Maren Deepwell

Tag: #ds106radio

  • VIRTUAL TEAMS BOOK: … EXTRACT FROM The Introduction

    VIRTUAL TEAMS BOOK: … EXTRACT FROM The Introduction

    Progress since the last post

    Since my last post, I have been working on the Introduction to the book and that has been very helpful. It’s prompted me to write an overview of how all the chapters hang together and it’s help me get a clearer sense of the overall structure.

    Apart from the conclusion, I have now drafted all chapters. I have decided to incorporate what was going to be a chapter on addressing inequality and inequity in remote work into each chapter as those questions came up again and again.

    So now that I have a clearer sense of the shape of the book, I want to make a plan for revising and improving the drafts that I have completed so far, building up to a week long writing retreat in late January.

    Remote working radio:

    It’s time to start what will hopefully turn into a monthly radio meet up on DS106radio talking about the journey from learning online to working in distributed teams. The first one of these will happen today:

    • Date: Wednesday, 1st December 2021
    • Time: 19:30 GMT
    • Where: DS106 Radio
    • Hashtag: Chat with me or submit song requests #DS106radio

    See you on the airwaves.

    Chapter: Introduction

    Below is an extract from the draft introduction chapter:

    In 2017 I embarked on a journey of organisational transformation as the CEO of an independent charity, as we took our organisation from a traditional, office-based model of operations to a fully virtual, distributed team. In comparison to many businesses who were forced to adopt home-working in response to the global pandemic, we made the transition for strategic reasons over the period of a year. Instead of sending staff home with a laptop one day and starting home-working the next, we went through formal consultation periods and implemented the transition gradually, providing support and training at every stage. As a result we made a very successful transition and started to focus on how to evolve our approach to working as a virtual team beyond practical considerations from the outset. 

    When I set out to create a new vision for what working for our virtual organisation would be like I came across a lot of practical advice about infrastructure and business processes and I also read a lot of management books that seemed intent on helping leaders and managers to translate traditional power structures from the office to the virtual workplace with a strong emphasis on productivity, cost-savings and employee surveillance. None of what I came across helped to answer my questions. 

    What I was looking for was authentic insight into what it’s like to manage people remotely and to lead an organisation from home, and to do it well. And by doing it well I mean not only meeting budget targets and KPIs but to balance business needs with employee happiness and wellbeing. I was looking to find creative and fun ways to work with people you may never meet in person and to build meaningful working relationships.  I was looking for ethical ways to work online that respect employee privacy and build trust between the organisation and its staff. In short, I was looking for the opposite of the ‘office-deficit’ model. 

    This is why I wrote this book. It’s the book I wish I had when I was setting out on my journey to lead a virtual team. I hope it will provide a source of inspiration and a prompt for reflection to my readers and will be of practical help with managing hybrid, blended and fully distributed teams and organisations.

    If you’d like to keep in touch with book progress:

    • Subscribe to my newsletter;
    • Join today’s monthly radio meet up on DS106radio;
    • If you’d like to invite me to speak or write, get in touch with me directly.
  • Remote working radio

    Remote working radio

    In recent months I have been blogging about writing a book about leading virtual teams and I have shared my progress in blog posts and extracts from draft chapters.

    This month I am writing on the introduction for the book and once I have that completed, then I’ll be close to having a draft of the complete book, which is pretty exciting.

    And that means it’s time to start what will hopefully turn into a monthly radio meet up on DS106radio talking about the journey from learning online to working in distributed teams.

    The first one of these will happen next week:

    • Date: Wednesday, 24th November 2021
    • Time: 19:00 GMT
    • Where: DS106 Radio
    • Hashtag: Chat with me or submit song requests #DS106radio

    See you on the airwaves.

  • A love letter to #DS106radio emergency broadcasting

    A love letter to #DS106radio emergency broadcasting

    Tomorrow’s the big #ds106 #ds106radio marathong and I can’t wait for 24 hours of broadcasting on my favourite radio station.

    I came late to this great endeavour and only really got into DS106 Radio in 2020, when my friends Tannis and Anne-Marie and I started broadcasting every Sunday throughout lockdown from Canada and the UK respectively. If you’d like to get a flavour for what we got up to, then head over to this post from July 2020 or hear us chat about it in this video Hope on the Airwaves from the OERxDomains21 Conference in April 2021.

    I got a lot from this and many other ’emergency’ broadcasts on DS106 since March 2020. I listened hungrily to voices of distant friends and colleagues, who were sharing their own trials and tribulations along with a varied and inventive playlist of tunes both old and new.

    Last year was a year of loss for many and one of the things the broadcasts have given me a renewed appreciation for, is how each individual in their particular is contending with a whole lot. The pandemic might have stopped many activities across the globe, but it certainly didn’t feel like a break for anyone working in EdTech.

    Anne-Marie and Tannis got me through some of the roughest patches of a very difficult year and we found some respite from the demands of being an adult woman in pandemic times through our collaborative playlists.

    Ladies, thank you for the laughs and tears and love. See you on the airwaves.

  • My March ’21 in 10 Tweets

    March has been full of adventure and as we near the end of the month lockdown rules here in Wales have been relaxed and I look forward to slightly more options to venture away from home… safely. Cause of (cautious) celebration. So this is my March in ten tweets:

    FemEdTech Curation and International Women’s Day 2021

    It was my privilege to reflect on my fourth year of volunteering as a guest curator for 2 weeks for @FemEdTech. If you haven’t come across it before, I encourage you to:

    The last time I curated the account was just over a year ago, in February 2020. In this post, I wrote about my experience, and the humanity I found in our hashtag, our network. Things had changed enormously since May 2018 when I first volunteered, and also March 2019, my second time as a guest curator.

    Each year, I used my time as a guest curator to reflect on how much our community had developed and grown and it is no different this year – and yet everything is different.

    My curation slot also coincided with this year’s International Women’s Day and it was fantastic to connect with so many of the colleagues in the network.

    Dog Days of a different kind

    At the start of the month this young lady arrived in my life and this is my first experience of bringing up a puppy. That’s been a completely different kind of adventure, and a welcome one for sure (although not sleeping much to begin with didn’t make work or any other part of life any easier!). Thankfully, she’d settled in beautifully and with the help of a very good dog trainer we are making a LOT of progress (#CEOdogInTheMaking).

    Podcasts and articles published this month

    It’s been a super busy month recording podcasts and writing articles, and I had a lot of really interesting conversations which I am grateful for!

    New beginnings… and an anniversary

    I have been blogging more about leading a virtual team this month:

    What’s best?

    Getting ‘back to the office’?

    Staying with working from home?

    Who decides and what should we base this decision on?

    Having led my team from being office based to working from home with in person elements to working entirely from home for 12+ months with no in person contact, I’ve had a lot of experience with the different options.

    https://marendeepwell.com/?p=2947

    It’s been timely to reflect more on our team, as we have been welcoming new colleagues this month, including another PhD researcher, which means that more than half of the team I lead is currently undertaking research. I am really proud to have such an actively learning organisation!

    The last weekend of this year brought a very special moment as Anne-Marie and Tannis and I marked one year of broadcasting our Sunday Specials on ds106radio. It’s been quite a year… !

    Quick links

  • Goodbye, January – I’m heading downtown

    It’s finally January 31st – and I am still standing. Things continue to be bleak, and whilst I am lucky that COVID hasn’t killed me and neither has boredom… work continues to feel like it’s busier than ever!

    In cheering news

    So… it’s time to celebrate the positives of this month, starting with the best musical moment of the month:

    My colleague Debs singing ‘Downtown‘ by Petula Clark on Thursday night at a virtual karaoke leaving do was super life affirming and joyous! The tune has been in my head ever since and it was SO MUCH FUN! Thanks to Jim Groom’s inimitable hosting, this was one online staff celebration with heart!

    Jim’s work inspired another highlight of my month, sharing the opening of Reclaim Arcade on Twitter and beyond, lighting up social media in HUGE VHS TAPES and neon. I am so much looking forward to visiting the arcade in Fredericksburg, Virginia on day!

    Congratulations to Jim and the whole crew on a wonderful new venture 🙂

    Also… I have BLOGGED!

    Including this one, I have already written 9 (nine!) blog posts this year.

    I wrote some ‘getting back into work’ at the start of the month including this post on feeling like I have a whole new job.

    Also, some posts on virtual teams and leadership, a highlight of which has been this post Celebrating 3 years as a virtual team – an #altc perspective: a joint post by the whole ALT staff team written as we celebrate our three year anniversary as home-workers, running the leading professional body for Learning Technology as a virtual organisation and successfully charting a way through the ups and downs that the last three years have brought for us as a team.

    And also writing about OERxDomains and AmplifyFE.

    Small things have made a big difference this month:

    It snowed and that transformed the world around me…

  • Still broadcasting on #ds106radio

    It’s the middle of July… and ever since March every Sunday evening three of us, Tannis, Anne-Marie & me, have been meeting up on Radio DS106 http://ds106rad.io/listen/ .

    This little online radio venture started as a crisis support for each other and our listeners. We met up once a week to share lock down tales and even though the immediate crisis has started to relax somewhat in our day to day lives I value the connection and shared Sunday evenings even more now than I did a few months ago.

    It’s a pleasure to meet up and see how everyone is getting on… and shared some tunes along the way (have a look at this playlist of summertime tunes – complete with the Pixies, Cure and Kinks 😉 ).

    It’s great to have a window into how others are doing getting back into the swing of some kind of everyday normality outside of work and my immediate high street. It’s reassuring to see how long it takes for others, not just me, to adjust again.

    We are now talking of first trips… days away from home… new pets… things that a few months ago we didn’t have any hope of doing. And that is a great win for all of us, taking our first careful (and masked) steps back into a more social life.

    I am super grateful to my friends, Anne-Marie and Tannis, for making it all possible and keeping it going. It’s been simply amazing and I look forward to it each week.

    See you on the airwaves and we hope you stay safe & well x