Kirsten Clacey studied clinical and neuro psychology and then spent time trying to find a career path she connected with before stumbled upon agile methodology and team coaching and realized she’d found her calling.
She now works at Eyeo, who are trying to create fair and sustainable internet for all, as a Remote Team coach. She specializes in facilitating remote events and has even written a book on remote facilitation! In her spare time she loves playing board games, reading fantasy books, playing with her two amazing doggies, and yoga.
As a specialist in remote working, Kirsten discusses the key benefits and challenges of remote teams, the importance of setting up meetings well to support collaboration, and how to adjust expectations during the Covid pandemic to look after your staff while they continue to work from home.
In this conversation we discuss:
- COVID-19 has created a new, global requirement for better remote working set up.
- Benefits of remote working, and challenges of setting it up well.
- Focusing on meetings initially so they are valuable and connect teams well.
- Meetings are “one of the smallest units of collaboration within your organization” so focusing on the culture within them will impact outcomes and culture spread, and one of the most important areas when remote working
- Use meetings to connect people as humans.
- How to make remote meetings more productive and positive by enabling different modes of engagement.
- Our limited ability to hold short term information, and using visual tools to get people on the same page following meetings.
- Remote working supporting diversity, and leaders supporting inclusion.
- Eyeo’s two day remote conference for 200 people and the methods they used to create it.
- OpenSpace conference design.
- Building a conference agenda using full team participation and collaboration.
- A great team activity for highlighting the way we communicate with each other.
- The level of communication that is required to get a remote team informed, and ‘redundancy’ in communication.
- The importance of ensuring everyone understands how to use tools when working remotely.
- How extroverts can remain connected when working from home.
- Games and networking activities that connect remote team members.
- The differences in remote working during COVID-19.
- Releasing the 9-5 workday.
- Team engagement on ideas requiring longer term thinking.
Kirsten also mentioned a number of tools and tricks she uses for successful remote facilitation, which are outlined here:
Remote Open Space:
- The How to Guide
- Our agenda mechanism (zoom out to 50%)
- Our room posters
Virtual games I love:
- A drawing game that is currently on sale for free because of COVID-19: Drawful
- There are a ton of awesome, very easy games here: Jackbox Party Pack 2
- This ones a bit like air hockey, it’s chaos but fun: Haxball
Speed Networking Questions:
- The format for how we facilitated the speed networking and games night
- Questions 1
- Questions 2
- Questions 3
Some free facilitation formats to help people make remote meetings more awesome:
Love this Podcast so much that you can’t wait to listen to another? Check out Episode Ten: True Flexibility, the Juggle and Boundaries
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