance so stay tuned for the recording and our reflections.

  • Talking about leading a Virtual Team #OEB19

    Nice to CC you by @visualthinkery is licenced under CC-BY-SA. Remixed by Maren Deepwell.

    This is a special #OEB19 post (cross-posted here) sharing our conference session: Leading Change through Open Conversational Digital Practice. In the session the two of us, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team. 

    As a senior staff team working in educational technology we have worked for the past two years to develop a conversational digital professional practice that enables us to focus on mission-led innovation, develop an open approach to leadership and to lead our virtual team, both digitally and geographically distributed. 

    In our session we discussed why this kind of practice should happen in the open and why it is important; why and how you, as a learning professional/educator, can try to adopt this approach; and what the barriers you may encounter are. 

    You can access the full slide deck here: https://go.alt.ac.uk/tts242 . 

    Do you have your own approaches to open leadership or working in or leading virtual teams you would like to share? If so we’d love to hear from you. Comments on Martin’s blog are open or you can reach us on Twitter @mhawksey and @marendeepwell.

  • Virtual Teams #OEB19 preview: Leading Change through Open Conversational Digital Practice

    Welcome to this month’s post (cross-posted here) in which we, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team. 

    How is the way we work and communicate changing as we work in ever-more-distributed ways? In this special #OEB19 post we give you a preview of the work we will share at the conference and the conversation we hope our session will prompt. 

    As a senior staff team working in educational technology we have worked for the past two years to develop a conversational digital professional practice that enables us to focus on mission-led innovation, develop an open approach to leadership and to lead our virtual team, both digitally and geographically distributed. 

    In our session, we’ll be discussing why this kind of practice should happen in the open and why it is important; why and how you, as a learning professional/educator, can try to adopt this approach; and what the barriers you may encounter are. 

    Maren Deepwell: Let’s start at the beginning: For nearly two years now we have led an open online conversation of blog posts and podcasts, talking about our organisation’s transition from an office based model to a virtual team. It was your idea initially to write about our organisation changing, and we both imagined that the lessons we’d share would be more practical, wouldn’t you agree? However, over the two years we have been writing these posts, our topics have focused much more on strategy and leadership than practicalities. Taking time to step back and reflect together has become an important element of the way we work and lead our team. One of the questions we get asked is how the conversation itself is created and that is something our #OEB19 session will explore. In summary, we use a shared Google doc to have a written conversation, usually over the space of a few days or a week. I often start to write the first paragraph (as I have done here) and the dialogue starts from there. Martin, thinking about how we write, how would you explain our “rules of engagement”? One characteristic that’s important to me is that there is no judgement, i.e. we can share what has worked well or what went badly wrong without prejudice. 

    Martin Hawksey: When we started I did indeed think we’d focus on the nuts and bolts of managing virtual teams, which still does feature to a degree, our conversations have however often focused on some of the bigger questions, and at times very personal challenges of working remotely. In terms of rules of engagement our main one is to protect the privacy of our team and ALT Trustees. As part of our conversations we’ve been happy to write and talk about some of the personal challenges we have encountered, such as health and wellbeing in a remote context. Over the last 2 years it’s not just the both of us who have had to deal with the practicalities of being a distributed organisation, it’s also something all our whole team has had to adjust to as well. While we have respected the privacy of those around us our monthly posts are however an important opportunity to discuss all aspects of the organisation. In practical terms how this often works out is one of us will write something in the Google Doc and then this is picked up for further discussion either in one of our regular online catch-ups or in the video call we always have before the post is published. Personally I find this semi-structured approach incredibly powerful as it encourages both personal reflection and dialogue. The fact this is also multi-modal and combines synchronous and asynchronous communication means there is a constant exchange between us even during busy times. Are there any rules of engagement I’ve forgotten? Are there other benefits you find with our approach?

    Maren: How you describe our approach really resonates with me and I look forward to discussing the ground rules we set for our conversation more fully in our session at the conference. I also agree with you that this conversational approach has many benefits, including prompting the personal reflection and dialogue you mention, improving our way of working through communication.

    Leading a team through open practice however also puts us in a vulnerable position: one example of this is giving our audience a glimpse behind the scenes. Traditional approaches to leadership and authority are often grounded in a sense of infallibility, creating a perception in others that those in the lead have all the answers. When we started this project we were in the midst of a transformational change programme which affected all parts of our organisation and our job was to lead by example, to build confidence in all the new ways of doing things and to project faith that everything would work out. Doing that through being open is quite a departure from more traditional models and can take adjusting to, not just for those in our shoes, but our colleagues and everyone in the organisation. This is where things like seeking consent for example became so important. It’s interesting to consider how our own perception of this has changed. Sharing practice as a senior staff team can bring shared recognition but potentially also shared criticism. Another risk to what we do is that we blog about our work as it happens, rather than from the relative safety of hindsight. We often write about work in progress or recent events and things don’t always work out the way we anticipate. In fact I would go as far as saying that most of the time things take surprising turns and whilst operations may seem seamless on the surface, obviously that is not always the case. Sharing openly how things don’t work out, how situations have changed or what we would do differently next time takes a lot of confidence and discipline. I find it valuable to share what didn’t work, but at the same time not everyone is comfortable with that approach – some people read it as weakness, as too informal or as lack of leadership. You have talked before about how your attitude towards open practice has changed over the years. What are your thoughts on the risks and barriers? 

    Martin: I would say my approach to open practice has matured and my view has changed from everything should be open to a more nuanced view of what is and isn’t shared openly. This change stems from a recognition in areas like open education the process of learning can be very exposing and the feelings of vulnerability can negatively impact the learner experience. Within our posts we have the safety net that everything we write or discuss isn’t published so our conversations can remain frank and honest. In terms of what is published, I feel I have a personal advantage of not being the CEO which means if I do say anything inappropriate you can flag in the edit. Whilst I feel like I have more freedom in our conversations one of the challenges is still how will what we say be perceived. Having blogged about my work for a number of years it’s interesting that I’m still surprised when someone else references them or mentions something I’ve written in conversation. This particular self edit is rarely at the forefront of my mind when we publish posts but I think it’s still sits there and perhaps over time it has slowly moved forward. Where it became particularly apparent that there was a wider audience to our conversation was our last recruitment round and it was clear that a number of our candidates had done some background reading. On the plus side our posts hopefully convey some of the culture and values of ALT, also giving a sense of what working within our particular virtual team is like, but as an interviewer slightly unnerving to have what we have said referenced. One question I often ask myself is if the model we’ve adopted would work in other scenarios or contexts? Do you think our organisational structure or sizes helps this conversational model work? Do you think that because we work in the education sector where there is a long history of contributing to the commons that we are more comfortable sharing our thoughts and experiences in this way?  

    Maren: I suppose we borrow elements from both open education and open source ways of working (although most of what we do is leadership) and in previous posts we’ve talked about other blogs and podcasts that inspire us. Our approach could definitely be translated into different contexts and I’m excited that we’ll be sharing some examples and exercises for participants who want to have a go at the conference. For now though, I’ll try to articulate my answers to your questions: as I said, in my view conversational digital practice could work in any context and I don’t see why the organisation’s size or structure would make a difference – indeed whilst it does shape our conversation I don’t think what we do is limited to individuals in senior roles or even managerial roles. Regardless of role or context, much of the power of the approach lies in making regular time to reflect and engage in a critical dialogue. It could be harder or at least different to start this conversation with someone new. Like you mentioned above, we act as each other’s sense checkers and editors and we are comfortable with making or suggesting changes to what the other has written, without fear of implying criticism or causing concern. It takes time to establish that kind of collaboration. What is unusual (and indeed a result of the structure and size of our organisation) is that our roles make up the entire senior staff team and thus our open practice provides a particular kind of perspective, one which mirrors our responsibilities and strategic roles. We have the privilege to blog from a position that enables us to contribute ‘thought leadership’ (I dislike that term, but it best describes what I want to convey). One last thought I have is why it is important for our conversation to be in the open. There’s a lot to unpack here, and in some ways you could take this approach and adapt it as a closed project or an internal company blog or even publish it anonymously and much of it would work just as well. And yet, one reason why it’s important to me to be visible, for our voices to be identified, is that when I started this job I was desperately looking for examples I could relate to – and I didn’t find any. I hope that our posts might end up on the screen of other reluctant leaders, who may find that their desire to make a difference and do interesting things wins over their reluctance to have a ‘senior’ role and all that entails. To me, this conversation is about forging our own path leading a virtual team and leaving sign posts for others who are headed in a similar direction. 

    Martin: This seems a good point to end this particular conversations but I wonder if in preparation for our OEB session that we extend the conversation to our readers. So dear reader are there any aspects of the model we use for open conversational practice you would like to learn more about? Do you have your own approaches to open leadership or working in or leading virtual teams you would like to share? If so we’d love to hear from you. Comments on my blog are open or you can reach us on Twitter @mhawksey and @marendeepwell or via LinkedIn. 

    Curious to read more? We’ll be publishing the slides from our #OEB19 session and you can also catch up on earlier posts on our blogs, podcasts or find out more about ALT, the organisation we work for.

  • Virtual Teams outtakes: Home-worker / house-worker…

    This post, which is an ‘outtake’ from my regular series of Virtual Teams posts with Martin Hawksey, is me thinking out loud about how working from home can lead to doing a lot of housework. I reflect on how to avoid being landed with all the chores because you are based at home and how maybe you can make housework work for you for reclaiming some balance.

    Working from home = doing the work of the home
    When I started working from home full-time, I suddenly started doing lots more chores. I didn’t mean to or plan to and it look a couple of weeks before I even noticed. I was fast turning from a home-worker to a house-worker….! Although I have a dedicated work space, it is also where we dry laundry. So part of my day to day routine from day 1 involved sorting out the laundry in order to clear my work space. Then, when I go to make tea in the kitchen, I see mess. Last night’s dishes. Bins that need emptying. The coffee maker that needs to be descaled. Every time I went anywhere in the house, I saw chores that needed doing. I seriously envy people who don’t see those things. Maybe it is a gendered perspective, too. In any case, being at home also meant I was able to accept deliveries, sort out meter reading visits, engineers, plumbers etc. It became quickly normal for me to do things at home because I was at home. And it sucked up time and energy that I wouldn’t have spent on chores and housework before I was working from home… . It made me realise that in order to find a better way to work from home for myself, I needed to adjust my idea of what my own professionalism means to me.

    Avoiding the trap…
    Now, other home workers may not have encountered this issue or indeed welcomed the opportunity to sort things out around their homes. I did not.
    So as well as building new habits myself (setting aside time to do chores rather than doing them as I saw them, learning to ignore things that weren’t urgent, reminding myself of sticking to my working hours…) I also had to communicate that to everyone around me (no, mum, you can’t come over this morning, I am at work… or no, I can’t do this on Wednesday afternoon, I am working…).
    It took a while, but eventually I developed the awareness to build new habits and norms of behaviour that supported my professional work, stopped me from doing more chores than I need to and helped my family to acclimatise to me being home-based on a full-time basis.

    Upsides 🙂
    That said, there are many upsides I discovered once I felt I had achieved a better sense of balance. For example, going to the post office or popping to the shop to buy milk is a welcome bit of exercise that fits well into my working days. I like getting outside, getting some fresh air and seeing something other than the fours walls inside my office.
    Also, doing laundry and drying laundry gets me up and down the stairs every few hours, and also prompts me to take breaks from staring at my screen – so that’s a win.
    My cat, who doesn’t usually fall into the “chores” category, but who still needs caring, is always good for an unpredictable break and we often end up sitting outside the back door for 5 min and watch the world go by (me) or the birds in the garden (him). The fact that food and water bowls get replenished on the way is a nice side effect of a short break away from my desk.
    What’s also helped over the last two years is learning from colleagues, who have built similar routines and found their own rhythms to their days… so some days there is a flurry of “going to go walk the dog…”, “going to lunchtime gym class…”, “popping to the shops…”, “going for a walk” messages in the middle of the day, when each of us departs for lunch. Walking through the kitchen, I am now perfectly happy to ignore any chores that may need doing. They can wait.

  • Virtual Teams: Strategy unpacked… how being a virtual team is changing our organisation

    Welcome to this month’s post (cross-posted here) in which we, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team. 

    This time we talk about how much strategic progress we have made in the last few years and how being a virtual team has contributed to that. We also discuss our values as an organisation, how we have tried to reduce our impact on the environment and the upsides of being geographically distributed. 

    New here? Catch up on earlier posts, podcasts or find out more about ALT. 

    September 

    Maren: in our last podcast we talked about approaching our second anniversary of becoming a distributed team. Given that it took a year to execute the transition it was about this time three years ago that the strategy for this organisational change was set out. We are currently in the process of reviewing our strategy so this seems like a good time to take stock: let’s start with money. Financial efficiency was not a key driver for becoming a digitally and geographically distributed organisation but it was part of our strategy to spend less of our resources on renting under-utilised office space and all the costs associated with it, and instead increase resources for the services we provide to our members. Even taking into account one off transition costs, we have been able to redistribute between 5-10% of our annual turnover and that has begun to make a real positive difference to our budget each year. In this series we often focus on our experience of leading a distributed team day to day and in our last podcast we discussed how the distributed nature of our work has become a benefit to how we deliver events. It’s interesting for me to take a step back and see what other benefits it has delivered. Another example is our aim to recruit staff located in many different parts of the UK in order to better collaborate with our national community. We have previously talked about the positive experience of recruiting for our virtual team and how being independent of location has enabled us to attract a much wider pool of high calibre applicants. 

    Image credit: Voronoi by @visualthinkery is licenced under CC-BY-SA.

    Whilst a charity with a staff team of six can’t cover all parts of the country, we are now far more geographically distributed and able to travel to local events and meetings than before. In contrast to only two years ago when nearly the whole team was Oxford based and our ability to support remote working was limited, our reach has significantly increased! That’s two big wins: more financial resources for what matters most and more people power where it makes a difference. 

    Martin: It’s interesting to reflect on the bigger picture and the differences from 2-3 years ago. Something I’ve not analysed but is at the back of my mind is differences in travel and in particular air travel. With a team located across the country more travel is required for us all to come together. We try to be efficient in terms using other commitments like the face-to-face events we run our our Board meetings to minimise additional travel. In terms of whether we are generating more carbon emissions the calculation is complicated because when our office was located in Oxford I would fly down approximately once a month. In a distributed team my need to meet face-to-face is less frequent, but there are more of us to move around the country. In terms of carbon cost none of us need to commute to work. As a distributed team we’ve also greatly reduced our print requirements moving to a virtual filing system. Even our expenses are entirely electronic and we’ve no need to print or post receipts. Some of our changes are by design, others are born from practicalities. For example, I know that you will often take the train for events in Scotland because it is impractical for you to get to an airport. For this year’s Annual Conference it was fortunately on my doorstep making it easier to transport the equipment we require. How much equipment we need varies from event to event, but with the environmental impact or air travel I’m rethinking how our get to our events and meetups. 

    Maren: I suppose it’s all relative.. and there is always more we can do – but having reviewed our operations over the past 3 years, we can see that we have definitely reduced our impact on the environment overall. A different kind of strategic change I’ve been thinking about and which relates directly to our organisational values is creating and using openly licenced content, anything from our strategy documents, call for proposals, photos from events, artworks, member badges and more. The call for proposals and guidance for reviewers have been adopted by other conferences and remixed to fit their purpose, whilst some of our policies, such as our privacy policy, and governance documents have likewise been used by other organisations and referenced back to us. We have also been working with Visual Thinkery to create a number of remixes and those often take on a life of their own in the wider community. For me, these are examples of how our values shape our operations and a contrast to how ALT operated when I first joined. In a recent blog post Frances Bell wrote about her sense of the Association being a generous organisation and that made me reflect on how generosity is a big part of our approach to leadership and one of the motivations behind our open practice. 

    Martin: I’d also read Frances’ post and it was interesting to reflect on whether having a virtual team with an inclination towards “generalised reciprocity” makes things easier. In terms of qualities I think it does make a difference to have people willing to support others particularly when contact time in a distributed team can reduce those serendipitous ‘watercooler’ moments – this is not so say those opportunities don’t happen instead they take place in other spaces, there however has to be a willingness and culture that values sharing and values supporting others.

    Just coming back to the environmental factors for homeworkers. We’ve previously talked about the advantages of working from and having more control on your working environment. At the recent Labour Conference shadow equalities minister Dawn Butler announced a proposed policy which is designed to consider the specific needs of menopausal women in the workplace. As part of this “adjustments that employers could be required to make could include the provision of ventilation facilities”. There are a number of factors that can affect your personal thermal comfort level and research has shown there can be biological gender differences. As the colder weather arrives, so does the annual team chat about our individual workplace temperatures, which can bring its own challenges. These are not just limited to personal comfort levels.  From the Wikipedia page on thermal comfort:

    Residential buildings in particular can vary much more in thermal comfort than public and commercial buildings. This is due to their smaller size, the variations in clothing worn, and different uses of each room.

    So as our team starts the ‘discussions’ with partners over the thermostat there are plenty of opportunities for us to show some generosity towards each other … and pictures of snuggly pets.      

    Maren: I have lots of thoughts about how the seasons impact on homeworkers and on balance I much prefer a working environment in which you can feel the changes in the weather and adjust accordingly instead of being at the mercy of a centrally controlled heating system or indeed working in a building where you can’t open the windows.

    What really struck me however is you talking about an organisational culture that values sharing and values supporting others. I recently had a conversation with the Chair of our Board of Trustees, Sheila MacNeill, where this came up strongly and it resonates, too, with what Martin Weller wrote recently in a post on ‘meticulous informality’. The point I am getting at is that our values, as an organisation, are very practical, day to day elements of how we lead our team and how we operate and leverage them to achieve our strategic aims. And more than that, our values as an organisation and the core principle of our professional accreditation scheme are closely aligned:

    When we set out to define our shared values in 2016 I didn’t fully consider how these elements connect with each other. Now I think that this is one of the most interesting areas to think about and there’s a lot we could unpack here, for example how openness enables us to critically examine the interplay between technology & learning or how ALT being independent of government and industry supports effective (and less biased) sharing of practice. You recently achieved your accreditation (and blogged about it) and I wonder whether you have any thoughts on this, as you work as a Learning Technologist in a senior role? 

    Martin: It’s really interesting to consider how our values and core principles interact with each other and influence what we do, including as a virtual team. In terms of openness for me I can’t see a direct link to critically examining the interplay of learning and technology … just because you value openness doesn’t mean you have a more critical eye. Generally I do however believe those who value openness are more considered in what they do. As someone who has been blogging for over a decade I developed a level of comfort in publishing things in the open. I’ve published a variety of content from thought pieces to practical tutorials and there is still always an aspect of how it will be judged by my peers but at the same time the consequences of publishing something that is wrong are fairly low. In the case of my peer reviewed portfolio for CMALT the stakes are higher, you are seeking accreditation of your knowledge and skills.  In my case I deliberately chose to do my portfolio privately, only publishing it once I knew I had passed. I know others who have very successfully developed their portfolios in the open getting feedback, encouragement and contributions as they produce it. For a number of years my philosophy was that everything should be done in the open, but more recently this has become more nuanced and I now recognise that learning can be a very vulnerable process often referring to Alec Couros’ ‘thinning of the walls’ in my presentations on this topic.  In the context of virtual teams it is perhaps useful to think in a similar way. Aspects of virtual teams can for some expose vulnerabilities and discomfort, for example, most video conferencing applications include a preview of your webcam which some people might find discomforting – when you meet face-to-face it is very unlikely that the person you are speaking to will hold up a mirror so you see yourself.

  • Virtual Teams: The perfect blend? Bringing the skills of distributed teams to face-to-face events (special podcast edition)

    Welcome to this month’s post (cross-posted here) in which we, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), openly share our approach to leading a virtual team.

    This time we talk about how we as a digitally and geographically distributed team connect face to face and why we think a blended approach is important. 

    New here? Catch up on earlier posts, podcasts or find out more about ALT. 

    August

    Maren: from the outset our approach to running a virtual team has been blended. In these posts we’ve talked about face to face team days, conference meet ups and even cpd by post – all examples of how we blend virtual working with ‘real world’ elements. What I’d like to talk about is why it’s so valuable to share some coffee & cake in person from time to time – to build relationships, communication & collaboration. I don’t think meeting up in person in itself is enough though. Over the last ten years I’ve come to realise that the more I prepare for a meeting and share my thoughts and expectations with whomever I am meeting, the more I get out of the time spent together. In my case, my former line manager, my mentor and every Chair I’ve reported to as CEO have been distributed remotely and rare face to face meetings have been precious. In order to make the most of them, I reflect on how things are going, how I feel, beforehand, so that I am better able to convey what I want to say when I am meeting someone in person. I’m curious about how that can also apply to conferences or other events. This year I was fortunate to meet many Canadian colleagues I’d never met before in person and I spent a lot of time chatting with them online in advance. I received travel tips & help preparing for the trip and it really made a big difference to how well the trip went and our ability to work together easily once I arrived. I think what I am getting at is that often people assume it’s the physical proximity that makes the difference in communication or collaboration and I’m keen to explore why it’s more nuanced than that. Some of the most important communication in my experience has been entirely online and depended more on the effort and engagement of those involved than their location. And yet… you can’t beat working alongside someone for learning new keyboard shortcuts. I realise that is a small thing, but it always reminds me that there are some things you miss out on in virtual working. So that’s my opening for this month’s podcast. What do you want to talk about? 

    Martin: Having just delivered our biggest annual face-to-face event with over 450 attendees joining us for our Annual Conference the benefits of physically coming together is at the forefront of my mind. This is one of the few times of the year when we come together as a team. The conference itself is usually over a year’s worth of planning and there are as you can imagine a lot of moving parts. The majority of the conference preparation is done as a distributed team and we’ve previously talked about how this works as a virtual team. Something that I thought really clicked together this year was our team communication during the event. As part of the conference we had to manage the attendee experience across multiple venues. To do this effectively, our team is spread across the conference site. We have a very detailed run plan so you generally know where each team member is going to be at a particular time, but to coordinate things we have a group Google Hangout chat channel. With this we can share how the conference is going, note any issues, answer quick questions or highlight the need for refreshment/breaks:

    We’ve previously tried to use Google Hangouts chat as part of our events administration, but this year was the first time I felt it really worked. There were a couple of reasons I felt this worked better this year, in particular, given we use Google Hangouts chat in our day-to-day activity we were all very familiar with this tool and how to use it. Another important factor was that this was the first year we also took the time to make sure we could access the chat regardless of whether we were on a Chromebook/laptop or using our mobile devices. Often when Virtual Teams are discussed it feels like you are always arguing against how it compromises operations. In the case of our Annual Conference our experience of working in a distributed team I feel actually greatly benefits us.

    Maren: that’s an interesting point. Initially I suppose it was mostly the other way round, ie existing relationships or knowledge made it easier to establish an effective virtual working environment. As this is our second year as a distributed team I think you are right about our virtual working practices becoming a benefit to working together face to face. I’ve really noticed the difference in my own mindset, I no longer feel like I haven’t seen a colleague for a long time when I see them in person. Instead our last virtual interaction ‘counts’ in my mind. That makes building relationships a lot easier, because you are not starting from scratch every few months. Another factor that has changed is mandating what’s required and what is optional. When we set up virtual operations we offered a lot of choice in terms of which platforms, tools or devices to use and the first two years have helped us, as a team, determine what is essential for effective operations such as the instant chat on different devices and what’s up to the individual, such as personal to do list formats. Delivering events has been a big part of helping us figure that out. The other big factor in such a small team is having a sufficient number of people present to check whether your idea of how things should run actually works. When there is only two or three people engaging it doesn’t work as well. In a small team one individual may represent 20% of the overall team and so everyone’s actions have a big impact. For example, for me personally that makes a big difference when it comes to sharing priorities for upcoming catch up meetings. Initially I was happy for everyone to choose a format but over time I realised that it takes too much time to switch between all the different tools for lists that are shared and having a common format also means that we all learn from each other’s practice, like the keyboard shortcuts I mentioned earlier. 

    Martin: As our team has grown I can see the benefits of having standardisation. As part of my role I support the implementation of our infrastructure. This includes the physical purchase of equipment as well as supporting staff with how to use it. Broadly the technology we use is fairly standard with a mix of Windows laptops/desktop and Chromebooks. Generally where practical we repurchase the same product or a similar product from the manufacture. This makes things easier so for example in the case of Windows laptops we have variants on the Lenovo X200 series so I know how the software Lenovo provides to manage device hardware generally works. The same is true for Chromebooks and we currently predominantly ASUS Chromebook Flip C302s. It means I generally know what USB-C hubs to buy as well which monitors have suitable connections and adjustments. As I’m not a day-to-day Chromebook user an area I struggle more is shortcut and command keys but luckily we’ve got a good cross-section of experience in the team now so if I can’t help there is generally someone else who can point us in the right direction. An area I’m often left in the dark with is iOS (for the last decade I’ve been exclusively using Android based devices). At ALT, we don’t have a policy of providing mobile devices to staff, the exception being our events manager. In the case of our recent Annual Conference it meant when one of our team asked how to install Google Hangouts chat on their iPhone I was completely lost, but fortunately as you are an iOS user you were able to help. The desire for a standardised provision is likely to be the wish of every IT manager in the land, in a distributed team it perhaps becomes more important because remote support of physical things becomes much harder. Similarly, I can see why having a common format for catch-ups means time better spent.