This week I am officially started my coaching certificate and I am looking forward to getting involved in the course. In order to become an accredited coach, an ICF Associate Certified Coach, I am taking part in Katie Linder’s Higher Ed Coach Training.
After two years of very little formal CPD that didn’t have to do with charity crisis management, I am delighted to have this opportunity to learn and develop in an area of my leadership practice that I have long been passionate about: mentoring and coaching.
A few years ago I co-authorised a series of blog posts on mentoring with my amazing former mentor Margaret Bennett, and since I have continued to develop in this area. How I feel it’s time to formalise my skills and gain more insight into coaching.
My focus
There are two areas I am particularly interested in: leadership and executive coaching, which is growing in particular in Higher Education, and organisational development coaching, which is focused on helping organisations with cultural change and strategic transformation.
In my role as CEO I frequently advise and work with organisations who are seeking to develop their use of educational technology, develop and recognise staff in this area and to create a vision for their digital futures. Enhancing my skills to coach individuals and organisations through these times will add an important new skillset to the experience and expertise I have gained over the past ten years.
Continuing to develop in an executive role
This year is my tenth year as CEO and over the past ten years I have learnt a lot in my role. The past two years in particular have been challenging for everyone and leading my organisation through these troubled times has pushed me to develop new strategies and approaches fit for times of crisis.
I think this year is a good moment to shift the momentum and to start to actively plan for and respond to what I see on the horizon instead of reacting to what is happening in the moment.
Supporting women into leadership roles
Over the past few years I have actively supported other women who are looking to advance in their careers and develop their professional practice. As part of my coaching practice I will continue to offer support women moving into management and leadership roles.
One of the aspects of my coaching practice I will be developing this year is to offer individual and group coaching sessions, and I will be sharing further details of this later in the year.
Professional recognition
It’s important to recognise professional skills and expertise, and a big part of why I am spending my free time each week taking part in the course is to learn about and gain a new professional accreditation and also include it in my CMALT portfolio. I want to learn about the ethical standards and formal tools of the coaching profession alongside gaining practical knowledge about supporting the individual and organisations I work with.
This past month has been BUSY. I am good under pressure, but it took a lot of energy and effort to keep things in some sort of resemblance of balance this month.
ALT is always busy in August, because we run our biggest event of the year in September, and it has keep us all working hard. It’ll be worth it when we see it coming together in just over two weeks. If you haven’t already registered, I’d encourage you to join us (and applications for scholarship places remain open, too).
I am looking forward to us convening as a community. Hundreds of participants and speakers, many of whom I know. It will be good to reconnect after what has been quite an isolated year.
Here is a quick run down of what I’ve been up to other than conference prep:
I made a terrarium
Blasus Terrarium Workshop
Thanks for a wonderful independent plant shop, I was able to join a “make your own” terrarium last week. It’s a succulent terrarium, my favourite kind of plant.
It was a great way to do a local activity and go somewhere new – plus, there is now a beautiful new terrarium next to my desk.
Blogging
I blogged quite a bit this month (for me).
JOINING CONVERSATIONS FOR EQUALITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION & BELONGING: I recently joined the anti-racism & learning technology group. I am particularly interested in the mentoring and coaching area and also recruitment. I am currently in the process of recruiting for a member of staff and post no. 3 is very relevant to me, encouraging us to ‘disrupt the current procedures in place, and to ensure that we can action diversity rather than pay lip service to racism issues in the sector’.
WE ARE LOOKING FOR A COO… A LOOK BEHIND THE RECRUITMENT DOORS: We are currently recruiting for a Chief Operations Officer for ALT, and I couldn’t be more excited! Now we are planning ahead for post-pandemic times. Whilst we have an excellent track record delivering online activities and a lot of expertise in virtual events, we don’t just want to follow our old ways. Instead, we are starting to innovate and that has helped us redistribute our income streams and ensured that we are back to generating the charitable income we need to achieve our mission. Next, we are looking to develop blended ways of doing things and improving what we are already good at. In order to achieve that, we have created a new role and are looking to grow our staff team… .
MAKING TIME FOR CPD IN A LEARNING TECHNOLOGY LEADERSHIP ROLE: In the past year it’s been hard to make much time for professional development, or at least the kind of professional development you can plan. Like many in my position, I had a huge amount of professional development focused on keeping my organisation running in a crisis, emergency governance, financial crisis management and so forth. Things are STILL extremely busy, and look like they will continue to be for some time to come, but I am making time do actually plan some CPD beyond giving talks and attending (virtual) conferences.
POSEIDON, BIN COLLECTOR, JUDGE. WHAT I WANTED TO BE WHEN I WAS A KID: When things are busy, it can be tough to make time and space for YOU. So in order to make some space for ME on MY blog, this is a blog post all about… me ?. Reflecting on ‘career’ progress for want of a better word is an important part of charting your own development, and this is something I have been doing as part of reviewing and updating my Senior CMALT Portfolio. The time frame for updating the portfolio is the last 3 years… but what we I look back 30+ years instead?
Book progress
I have been working on Chapter 3. This includes some of the most interesting sections relating to Learning Technology and Open Education, in particular a section on open approaches to leadership.
The chapter was harder to write because I had a lot of things I wanted to refer to which would be covered in other parts of the book, which don’t exist yet. On the plus side, I have managed to get into a good routine with my writing, and I found a regular writing (half) day, which helps a lot.
I recently joined the anti-racism & learning technology group. If you’d like to learn more about the work of the group, there is a series of blog posts on the #altc blog which provide a great starting point:
The AR<CoP has been meeting since November 2020 to address these challenges and currently encompasses three areas of activity:
Guidance for Content Developers. The focus of this area of activity is to create a set of recommendations to incorporate anti-racism in digital learning content.
Research Connected Activities. Research, seminars and advances in the field of digital education are covered in this area. For example, diversity and digital leadership, and the influence of biases in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.
Mentoring & Coaching. This area of activity aims at creating connections between colleagues who wish to support and receive support for career advancement and managing the complexities of an increasingly fast-changing work environment.
I am particularly interested in the mentoring and coaching area and also recruitment. I am currently in the process of recruiting for a member of staff and post no. 3 is very relevant to me, encouraging us to ‘disrupt the current procedures in place, and to ensure that we can action diversity rather than pay lip service to racism issues in the sector’. Specifically, looking at:
Gender empowerment and more diverse students/staff pool
Unequal pay between white staff and other ethnicities
Demographics of the UK and the geographical locations of applicants
Reflections
The first meeting I was able to join in with was on 29 July, and this introduced Bold Conversations for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging – activities planned for the autumn term. I really appreciate the opportunity to join the group’s discussions and the opportunity to educate myself, challenge my ideas and blind spots.
The main part of the session was about setting up circles for discussion and coaching each other, offering safe spaces for mindful listening and voicing issues around the core areas of activities. I found it really interesting to hear and listen to the approach modelled here and how it reflects the values of the group.
It was good to learn about a particular strand of work of the wider group, and I am particularly interested in the coaching approach used.
Come the new autumn, I am looking forward to being more actively involved in the work of the group and I am grateful to the inspiring group facilitators for moving this forward.
Just over a month ago, this project to write a book about leading virtual teams got underway. If you missed the first post that explains what the book is about and the open approach I am taking, then head here to catch up.
Progress since the last post
Since my last post, I have outlined what the book is going to be about and each chapter within it. I have set out word limits for the book overall and each individual chapter and I have gone through the material I already have and I have assigned it to each chapter.
Then, the task of writing the first chapter began. I picked Chapter 4: Pitfalls and problems of virtual teams to start with as this includes a section on the pandemic and crisis working, which is something I am thinking about a lot at the moment.
I have dedicated one afternoon a week to focus on writing and doing bits and pieces for the book around that. I started writing over 5 weeks and took some time off to have a holiday, and the chapter changed a lot from zero to 12,000 words and is now 9,475 words long.
It was really useful to start writing and I learnt a lot from drafting this first chapter. It still needs more references and the tone isn’t quite right, but having the first draft of the first chapter is a nice milestone.
For the next four weeks, I will be working on Chapter 3, on leading a virtual team.
As planned, I will be sharing extracts from work in progress (read the first extract below) and invite you to read along, reflect and share your thoughts. As part of the book writing process, I will also organise virtual drop in sessions which are open to all and free to attend and there is a regular newsletter with updates about the book and upcoming events or get in touch with me directly.
Chapter overview: Pitfalls and problems of virtual teams
Many unforeseen problems arise in a virtual team over the years. In contrast with managing a traditional, office-based workforce, there are a lot of factors at play that you have little or no control over when you manage people remotely, from moving house to problems with technical infrastructure. This chapter explores some of the difficult and dark times I experienced leading a virtual team and ways to cope with them. I also discuss ideas for establishing a positive life/work balance for remote workers and hopefully avoid many common problems from the outset.
One of the lessons I learnt about leading a virtual team is that many problems only arise over time. Something that isn’t an issue early on can become problematic a year down the line when you no longer benefit from things you have done when you were working together in person in the office. One example of this is the renewal of a contract last renewed when there was still a physical filing cabinet with the relevant papers in it next to your desk. In my case, it took literally a calendar year to sort out a complex mail forwarding arrangement that still gives me nightmares. Even in a relatively small organisation like the one I lead, certain processes only occur every 2-3 years or less frequently. I found that in particular governance, audit and quality assurance processes can become harder over time as the organisational memory of how things were done fades and you need to establish new ways of doing things remotely.
Your portfolio of problems will change over time, and there are several other factors, such as staffing changes or establishing a new service for example, that can cause new issues to arise in the dynamics of a virtual team. Each onboarding process brings with it an unknown quantity of home-working related variables that over time impact on your team. Everyday challenges can seem easy to overcome at first, but the lived experience of spending every day at home and working can be difficult to anticipate.
It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on how many things shape life at home and by extension working from home and how much things can change abruptly and without warning. It may be a new pet, a sudden illness or redundancy that causes home life to change overnight. Or it may be external factors such as a building site or noisy neighbours. Managing a virtual team involves to some degree connecting with the reality of home life of your workforce and all that brings with it.
Whilst a lot of what I focus on in this chapter is about creating balance between life and work, about maintaining a degree of professional detachment and separation between home and work, there are limits to what can realistically be achieved. There will always be situations when not going out to work means that there is no escape from a difficult situation at home and this is one of the most challenging aspects of managing a remote workforce.
I have divided this chapter into three sections: first, I want to focus on everyday challenges that virtual teams experience. That includes negotiating the tension between working from home and doing housework, working from home in different time zones and seasons as well as wellbeing for home-workers.
The second part of the chapter is about managing crisis and change as a virtual team, such as moving house (which can be more impactful than anticipated) and how to communicate and build trust when things really go wrong.
The final part of the chapter is dedicated to reflecting on working in times of pandemic. Before 2020 none of us had experienced this scale of global health crisis as a virtual team and we learnt a lot from the experience which we tried to meet with grace and compassion.
Draft Chapter extract
Below is an extract of the draft chapter. This is the third and last section of the chapter.
Working as a virtual team in times of global crisis
“Hello from month two of lockdown here in the UK. I initially started writing this post on 23 March 2020, but since then so much has happened that I stopped and now, a month later, I’ve started again.
I’ve been reading so much about the current crisis: at first there were emergency announcements and lockdown measures, then support and help for coping, then about the ‘new normal’ and now we’ve arrived at predictions for the future.
It is both incredibly busy and extremely boring.
I am not sure how I feel about the idea of ‘business as usual’. I can understand the desire for a sense of normality and keeping to a routine, but no one can really function normally just now, so I am starting to think about what measures we can take to lead our team through the coming months..
My ideas include a 20% reduction in overall productivity (to give us as a team more flexibility around care commitments etc), setting priorities for each week and creating a clearer overview for us as a team (kind of like what you would do for a project, ie treat the crisis as a project) and to try and set aside small pockets of time for thinking about things, rather than just doing…”
Reading the opening paragraphs of a blog post I published on 4 May 2020, and it takes me right back to those dark days. Obviously, the COVID-19 crisis had a much wider impact than I can comment on in the context of this book. The social, economic and political ramifications here in the UK and globally cannot yet be fully understood. The human cost, which continues to rise, is huge. Personally and professional we have all been affected.
In the context of working as a virtual team, the great pivot online introduced a great number of people to work from home and this is something I have discussed earlier, in the Introduction.
When the crisis hit, our team was already working from home, and in that respect we were safer than many others. Also, our organization was safer. We already had established processes for working from home and that was a huge plus.
However, no one had prepared for what was to come next, and I want to reflect on the practical as well as the leadership challenges of leading a team through such a crisis.
For me personally, the global pandemic coincided with a period of great personal upheaval including divorce and a move to a new city, which made this time one of the most challenging of my career as a CEO.
Practical measures
To begin with, we took a lot of practical steps to support staff during this time of crisis. This included:
Extra paid time off, extending Bank Holidays for example
Regular, individual check-ins with HR and support staff
Diverting funds usually spend on development like attending events to offer financial support for coaching, mentoring and counselling
Including wellbeing check-ins in weekly team meetings
Encouraging staff to share tips for wellbeing, for example links to online meditation sessions, helpful reading, recipes or entertainment
At times of high stress, even two weeks can seem like a long time and a lot can change in how a team is feeling or coping. It’s challenging to share how everyone is when some of the things that are happening to everyone are very personal.
What I focus on is to find some balance between work being an escape, a bit of “normality” for everyone and work being a source of social interaction and support. These two things are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they can sit uneasily alongside each other when for example one person wants to try and have a ‘normal day’ and someone else feels like sharing their personal or crisis news.
One of the most recognisable features of working from home during the pandemic is the video call, which “can be cognitively demanding keeping an eye on the chat as well as listening to what the presenter is saying and looking at their slides”. ‘Why is video conferencing so exhausting?’, exploring factors like “non-verbal overload” and “constant gaze” as reasons video calls can be more tiring than meeting face-to-face.
As someone who does lots of online meetings back-to-back his is something I can relate to. I am not a fan of back to back video meetings and I find there are alternatives:
having a phone call (often more personal),
meeting around a document,
or screen sharing something that everyone can focus on instead of video,
or having an audio call maybe with video briefly at the start to wave hello.
If… nothing helps and you do have to have back to back meetings, as I often do, then what works for me is
to have them standing up (I currently have a standing desk only),
to keep each one to half an hour or less,
to take regular breaks between meetings,
and to check in with everyone participating at the start.
Being one of many faces in a grid of video camera pictures is not a helpful way to visualise what having a productive meeting looks like. We don’t all just stare at each other in person. So having a visual focus other than those individual feeds, like an agenda document or a shared screen is key to getting things done for me.
We also explored using a virtual backdrop in video calls, like in a meeting or at a conference, and I am in two minds about it. Whilst I prefer seeing people in their context, I appreciate that many are not in environments they are comfortable sharing widely or wish to protect their privacy.
Strategies for crisis working
As time went one and as we passed 100 days since the lockdown in the UK commenced, more strategies for working as a virtual team in times of crisis emerged .
As well as focusing on our own team, I received requests every week from organisations who were considering adopting working as a virtual team as their ‘new normal’. Every few days I had calls with senior managers who are trying to decide whether they still need a physical office, managers whose employees want to have more flexibility, less commuting and more virtual collaboration. We talked through things like PO boxes, GDPR for home-workers, financial support and line management – but we also talked about the reasons for such a shift, how important it is to think through strategy and values underlying those moves to virtual teams.
Over time, my concern grew that there is a lot that was being left behind, particularly messy HR problems, access issues and long term implications of not meeting in person. For a lot of people I spoke to, endless Zoom meetings or Microsoft Teams was all they have to go on when they start to think about what their virtual work world will look like.
When I started thinking about what our team would look like online, I must say that tools for video conferencing were not even on my list! I was thinking about consulting employees, drafting what I wanted to be the most equitable changes to employment contracts and setting out a blended model of working together that saved some costs, but also budgeted for others such as team days in person, equipment, travel costs, home-working allowances and so forth.
Even with an established distributed working culture the impact the crisis could be seen on our virtual team. Many went from having their own dedicated workspace in a calm home to suddenly discovering this had become a shared workspace with other members of the household. Sharing a workspace, an increase in video calls, homeschooling and childcare meant even established remote workers are also having to rediscover ways to make things work.
Whilst ALT is a distributed organisation there has always been a recognition of the importance of face-to-face time both one-to-one and through team away days. 100+ days of social distancing also meant we as an organisation missed our regular face-to-face team days. I found I really miss face-to-face away days and the opportunities to meet individuals in person. The longer the period that we do not meet up as a team the more I feel the impact of not having more informal catch ups.
Many of us were not able to easily find a quiet spot for a conversation in lock-down homes, and even when not surrounded by family, there is a lot going on within the home environment that can be distracting. All of which makes it more difficult to really focus on conversations, particularly in a Line Management context.
Fellow CEOs I talked to are finding they are similarly experiencing some deterioration in those important relationships. Some people find it easier to establish an equivalent level of trust and exchange than others.
Ideas we have tried to create different kinds of spaces to interact in are:
Meeting around documents
Walk and talk conversations on the phone, whilst we go for a walk individually
Good old-fashioned phone calls
Virtual get togethers for social occasions such as birthdays
In year one of us being a virtual team, we had a lot of change to cope with but enthusiasm was high. Year two was mostly about settling into being a virtual team and ironing out less straightforward issues. We strengthened policies for home working and collaboration that made our way of working more robust and sustainable. Year three started off with a new strategic vision to take us further, to build on what we had established and six months in we have a completely different business model and context to contend with.
What I am thinking about really is what year four should look like… . I read a lot about a desire not to return to the old ways, but I don’t really empathise because the way in which we work as an organisation had already departed from the traditional model well before the pandemic forced many into the great online pivot. Personally, I wouldn’t relish a professional life without face-to-face interaction with colleagues or Members. I miss it.
I have put in place a feedback form that I hope we can complete every few weeks or months to ask individuals about their personal preferences regarding travel, having meetings or catch ups face-to-face and also going to events – taking into account their personal circumstances and wellbeing.
The differences between colleagues who live in different parts of the UK, even in our small team, have really become clear to me in recent weeks, particularly as the lock-down in Wales, where I live, was last to lift.
Dealing with precarity outside beyond our control
As life, in the UK at least, entered a new phase and restrictions were being eased, workers started to return to offices in greater numbers. Holidays at the end of a difficult year were on the horizon and in many ways things were starting to improve. We moved from crisis mode to post-pandemic living. And yet there was no let up in sight at work. For my team, work continued at full pace, and the strain of the last 18 months was showing. Everyone had their own particular challenges, their own struggles and personal circumstances that shaped their experience of this time. What we did have in common is less capacity to cope with stress, with things going wrong.
The continued impact of the pandemic, of self-isolation cases at school and at work, the lack of childcare, transitions and changes at work, as well as crowded family homes and all that we didn’t do the previous year catching up with us created a sense of continued precarity beyond our control. Many of us had been fully vaccinated by this time and grateful to be safer from a deadly virus, but we continued to have a lot to contend with in our own ways.
Acknowledging things not being normal
Through the loss of being able to run face to face events and also due to other factors, our organisation lost nearly half of its turnover in 2020. Like many charities, we struggled with that scale of loss and although our strategic response had a positive impact very quickly and helped us weather the most difficult period, we had to make savings and cuts wherever we could. A year on, I was pleased to see that month by month things were improving and new income generation strategies were starting to pay off. Yet we were still having to be extremely fastidious when it came to managing our resources. Some staff costs had to be cut in order to safeguard the future of the organisation and we were not yet in a position to relax those measures.
This was a singular context but it does translate into many situations when a team or an organisation is coping with a difficult period and it got me thinking about ways in which to provide support and acknowledge challenges.
Usually, I would have looked to structural changes first, to aim to provide more staffing resources, more support for existing staff or financial rewards and benefits.
In the context of post-pandemic recovery, my scope for those sorts of measures was extremely limited however and I had to think about other approaches. Something that would go beyond the formal support already in place and which had been positively received. One of the ideas we put into practice was a wellbeing day. A duvet day if you like.
A day when you don’t have to come to work, you don’t have to use a day of holiday. You can take it whenever you need to and you can focus on rest, relaxation, whatever you feel might improve your wellbeing.
I was glad when our Board approved this proposal and granted the extra day to all staff. The aim of this was partly to give everyone an extra day to breathe and also about acknowledging that things weren’t normal. That we still have a lot to cope with, a lot to contend with. Here are some of the ideas we came up with for how to use the day:
Mentoring & cake: Sometimes an extra day off is just what you need to do some thinking. Get in touch with your mentor, coach or a friend and arrange a chat over a long walk. Take a step back from your daily grind and get some head space. Aim to end your chat somewhere with excellent cake.
Early run and pub lunch: Maybe a wellbeing day for you starts with a nice run (jog, walk) along the river or around the park, enjoying the feeling that everyone else has to go to work, but you don’t. Follow your feet, and breathe in the morning. Job done for today. At lunch, head to the pub for an early lunch (int optional) and revel in the luxury of not having an improvised sandwich for lunch.
Bed: This needs no explanation. Stay in bed. Enjoy.
Tidy and new pictures: Maybe you want to use your day to make your working space the best it can be. Have a tidy and clean and then get creative by putting up some new pictures. Extra points for making something yourself. Also extra points for dog/cat photos. The nice thing about this kind of day is that you get both unlimited tea AND a nicer desk when you do have to go back to work.
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.
Hello and welcome to this month’s special podcast edition post on leading a virtual team. In this post (cross-posted here) the two of us, that is Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and Maren Deepwell (@marendeepwell), continue our series of openly sharing our approach to leadership.
If you are new here, you can catch up on earlier posts and podcasts or find out more about ALT, the organisation we work for as senior staff. We really appreciate comments and feedback and welcome questions or suggestions for future posts.
This time we’re talking about how we recruit new staff, what it’s like to carry out a virtual selection process and how that led to interesting reflections on what it means to be professional as a home worker in a virtual team and how we approach professional development.
Our podcast is embedded below or you can listen on SoundCloud.
May
Maren: we’ve been recruiting for two new team members recently and the virtual recruitment process has been a really positive experience. People often ask me how it works to recruit wholly online and in this post I’d like to share some of what we do. From the outset, recruiting for home-based roles gives us a much wider pool of applicants to choose from, and often more experienced candidates, too. We include details of how we work as a virtual, distributed team of home workers in the job description, and this time we included it as part of the practical test in the selection process, too. We conduct the application and initial short-listing process in the same way as you would for traditional roles, we meet online to agree a short-list and then invite candidates to take part in an online test. The practical element is conducted in our G Suite environment to give candidates a practical insight into the role. Likewise, the interview is conducted via Google Hangouts Meet. In one instance all the candidates we interviewed were already home workers and we included questions specifically about home working in the interview. I felt that those questions worked extremely well and led us to learn more about each candidate but also to establish a rapport about some of the challenges you can encounter. Did you find that those questions worked well? Was there anything in the answers that stood out for you?
Martin: I think the process worked well. A surprise to me was how considered the responses were to our question around homeworking. When we asked ‘Have you had any experience working from home previously? Can you expand on the main challenges you’ve encountered and/or perceive?’ a common response was to highlight to issues like isolation and maintaining boundaries between work and personal life. Previously I’ve seen questionable headlines like ‘Half of the UK workforce to work remotely by 2020’ and whilst I don’t expect we’ll even get close to this figure I get the sense there is a higher proportion of the workforce who have worked remotely either full-time or parttime. It’s useful at this point to also make a distinction between working remotely in a solo capacity and working remotely as part of a distributed team. This is where as part of the interview process I feel we got a better insight into whether the candidates would potentially work well in our team as responses revealed the skills they had beyond personal awareness. As part of this we also asked out candidates how they deal with change in the workplace. Given my role in supporting ALT’s infrastructure an aspect that always comes to mind is how our team deal with the continual updates to G Suite and our other web services. Was there anything from the interview processes that has inspired you or identified new opportunities?
Maren: One of the things that has inspired me was gaining insight into how home working is a factor in job selection. It was interesting to hear whether and if so how specifically being home based motivated candidates. The most obvious differentiator is no longer being constrained by location (which in our case was Oxford before we were a virtual org, which really limited our pool of applicants as Oxford is one of the most expensive places to live in the UK). Instead of applying for a job because it’s local, a far greater proportion of applicants selected by what they are passionate about and/or have experience in. Also, many more applicants had considered how the job would fit into their work/life balance and career progression and the questions around home working helped articulate that. As a small independent employer we can offer great opportunities and unique benefits but not the same as a large company could. On a personal level, I learnt a lot from how during the recruitment process we as a team express what we do and why we enjoy it. Questions like ‘what’s a typical day like?’ or ‘what do you find most rewarding?’ prompted us to share a perspective that we don’t often dip in to. I find it shifts my own point of view, allows me to see things in a new way, which after over ten years in the organisation is always a good thing. I am wondering… if I was applying for my job now, what question would I ask the panel. If you were in that position, what would you want to know?
Martin: There were some great questions and like you I enjoyed talking about what working for ALT is like. I’ve been racking my brain to put myself back in the position of one of our interviewees and what I would ask. After over five years with ALT I’m struggling to remove some of the tacit knowledge of the organisation and how we operate to come up with some questions. One of the themes from our recent selection process was candidates asking about CPD opportunities. As you mentioned we are a small independent charity so there are some constraints on budget. Even with this in mind I’d say there is a strong culture for learning and supporting each other. As a small organisation it feels like we can also engage in CPD activities in a less formulaic fashion. For example, rather than going on an equality and diversity course my own CPD has recently involved looking at and talking about equality in Learning Technology. Given the nature of what we do there are also lots of opportunities to learn from our members. Only last week I was able to attend a workshop hosted by the University of Edinburgh on the emerging use of Jupyter to support learning and teaching. Given the variety of approaches to CPD that we have it can sometimes be hard to articulate. Are there other approaches we have to CPD you think we should highlight?
Maren: … well, as you’ve brought us on to talk about CPD, I’ll add that I’ve been playing with the idea of postal CPD activities for virtual teams recently. The idea came out of an article I read about the value of focusing on positive feedback and I came up with a postal activity called positive feedback by post. I really enjoyed the change of pace doing something by letter brought with it in contrast to the CPD I usually do which is often event based or online. Personally I think we as a team have exceptional CPD opportunities through the resources and support our organisation provides for things like mentoring and training, through working with Trustees and Members, time to travel and also support for internal schemes like CMALT. But for now, I’m busily dreaming up things delivered in the mail. It’s nice to get something tangible delivered to you by letter rather than email or instant chat when you’re part of a virtual team.
