Insights for Working, Leading, and Learning Remotely

Updated November 29, 2021

While we hope you’ve been showing appreciation to your remote teams throughout the year, we've reached the season where gifts can be a capstone token of appreciation for your employees’ contributions through what has assuredly been a difficult year.

Our team has pulled together a robust list of gift ideas that are specifically for professionals who work from home or as a part of distributed teams. We’ve focused on physical gifts as well as virtual presents for teams. Since we’re a small business ourselves, we aimed to include fellow small businesses throughout our suggestions.   

Physical Gifts that Require Shipping

^{Image source: Leon and George, Canva, Deskboard Buddy, SAMA Tea, Frères Branchiaux, Tsedal Neeley}

Because so many professionals continued to be physically disconnected from friends, family, and co-workers this year, it can be especially meaningful for employees  to...

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Flexibility is the name of the game. Employees demand it. Companies know they need to embrace it. Yet, the way leaders are currently going about making changes are rushed, not thorough, and unsustainable. It’s no surprise, since much of the rapid shift has occurred during a global pandemic. 

Friendly reminder: Emergency remote working is not sustainable remote working.

However, two other powerful dynamics are roadblocks to a sustainable shift to flexible work. First, misalignment on goals and priorities for future hybrid teams at an organization. This leads to different teams using their time and energy troubleshooting challenges in isolation—and often reverting to old behaviors. Executives hold the responsibility for setting and clarifying their remote work vision. 

Second, leaders resist changing their own working behaviors. In order to help remote and hybrid team leaders overcome this resistance, we’ve...

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

It’s nearing the end of 2021 and professionals are searching for more flexible work, which is empowered by asynchronous communication. Yet employees also continue to feel overwhelmed by information, which can be exacerbated by ineffective async communication. 

Teams often look to new tools to solve their communication problems. In some instances, a shift to or inclusion of a new async-focused tool stack is exactly what the team needs. However, it’s critical to also evaluate how your team uses and is aligned on the use of their existing communication and collaboration tools in async-first ways.

One such tool is the Slack communication platform. Slack has unfortunately become synonymous with the creep into always-on and ASAP culture. Here are some ways that Slack has morphed into a synchronous channel:

• Availability is a proxy for working time. While the availability and status features can be helpful for setting...

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Effective remote and hybrid teams prioritize async communication and collaboration. This might look like:

• Sending direct messages with the expectation that the person will respond later, not immediately
• Reducing the number of synchronous meetings in a given week
• Structuring a blend of async and sync collaboration

Autonomous work, powered by async collaboration, means employees can get work done at different times, across time zones, and with flexible schedules. While leaders and individual contributors know they need to work asynchronously, they don’t know how. Effectively using blended meetings is one strategy for shifting your team’s work toward async-first practices.

What Is a Blended Meeting?

Blended meetings are a combination of asynchronous collaboration, which takes place not at the same time, and a synchronous meeting, where people connect at the same time. They typically involve async prework and postwork to...

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes, 15 seconds

The TLDR of “The Great Resignation” is that employees are demanding greater flexibility when it comes to their work requirements, and greater ability to bring a balance of health and other priorities to their lives. In response, employers have been quick to reconfigure roles to appear accommodating to flexibility, and specifically to remote location. However, not all remote roles are created equal and when we dig into these companies and teams, we uncover inconsistencies about what remote truly means. For example, the job posting might be tagged as remote, but the HR team specifies it requires being in the office three times per week or being within 20 miles of the office.

In order to provide support for those searching for flexible or remote positions, we’ve pulled together the critical elements that a candidate should look for when finding a position that doesn’t include remote as just a buzzword,...

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes, 25 seconds

September 2021 marked our 4th birthday at Workplaceless, and we hosted our final Networkplaceless event focused on async vs sync communication. While some news outlets represent remote work as a passing trend with an end in sight, savvy organizations are not only embracing remote and hybrid work, but empowering flexibility by shifting to async-first practices.

Since async-first work habits save time, reduce interruptions, increase autonomy, prevent burnout, reduce micromanagement, and combat inequity, we spent the majority of the session targeting attendee pain points and brainstorming solutions that leverage strategic use of synchronous communication and emphasize async. In fact, 100% of attendees expressed a desire to shift toward async-first communication to help solve some of their challenges. 

Common struggles include:

Attending Too Many Video Meetings and Zoom Fatigue

Zoom fatigue first entered our work...

Sixty-nine percent of companies intend to involve some sort of “hybrid” in their workforce location plans for the fall of 2021 and into 2022. Yet, these setups are uncharted territory for many teams. Finding what works for your organization will involve experimentation. But, you can learn from those who have done this before. We reached out to experienced hybrid teams to ask about the practices they’ve established to ensure their teams are inclusive and productive.

We specifically wanted to focus on how teams overcome challenges that can make hybrid work harder, such as:

• In-office vs remote workforce inequities
• Remote employees left out of decision-making
• Unprepared leaders
• Executives out of touch with workplace realities

Here are some routines from a wide range of teams worth considering as you experiment with your own setups.

“At Loom, our very own asynchronous video messaging tool is foundational to how we communicate, collaborate, and...

Hrishikesh Pardeshi is the co-founder at Flexiple, a fully remote bootstrapped company with $2 million+ revenue. He's passionate about remote working and has also built Remote Tools and Buildd.co.

We're grateful to Hrishikesh for sharing his expertise. Any opinions expressed within this blog post are those of the author and not necessarily held by Workplaceless itself.

It’s been a while since the world had to go through a sudden shift to working remotely. As the COVID-19 pandemic forced companies to go remote, the reception was mixed. Companies had to restructure their teams, find remote practices that work well and ensure that there was no loss of productivity, all at the same time. Given the suddenness of the situation, this definitely wasn’t easy.

In a remote environment, the way a team functions is very different from a co-located setting. Teams have to find what works best for them and effectively coordinate with each other. Processes such as hiring and...

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 30 seconds

Organizations continue to tackle remote and hybrid work challenges like overwork, Zoom fatigue, burnout, disconnection, and interruptions. Leaders, managers, and their teams recognize that finding the right balance between async and sync communication is critical. But coming from a work context where decision-making, creative thinking, and connection all take place in a co-located office environment, professionals often struggle to shift to this new paradigm of async-first work.

Before you start to learn how to implement asynchronous communication and collaboration, it’s critical to understand both:

• what is asynchronous vs synchronous communication
• why asynchronous communication is beneficial to teams

But HOW can teams implement impactful async communication? Here are the seven fundamental steps to implementing effective asynchronous workflows, collaboration, and communication:

1. Establish a Placeless...

Originally published June 2019. Just as relevant in July 2021.

As of June 2019, Remote work is on the rise and expected to grow exponentially in the coming years. Yet, some companies are changing course by banning and limiting remote opportunities, finding comfort in supposedly having more controlled work environments in brick-and-mortar offices.

An article published by SHRM (“Why Are Companies Ending Remote Work?”) discusses the reasoning behind the shift of large corporations such as IBM, ATT and Yahoo to recall remote employees. Specifically, the author identifies the following concerns with remote work:

• Employers allow people to work remotely without giving them the proper training or resources to do so productively.

• Supervisors—untrained on how to properly manage and monitor remote workers—find it easier to manage someone face-to-face.

• Some supervisors—perhaps because they feel they must be in control or don't trust their...