EP059 - How to train remote skills for your team with Tammy Bjelland at Workplaceless
About the episode
This episode focuses on leadership, managerial, and team training methodologies. How can you train your team for the necessary remote work skills? How can you ensure that your managers and leaders can drive their team’s productivity in a fully distributed environment? To discuss this, I invited Tammy Bjelland from Workplaceless, helping companies, especially enterprises, learn remote work skills.
About the guest
Tammy is a leader, speaker, educator, and founder at the intersection of the future of work and the future of learning. She is the founder and CEO of Workplaceless, an award-winning training company that supports organizations worldwide in building the capabilities needed to thrive in flexible, digital-first environments.
As an expert in remote and hybrid work, she guides individual contributors, managers, and executives in successfully navigating the complexities of distributed work, including balancing asynchronous and synchronous communication, ensuring equitable outcomes regardless of location, managing performance, and building a remote learning culture.
Connect with Tammy on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome, everyone. Welcome on the Leadership Anywhere podcast. Today, we will discuss remote work leadership training programs. This is a service that lot of people provide but not many of them provide it on an enterprise level. And I think there is a fundamental difference between a small scale or scaling up company, growing company compared to an enterprise level company in terms of everything, but especially in leadership and learning and development programs, and I'm eager to hear how it goes for enterprises in remote for scale ups and remote work learnings from Tammy Bjelland, CEO of Workplaceless. Thank you for coming, Tammy.
Thank you so much for having me, Peter. I'm very excited to have this conversation.
Me too. Me too. So tell me a little bit more about your background. How did you end up in remote work? How did you end up in leadership development?
Yeah, so my journey in remote work started in 2011. I had moved back to the U. S. from Spain. I'd been living in Spain off and on for five years. And moved back to the States and wanted to work remotely because I wasn't sure where I wanted to live yet. So I wanted the flexibility of being able to choose where I lived. Wanted to live based on preferences and not my job. So looked for a remote role and found a wonderful remote job with a hybrid ed tech company based in Utah. And I ended up on the East Coast back in Virginia, which is where I am from. And so I was working remotely in ed tech and loved it. Worked on a hybrid team. I loved it. I knew from then on that I was going to work remotely. That was what I wanted to do. And I continued it in tech, continued in education consulting and then branched out into corporate training and instructional design and leadership development and in 2017, I had become so frustrated by the lack of professional development and learning resources for people in my position, which were remote workers, remote leaders and there were just no resources available that really spoke to my situation. And on the hiring side as well, it was challenging because, or on the hiring and on the management side, it was challenging to identify resources to give to team members or to really tell whether an incoming team member had the skills to succeed in a distributed environment. So based on my personal experiences, and then doing some initial market research really identified this gap of professional development that was very specific to distributed teams in a way that was scalable, right? So even back in 2017, there were workshops on remote leadership or remote work but nothing that was really cohesive in a way that was addressing all of the employees in an organization, whether they're entry level, whether they're leaders, whether they're executives, like there was nothing that was comprehensive approaching remote work and distributed work skills from that angle. So tested the market with the remote work certification, which was launched in 2018 and that launch went fantastically and that particular program was used in economic development initiatives around the world to train individual job seekers and career shifters to enter the remote job market and access remote jobs. Then that program was also used by organizations to onboard employees and to train employees on the best practices in how to be effective working remotely. So based on that market test with that program and how well that went we developed our leadership program, which is lead placeless. So that addresses the need for managers to be able to manage their employees at a distance. I, this is the phrase that I use all the time to describe this need, a remote worker could be the very best remote worker ever. They could be completely proactive and completely productive, but if they have a manager that has no idea how to manage them across distance, they will not be successful. And so it is really critical for any organization that is looking to improve the competencies organization wide and digital working, you have to start with managers because they're going to be the ones that model that effective behavior and they need to be able to support their direct reports in applying those behaviors and in practicing those skills. So you really do need to approach that from the leadership angle first and then train everybody on the discrete skills that they need to be successful in their role.
I can sense that this will be an amazing conversation because we do operate on a pretty great synergies and we talk almost like the same things over and over publicly to everyone. One thing that I quickly want to reply that you started pretty early. I personally started my journey in 2012 no, 2014, sorry, 2012 in London, and then after that in 2014 and I personally feel like a dinosaur in this whole game. Back then we didn't have Slack. We didn't have anything, Zoom, whatever. We operated on Google Hangouts and Skype and all the tooling that we now have the abundance of Almanac, Notion, whatever. We didn't have those at all yet. We still were able to work remotely as a company, as a group of people, as a community of people at the workplace. So it's always great to have someone who started even earlier.
Yeah. And I'll say so my previous background was in academia and that is remote work in a nutshell asynchronous work, you work on your own, you come together for very strategic synchronous conversations. But I like to say that I was very much trained for remote work. And I think that a lot of people don't really think of it that way, but there's a lot of things that we've done in the past that didn't necessarily seem like groundbreaking really do prepare us for the future of work. And even, if you go back even farther when you had homework to do, it's work you do on your own time.
Of course totally. I totally get it. And I also, that's async work. We've been trained to do that of course, but we just didn't call it the async work, but yes we did that. And also I resonated with the statement that you said that back then in 2000 mid 2010s, there weren't too much resources available. And I think that's an understatement. There was zero resources, at least not something that was condensed and it's mostly aimed to like individuals and solopreneurs or something but not for the corporates so yeah there and I think by the way, the situation is not well, it's a little bit better now obviously, but it's still not sufficient compared to like learning and development programs, which are not remote work focused on this space. So I love the journey. Thank you for sharing. I think it's really valuable. Let's start with the with that fact that you mentioned that not everyone has the applicable knowledge or truth to be able to work remotely. And I totally behind that and supporting that one of the first questions that I usually ask or look for when I hire people for the teams that I manage is that do you have any previous remote work experience? Because that is super important. So I don't have to like, start from this is zoom and this is how you use it. So can you tell me a little bit more or some examples of what you think that should be in everyone's skill set when they are doing or starting to applying or, starting their remote work journey as an individual, not as a corporate.
Yeah, as an individual, I think the first thing, and this is what we start with in our remote work certification course, is self management. So how do you manage your own emotions when you're working remotely? How do you stay motivated? How do you be proactive and reliable because one of the things that we emphasize heavily across all of our courses is this idea of task based versus relationship based trust. So relationship based trust you develop, through synchronous communication and through developing those deep connections, but in remote work, I think more so than in office based work. That task based trust is so important because you don't have as many synchronous touch points. And so you have to demonstrate every single day that you are being productive, that you are contributing to the shared mission of the team that you are solving problems when they come up and you're not letting them stop you from making progress. You're helping other people overcome obstacles. And you have to be able to do that using asynchronous communication methods because you can't always wait until the next time you talk to your manager to help you, deal with some of the blockers that you're experiencing right now. So the very first thing is self management and how do you demonstrate that in a distributed environment? So that's one of the very first things. And then communication. Very much related is this idea of balancing synchronous and asynchronous communication for people who are new to the remote workspace. There is a lot of education that has to happen around just categorizing types of communication and I being able to recognize what types of messages best are sent through specific types of channels. This request for an update is that best shared through zoom call, or is that best shared through slack? So being able to understand what the channels are that are available to you and how to effectively navigate those and send the right messages to the right people at the right time.
Sorry, I was just jumping in and sorry but this requires a careful planning from the management as well, by the way, and just for the audience who was listening just to give like a very tangible example, let's say you have a which I always suggest for everyone let's say you have an emergency situation where fire is breaking down and whatever you need to extinguish the fire, handle the situation promptly, sharply and on time. Synchronous and ASAP. Usually it's not the best to send the the emergency information through your usual channels, Slack or email or something because these are all occupied by others anyway. So usually the recommendation is to have a channel that is dedicated quintessentially to emergency. Use WhatsApp or whatever. I don't care just like a channel that it's only for emergency.
Oh yeah, sure. So part of that the individual contributor training revolves around understanding the infrastructure that's used to, document the team norms and processes. And so one of the tools that we talk about in our leadership training is the communication charter and how to create that for your team. So you set those expectations for how you're going to communicate. What are the response times that are expected? What are the channels that you have to use? But from an individual contributor's perspective, they have to just know that there are different channels used for different types of messages, right? And it's not necessarily something that we think about in a very intentional way, just overall, like we have our personal preferences, right? I don't want to call somebody on the phone. That's a personal preference. But if the website is down, I would probably call the person who is managing that.
Yeah. Totally.
So there's that that need to understand, how to categorize the types of messages you want to send and then also the importance of being like providing as much context as possible in your communication so that you eliminate that back and forth as well as learning to rely on documentation instead of relying on access to people for information. Those are all things that everybody, no matter who you are and no matter what level you're at, you really do need to develop and practice those skills because especially people that have been, I see this on both ends of the generational spectrum, right? Because you have people who have been in the workforce who have always relied on synchronous communication to get access to information. And then you have people in younger generations who also tend to rely on people for information. And so it really it spans like it's an intergenerational phenomenon, but we rely on people instead of knowing how to find the information ourselves. And then if that information is really not findable, how can you be proactive and take and use your own agency to document that information for yourself and make it available to others who might need it. And that is, again, another skill that an individual contributor and a manager should be developing so that collectively you're contributing towards this culture of documentation. Instead of continually having to ask the same person multiple times for the same information.
Totally.
So those are just some examples of the topics that we cover in the individual .
No. All valid, all valid. And I would I would ask one, one more thing. The writing, which you already mentioned by the way in a different way that, and that many people rely on talking when they transfer information to one another. And writing is something that the skill that I think it should be learned in a very professional manner, if you are working remotely, and it doesn't matter what type of role that you pursue.
Yeah, no, writing is crucial. It's how we share information and it's not, again, it's not a new skill. So it's not something that should be new to anyone. However seeing writing instead of an administrative task, seeing it as a strategic task, I think is a mindset shift. Especially for a lot of leaders or for people who have been in the workforce for a long time because taking notes documenting is often delegated to an admin role and it's not seen as a leadership skill.
Yes. And by the way, you are coming from research or academia as you mentioned. So you probably write much more better than most people because you just have to.
I write I use way too many words, Peter. That's how I have to edit and edit again to make it much more concise.
That's welcome to my life. Pretty much me. But again, yes most people usually rely on writing not as you said, this is really clever not as a strategic task but more like a administrative task. And I think it's really valuable to improve the existing writing task, so writing skills that you have to apply to a remote work setting. And I think, by the way, by improving, I usually mean that forgetting previous practices and relearning some stuff. Just to, skim the milk a little bit. But yeah, anyway. Let's switch a little bit of a perspective from the individual, because I think, again, I think it's super important to individuals to learn, get certified. That's also important I think from at least from the perspective of the companies learn these skills. But it's more important for the companies to be able to employ productive remote working people. And if I'm a company that's like a, maybe a cheesy question or to generate from, I don't know but if I'm a company, how would I know that the people that I hire are versed in the remote work skills that I need to need them to.
Yeah. As if I were advising a company on that, I would first have them identify the skills that are the most important to the role, right? So it really depends on the role.
Sure. Start with yourself.
Yeah. Yeah. So looking at the role and determining what are the skills that are most critical to the success of that role. And we have a remote work competency model that lists the skills that are specific to remote work at every level of your career. So individual contributor, manager, executive and so that can help companies identify, what are the skills that are most important in this remote role?
Sure.
And in terms of how to assess it the question would be how do you assess performance? So how are you measuring performance? Because the performance is informed by the skills and the ability to apply those skills in the role, right? So those have to be, there has to be, a very clear connection between the skills that you've identified and then the performance objectives that you've identified as well. So really the performance metrics would tell you whether somebody has the right skills. And if it's not telling you that they have the right skills, then you need to look at both your performance metrics and the skills that you've identified because it, and that's pretty typical, I would say, of a company that's we're just going to use some boilerplate language about what this role does and the skills that they need, but then their day to day activities don't necessarily require those skills or not in a way that's measurable and so there's often a disconnect, I would say, between, the start of somebody's journey and in a role and then what they actually end up doing on a daily basis. I don't know any of the research about that, but actually, now that I'm saying it out loud, I'm like, that'd be really interesting to ask individuals at 3, 6, 9, 12 months into their tenure, how closely do your daily activities match the job description that you applied to?
I'm sure there will be surprise. Yes.
Yeah. Anyway that's definitely a tangent. But identifying, how well does somebody meet those objectives and then if there's any gaps there, that's where additional training would come into play. That's where, you'd be able to identify. Okay this person struggles with managing their time or accomplishing their tasks according like meeting deadlines, right? So working from there is identifying what the real issue is it that they are, they don't have it really clear expectations for the projects that they're supposed to be working on. Do they not have access to the information that they need? Or is it a question of they need to be able to focus when they're working remotely? What is the actual gap? And who's responsible for the gap? And if the individual contributor is responsible for that gap, that's when individual contributor training comes in. If it's a gap of there's no expectations, there's limited access to information. There's all these blocks. There's not enough people working on the project. And those are problems that are not going to get fixed by individual contributor training. So that so really understanding what the gap is and whose responsibility is addressing that gap. That's really a question that sometimes. Companies don't ask enough and as a learning and development provider sometimes we do come in to a client and they say, we need training. And you go through the process of discovery and learning more about the company and their needs, and maybe even doing a full on needs assessment. And you discover that. Upper management, executive level all the way, down to the director VP level, they don't believe that remote work is going to work. They don't want it. And training is not training. Individual contributors is not going to help anything in that situation like the gap is a mindset gap and the real training that needs to happen or the real change management that needs to happen is at that leadership, that executive level and if there's a problem and if there's no buy in for that, then what are we even doing here? And so there's definitely been times where we work with an organization and they've misidentified what the primary gap is. And as a learning and development provider, like what we deliver is improved capabilities in flexible work practices. And part of that, the first part of that is, is adopting that mindset, but we can't promise improved capabilities in an organization that hasn't bought into the future at work?
Some absolutely. And correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what I saw so many times. Sometimes there is a buy in but it's not a genuine buy in. It's just a I need to throw resources on this problem right now. So let's sign up a training provider. Let's train everyone on remote work because we are now working remotely because of the pandemic or whatever reasons. But in my mindset, I don't believe that this should be the future. But this is the reality that we are dealing with right now. So let's hire these guys, let's provide the training, let's do everything. And from your perspective, not just your improving capabilities, but you are facilitating the change. You're helping them to do a little bit better in that sense and it's really hard to deliver on that promise if the leadership is not buying. wholeheartedly into the entire concept. They might buy into the, procurement, but they are not buying into the into the whole idea of the development.
Yeah. The best results happen when there is buy in from leadership. And if there's a situation like, like you've said, where there's like a check the box kind of buy in, if there can be positive outcomes in that situation if we, as vendors are able to come in and continue conversations to generate buy in and to address that mindset. So we do have programs that are specifically geared toward executives and change agents with to develop this understanding that you might not agree 100 percent with remote work or offering, this ultra flexible model. However that still plays a part in the role of adopting flexible work, right? And you're still working hybrid anyway. So it's it's at least partially true for you as well. Yeah and whether or not you agree personally, you do have to think about the outcomes for the business. And the data show how important flexible work is to the workforce and to innovation to being resilient and to maintaining business continuity despite interruptions.
Sorry, just one example. Enterprises they do work and they did work remotely even before remote words actually coined up. You had global companies have been working distributedly since they set up their first headquarters in a different country. The very reason why we have the big consulting companies, by the way, like McKinsey's and stuff, is that they share the knowledge that they learn at local market with the global team, and they collaborate on that knowledge, and they provide value to their companies and their clients. How they share their knowledge and collaborate on that knowledge. It's remote work maybe they don't call it remote work. They call it whatever but it's a remote work concept and it's a challenge that every company should face. I wanted to ask one question seriously, because hope you don't get offended, but we are both dinosaurs in the in remote work. Because of this I think we see the trends. So we saw a lot of like how the whole thing started, how it got evolved and where it is right now and around like let's say pre pandemic, because that's a really clear marking point for most people in terms of remote work, at least and anything else as well. Pre pandemic I usually had this question for everyone who I helped or hired directly that do you have any remote work experience? Because that was a filter for most people that yes, they will be able to perform in my gig because they performed in previous gigs as well, right? So I don't need to explain anything fancy or how to start with the zoom call or whatever. Now that was like a trend around three to five years ago. But now the trend, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, maybe you see something else, the trend is that a lot of people entering the remote workspace who never worked remotely. And the big end here is that they are well versed in management techniques, so they are mid managers, they are highly skilled professionals on their own, but they don't have the remote work skill set, but they are still trying to work remotely because their companies are remote or hybrid or whatever. And that creates friction because although they are great managers in the office, but they are really hard to do any kind of management techniques in remote work. Do you see that trend too?
Oh yes. Yes. I can't even expand on it too much because you've captured it perfectly. I think and it goes even beyond that because for some people they have not yet recognized that remote management is a different skill set. And so there's one level of people in the workforce that are managing their and they're managing remotely and they previously they've worked in the office and they know that they have the skills in the office and they've recognized this need to acquire new skills to be able to do that effectively in a distributed environment. And then there's another set that haven't quite realized that you do need to acquire new skills and that really, I think, is where so much of this thought leadership around remote work and leadership is so beneficial because I do think that the more examples and the more templates and the more case studies that are shown publicly the more likely it will be that somebody who isn't even thinking about remote management skills, they're going to come across it at some point on their LinkedIn feed on Twitter or wherever they're at and recognize, oh, these problems that I've been having, it can actually be solved by me developing some of these additional skills that I didn't know that I needed. I think that there's definitely a recognition. I'm not going to go so far to say that it's universal but I do think that there's a recognition that remote and hybrid work is different. There's, it's different. And the difference is because we're not in the same place. But beyond that, there's definitely a lack of familiarity with how things could be better. There's not a lot of awareness of what are the other ways of doing things. So that's why it's so important for these forward thinking companies, gitLab and Atlassian have been, two examples of companies that publicly share their ways of working with the world. And those are just two examples. But they're so valuable because they show people that there's actually a different way of working. And this is what it actually looks like on a day to day basis because I think, and this is reflected in some of the work that we've done with companies throughout the years is that before people see examples of different ways of working, they think they're doing great. They're like I use my tool stack fine like I use, like we use zoom, we know how to use it. It's great. But then when they see an actually well run meeting that has an agenda that has, opportunities for collaborative engagement as well as async input from around the world. They're like, oh, that's what this could look like. They just don't know what alternative realities exist.
And don't trigger me. Don't trigger me, please. Yeah.
And that's when people are like, Oh, no, actually, I do have I have more to learn. I guess it had never occurred to me that work could be this effective. And so I do feel that all of the thought leadership and all of the public sharing of how different teams work is so helpful. I think that's one of the most helpful things that we can do to move the future of work forward is having companies be more transparent about how they actually do things.
Yes we should put it on a t shirt or a flag, but because I seriously, this is so solid and I'm not going to get triggered with the meeting example, because yes, I saw so many times of this example when people thought that they know how to do things, but in reality it wasn't efficient or productive at all. So let's focus on the enterprises because I think that's a super important aspect and a pretty unique what you do. Because let me explain why in terms of enterprises most of the companies that are pretty big now, they were pretty big before remote work. Anyway, they already had management practices. Most of that you can learn from any MBA school or whatever. They already have some sort of like a flow of how they and processes on how they do the work. But now everything is shifting and changing and here hybrid is more prevalent. Remote is more prevalent. People are starting to work more flexibly. And we discussed, of course I mentioned before that how they view and practice their management skills is totally different or sometimes different compared to what it means to manage people remotely. How can you roll out any and this is the question, how can you roll out to enterprises, any kind of remote work learning and development programs without hurting or destroying their existing leadership and managerial practices, which you need to do a little bit, because it's, obviously you need to forget some things that is valuable in the office. But how can you succeed in putting out roots in these bigger organizations, because it's inherently different from a small growing company.
Yeah, so our leadership program, Lead Placeless, is really hyper focused on what makes distributed leadership different. And so it is actually designed to complement existing leadership training in, that's internal, because we know that every enterprise is going to have their own brand of leadership. And some of the concepts are universal, but there's so much that is just very unique to the culture of that company. And we are not interested in messing with that, right? That is we want to work with enterprises that have a really evolved, sense of what it means to be a leader in that organization. So Lead Placeless has been designed to really complement that and focus on what are the areas, what are the practices that really effective distributed leaders are able to do well. And so that so there are 7 key areas. So it's meetings. So how do you structure and run effective and inclusive meetings? How do you foster connections among your team across distance? How do you manage performance? How do you help your team set boundaries? And how do you as a leader make sure that you're respecting people's boundaries between work and life. How do you make decisions without always relying on synchronous communication? How do you enable autonomy in your team? And how do you manage all of the tools that you and your team are expected to use? So these are categories that through the work that we've done, the research we've done, these are specific practices that are different In a remote or hybrid team than in a co located team, because there's some things that aren't necessarily very different, right? But these are the areas that really do require an intentional reflection on your current practices and intentional development of new skills and abilities.
As a leader of a hundred people, I already have I'm not being just like example, I already have two questions about around these seven key areas. I think I pretty much know how to run a meeting, but obviously I can learn some different ways. I know how I can use the tools, tool stack and tech stack that we are already doing and managing maybe add some extra to make sure that remote is continue to become an option. I think I provide like a clear autonomy to my team as well obviously that can improved. How can what does it mean when you say that providing some sort of, or respecting some sort of barrier within the teams, because that's something new to me as someone who spent 20 years in the office leading remote team, leading teams.
Yeah. So boundary. Yeah. So boundary setting is really important in remote work because the data has shown that remote workers tend to work longer hours than their in office counterparts. Remote workers struggle with number one inability to separate their work life and their home life when they're working from home, especially so that inability to really drive like a distinction between those two parts of your life and then also because remote workers want to demonstrate their value, and they also want to develop social capital across distance. They want to be recognized for being proactive and being communicative. Remote workers are more likely to default to being over responsive and feeling like you have to be on at all times. And so those tendencies in remote workers can build up in a way that you become so ultra responsive that everybody else in the entire team now has the has adopted this belief that you have to respond right away to everything you have to be available on Sundays because, somebody might want information from you. And so you have to be really careful. As an individual contributor and especially as a manager to number one set very clear expectations about when you actually expect a response. So I feel like working on a Sunday because I took Tuesday off just because I'm sending you a message on a Sunday doesn't mean you should respond on a Sunday. So managers have to be very careful about being explicit about those expectations because as a manager, your behaviors speak louder than your word. So if you don't ever say anything about what your expectations actually are, if I get a message from my manager on a Sunday, I'm going to feel obligated to respond because I want to demonstrate that I am a team player, that they can count on me, that I know how to manage my time, et cetera, et cetera. So as a manager, you have to know how to lead discussions with your team about. These are the expectations that we have. This is we're going to have team meetings at certain hours. What are the times of day that are completely off limits to you? What are the days where you do have some flexibility? And you do have to be upfront about asking. Because assuming that everybody wants to work nine to five is just not the case that assumption is false for a lot of people like most people that are choosing workplace flexibility, want the flexibility, so they might have schedule flexibility or want that schedule flexibility so that they can get work done, early in the morning before their kids get up, and then, in the afternoon, and then in the evening. So knowing how to ask explicitly, like what people's expectations are for synchronous meetings and then beyond that, beyond like setting those and documenting has to be documented those expectations. What happens when somebody is asking you to stretch those boundaries? What happens when you've said, I cannot take meetings at dinnertime, so 5 to 7 p. m. Eastern time because I want to make sure that I am there with my family having dinner, very important to me. What happens when a manager sets a meeting for 6 p. m. on a Wednesday when you've set that boundary? What resources do you have available to you to redirect and remind your manager that you've set this boundary? We're going to, choose a different path. Managers assume that people will speak up for themselves. I think in my experience, I would say that, managers because they speak up to themselves anyway. So yeah, so they tend to think, Oh, so and so knows that they could just tell me that they can't come or whatever. And that's not always the case. You have to be explicit. You have to give that permission explicitly and you have to constantly remind people as well. Especially if you've got turnover, if you've got new team members that maybe weren't there during the discussion about setting boundaries but reminding your team members and then also modeling effective boundary setting for yourself. Not responding on slack immediately, like waiting, not feeling like that constant pull. Like you need to be ultra responsive. So there's a lot that goes into managing a distributed team and helping your team respect boundaries so that they can effectively. Separate their work life and their personal life for better energy management and just, quality of life.
Absolutely. And just two very tangible and basic examples for everyone and the audience to understand. It's just when you send out an email, just p s you don't need to respond to this email until whatever. That's just a basic practice that you do. Our other one which I usually recommend is the personal user manual. Document how you personally prefer to work, prefer to communicate, when, where, how, everything. I'm from Europe, so it means that I'm like more direct than most people. If it's in my user manual that I am direct, I also value someone else to be direct with me. So you don't need to use the shortcuts and you can just chase and be direct with me. But I do understand that some people don't prefer that kind of communication. So it's super important to understand how other people prefer to be communicated with and a personal user manual is very important to do. And the other thing that maybe the last question I wanted to ask the connection part. So it was the second on the list, I think.
Yeah.
So is it, am I getting it right? But is it more about culture and collaboration and how people are working together?
So a little bit. The main focus of that particular section of the course is about developing rituals and habits and adopting practices that allow for more connection. So we have a framework called the placeless taxonomy. So it is a categorization of the purpose of connect of communication. At the bottom, it's informing at the very top it's connecting. So these are the purposes, the various purposes that you have when you're communicating with somebody. And it's categorized in order of how difficult that purpose is to achieve asynchronously. So at the bottom it's the easiest. So informing, that's the easiest type of communication to achieve asynchronously 'cause you just send an email, you record a loom. At the top of the pyramid is connecting 'cause that is the hardest to achieve asynchronously. And so we use that framework to help managers and anybody who owns a meeting to identify which tasks should actually be synchronous and anything that you are. If you are scheduling synchronous time with a team member or with a group, you should be reserving some time for that top order task. Reserve time for connecting, whether that's like an icebreaker, whether that's like a just a short conversation. Like emphasizing the human part of work should be part of any synchronous conversation, so that's part of that section of the course is helping leaders understand how important it is to focus on the relational side of work instead of just the transactional side of work, especially when you have synchronous conversations and then making connection a practice and a habit within your team by developing rituals. Whether that's a if you have a recurring team meeting, have some sort of team building activity as part of that recurring activity or having a Slack bot add questions to a slack channel. So on the workplaceless team, we had a bot called let's play. And every Tuesday we'd offer different game prompts. So we would play like async charades and have a conversation prompt about what we played as kids or favorite board games. So it was all around playing. And so that's just a ritual that a man, I set it up and. Slack using Zapier and it was one of the things that the team loved the most about connecting with one another because they could do it on their own time. And it was fun and it was like low stakes. You didn't take much time, even for me to set up or for anybody to participate. But it's just a constant it's an integration of a reminder that we're humans and we should learn about each other as humans and connection with each other is one of the most important things that we can develop as a team. And it builds trust and it builds, rapport that's really important in moving work forward.
We are humans, not just task monkeys, of course. And also, no, seriously, it's, and it's also inherently different working remotely than compared to the office so if you have a meeting in the office, for example, I don't know, it's, if you have like open senses you know how people feel at that day during that meeting anyway. And it's easy to guess that, if you have a bad day, if you have a good day if you have something going on with your mind or something and it's totally harder remotely because we are just on the screen obviously you can see each other and stuff like that but it's hard to guess how we each other feel and one of like basic example again just ask people even automated before the meeting on slack. Just ask people how they feel. That tells a lot to the manager. For example, if someone has a bad day, which is not visible on the screen to go easy on the tasks or whatever with that person, because, everyone can have something on their mind anyway.
Yeah. Yeah. And that's a great example too of just, that's it's a habit, right? It's not even a skill. It's just a habit. But it does take practice. Because often, and I find this more to be the case in remote work, and I don't really understand why, but we do tend to be more transactional. I think in meetings. It's okay, let's just get down to work and I don't I would love to know, like the why behind that. But I know that's the case and there are ways to remind yourself to not make it so transactional, but I think it's fascinating. As soon as we get on a video, we're like, okay I can't even think about you as a human being. We're just going to get down to work.
Maybe because of the tech, technology or the tooling. It's, I think it's complex. So it's a, there is no silver bullet. Maybe that, that the company itself has too many meetings. And come on sorry, but if we would have the fifth meeting today, I would be transactional with you at all times. I don't care. I just want to yeah, get over with this and that's it. So it's I think it's complex and individual to every company. Cool. Okay. I think we scratched the surface at least a little bit more on this topic. I hope you enjoyed it.
Yeah. Yeah. One, one more thing I just want to add about training enterprise, cause this is something that, I think is pretty unique to what we offer. So because we have programs for every level of your remote career it's really impactful when we can deliver a training program that does that in an organization. So having training for all employees. We have an async at work course. So that is a very short course that if you're new to async, that is a great way to learn about the concept and to make very small immediate changes to improve that balance of sync and async and then training managers at the same time and and working with executives and change agents as well on the mindset shift that's required to really, truly adopt flexible work. And because we have an aligned language, we have an aligned competency model. It's really impactful when we can deliver.
One last question where people can enroll.
Yeah. So you can find information about all of our programs and enroll directly at workplaceless.com.
Perfect. And where people can find you, if they have any specific questions especially from you, Tammy.
Yes. They can find me on LinkedIn. I'm not there as much as you are, Peter, but I'm there quite a lot. They can reach out to me anytime on LinkedIn or they can contact Workplaceless through our website.
Perfect. Thank you for coming here and sharing all the insights. I hope you enjoyed the show. Thank you for your time.
Thank you for having me.
