June is my birthday month and inspired by my upcoming celebrations, I thought I’d share some ideas about celebrating occasions like birthdays or milestones at the home office. You may prefer to ignore these all together or not celebrate with work colleagues, and I share some of the reluctance. However, during the pandemic especially, celebrating birthdays became a welcome focus for our virtual team, an excuse to spend an hour or two doing something other than fire fighting. And so, I came to enjoy and value moments of connecting with colleagues and spending time having a few laughs more and more.

Like many people I prefer not to work on my actual birthday, and take a bit of time off. Alongside the time away from work, I make it a point to have some celebration at work, and to share something that I am comfortable to with colleagues as a way to get to know each other a bit better.

In 2020, when I turned 40 having moved to a new city just months before, at the start of lockdown here in the UK, my colleagues organised a surprise birthday party, dropped off by a safely socially distanced colleague who lived close enough to make it both legal and practical to visit me in my garden. We ate cake, with other colleagues joining via video call, and I received lots of small, thoughtful gifts and cards that brought a huge amount of cheer to me during a dark time.

As a manager or a leader it’s especially important I find to spend some time with colleagues informally, and when you are based at home or a hybrid worker, then those opportunities can be few and far between. More often than not, team days or long planned meet ups don’t happen with everyone involved, and although interacting online can feel less connected, it is often more achievable.

In this episode I share some ideas to help make that moment of celebration stand out a little, and create memories. Read the episode blog post.

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This episode is part of my free and flexible course: How to Lead Virtual Teams. Each course topic includes a podcast to listen to, prompts to help you reflect on your practice and inspiration to explore the topic further. 

Topic: Course reflection – Setting intentions for your practice

Download the course companion book, ⁠⁠⁠Leading Virtual Teams⁠⁠⁠. The book is free to download in different formats and we will use individual chapters from the book throughout the course. For each topic, individual chapters are sign-posted, so you can explore issues particularly relevant to your practice further.

Find out more on the ⁠⁠⁠course homepage⁠⁠⁠ or head over to my ⁠⁠coaching offers for individuals and teams⁠⁠ if you are interested in working with me.

This episode is part of my free and flexible course: How to Lead Virtual Teams. Each course topic includes a podcast to listen to, prompts to help you reflect on your practice and inspiration to explore the topic further. 

Topic: Leading Team Activities

Download the course companion book, ⁠⁠⁠⁠Leading Virtual Teams⁠⁠⁠⁠. The book is free to download in different formats and we will use individual chapters from the book throughout the course. For each topic, individual chapters are sign-posted, so you can explore issues particularly relevant to your practice further.

Find out more on the ⁠⁠⁠⁠course homepage⁠⁠⁠⁠ or head over to my ⁠⁠⁠coaching offers for individuals and teams⁠⁠⁠ if you are interested in working with me.

This episode is part of my free and flexible course: How to Lead Virtual Teams. Each course topic includes a podcast to listen to, prompts to help you reflect on your practice and inspiration to explore the topic further. 

Topic: Fostering a shared team culture

Download the course companion book, ⁠⁠⁠Leading Virtual Teams⁠⁠⁠. The book is free to download in different formats and we will use individual chapters from the book throughout the course. For each topic, individual chapters are sign-posted, so you can explore issues particularly relevant to your practice further.

Find out more on the ⁠⁠⁠course homepage⁠⁠⁠ or head over to my ⁠⁠coaching offers for individuals and teams⁠⁠ if you are interested in working with me.

This episode is part of my free and flexible course: How to Lead Virtual Teams. Each course topic includes a podcast to listen to, prompts to help you reflect on your practice and inspiration to explore the topic further. 

Topic: Setting shared expectations

Download the course companion book, ⁠Leading Virtual Teams⁠. The book is free to download in different formats and we will use individual chapters from the book throughout the course. For each topic, individual chapters are sign-posted, so you can explore issues particularly relevant to your practice further.

Find out more on the ⁠course homepage⁠ or head over to my coaching offers for individuals and teams if you are interested in working with me.

This episode is part of my free and flexible course: How to Lead Virtual Teams. Each course topic includes a podcast to listen to, prompts to help you reflect on your practice and inspiration to explore the topic further. 

Topic: How we work and onboard new colleagues

Download the course companion book, ⁠⁠⁠Leading Virtual Teams⁠⁠⁠. The book is free to download in different formats and we will use individual chapters from the book throughout the course. For each topic, individual chapters are sign-posted, so you can explore issues particularly relevant to your practice further.

Find out more on the ⁠⁠⁠course homepage⁠⁠⁠ or head over to my ⁠⁠coaching offers for individuals and teams⁠⁠ if you are interested in working with me.

This episode is part of my free and flexible course: How to Lead Virtual Teams. Each course topic includes a podcast to listen to, prompts to help you reflect on your practice and inspiration to explore the topic further. 

Topic: Course Orientation

Download the course companion book, ⁠⁠Leading Virtual Teams⁠⁠. The book is free to download in different formats and we will use individual chapters from the book throughout the course. For each topic, individual chapters are sign-posted, so you can explore issues particularly relevant to your practice further.

Find out more on the ⁠⁠course homepage⁠⁠ or head over to my ⁠coaching offers for individuals and teams⁠ if you are interested in working with me.

At the moment, a lot of my work is focused on the upcoming OER23 Conference. OER23 is the 14th annual conference for Open Education research, practice and policy is organised by ALT, the Association for Learning Technology, in partnership with UHI, the University of the Highlands and Islands. OER23 will bring together the strong Scottish Open Education movement and international participants to leverage our shared expertise for change in policy and practice. The conference will be co-chaired in partnership with the GO-GN Global OER Graduate Network, connecting emerging researchers and a global perspective with local and national knowledge.

Suffice to say, I am super excited about this event which I have been fortunate enough to help organise since 2015 and which is always a great highlight of my year. This year, I am especially looking forward to heading up to the conference, partly because it’s in one of my favourite parts of the world, the Scottish Highlands, and partly because it will give me a chance to catch up with many friends and colleagues I haven’t seen in a while, including long-time collaborator, Lauren Hanks.

Lauren and I have been talking about hybrid working and leading virtual teams for the past few years, and at least year’s OER Conference we even ran a session together: As leaders of virtual teams, we critically examined what lessons we can learn from open approaches to learning and teaching and how we can use that knowledge in an increasingly virtual workplace. Since then, I have been thinking a lot about why open practice is so important for knowledge workers, and particularly managers and leaders who work in hybrid, distributed or fully virtual team: Read the blog post.

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I read a lot and going to my local library has been a big part of my life as a child, throughout my school and student years. I was lucky to have access to wonderful libraries first in London and later in Oxford, where I sat in the Radcliffe Camera as I finished writing my PhD.

In this episode I talk about libraries, reading and generally geek out about the joy of books!

Read the first post about this episode... and the second post. 

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