Maren Deepwell

Tag: #virtualteams

  • Leading Virtual Teams: Book launch in a post

    Leading Virtual Teams: Book launch in a post

    It’s been such a pleasure to celebrate the launch of the Leading Virtual Teams book last week, and a special moment for me as it is my first solo book publication. This post brings all the resources and information about the book together in one place, so whether you’d like to catch up or take a deeper dive, jump right in:

    About the book

    Leading Virtual Teams – Field Notes from a CEO by Dr Maren Deepwell, published in 2022 as an open access publication by the Association for Learning Technology, UK. 

    What is it like to manage a virtual team and to lead an organisation from home? How can you not only meet budget targets and KPIs but balance business needs with employee happiness and wellbeing?

    Leading Virtual Teams explores current practice in succeeding in a virtual workplace and questions what the future may hold.

    In 2017 I set out to find creative and fun ways to work and build meaningful relationships in a virtual team. To find ethical ways to work online, respecting employee privacy and building trust between the organisation and its staff.

    This book provides practical advice and case studies as a source of inspiration and a prompt for reflection for virtual teams and their leaders. From recruitment and induction to establishing effective and sustainable ways of working in the virtual workplace for small and medium sized organisations, Through case studies and practical advice this book explores the highs and lows of what it means to work from home long-term and sets out a new kind of professionalism for virtual teams.

    Book launch recording

    It was great to see so many of you on 1 December 2022 to celebrate the launch of the book. You can now access the recording of Professor Helen O’Sullivan and Dr Maren Deepwell in conversation, sharing insights into ALT’s journey to becoming a virtual organisation and the story of how this book came to be. 

    Free to download

    You can read and download a free digital edition, published as an Open Access publication by ALT in partnership with Open Academia. The Open Access print edition, published by Lulu.com, will be available to purchase soon.

    Digital edition – out now

    Leading Virtual Teams is licensed under a Creative Commons licence CC-BY-NC-ND, copyright Maren Deepwell 2022.

    Order your printed copy

    More stockists coming soon. For now, you can order a printed copy from:

    Explore resources, blog posts and podcasts

    There is a wealth of resources and inspiration in the Virtual Teams blog posts, more recent blog posts and resources and podcasts .

    Sign up for the free Leading Virtual Teams course

    If you’d like to learn more about leading virtual teams, join my free course starting in spring 2023. This course translates key parts of the book into practice:

    • Onboarding and setting expectations
    • Fostering a shared team culture
    • Managing people and processes
    • Strategies for succeeding in hybrid workplaces in the long term

    This course offers a unique blend of inspiration, practical support and resources. Join us to explore ways of working in the hybrid workplace that are aligned to your goals and values and how to lead with agency and authenticity.

    Sign up now

  • Leading Virtual Teams: Missed moments

    With the holiday season coming up, our team has had a long overdue in person Team Day and we are also planning a virtual get together in a few weeks. These social activities are important to virtual teams, and I really value the opportunity to spend time with colleagues in a more relaxed way.

    Blended approaches to working together can help shape the dynamic of the year, and punctuate long periods of remote working with new inspiration and energy connecting with colleagues in person can bring.

    That said, this year it’s proving hard to make that actually happen. A mix of post-pandemic factors, cold + flu season, taking long overdue leave and simply bad luck have resulted in many of us missing one or more of these important moments.

    Does it really matter, though, that we are not able to all meet together? Does it make a difference that I miss a Team Day or a get together?

    Here are my thoughts on this:

    Yes, it does…

    In our team we set clear expectations that we meet in person 3-4 times a year. In 2022, thanks to train strikes and various other factors, our meet up got delayed and rescheduled several times, and it really had an impact. Relationships can change if you lack an expected amount if in person interaction.

    Touch base: One of the aspects of being in an organisation in which everyone works from home that I find challenging is that I can easily forget how different an experience home-working is for each of us. What you see on a video call is only a small sliver of colleagues’ reality. Meeting in person really helps me touch base with colleagues and get a different perspective on how everyone is doing.

    Joining in: We often have a social focus for meeting in person, and we have tried out a lot of different activities over the years. I enjoy joining in those activities, and being part of everyone interaction in a different way. The recent activity I missed out on was an escape room, and I am sorry I missed it!

    Getting a sense of things being ‘normal’: This is a clumsy way of putting it, but I am not sure how else to express it. What I mean is that, our team met 3-4 times a year in person in 2019 and it matters to us that we are back to meeting in person in 2022. Things are not the same as in 2019, but we aim to have a blend of working from home and meeting in person, and it feels reassuring (and fun!) to get back to that schedule. Care

    No, it doesn’t, if…

    It’s a reality of any virtual team that someone is off or unavailable and thus misses out on a shared experience. The larger the group of people trying to get together, the higher the chances that people are missing out. There are plenty of ways to make up for the missed interaction, such as:

    Share what happened: in the case of our Team Day, colleagues took photos and shared these with everyone afterwards, and also shared their stories at the next virtual meeting. We talked about what happened on the day and included everyone in the conversation.

    Make it clear what others got out of it: we had planned to swap Secret Santa presents on the day, and these swaps largely moved online. We also went through some training for a new productivity took we are trying out, and that, too, continued virtually so that everyone could take part.

    Encourage alternative forms of engagement: in the weeks after the event, we offered other ways to engage, and continue to conversation even though we were busy and had a lot of other things happening at the same time. That’s a crucial point for me: if it was important enough to spend time and energy to bring a group of people together, then there should also be an emphasis on afterwards including everyone who wasn’t able to get there.

    Care goes both ways

    During this year, I have been thinking a lot about the boundaries between work and personal space, about finding balance between the needs of the employer and the needs of the individual. In my context, working for a small employer with fewer than 10 employees, even a very small number of colleagues being unavailable as planned has a huge impact.

    Today, for example, out of 6 employees: 33% are on holiday, 16.5% are off sick, 16.5% are not scheduled to work, and 33% of us, two people, are working.

    When you are working in a team or organisation of a small size, balancing the need to work together on things and share experiences with the needs of each individual can be a difficult balancing act. Care goes both ways. We want to show care for each individual and their needs (take leave, be off sick, work flexibly) and also the needs we have as a team (collaborate in real time, meet to discuss new plans, spend time together).

    Those missed moments can add up. In order to have good cohesion as a virtual team, you need to have enough of them with enough of your team to benefit long term. Which is why I am already looking forward to our next get together 🙂

  • Hacks for Hybrid Working… flex course reflection

    In the past couple of months I had the wonderful opportunity to work on a project outside my day job. Together with the awesome folk at Reclaim EdTech, and working closely with Lauren Hanks, we embarked on a journey to design and run a four week flex course all about hybrid working.

    It was interesting to learn more about the format of flex courses, which are run regularly each month in the Reclaim EdTech community (check out the events calendar). I have experience of different formats of courses, but I hadn’t come across one yet that uses this format, combination of Discord, blog posts, videos and interactive sessions.

    With a blend of synchronous and asynchronous element, I love that these course fit around busy schedules, and are available to offer expertise and support when needed.

    What the course was about

    This particular course focused on a different topic each week, and here is a quick overview quoting Lauren Hanks’ post:

    EVENT SUMMARY

    For many of us in Higher Ed, hybrid working is here to stay. So whether you’d like to create a better work/life balance juggling being on campus with working from home, or you are looking to move from crisis mode to a way of working that is more sustainable, healthful or simply a little more joyful, this course is for you. Join us to explore hacks to create a better hybrid workplace for everyone.

    We are excited to join forces with Dr Maren Deepwell, author of Leading Virtual Teams and each week features ideas to try out, prompts to reflect on and resources with a host of community voices. Here’s our topic list:

    • Week 1: Hybrid Working Unpacked
    • Week 2: Digital Tools in the Virtual Workplace
    • Week 3: Exploring Hybrid Working Hacks
    • Week 4: Complete your Hybrid Working Roadmap

    The final post we published at the end of the course gives you a bit of a flavour of what it was all about in practice.

    Week 5: Checking In

    What I learnt along the way

    What I enjoyed most about the course are two things: firstly, it was super stimulating to work with Lauren, who, like me, lives and breathes the reality of leading a hybrid workforce day in, day out. We had a lot of fun running sessions, designing activities and reflecting on the questions from our participants.

    It was a huge learning curve for me to work with a different team, in a new environment, and having such experienced collaborators made it all feel easy and interesting. You can always tell when you are working with folk who know how to work together virtually, and it was impressive to experience that as a ‘newbie’.

    The other aspect of this project I really got a lot from was the input from everyone who took part. As well as synchronous conversations happening around live sessions, we had an ongoing chat for the course which brought up thought provoking points every week and activities like a splot site that gave us a glimpse of what other people’s homeworking and hybrid working spaces look and feel like.

    We do something similar in my own team each year, and it never stops being useful to see what others’ day to day looks like in reality.

    A highlight of the four weeks was definitely a hybrid working radio show on DS106 radio, for which we were joined by Jim Groom. Chatting hybrid working hacks for an hour was definitely too short!

    It was also stimulating for me to step into a different role professionally, and getting to focus on the design and delivery of a course. It’s been a few years since I last did that and it was useful to flex those muscles once again.

    Look out for a podcast coming soon, in which Lauren and I will reflect together and share our perspectives on Hacks for Hybrid Working 🙂

  • Out now! Leading Virtual Teams

    Out now! Leading Virtual Teams

    Today is an exciting day for me, as my book goes out into the world. It’s my first experience of this kind of publication, and feels quite different from anything I have published before.

    As an Open Access publication, the book is immediately and freely available to download and read online and I am really looking forward to celebrating the launch of the book this evening in conversation with ALT’s Chair, Professor Helen O’Sullivan.

    Thanks and acknowledgements

    First and foremost I would like to thank the Association for Learning Technology for the support for this venture. Special thanks go to Professor Helen O’Sullivan, Chair of the Board of Trustees, without whom this publication would not have happened, as well as the Trustees at time of writing, who reviewed the manuscript: Bella Abrams, Peter Bryant, Lorna Campbell, Elizabeth Charles, Shonagh Douglas, Sharon Flynn, Natalie Lafferty, Keith Smyth and David White. 

    Many of the examples in this book were collected between 2017-2022 in my role as CEO of the Association. I am grateful for the input from everyone I worked with, especially the core staff team, with whom I shared the transition to becoming a virtual team and the years since. The transition was a unique opportunity for me and the team as a whole to shape a new era of a long established organisation. Many of our experiences from 2018-2020 were chronicled in collaboration with Martin Hawksey. Martin has given his kind permission for this book to include many of the ideas we originally blogged about. 

    This book is subtitled Field Notes from a CEO because my years as an Anthropologist taught me how to adopt a researcher’s outlook. 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 inquiry. My fondest thanks to the Material & Visual Culture staff and colleagues at the Department for Anthropology at UCL, who inspired me so much during my time there. 

    Last, but certainly not least, I would like to acknowledge all the open practitioners and researchers who have shared their insights and provided input along the way. 

    Thank you. 

    Get your copy

    You can read and download a free digital edition, published as an Open Access publication by ALT in partnership with Open Academia. The Open Access print edition, published by Lulu.com, will be available to purchase soon.

    Digital edition – out now

    Print edition – coming soon

    Leading Virtual Teams is licensed under a Creative Commons licence CC-BY-NC-ND, copyright Maren Deepwell 2022.

    Sign up for the free Leading Virtual Teams course

    If you’d like to learn more about leading virtual teams, join my free course starting in spring 2023. This course translates key parts of the book into practice:

    • Onboarding and setting expectations
    • Fostering a shared team culture
    • Managing people and processes
    • Strategies for succeeding in hybrid workplaces in the long term

    This course offers a unique blend of inspiration, practical support and resources. Join us to explore ways of working in the hybrid workplace that are aligned to your goals and values and how to lead with agency and authenticity.

    Sign up now

    Explore resources, blog posts and podcasts

    There is a wealth of resources and inspiration in the Virtual Teams blog posts, more recent blog posts and resources and podcasts .

  • New adventures in podcasting

    For the past few years I have indulged in my love for internet radio. DS106 has been the most fun, a valuable way to connect with colleagues and friends, to have some fun during lockdown and beyond.

    Last year I started remote working radio shows on DS106radio, sharing the story of writing my book, ideas and insights and had some wonderful special guests along the way. It was a great season of chat and music and a wonderful way to connect with listeners.

    The one issue with the radio sessions was that it proved difficult for folk to catch up with it, and it was a challenge for me to schedule the sessions live. I ended up having to reschedule often, and it made it hard for everyone who wanted to listen live or catch up worth the recording.

    So this year, I am embarking on new adventures – this time in podcasting. I love listening to podcasts and I am excited to learn how to record them and make them available.

    It’s been fun and interesting to learn about a new medium and to think about how I want MY podcast to work, given that up to now I only had the opportunity to be on other people’s podcasts.

    And I love it! I enjoy the experimentation and figuring out how to connect with all the different platform, which is definitely still a work in progress.

    Each episode includes tools, resources and strategies for different aspects of hybrid working, and links to blog posts and further reading.

    I hope you enjoy the show. As always, share your ideas and feedback in the comments, or on social media. If you have a specific questions or comment, contact me . I look forward to hearing from you.

    Listen to the podcast

    Recent episodes

  • Book launch week unpacked

    Book launch week unpacked

    I am really, really happy that this week my book is finally going to be published. The digital edition has been ready for a while and the first proof of the print version arrived this week, so it’s starting to feel real. Yesterday I added the ISBN to the cover design and ‘BOOM!’ – it felt like a proper book.

    Publishing a book feels scary. It took me nearly two years to write, although I started with years of blog posts and presentations to draw on. I rewrote pretty much all of the material I already had, cutting and editing along the way. If you have followed the progress of the book or read any of the draft chapters I published along the way, you will know just how much of an evolution this project has been through.

    Even after the editing process was finished, I found an error in the introduction, and fortunately there was time to get it fixed and the files updated. I am sure the print edition will include some typos, too. So I am making a list of things to fix in the 2d edition.

    It’s not perfect, that’s for sure, but I am proud of this piece of work. It’s useful and interesting and an attempt to grapple with issues that many in leadership roles will be familiar with. Obviously I want it to be well-received and reflect positively on ALT, as so much of the inspiration and case studies are focused on my work there. I appreciate it enormously that the book’s digital edition is published by ALT as an Open Access publication. Sharing knowledge is after all what this book is all about.

    I also feel a little sad, to let the book enter the public domain. Since I started working on it, it’s been my project, mine to nurture and progress. It’s been my focus on days off, evenings and weekends and a writing holiday. Sure, I have published extracts along the way, and I have shared some of the resources from the book on radio, in my podcast and the Hacks for Hybrid Working course. And the book has bee read by colleagues and Trustees who helped review it. In some ways, there is little in the book that isn’t already out there.

    Once the book in its entirety is out, then it belongs to all who read it. It becomes lots of different things to many people and they make their own meaning, shaped by their experiences and context. I am excited to see how the book may be used or interpreted by others and I hope that the related resources, blog posts and podcasts will help make it a valuable resource.

    Meanwhile my thoughts have started to turn to the course which I will run in spring 2023, offering a practical approach to leading virtual teams #excited.