I can’t quite believe it’s been three years this month since I started my podcast, and a 130 episodes into the experiment, I feel it’s time to celebrate 🙂
I’ve documented my journey as a podcaster in regular posts over the years, and looking back at these now, I’ve been reflecting on what I love about the show and this platform specifically, and also how I’m hoping to develop the podcast over the next year.
Audio only
One of the things that has changed since I first started the podcast is the arrival of video podcasts as a more popular format. Alongside that AI-powered tools have made it easier than before to produce podcasts, transcripts, and related content. Some platforms, like Google, now require shows to be submitted in video format, even if it’s just a holding slide.
I’ve been experimenting with all sorts of things on the show, and for now, I’ve decided to keep to an audio only format. One of the reasons why I started the podcast is to enable my listeners to engage with my work whilst stepping away from the screen, and I want to continue to do that. The increased environmental impact of producing video content, especially using AI-tools, is another reason why I don’t really want to change.
Special guests
When I first started getting requests from agencies and individuals to come on the show I was quite excited and I tried a few episodes with special guests I hoped would be the right fit for the podcast. Over time however, I found that very few of the folk (and bots) who contact me are closely enough aligned to my approach to work as well as I’d like.
Whilst it’s more work for me to approach, invite and liaise with guests myself, it also helps me ensure that the conversations are really relevant to my work, and hopefully that results in a more coherent and authentic offering for my audience, too.
I am so grateful that over the past year or two more guests than ever have given up their time to come on the show and talk to me, and I am VERY excited about the line up for 2026 taking shape.
Work on the next book
Which brings us neatly to work on the next book, which many of the interviews I record for the show help inform. It’s a wonderful way to do research and supplies me with a huge volume of transcripts I can dig into as I progress with the project.
Send me your ideas and requests
I’ve recorded a celebration episode to mark the podcasts 3rd birthday, so enjoy the listen… AND get in touch to let me know what you’d like more of in 2026. If you have a topic request, would like to join me as a special guest or have any other comments or feedback, contact me . I look forward to hearing from you and thank you for listening 🙂
The podcast is available on different podcast platforms and I hope you enjoy the show.
A year ago my book Leading Virtual Teams was published, and I can very clearly remember all the wonderful excitement that led up to the launch, and am still grateful for all the encouragement for this Open Access publication.
A year on, and the book, which was initially inspired by the work Martin Hawksey and I did at ALT, has turned into a whole host of resources, two free courses and a podcast which informs my wider work on hybrid working leadership development and coaching.
A year in Leading Virtual Teams
To celebrate the milestone, this post gives a quick overview over what’s happened in 2023 and if you are just discovering the book or my work, this is a great place to start:
Open Access publication – December 2022
Leading Virtual Teams – Field Notes from a CEO by Dr Maren Deepwell, was published in December 2022 as an open access publication by the Association for Learning Technology, UK. You can read and download a free digital edition, published as an Open Access publication by ALT in partnership with Open Academia.
I started the podcast in 2022, but in spring 2023 things really started happening. Each week, I share ideas and strategies for creative and fun approaches to help you succeed and lead in the hybrid workplace. Each episode includes tools, resources and strategies for different aspects of hybrid working, and links to blog posts and further reading.
Podcast | Blog post | Part 4: Fostering a shared team culture (12 May ’23)
Podcast | Blog post | Part 5: Leading team activities (19 May ’23)
Podcast season 3 with weekly episodes – September 2023
In September I was excited to have Season 3 of the Leading Virtual Teams Podcast finally underway. It’s a new season in every sense… and that is why I kicked off with ‘new pencil case’ moments in episode.
This episode celebrated the start of September, and the new season or start of term for many of us. I have recently tried out a new gratitude journal share ideas for how to find bright spots in a busy time of year. I also give you a preview of what’s in store for season 3 and the upcoming run of the Leading Virtual Teams course in October.
Free Hybrid Working Habits course launches – October 2023
I have experienced a lot of ups and downs working from home, managing remote workers and collaborating virtually, and I chronicled this in my book, Leading Virtual Teams (2022). One of the things I learnt along the way is that a good work/life balance and relationship with digital technology may look a little different for everyone but that the journey how we get there is similar. That’s why I designed this course: to share practical tips that you can use to find ways to make hybrid working really work for you (or you team or organisation) in the long term.
It’s been great to see the course attract lots of listens and interaction. Although I do encourage people to register for free, only about half of the people participating in the course do. Others prefer to simply subscribe to the podcast to listen along and explore at their own pace.
The topics for the course resonated well with participants, especially those designed to help manage digital overwhelm and setting life/work boundaries. Plus, I really enjoyed recording these as well, which is an added bonus!
The course resources and podcasts are now freely available and you can explore topics at your own pace. The easiest way to do that is to listen to the course podcast:
It’s been a wonderful year, and it’s also been a lot of hard work. Practically all my work in this area since the publication of the book has happened around the edges of my day job, and especially until the end of September that was a very full on commitment. Since focusing full time on my free-lance work I have had a little more scope to take on paid work in this space, and thus give this topic a bit more time in my day to day work.
Every now and then I get an email or a message or someone speaks to me at a conference about something valuable they found in the book, something that helped them in their work or opened up a new perspective and it always, always makes my day.
I have chosen not to publish the book commercially, instead going the Open Access route with the book and all the resources and courses I have published since, because I want as many people as possible to learn from the mistakes I made and the experiences I recount, and find a better way to manage blended, hybrid and virtual organisations. One downside is however that I have not much data about how many people engage with the work I do, and with an ever more fragmented social media landscape getting a feel for one’s reach is more challenging still. Which is why I value it so much when folk do share some feedback or send me a message.
All in all, it’s been a fun and rewarding year working towards putting the book into practice and making the ideas in it available to a larger audience.
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Over the past four weeks I have run a free and open course all about hybrid working. This week, we are wrapping up the course for 2023, and I’d like to take the opportunity to have a BIG thank you to everyone who took part, and contributed!
I love the format of the course, which is podcast cased with new topics released every week, as it allows folk to follow the course at their own pace, and offers the option to take part synchronously, too.
Inspiration for future courses
Quite a few people who registered for this run of the course expressed an interest in the weekly sessions to drop in. With between 30-50 participants taking part in the course each week, one of the challenges for me is to find a time that works across different time zones. For future runs of the course I’d probably come up with a better timetable to give more people the chance to connect and learn together.
Another element of the course that I am keen to develop is how new topics are released. Many people taking part have a lot of other commitments to juggle, and might find it easier if all the resources and topics were available from the start. I am going to have a think and see how that might work… 🙂
What worked well?
It’s been great to see the course attract lots of listens and interaction. Although I do encourage people to register for free, only about half of the people participating in the course do. Others prefer to simply subscribe to the podcast to listen along and explore at their own pace.
The topics for the course resonated well with participants, especially those designed to help manage digital overwhelm and setting life/work boundaries. Plus, I really enjoyed recording these as well, which is an added bonus!
Course catch up
The course resources and podcasts are now freely available and you can explore topics at your own pace. The easiest way to do that is to listen to the course podcast:
The course is podcast based and new episodes released weekly on Fridays. The podcast is called Leading Virtual Teams and you can find it on: Anchor, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.
If you’d rather see everything at a glance, the Course information page provides a handy guide to the course and links to all previous topics:
This past week all my networks about hybrid and virtual working have been dominated by attention grabbing headlines from this year’s KPMG CEO Outlook survey:
Most bosses think you’ll be back in the office 5 days a week within 3 years (Fortune)
Two-thirds of CEOs think staff will return to office five days a week (The Guardian)
Most executives expect a full return to the office by 2026 (The Times)
These headlines are usually accompanied by predictions around the disadvantages employees not willing to return might face:
87% of CEOs globally – 83% in the UK – told us it’s likely or very likely that employees who make an effort to come into the office will be rewarded with favourable assignments, raises or promotions.
There is some mention of the need to carefully handle a return to the office, to take into account what employees need and want, but overall, there is a strong sense of relief that established corporate power structures are flexing their muscles by demanding that workforces return to their rightful place in every sense of the word.
When I carried out the research for my book on virtual working, I found a distinct lack of evidence that the employment policy landscape in the UK or the US was changing. Other countries, especially around Europe, used the increase in home working during the pandemic to establish laws around employees’ rights to disconnect. But here in the UK there was no sense from government of urgency to create similar policies for the long term. Instead, UK policy flexed to accommodate emergency measures and short-term solutions.
So what do we really know about what the landscape looks like in the UK beyond the outlook of CEOs? Are workplaces really preparing for a return to the office, five days a week?
This is an interesting report, based on YouGov survey data, that explores flexible and hybrid working in the UK. The report focuses on employer and employees perspectives related to changes to flexible working law.
What I found most useful is that the report gives you a sense of what the current overall scale of flexible and hybrid working is in the UK, and also how many different practices this encompasses, with everything from working from home to having a four-day week and from zero-hour contracts to career breaks.
Hybrid working, in the context of this report, requires employees to still be in the workplace for a specific number of days per month or per week. The report states: “Over half (52%) require hybrid working employees to be in the workplace for a minimum number of days in the working week/month, while 46% do not. Private sector employers are more likely to say they have a minimum requirement, and voluntary sector employers are more likely to say they do not. Overall, employees are most likely to be required in the workplace for two (35%) or three (33%) days a week.
Is this a long-term trend? Or simply organisations operating more or less as before, but with more flexible and hybrid working added on top of existing practices? When it comes to long-term impact on resourcing office space, pay and equality, the report only includes brief mentions. It does highlight that employers perceive a positive impact on productivity, recruitment and retention as well as employee financial wellbeing.
When it comes to hybrid working specifically, the report states that “Eighty-three per cent of organisations have hybrid working in place. Forty-five per cent have a formal policy, 24% take an informal approach, and 13% are developing policies through learning/trialling. When CIPD last asked this in a similar survey in June 2022, fewer had hybrid working (77%) and fewer had formal policies in place (34%).”
This is really interesting, particularly when thinking about the managers leading teams in half the organisations that have hybrid working in place, but do not have formal policies. The need to develop skills for manage this scale of changes in the workplace is clearly becoming more urgent as the proportion of workplaces who offer flexible and hybrid working increases. The report reflects this as a negative impact of more flexible and hybrid working:
Specially, ability of managers to lead teams effectively (-18)
and identify as challenging for managers managing remote teams from a wellbeing and performance perspective (41%)
Developing your skills as a leader or manager in this context is particularly difficult because so few organisations have expertise to draw on and there is little formal training led by experts who actually have a track record beyond their personal experience of working from home.
Interested in evolving your approach to Hybrid Working? Registration for my next course starting 20th October is now open and it’s free for everyone. Sign up today.
Changes to workplace laws
One of the biggest changes in the UK this year is the Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Bill. This Bill has wide-reaching consequences for employers and employees, including granting employees the right to request flexible working from day 1 instead of after 26 weeks (background info) with the aim to make employment ‘flexible by default’.
As part of the work of the Flexible Working Taskforce, there now are a growing number of resources for employers and employees, including:
This follows on from last year’s UK consultation Making flexible working the default (December 2022) which included a focus on better understanding how informal flexible working operates in practice. It is very clear how far-reaching this particular issue is, even if the proposed changes to employment law don’t encompass all aspects:
Flexible working doesn’t just mean a combination of working from home and in the office – it can mean employees making use of job-sharing, flexitime, and working compressed, annualised, or staggered hours. … The ‘Making flexible working the default’ consultation recognised that flexible working is different for every employee, employer, and sector – it does not come in one size only. For an office worker, they may benefit from a job-share so they can better care for their children, or a factory worker may request different shift patterns that suit their balance between home and work. Because of this, the government will not instruct employers or employees on how to carry out their work, instead we encourage both parties have constructive and open-minded conversations about flexible working and find arrangements that work for each side.
However, the proposed changes do not go far enough in addressing the wider issues at stake here and this WIRED article provides a helpful insight into what’s not being tackled.
What does this tell us?
The change in the law around flexible working seems to be paying lip service to what employees demand, but is not going far enough in tacking the hybrid working issue that grab the headlines. This bill won’t protect the rights of employees if bosses increase demands to return to the office full time or ensure that those not returning won’t be disadvantaged. It doesn’t put onus on employers to up skill managers or upgrade infrastructure to exploit the full potential that hybrid working could offer. What it covers is too broad an area and not clearly enough defined to support hybrid working specifically.
There’s also something else at stake here, which comes out in the KPMG survey, a sense that work is all about people, “that business are about people, after all”. There is a lot of talk of nurturing wellbeing, supporting careers and offering the right sort of value proposition to employees with whom “hybrid working is extremely popular”.
Businesses are about making profits, and I am pretty such that the companies that take part in the KPMG survey and those quoted as ‘leading the return to the office’ such as Amazon and Google, are not seeing how giving employees more flexibility, continuously up-skilling managers to adapt to flexible workforces and making less use of extensive corporate campuses will benefit their bottom line.
Hybrid working is extremely popular not because some people can’t see that it’s more fun to have a coffee with colleagues than staring at endless video calls through a laptop screen. Hybrid working is popular because it enables people to cope with the competing demands of their lives, including family or caring responsibilities. It means spending less time and money on commuting, eating lunch alone and buying office appropriate clothes. Hybrid working has opened up a new perspective for many that work matters less, and being outside, spending time with family or simply taking a breath is more important than work.
Yes, hybrid working is complex and not without downsides, as I have explored at length elsewhere, but these headlines about mandating a return to the office seem to be much more about executives clinging onto old power structures than caring about people. Let’s not give into that and instead use the momentum created by the increase in hybrid working during the pandemic to shape the future of work for good.
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It’s July and time for a mid-year top 5 review, helping you catch up on the most popular episodes on the Leading Virtual Teams Podcast!
No. 1 – S02E12 – How to Lead Virtual Teams: Part 1
The most popular episode so far this year is the intro to my How to Lead Virtual Teams Course. In the first course podcast, I introduce the topics of the course and show you how to take part. For the orientation session, we’ll be focusing on the introduction chapter of Leading Virtual Teams.
No. 2 – S02E11 – OER23 Special: What’s so important about open practice for hybrid leaders?
This episode shares a lot of excitement about OER23, an event which I have been fortunate enough to help organise since 2015 and which is always a great highlight of my year. This year, I was especially looking forward to the conference, partly because it’s in one of my favourite parts of the world, the Scottish Highlands, and partly because it gave me a chance to catch up with many friends and colleagues I haven’t seen in a while, including long-time collaborator, Lauren Hanks.
Lauren and I have been talking about hybrid working and leading virtual teams for the past few years, and at least year’s OER Conference we even ran a session together: As leaders of virtual teams, we critically examined what lessons we can learn from open approaches to learning and teaching and how we can use that knowledge in an increasingly virtual workplace. Since then, I have been thinking a lot about why open practice is so important for knowledge workers, and particularly managers and leaders who work in hybrid, distributed or fully virtual team: Read the blog post.
No. 3 – Special Episode with Martin Weller
In this episode I welcome a special guest, Martin Weller, as we talk about writing books, virtual learning and virtual working and what we are learning along the way.
Leading Virtual Teams – Field Notes from a CEO by Dr Maren Deepwell, was published 1 December 2022 as an open access publication by the Association for Learning Technology, UK.
No. 5 – S02E19 – Meditation and mindfulness for hybrid and virtual teams
During the recent Mental Health Awareness Week, I looked for new tips and ideas for virtual and hybrid teams keen to embed mindfulness and meditation into their ethos. In this episode I share ideas and practical approaches. You can find more information in the episode blog post.
Listen to the podcast
Each week, I share ideas and strategies for creative and fun approaches to help you succeed and lead in the hybrid workplace. Each episode includes tools, resources and strategies for different aspects of hybrid working, and links to blog posts and further reading. On this page, you can find links to the all episodes and further resources in the show notes.
During the recent Mental Health Awareness Week, I looked for new tips and ideas for virtual and hybrid teams keen to embed mindfulness and meditation into their ethos.
I’ve previously shared tips, which I have updated and included again below. This year my focus has specifically been on finding resources for meditation and mindfulness.
Sometimes it can be most helpful to bring in external facilitators to lead this kind of work, and run live sessions for teams. One of the challenges however is to schedule these sessions at a time when everyone can attend and also find a format that meets the needs of diverse individuals.
So instead of looking for a specific course or facilitator, I have been looking to find approaches that are easily available and accessible in a flexible way, so that colleagues can engage as and when they wish to. There are a lot of free resources online as well as specialised apps such as Headspace, Calm Business and Insight Timer for Work.
We tried Insight Timer for Work and offered colleagues the opportunity to explore resources such as meditation recordings in a huge library of content available in 44 different languages. We are a small team, and as such as weren’t focused on creating a particular level of engagement or meeting goals. We don’t use the analytics that the platform can provide.
Instead, we started to share content we came across that was helpful to us, and we organised an informal meet up for staff to spend 15-20 min online. To make this as flexible as we can, the format we adopted brings us together in a video call at the start of the session, and we say hello and check-in with each other. It’s encouraged but not required to share what 5 or 10 min track you are planning to listen to. Then cameras and mics are switched off, and everyone engages in their meditation or mindfulness activity. At an agreed time, we return to the video call, and reflect a little on how we got on.
Scheduling the meeting provides a way to stay accountable to the intention to take a mindful break for those who want it, and is opt-in only. We decide each time if we want to meet again, and then put another date in the diary.
It’s a small step, but a welcome reminder to take a breath in what is a very busy time indeed.
Create time and space to talk: For many people working from home seems to be a never ending marathon of back to back meetings in Teams or Zoom. That’s a tough context in which to create time or space to talk about mental health. I’ve often blogged before about different ways of working, around a document, whilst walking, offering time to reflect and write together… and you really need to find pockets of time and space that suit your team(s) in order to get meaningful conversations. In addition to weekly group meet ups, make time to have one to one catch ups and wherever possible don’t schedule meetings back to back for the whole day or week. Consider how you might use informal and formal spaces which are always there, such as chat channels, for meet ups, chat and conversations.
Read the signals: For some, what works for everyone else isn’t a good fit. That applies to in person management just the same, but I feel working virtually increases the danger of missing obvious signals. If you have just come from one meeting and the other person has done something different, it’s easy to talk at cross purposes. So if you are talking about personal stuff, asking about wellbeing or mental health, you need to be prepared to look out for subtle signals, including tone of voice or chat, body language and even emoji. It’s helpful to have a communication channel in which discussing sensitive topics is safe and personal. Or rather than changing how you talk, consider what else you can modify to create a different atmosphere: go for a walk and talk; or have a phone call with cameras off. We don’t always feel the same, so our working practice shouldn’t always be the same either.
Talk about mental health: aim to normalise talking about mental health in an appropriate way and check in on how everybody is doing regularly. Clearly sign-post ways to seek expert or confidential advice such as via HR professionals, at appraisals, through organised coaching, therapy and other support.
Enjoyed this post? Then listen to my podcast episode on mindfulness and meditation:
