How to Work Remote Without Endless Meetings

- How can you decline all your meetings this week and be super productive? By running just one workshop. The Workshop Wednesday community helps you to run high-energy and results-driven workshops, so that you can take back control over your work. And in this series of YouTube videos, we're gonna show you step-by-step on how to get there.

In today's episode, we'll be covering the basics of working from home and the Zoom video call madness. (upbeat music) If there's only one good thing coming out of these crazy times that we're living in, then it should be setting the standard for a new way of working. It's quite clear now, even for the more traditional organizations that work, doesn't necessarily need to happen at the office.

Working remote is here to stay and it can have major positive side effects. But there's one big issue though, that most of us don't know how to work remote yet. So people are sitting behind the desktop for eight hours straight, jumping from one Zoom meeting to the other. And still many organizations want to make this way of working permanent.

I've been working on and off on a remote basis for more than 10 years now, and when done right, I love it. Even so much that when I'm reading this book, "The 4-hour Work Week" the idea of becoming a digital nomad. So working in another country with no permanent office place is in the back of my head.

So maybe that's something for the near future. But there are so many examples to learn from when it comes to working remote, and when executed well working remote with these kinds of tools it enables you to be highly productive while also deciding on your own working hours. Times have changed and knowledge work doesn't longer fit in the nine to five schedule.

A great source of inspiration are tech companies who have been working this way already, sometimes for even 20 years, and companies like Basecamp and Automatic, GitLab, and Mural, they've been sharing so much valuable information that you can learn so much about the way of working and prevent making the same mistakes as dated.

They've published, even the complete handbooks about their way of working, and what to explain how they work together with more than 1000 employees in different time zones. And what do we think that the common theme is in these playbooks? It's to eliminate all your meetings. A really great podcast about why meetings are killing remote work is this one from Matt Mullenweg in conversation with Sam Harris.

And they talk about the new future of work in which Matt explains the five levels of remote work. And Matt knows what he's talking about because he's been working since 2004 in this way, and they have now more than 1,000 employees. He describes five levels of autonomy which you need with remote work, and the higher you get, the more productive you become.

The first one is where you need to go to the office to get work done. And the fifth one is what he calls Nirvana, where you're effortlessly effective and he doesn't really give much detail on that, what that level looks like. But I think it's nice to strive for a level. But most company are stuck in level two right now, which is just a simulation of what they did at the office, but then online.

So back to back meetings and the day full of interruptions and it's really hard to get work done. And this is where the companies with soon fatigue definitely are in. Level three is where it starts to get interesting. And first of all, you need to get your gear, your set up in place. I will tell you about that in a bit, but where it gets interesting is that you see that the synchronous meetings.

So the meetings where you need to be in the same room at the same time, they get replaced by asynchronous procedures. So for example, you needs feedback on something. , instead of calling a meeting, you record a short video and you send that through your colleagues and you provide them a way to give feedback, for example Google Docs, where they can comment on what they just saw and how they can improve it.

And this gives you a lot of flexibility, because you then don't need to be in the same meeting room to work together and to make each other's ideas better. And this is a great way to look at your calendar, which meetings can I cancel and can I replace with an asynchronous way of working instead, because then you remove the pattern interrupts from your day and you get more focused time to get the actual things done.

Level four is where you hardly have any meetings at all. And you're working with a company with employees all over the world in different time zones, and you have processes in place where it's easy to collaborate with each other and to make decisions. But yeah, the need of meetings are reduced to a minimum.

And this is the part where I partly agree and partly disagree. I will explain later why. But I find this really interesting, because then you can make use of a global employee pool. And also you can set up a system where your company is working 24-seven because if you have the right amount of people in different time zones, then they can build on each other's ideas and you're working around the clock.

And you might be wondering right now if you are telling me to eliminate all meetings, why are you starting a workshop Wednesday a community workshop. It's kind of a meeting. And I'll tell you in a bit, but first let's talk about remote work setup first, because you need that to get to the level three.

I've been in countless video calls this years, and I've seen many examples of workplaces of where actually is just undoable to work from for a longer period of time. The most important basics are having a great monitor at the right height, so you can look at it from a high level, and a great chair where you can sit comfortably on all day.

And even if you're working at a kitchen table, then you need to invest in this. And if you're working for an employer, then they are the one who should pay this because it's really killing your productivity, and it's even killing you physically overtime if you don't invest in this. Sitting as the new smoking, so make sure that you improve your setup.

For now I'm not going to go too detail in my setup. I will share that in a later video, but this post from Matt Stauffer is great for inspiration. It talks about the webcam and the lights and the audio you need for a remote work. And the also is gathering different kinds of options, so depending on your budget you can choose what's working for you.

And then you can also see the difference in the investment that you make. And a guilty pleasure of mine is this a YouTube rabbit hole to to dive in creating the perfect desk setup. So you see a lot of videos coming by where people show their desks. And it's a great inspiration. It's fun to look at, it's also a great waste of time sometimes.

But yeah, like I said, I will share mine in another video. So let's get back to why I think now is the perfect time to start the Workshop Wednesday Community. And that's basically because level four describes to kill all your meetings. And I agree with that, but I also disagree with that. Let me explain why.

That's his book from Basecamp called Getting Real. And in the book, one of the chapters is about meetings are toxic, and they say, "Don't have meetings. " And I agree with that because what they do really well, they describe why it's toxic to productivity to have a meeting because it breaks your day into small incurrent pieces.

It's usually abstract and fake. It's a small amount of information. That's the cashier... There is at least one more in that it gets it turn to waste everyone else's time and three other points. And I agree with all these points. However, I think if you have someone who can make sure that this doesn't happen and ideally it's the whole team, but at least if you have one person then I think you can be even more productive than the traditional meetings they describe here.

And in level four, the times where you actually need to collaborate with people, I think you should call in a workshop. And if someone prepared it, if the team also come in prepared, and then in the workshop only do teaching formats, do workshop formats where you work together and where you can work to get our alone and make each other's ideas better.

However, in the last 10 years that I've been doing this role myself, as an agile coach and a design sprint facilitator, I see that this role is often misunderstood and it's also a role that people don't naturally feel comfortable in picking up. So that's why I think the Workshop Wednesday Community comes into place and we're gonna show you step-by-step in different workshop formats on how to achieve this.

As a start, I will be sharing my own personal workshop formats as step-by-step guides which you can use and adapt for your own workshops. They're all adapted to remote working and you can download them yourself. And then in near future I want to use this platform for other workshop facilitators where they can share their best practices so you can learn from them.

Of course you don't learn by following the rules, you learn by doing, by falling over, and by getting up again. And that's why we created an expert program for the Workshop Wednesday Community. It's the only part of Workshop Wednesday that's paid so that we can create a safe environment for you to practice your workshop facilitation skills and to prepare your workshops.

So join the Workshop Wednesday Community at workshopwednesday. co, and that's a bonus you'll get a weekly email with a PDF download of that week's video, so that you can apply the work of yourself. Go over to workshopwednesday. co and you will find everything you need. That's it for now. Thanks for watching.

And see you in the next one . Peace! (upbeat music)