As I have been working on my book Leading Virtual Teams, I have been talking about working remotely on DS106 Radio on the Remote Working Radio Show.
What has started out as a lot of music and a bit of chat from me and sharing updated on the book has grown into an hour of chat with special guests, exploring how we work from home, what challenges we encounter and tips for developing your own practice.
The show is taking a break over the summer, so here are the recordings from season 1 for you to catch up with and enjoy. A huge thank you to my guests who joined me on air and shared their insights.
We will be back on air in the autumn for season 2.
After finishing a complete draft of the book in April, my reviewer group has been busy working through each chapter. I have ~20 volunteer reviewers who provide feedback and I am really grateful for all the work they have been doing. This week, by 6th May, the review period comes to a close and at that point it will be my job to work through the comments and feedback and get the next draft of the book ready. This will also involve picking up formatting errors and trying to clean up the references as much as possible. During May and June I will also start work on the cover of the book and finalise the publishing deadlines for the production partner. Exciting times!
Virtual Teams at OER22
I really enjoyed talking about Virtual Teams at the OER22 Conference in 28 April. Long-time colleague and friend Lauren Hanks, Director of Operations at Reclaim Hosting and one of the Co-Chairs of last year’s edition of the OER Conference, and I, are getting together to reflect on the connections between open education and open approaches to online collaboration and work.
As leaders of virtual teams, we want to critically examine what lessons we can learn from open approaches to learning and teaching and how we can use that knowledge in an increasingly virtual workplace.
This session builds on a recent episode of the Remote Work Show on DS106 Radio, in which we started to unpack some of this.
Remote working radio…
I will be doing not one, but two remote working radio shows this month. Following on from our session at OER22, Lauren Hanks and I will be on the airwaves to continue our conversation. There is also a second show in the works for this month with a special guest joining the conversation, so look out for the dates and times for both.
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As part of my work on the Leading Virtual Teams book, I have been careful to define what is meant by terms describing different ways of working. It’s taken me a while to bring the various terms together, and to reflect on their meaning not just now, but also before the advent of digital technologies and more widely available, reliable, high speed internet connections.
In my childhood days for example, selling Tupperware from your garage was a popular way for women to work from home alongside bringing up children, for example, and that didn’t involve Zoom calls or being online at all.
Similarly, there are many industries in which distributed working (i.e. across a number of different geographical locations) or working remotely (away from a central location such as a campus or corporate HQ) has been commonplace well before we had the capacity to take much of our “office” with us in the form of a laptop or even mobile device.
Graphic showing an overview of different Modes of Working – CC-BY by Dr Maren Deepwell, Leading Virtual Teams (2022)
One of the key themes of the work I have been doing is reflecting on how the way we work impacts on us. More specifically, I am interested in how different modes of working impact on particular aspects of our lives such as physical and mental health, work/life balance or a sense of connectedness.
Inspired by my coach training, in which our coach trainer recently asked us to practice with a coaching tool called Wheel of Life, I have adapted this coaching tool to explore different ways of working such as working from home, hybrid working, distributed or remote working and working in virtual teams and reflect on how the way you work impacts on you and your life.
Here is one example focused on hybrid working:
Example of a wheel adapted to reflect on hybrid working
Each wheel contains eight sections, including one which is blank for you to add your own category. I have been experimenting with what categories to include based on the research I have undertaken, and the mix of what’s included changes for different modes of working.
For hybrid working, you could reflect on and score:
Home working environment
Work/life balance
Physical and mental health
Care and family responsibilities
Socialising with colleagues
Commute
Office or campus work environment
and… a category of your choice
Here is another example that I have completed for working as a virtual team:
Example of a wheel with scores adapted to reflect on working in a virtual team
In this example, I have added a lower score for “Virtual socialising with colleagues” and high scores for areas like “work/life balance” and “home working environment”.
Try out this resource
You can download this resource and use it or adapt it to better suit your particular needs.
BOOM! This month I am excited to share that I have completed the first draft of the book. It’s actually more like draft no. 3, but up to now I hadn’t ever written the conclusion, and now I have.
Now my 48,570 words or ~160 pages of work in progress have been shared with internal reviewers for comment and feedback until early May 2022. If you’d like to help review the book, please let me know and I’d be happy to share the complete draft with you.
There is still a lot of work to be done, but reaching a point at which I have a complete book feels like a great milestone.
Coaching update
In very exciting news I finished the first coach training course this month and thus I am a step closer to getting formally accredited as a coach. One of the things I am working on is a set of coaching style questions to help reflection on leading virtual teams… so watch this space for more updates soon.
Remote working radio… with special guest Lauren Hanks
I am very much looking forward to doing a special remote working radio show this month, with a special guest, in order to share current thinking in the run up to session we are hoping to run at the OER22 Conference in late April… join me and Lauren:
Wednesday, 13th April 2022 14:00 BST on DS106Radio
As this is a special episode, you can expect more conversation and fewer songs.. (and unfortunately no special requests).
Writing buddy update: Posey has helped me think through finishing the complete draft.
January was extremely busy for me and I am glad that I took a week’s holiday from my day job and focused on writing. It was the first time since my PhD years that I spent so much time focusing on writing, and I really enjoyed it.
For the week of the writing retreat, I set a number of aims:
Decide the title of the book
Write “about the book” and “about the author” blurbs
Edit the first draft of the book and write the conclusion, which would result in a complete 2nd draft.
I am pleased to say that I accomplished the first two, and that I have updated the information on the book page accordingly. The book will be called Leading Virtual Teams – Field Notes from a CEO by Dr Maren Deepwell and will be published in 2022 as an open access publication by the Association for Learning Technology, UK.
The book is subtitled Field Notes from a CEO because my years as an Anthropologist gave me a researcher’s mindset that I have never quite left behind. Although I have settled into a different mindset in my ten years as a CEO, no longer just observing, but leading, I still find myself just as curious about seeing the world from someone else’s viewpoint and doing my best to walk a few steps in their shoes. Leading a virtual team has challenged that ambition in interesting ways, and provided me with a new field for exploration.
I also made significant progress editing the first draft into a more coherent and complete 2nd draft. Of the 51,000 words I wrote since last summer, 47,500 have made it into the nearly completed version. The overall book will be ~55,000 words long.
What’s left to do is to finish editing Chapter 4, which I wrote first in July last year, and which needs the most work and also to rewrite the conclusion and expand it. I left the conclusion to last, dropping in fragments along the way, as I wanted to get a feel for what the book would be like overall, before finalising my concluding thoughts.
By the end of this month, the complete 2nd version will be finished and then the next steps await me: getting feedback from a wider circle of critical friends and readers, liaising with our publishing partner to progress the copy editing and deciding on a cover for the book, too.
Exciting times ahead, that’s for sure!
Talks and events
Join our monthly radio meet up on DS106radio. This time I’ll be talking about the writing retreat and share news on book progress on Wednesday, 9th February 2022 at 19:00 GMT on DS106 Radio – chat with me or submit song requests #DS106radio.
Coaching update
The first month of coach training has given me a lot of prompts for reflection. One of the fundamental coaching techniques I am learning more about is how to use powerful questions and as I was writing, I discovered that many of the reflective prompts and questions included in various chapters could be used in this context, too.
One of the ideas this has given me is to create a set of questions specifically about working from home and being part of virtual teams, that could be used in a coaching context, and could also be helpful in wider professional practice. I hope to share these in a future monthly update.
Writing buddy update
Posey has been an excellent writing buddy, and we have been taking regular breaks from the computer together as well as our regular afternoon walks. However, the best thing for her this month has been to finally be allowed in the office full-time.
