Designing remote culture and connection

On this week’s show, Lisa Riemers and Chris Weston meet Sharon O’Dea to discuss digital nomadism and the evolution of remote work. Sharon shares insights from her decade-long journey as a digital nomad, including her recent seven-week stint in Japan, where she worked from locations ranging from traditional coworking spaces to foot spas in town squares. The conversation explores how digital nomadism has evolved from a niche lifestyle to a mainstream working pattern, examining both the opportunities it creates for geographical arbitrage and talent access, and the infrastructure challenges that remain. Sharon highlights how towns like Nagasaki are developing specific offerings for remote workers, creating ecosystems that blend professional development with cultural exchange, whilst also discussing how these same principles can benefit people who simply lack access to reliable transport or need flexible working arrangements for caring responsibilities.

The discussion shifts to the practical realities of making remote work sustainable, particularly around the thorny issue of time zones and asynchronous collaboration. Whilst tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom enabled widespread remote work during the pandemic, they’re still largely designed for synchronous presence rather than output-focused collaboration. Sharon argues that truly effective remote work requires moving away from managing presence towards measuring outcomes, breaking the connection between work, time and place. The hosts also explore the human side of remote work—the importance of intentional rituals and moments of connection that prevent teams from fracturing when they’re not physically together. The conversation concludes with a more cautionary note about ensuring remote work is designed for dignity and connection rather than creating new forms of digital exploitation.

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Transcript automatically generated by Descript.

Lisa: Episode three 40 of the WB 40 Podcast with me, Lisa Riemers, Chris Weston and Sharon O’Dea.

Chris: Oh, hello everybody and welcome to January, 2026, which is as I think Matt said in a LinkedIn post the other day. It’s the 11th calendar year of WB 40 which is a little bit, uh, scary, but we are, we have evolved. We’ve got, you know, he is, that’s not here. He’ll be, he’ll be. Pulling the levers later on.

But, um, no. Today it’s, uh, myself and Lisa and Sharon oday and we’re gonna be talking about digital nomadism. And, um, but before we do that, we’re gonna talk a little bit about what we’ve been up to in the last few days, week. Uh, what whatever I think suits our purpose. Lisa, what have you been up to?

Lisa: Well, it feels like 2026 has had a bit of a slow start for me.

I’ve had a cold all year, which is fun. I did manage to get through most of Christmas, relatively healthy though. So we did have a really lovely run of it all. Had a lovely uneventful, festive period in the best way. Like everything ran quite smoothly and we saw friends and family and there weren’t any major dramas.

So the last week or so have been kind of. Winding back up again into work mode and picking up with clients that I was speaking to in December, and some people are raring to go and other people are still trying to get back into things. So it feels like a slow start to the year for me. But lots of stuff going on.

How about you, Chris?

Chris: Funnily enough, I was with a colleague today. I was in Birmingham going to see somebody and we, we were walking through and I was saying that actually it feels like January has, has gone very, very quickly. And I think maybe that’s because I didn’t go back to work until like the fifth of Jan.

So we’re, um, you know, we’re already a week in pretty much when you go back to work, but it’s nearly now the 12th. And I guess the, uh, impending deadlines that are happening this month and next month around various things at work mean that. It does seem like it’s the, the water’s draining away extremely quickly in terms of, uh, the time we have available.

So it does seem to have gone quite quickly and I happen to be really busy. However, I haven’t had to go too many places. I’ve been out and about a little bit. So it’s been uh, head down planning, getting ready for what’s gonna happen in the rest of this year. So, uh, yeah, I can’t say that very much has happened.

We had the snow last week, which, um. Which was extremely, uh, cold and, um, in my outside office here meant that I had to put the heating on about an hour before I wanted to come in here ’cause it was just too cold for my sensitive disposition. But other than that, yeah, I can’t complain. It’s been a decent start to the year.

So, Sharon, welcome again, welcome back. Hey, after, uh, many years of, uh, A Gap, what were you doing this year, this week?

Sharon: So actually I’ve been, we’ve been really busy. So, uh, the biggest thing is that we, me and my business partner, Jonathan and co-author, we sent in the final chapters and the last bit of the manuscript of our book.

Uh, this is the first opportunity. Then officially I get to plug it. So, thank you. Should I, uh, it is out, it’s available on pre-order. Are you, what’s best? You’re not sure? I’ll say that again. Thank you. I’m really glad you asked. It’s called Digital Communications at Work and it is the book that I wish I’d had when I was in-house.

It kind of walks you through the process of working out what your users need, what your organization needs, how to choose the right section of, uh, selection of platforms even, and configure them and manage them. For the long term. Uh, so it’s kind of about the infrastructure and plumbing of communications.

But yes, Jonathan and I finished off the last sort of few edits and sent them in on Friday. So while everyone else was enjoying their mint supplies, I was hunched over my laptop at home. Editing and going over and over the same handful of edits. It’s really weird when you work in digital, you know, we always say like, done is better than perfect, but it’s not there, is it?

It’s gotta be perfect. And it’s really counter-cultural. I dunno if you had it that experience, Lisa, but I’m like, oh, I could just change this bit over and over again.

Lisa: Yeah. I mean book is the, the ultimate in waterfall launching.

Sharon: Yeah.

Lisa: It’s, you can iterate and do additional versions in the future, but each one takes, what, 18 months?

So something like that. Yeah, it’s quite, quite the thing, and it’s.

Sharon: It’s quite weird going, okay, what if everyone hates it or if they don’t agree with, anyway, so yeah, it was really weird letting go, like it was okay sending off one chapter at a time, but that’s what I’ve been up to. And then alongside that, there’s the day job, which has suddenly got really busy, like the end of last year was moderately quiet and now all of a sudden everyone’s raring to go, which is great.

Uh, we’ve got some workshops coming up and I love doing that. That kind of just planning how we’re gonna get the best out of people in the room has been quite fun. So, yeah, it’s been, I can’t believe it’s the middle of January already. It feels like this month has gone super quickly already.

Lisa: So, Chris, when’s your book coming out?

Chris: Well, do you know what I’m thinking about that? I was, I was, I was thinking about it the other day actually. I’ve got, I’ve got the germ of an idea and. I’m not really the kind of person who thinks to himself I should write a book because I understand my own, uh, deficiencies in terms of, uh, ability to actually get on and do something like that for an extended period of time.

But I thought my, I was just sitting there the other day and I was thinking, I was actually reading another book. I was reading a book called something like. Why is everything fucked? A book about hope by a guy called somebody Manson, mark Manson or something like that. And it was quite good ’cause it, it talked about the fact that you know, there’s a lot of like I would call standard, uh, psychology in it, but a lot of stuff about.

About kind of narcissistic ways of thinking and why we, why we don’t, why we get into a bit of a, a model and don’t wanna move on with our, without what, whatever we’re doing. And we get rerun out of hope. And I realized that, that my particular way of tackling stuff. It does rely on a certain level of I think perspective on the basis that, you know, that sold saying that, uh, and I can’t remember who said it, a politician probably once upon a time, you know, nothing, very, nothing matters very much.

And those things that do don’t matter very much at all. Right. It’s like something like that. It’s like, if you work in a job where people might die, if you press the wrong button, or if you don’t, go turn the wrong direction. That’s one thing. But everything else, much as we want to be.

Professional, want to do our best the best we possibly can, which is we want to do the best for our colleagues and all of that kind of stuff. Alright. If we stopped doing it, if our company suddenly stopped working, somebody, another company would pop up doing that stuff, right? It’s not, it’s not the end of the world.

It literally isn’t. And therefore, how people react to different things that work. I think. My own reactions aren’t the same as, as other people’s necessarily. And maybe there’s a pamphlet in it. I wouldn’t call it a book. Maybe there’s a pamphlet. Maybe there’s a, or maybe just a two sides of a beer mat.

I don’t know. But you never know, Lisa, you know, now I’m feeling a bit left out. Now. Everybody seems to have written a book. Maybe I should, uh, maybe I should do that.

Sharon: See, chat. GPT bullied me into writing my book, which is I, um, I had to write a conference biography like a bug, who myself and being British, that’s just mortifying.

So I asked chat GPT to do it. And it was worryingly competent in that it got most right. I’ve got relatively uncommon name. I’m all over the internet. And that, except that. It then gave, there were a couple of things as always that just weren’t quite right, so it kept giving me degrees I didn’t have from universities.

I hadn’t gone to much better degrees than the one I actually have. But also then it said, Sharon is the author of two books and um, and they were, uh. The Digital Workplace, a Practical Guide and the Future of Work, A Guide for Leaders. And I, I didn’t write that. I wonder who did. So I went off down this rabbit hole of first of all looking it up and then went, oh, they don’t exist.

So that, then it was only just after chat GPT was launched. So then that led me down the rabbit hole of going, right. How does all of this LLM thing work? And, you know, the long and short of it, as we know is it’s something I could. Conceivably have written, just based on everything else I’ve done.

So I, I ended up going down the road of writing this blog, uh, like a blog post about everything that, this book that I didn’t write told me about, about how AI works. And then a, a publisher got in touch and went, yeah, but would you want to write it? Uh, and the rest is history.

Lisa: Amazing.

Sharon: So there you go.

Maybe you should ask chat gp, pt, what Chris Western wrote, and then sort of a little prob uh, fantasy. Fill it in. Retrospectively,

Chris: I think I’m be a bit frightened to find out what it think wrote and, and, and the ensuing controversy or whatever it might say.

Lisa: Well, I’m looking forward to Western seditious.

Coming soon to a, coming soon to a pocket near you,

Chris: Thomas Payne or somebody like that. Absolutely.

Lisa: Shall we get on with talking about nomads and working from different places? Why,

Sharon: where are we working from today?

Chris: Well, I am working from where I normally work from, which is in my little kind of box office in the garden.

Because when our, when our company was, uh, sold and, um, the company I worked for, uh, last year, or actually now the year before last we lost our, uh, most of our offices and now we’re, because we’re a very pretty international business, we’re all scattered the four winds. So we all work pretty remotely.

So that’s where I’m at. Home.

Lisa: In my office, in my house in southeast London. I say office, it’s uh, the other room that’s a guest room and a storage room, and it’s our room. But I’m in southeast London working remotely as I do usually.

Chris: So are you, Sean?

Sharon: I am actually in my office, which I know sounds a little bit counter-cultural for someone who largely is quite nomadic, but I, um, when I’m, I’m based in Amsterdam and I have a little office in a cowork space about 10 minutes from home because I live in a really tiny flat, and, uh, if I didn’t have somewhere else to go, I would never leave the house.

So it, for me, it’s quite nice having a mental space, which I go to. And then leave again. But obviously it being about an hour on from here, I am the only person in the building. So just before we got on this, this call, I had to sort of run around waving my arms to turn all the lights back on.

Chris: Is a, that is an issue we’re working on your, in the office.

I do, I do know that. And likewise. I mean, I actually got this office about a year ago just because I needed to get out of the house. I couldn’t, I couldn’t work and live in the house. It was driving me absolutely batty. Just be, just through, uh, as you say, just seeing no other space at all. Even, even though I only have to like go four or five steps to hear.

It feels like a. A change. It feels like a, a barrier has been crossed. That kind of liminal space has been, has been has been crossed not, and get to a different place. But, um, so think, talking about, I mean, you’ve, you’ve talked about digital nomad Sharon, you’ve, you’ve written articles about it and you, you know, it’s the kind of thing that you’ve talked about before.

How did you when did you start, when was your first digital nomad experience?

Sharon: That is a good question. ’cause it, where do you start from? So I’ve always had a job, or certainly, oh, since I started working in banking, I had a job that took me away, traveling quite a lot for work. So I inevitably got used to working on the road as a lot of people who have that kind of job.

Do you know that it could be the odd few days here and there, but ultimately. Your work becomes quite mobile. And then when I quit that job and, and moved into consultancy, I just started to find that my work took me away a lot more than it used to, you know, to clients who were all over the place and then increasingly.

I realized that, I could take my work to wherever I wanted to be as well. So actually reflecting on it, I, um, my first reaction after I left my big bank job was to book a one-way flight to Bali. So me and my laptop did all my business. Setting up from there, like sort of on reflection, set the tone for the subsequent decade.

But I guess it I almost exactly 10 years we put it like that, but there was probably a bit of a lead up. And that’s obviously there was the, um, the 2020 period when the staycation trend went a little bit too far for my liking. But we’ve kind of, uh, since then started to ramp up a little bit to being much more flexible Again, maybe it was one of those post pandemic learnings.

Chris: And when you went to Bali, you’re thinking back to that, that first period where you were doing that, what did you kind of find anything, do you remember anything surprising you about being there and what maybe what you could do or what you couldn’t do or what you wished you did have access to and didn’t?

Sharon: Actually, you know what, I hadn’t actually reflected on it this way before, but if you read any books or articles about Global Nomadism, it’s almost the ground zero of the nomad movement. So people have been, you know, working remotely since you could get a reasonably priced laptop and a decent internet connection.

But, um, there’s a book called Global Nomads by, and she talks about a bunch of guys. Tried to plan a yoga retreat that went wrong and then ended up just using that opportunity to just invite a load of people who worked in marketing and stuff to come and work from Bali instead. And that turned into one of the original kind of co-living, co-working space.

It’s Hubbard in Hubbard, which interestingly is exactly where I began my no Badding journey by complete accident. I just quite like it. There’s a nice yoga space next door, but it does have the occupational hazard of potentially having monkeys trying to, uh, she on your laptop or steal eat food.

Chris: Well, I mean, that’s a, you know, that is a, that is a drawback, no doubt.

Think we’ve lost Lisa, my goodness. Least lost. Lost in the, uh, which

Sharon: kind of segues back to some of the conversations Lisa and I had about potentially being somewhat suboptimal for working. Uh, you know, you’re midway through a teams call. He goes, sorry, there’s a, there’s a monkey trying to steal my lunch.

Lisa: That’s amazing. One of the things that sparked this conversation was me seeing a picture of you recently in, was it in Japan when you were working out of a foot spa?

Sharon: It was So just for context, I, yeah. I was in Japan. For what, seven weeks, uh, which I’m sure we’ll talk about in a minute.

Um, working, living, and working as a global neighbor, but on one particular night out, we’re in this town of, which is a spa town, and it’s got little spas all around the town. Anyway, I, I had to jump on a call really briefly, but I just. It happened to be, I had my feet in a little spa in the town square Love lovely mall, but they sort of steam up was a little bit weird.

But yes there’s a photo of me somewhere with, on a teams call with my laptop, with my feet in some. Delight.

Lisa: Uh, there’s something about it it triggered the, my Inner health and safety manager, where I was thinking about what’s the workstation assessment for this and yeah, how safe is it?

Because I remember years ago when I was in house, like one of the, the most common source of injury in the office was paper on the floor. Like a, a slight, a piece of paper on the floor is one of the commonest causes of slips, trips, and falls. In office buildings. Mm-hmm. And I think about the stuff that I’ve tripped over in my own house, that I need to do my own workstation assessment.

’cause we’ve been shifting stuff out of the attic to go back upstairs and I’m moving stuff about, and we’ve got a new sofa, so there’s boxes everywhere at the moment. And I need to be careful if I get up to dash somewhere that I don’t trip over the kettlebells that are on the floor next to me. So there’s something about.

Doing this, taking part in these amazing opportunities, but making sure that we’re doing it in a safe manner.

Sharon: Absolutely. And kind of the, you know, the stereotypical image of a digital nomad is someone sitting on a beach with their laptop with some sort of, you know, some cocktail, you don’t wanna work on a beach.

Laptops and sand do not go well together. As any, you know, imagine how many laptops you must go through under those circumstances. Not just the monkeys, but the smoothie, the sand, the light bright. You can’t see a screen properly. It goes properly. Yeah, no, I mean, and the reality is, that image is nowhere near as, as two as anyone thinks it is.

There’s a lot of. Four desks, suboptimal screen setups, but mostly just huddled over a kitchen table somewhere trying to get stuff done.

Lisa: And I feel like something else that’s improved probably in that 10 years since you started doing this, is the kind of, well, I feel like the last five years, six years now, since we’ve all been working remotely, a lot more commonly.

Hmm. If you are on V, if you are on tv, your backdrops really important. But if you are on a regular video call, it’s very easy to blur your background or put a different photo behind you. Yeah. And that never used to be a common thing. Like I’m sure I remember years ago when you were, you were on Tell somewhere Cheryl, and you were sitting under a table so that the view of your, from your laptop camera was a, an appropriate background.

Sharon: Yes. Uh, do you know what it was? I was in California for the Facebook conference back in the day, and I’d long story short actually I won’t even bother going, sorry. I’d ended up on b BBC News three times in two days. Long story, but I’ll skip over it. And because of that, I then got invited on a whole load of other news stories.

So I had to hop out and then. Get like just on the right level of me and my laptop and like a decent background and be able to, and I think it was Al Jazeera, so I had it on like a bench and then sat on the floor so I could get the level right of the light and, and all of that. Which was fine except the session in the main hall ended and then all these legs just started going behind me.

So it just looked like I was in like pro or something. Anyway yeah, so these days you could probably blur it or something.

Chris: Yeah, and I guess that’s, you know, that’s, um. An artifact really isn’t it of the fact that where whilst we were all working from home, you know, uh, from time to time, and then we went, you know, it depends on what job you do.

Of course, you know, if you’re traveling a lot for your work, you know, you, you’re, as you say, you’re almost certainly gonna be flying your laptop up and working from different hotel rooms or sitting in airport lounges or whatever. But then the pandemic came along and everybody got a bit more, um.

May, maybe lots of people realized they could work from anywhere if they needed to. And the technology of course had just about got there with regard to teams type or Zoom or whatever, you know, two or three years before it might would’ve been a different story because bandwidth wasn’t quite so ubiquitous, you know, it would’ve been a lot harder.

But, so we got to that point where. Okay, so now we know we can, so the question is whether we should and what is the, what is the real benefit of that? And I’m thinking back to pre pandemic. So I, I did a job for a while, um, with a, a cryptocurrency project, funnily enough. Just part-time doing, helping a few, just helping them get to a.

Through a particular problem, but our had developers that were all over the, the, the place, you know, in different parts of the world make finding a scrum meeting really, really difficult. Frankly, we had what, one hour a day we could do it. But the fact is that these people just moved around. They, they, they were, they were just doing whatever they did wherever they wanted to be.

And I guess the question is, what’s the, what do you think the attraction is? What’s the benefit from your point of view as somebody who’s. Actually been out there, done it, and as currently, currently living in Amsterdam, you been there, what, four or five years showing now? Six

years.

Six years Blind me, so, you know, and but still managing to, to work with, customers in all sorts of different places.

What’s the benefit, do you think, or the, and, and the attraction of, of moving around in order to work rather than staying in one place?

Sharon: It classic consultants answer. It depends. Like, for me, I like the novelty. I like to travel and I, I’m very fortunate that I’m able to blend my work with going and, uh, experiencing new things.

So the time I spent in Japan, partly it was. It was sort of exploring the local market, but, um, and for the, the community in Japan, in Zaki, it was actually a little bit of cross pollination. So sharing, uh, entrepreneurship stories of self-employment, but also helping them to shape their digital nomad offer.

But for other people it’s actually, it’s almost like geographical arbitrage. So in a world where if you can’t afford to buy. If you can’t afford security at home to buy a house or whatever it may be, you might as well take a negative turn into a positive and enjoy the flexibility that lack of security affords you.

So if people are effectively working in one place and living somewhere cheaper without the cost of maintaining a home in a big city, so most of the people I’ve met along the way tend to be in that position of not having necessarily a rooted home. They paid for. All the time. I guess the question is then what’s in it for employers, uh, which is the flip side of that, and, uh, it’s a little bit trite to say, but in, you know.

Talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not an inner world where particularly now as borders, physical borders are tightening. It used to be that people had to move to work, but we are putting the infrastructure of work in place. It means that work can move to where people are, and that opens up opportunity both.

Geographically, but can happen on a local level as well. So it’s almost, I guess you could argue that digital nomads are extreme early adopters of that kind of work. But if we can get it right for people who want to work and travel, we can also get it right for people who want to work but live somewhere with a really bad bus service.

That’s

Chris: a good point actually. And you talked about Nagasaki and their, and their digital nomad offer. I think we’re seeing that quite a lot, aren’t we? Whether it be abroad or even. You know, towns in particular countries that are saying, actually, you don’t need to be in London. Or you don’t know you need to be in Paris or whatever, but let’s set up.

A place where there are, there’s good internet connectivity, there’s kind of services that you want as a, as a remote worker. Those sort of things are happening as well. Right. Have you, have you seen any other examples of that?

Sharon: Uh, annoying. I can’t remember the name off the top of my head, but there’s a few really good examples in Ireland.

So what they’re doing, yeah. Grow remote. We had Crow remotes, uh, and,

Chris: and they, those guys were on the podcast like years ago and

Sharon: ah, yeah, that’s the one I was thinking of, which is, you know, in, in, where you’ve got a cluster of tech businesses in, in one place, we can encourage people who work remotely, but for a bunch of different companies who happen to live in the same area, to connect for the social side of work, which might be a sort missing if you’re remote, but to still be able to access good quality work regardless of where you are.

But yeah. You know, if we can take advantage of the technologies that have emerged over the last, what, 10 years or so, like you say, they just about popped up pre pandemic to the point of being usable to make work a bit more accessible. But it means we can tap into talent markets wherever they are.

Lisa: I

Sharon: think

Lisa: something that I’ve seen that’s worked quite well as well.

I go away a couple of times a year up to ish year, and in Matlock there’s a lovely little coworking space that which, you know, you can book in for the day. I know the people that are in there. It’s, it doesn’t make a difference to most of my clients. And actually when I was up there last time, I was able to go and meet some folks in person, um, like friends of the podcast, Tony.

To actually go and have, I mean, we had a, we did a workshop in a service station just off the M1, but actually we just needed to get together in person and it was nice and convenient and meant I could go to them. And I think there’s, one of the things that I’ve talked about a lot as well is that the thing that I miss working from home is going to the pub with people after work.

Like I feel like that kind of. Camaraderie with people that you’re working with where you can actually have a bit of a decompress and have a chat about stuff. It can otherwise feel quite. Quite not well. It can feel a bit lonely, but I think also there’s all of that, when you are working in the same place that you live, that kind of work, energy doesn’t have a chance to escape if you just stay at home.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Lisa: Um, like I remember during lockdown when everything else was closed, going downstairs and have, and just ranting to Nick about my work because my work didn’t slow down at all. And, um, I just remember being incredibly stressed and bringing that stress into the house. And actually what I wanted to do was go for a pint with people and just vent about it and then, and then just chat about snacks, which is what we do.

And it’s, it’s now, it’s four years this week from when I set up pub o’clock as well. So, yeah, I’m looking forward to going to the pub on Thursday with some folks who I know it’s a real combination of people that might work from home a lot. Or have kids and just wanna get out of the house. Like it’s evolved a little bit.

It started off as, are you stuck in the house a lot? Do you want to come and have a ramp?

Sharon: And actually sort of drawing a bit of a parallel there, there is a, a kind of ecosystem of events for people who work in nomad ways. So the program I was on in Nagasaki brought people from all around the world to work together.

And actually it was really fascinating to me how quickly all of that bonded. So some of that was about, the shared experience of working in that kind of way, but also that kind of cross pollination of people working together on projects of shared interest. You know, there was someone there who was.

Who coached people on how to make good social media video. There was someone else there who I was a financial advisor, who was teaching people about investing in people’s skill shop. Uh, swapping actually that ability to get together and share and bond quite quickly was quite it, I thought there was a lot I could learn from it then that we can learn around how to build team dynamics as well.

And I think,

Chris: so what we’re not talking about, sorry, just, just, just on that point. Sorry, not what we’re, so, we’re not what we’re talking about in digital nomadism, it’s like digital hermit where you go away and sort of sit in a cave. Yeah. And work on your own. What we’re talking about is actually enabling, meeting different people and working in different environments.

Sharon: Yeah. So there’s things like, you know, I was a, I was inaki, but. Just before I got there, there was a huge nomad fest in and for Roka, the other side of the island, which had hundreds of people from all over the world who work as nomads. Again, getting together, a lot of people see the same people around the circuit.

Um, and there’s also co-working, co-living spaces. So, you know, you can drop in, in, I don’t know, say Bali or Thailand or wherever, Spain, and there’ll be a whole bunch of other people there who are doing the same thing. So you’ve got that kind of shared experience of you know, sharing a meal. There was one particular moment that stuck out to me ’cause I don’t, I’ve been there a week and there were two people, um, there from Israel and they were like, well, we always have a, a dinner with our family on.

Friday. So we are gonna cook for everyone. And everyone kind of bought something along, um, managed to cook like chow bread in a rice cooker, which was surprising and had like a proper about dinner on the Friday, which was just a really nice way of kind of getting together as a group and breaking the ice and everyone sharing their week.

Um, and it really reminded me of how quickly you can start to build that team dynamic if there’s that shared intent, that shared purpose.

Lisa: I think that’s something that shared intent and getting together, it is something that actually, so just before we went into lockdown, I was working at Department for International Trade where I know Sharon worked previously and the digital data and technology department had a really good and active community manager who was.

Proactively connecting people. So when most of us were working in the office for four or five days a week, we, there were some people already working remotely then. But having those, so it was, there were regular lightning talks where three people would do a five minute talk each, and there’d be one about a work project to show the work people are doing.

One about a personal project and then a wild card, which could be about literally anything. And it was a really nice way of getting at getting away from your desk. And when we were all together in the office, going to the biggest meeting room and sitting around a table, also having people dialing in if they work remotely.

And then when we did go to working Remote first, it was something that we continued and the Lightning Talks was still a time to get people together. ’cause you had five minute talk. Five minute chat about the talk. Then having that kind of scheduling, those kind of virtual coffees and they tried a whole load of things.

And we had, there were some amazing calls where we got people together to talk about different subjects. At the time, like I remember around the kind of Black Lives Matter movement, there was this incredibly powerful talk where people joined the, it was already a quite a strong team dynamic and quite a good community going on, and people were sharing their lived experiences of racism, right.

And it was really, it really showed the benefits of building those connections because people shared some very personal stuff and I’ve been working with them for ages and I had no idea that they’d gone through some of it quite recently. And I think it’s that setting, that intent setting, having those rituals, having those processes, not everyone comes all of the time, but it needs people, it needs somebody to care about it and other people to want to take part.

And it’s finding those ways of getting people together.

Sharon: I, I think the broader point there then is that, you know what office work could be lonely and and difficult too. And unless you, you design that with the intention of creating connection. And the same is true when you’ve got people working remotely.

There is a bit of an assumption that culture just happens and that trust automatically builds. And I, we’ve all seen the reverse of that. I worked with a few teams over the last few years who are. 100% or, you know, 90% remote. And actually they’re really fray because they haven’t intentionally created those moments of connection.

Um, and I, I think if you do that, then you can have a minor falling out over something work-based, and you don’t have anything to back it up with, to give people the benefit of the doubt. And you find that things get blown out of all proportion unless you’ve got that kind of role that you talked about, Lisa, where someone is kind of greasing the wheels a little bit and creating that sense of connection, then it, it can all fall apart.

Quite, quite quickly.

Chris: I think there’s a, um, sorry, carry on. Yeah,

Sharon: no, no. I was gonna say, because I realized that we’ve blathered for probably about half an hour, an hour and not actually got into some of the meat. I’m actually, we really think it’s quite useful to talk about. You know what, it’s not all.

It’s not all roses when you’re trying to remote work. A lot of the time it doesn’t actually work very well. Systems fray. Technology can be unreliable. But the biggest one for me is, is about time. You know, so we’ve got collaboration tools and we’ve got, you know, Lisa and I spend most of our lives trying to get people using Microsoft better.

And the reality is. While we’ve got the tool, we’ve never really changed the processes and while we still live with the reality of synchronous work, remote and nomad working is always going to be difficult. Time zones still exists. Someone still has to get on the phone at 10 o’clock at night. So there are always like suboptimal setups that we work around and I don’t know if we’ve, if we can really release the potential of remote work unless we fully address the issue of time.

Chris: That’s a really good point. So in the company I work for we’ve got, most of our people are in Vietnam, so that’s a fair old distance in terms of time zone away from the UK Now. But that’s a 25 year situation. So there’s been this customer practice and kind of routine has got into that. That means that actually rather than them being a, a, a drawback, you can use it as a positive and you can make sure that you, you know, you get into those, those routines of making sure that everybody’s got what they need before the other side goes to bed, so you know that they can then crack on.

But that’s different. Having look at a longstanding management of that time difference to having people who are moving around, isn’t it? And saying, oh today I’ll be in GMT plus seven, but tomorrow I’ll be in g mt plus three.

Sharon: Yes. Uh, actually interesting you said that. ’cause my business partner, I work in the same way.

You know that I, if I’m a few times zones ahead, then I get stuff done, send it to him, he does it in his day and is, we actually use it to our advantage. We can keep things moving, but almost you can get two days worth of work done in 24 hours. And yes, it is challenge. I think the challenge though is if you’ve got one or two people who are remotely, if everyone is working asynchronously, that’s not the point.

Uh, you know, and that means that you are making it work for someone who is. You know, over in Hanoi, but also for someone who can’t work till they put their kids to bed. And actually, if we can embrace that asynchronous ways of working, it’s not just about being able to work effectively with someone who is in a different time zone, which I remember painfully from when I worked for an Asian company.

Someone inevitably has to get on a call at six o’clock in the morning and hate it. But if, actually, if six o’clock is when you do your best work, then fine. Why don’t we make that possible for people? So actually it’s about. We’ve got the tools, we just haven’t really used them properly. And I, I think that’s

Lisa: also thinking about multinational companies where, if you’ve got something that does need to go out to everybody.

I’m a member of a international membership organization who did their A GM at 10:00 PM UK time. And it’s not my primary work, so I’m not gonna join that call. But when I was in house, if we had an important meeting that we wanted people to come to, we did two slots. You just repeated it so that you can be inclusive for people in Australia as well as people in New York as well as pe you know, like when you’ve got op opposing schedules.

It was basically, it was 10:00 PM UK time and the rest of Europe were dialing in at between 11 and midnight if they wanted to join. And I think it’s, I think it’s thinking about who, who it is that we need to connect with, talk to communicate to work with, and trying to make things work both ways. Like it needs, like there’s so many benefits to the employer, but also it does take a bit more thinking and a bit more time to make it right.

But I think the benefits you get at the end of it are worth it.

Sharon: That’s it, you know, because it’s not simply about making work available to people who wanna swan around the world, but actually be enabling people to participate in the workplace. So just to go off on a small tangent if you’ll excuse me, um, while I was in Tokyo, I did a, um.

A tour, like a walking tour of Tokyo led by a little robot that was sitting on my shoulder, which had a camera in it and a little speaker. And it was led remotely by someone working from a completely different town with a disability who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to lead a walking tour. Um, and it was fascinating to me, not just simply the using the technology to ree people to the world of work, but that wasn’t just about making the nine to five work in a different way.

It was going this is so, so this person had me, which. Co. Simply is, is the same problem my sister has. My sister’s been excluded from work for many years for exactly the same reason. If we can break work down into things that can be done in six hours, there are people who only have six hours of spoons in a week that would be able to participate.

So, and that we should be able to do that with knowledge work. Global Nomadism is part of that movement, which is about breaking the connection between work and time, as well as breaking that between work and place.

Chris: So do you think the tool, you say we’ve got the tools, Sharon, but I say a lot of this, a lot of the tools are set up for synchronous work. You know, mi you’ve got Microsoft Office and we’ve got teams, which is kind of predicated on the, you know, you’ve got the little avail availability, uh, circle, which came in, you know, many years ago.

It’s like, well you are green so we can get in touch with you today. Um, so how do you see this changing? Do you see the, the. Is there a, is there an approach that you’ve seen or any, um, any ideas that you’ve come across around that, that asynchronous working? That, that, that do let that happen? I mean, you’re talking about your, the way you work with your business partner, so you know, is that something that could be, can and kind of reproduced?

Is, is there a way to do that?

Sharon: Like everything, it’s not a playbook is there, but it’s about management, isn’t it? That we need to stop. If, in order to get the most of this, you need to stop designing for presence so you know about who turns up and how long for and start managing for what gets done. Um, so it’s that outcomes based measurement rather than try facing it on how long your light was green for.

You know, presence is a bit of a comforting illusion, but it is in the absence of any output measures, we kind of use it as a performance metric. So managers struggle with remote work because they don’t have any other proxies to go by. I guess. They struggle with not being able to watch people. It’s somewhat counter-cultural for people.

Nomadism and remote work more generally, I guess, collapses the moment. Your job depends on someone believing that it’s about when you’re working rather than what you produce. So how do we break that? Where the organizations I’ve seen do it well are those that. Done it from the outset so that it was interesting to see, actually, I interviewed a bunch of the other nomads on the, uh, particular tour I was on.

And it was notable that only one, no, sorry, two people had a job, everyone else was freelance. The one who had like a normal job really struggled. So it was almost like, but because her job was based in Europe, actually trying to get things done, you know, join all the activities, see the place.

While trying to struggle with other people’s meetings and lunch breaks and things like that actually that connected. As soon as you’ve got meetings, you are effectively just commuting by Zoom. It’s not really asynchronous working. What was interesting was to compare it to someone else there who worked for an organization that quite global, like nomad focused.

So they were sort of in the nomad in industry to a degree, and that was much more focused on what you got done rather than when you did it. So it has to be intentionally redesigning work, I suppose, around outputs based measures.

Lisa: I think there’s also something which we touched on a little bit earlier on this and, and also what, um, the previous guest Mark heard was talking about, thinking about the kind of rituals and the processes and the.

Things that we establish. ’cause we are as humans, even if we do get our work done better when we’ve got noise canceling headphones and we’re already in a quiet room, like we need that connection with people. And it’s very difficult to build that if your day is scheduled and back to back meetings that don’t have any kind of flex or any kind of connection built into the agenda.

You can build it into literal meeting agendas, you can say at the beginning or the end. Or there’ll be a time where we actually just talk a little bit more about what we’ve done this week, like we do in the podcast. Or like I did my pub meetup. We have a question of what’s the best and the worst. We started off with biscuits thanks to, um, Sunday brunch, but it’s having that kind of, it’s just a, it’s not overly structured, but it’s giving people like a.

A loose frame of reference to be able to actually not feel like they’re wasting time by spending time connecting and make, and building those relationships. Because ultimately, like you were saying earlier, if you are all working and it’s already a little bit fraught and you don’t have those types, you don’t have those bonds, it’s very easy for those relationships to fracture when you’re not, particularly when you’re not in the same place.

Mm-hmm. I feel like one of the things that as we’re all very heavily online. How many times have you seen group conversations that you’re in blow up because someone’s misinterpreted the tone of a, of a post? Or actually, the, it hasn’t been misinterpreted, but it’s been blown out of proportion. If you’re sitting together in, in the office or in a coffee shop or in the pub or having lunch together, you can say, well, actually I don’t agree with that, but that’s all right.

’cause we are allowed to disagree. Sometimes those kind of conversations, if they’re only happening in via text, people can dwell on it for days and stew on it and then end up drilling down into it and, and becoming either withdrawing or going off to find only the people they agree with. And I think that’s where we kind of end up.

It’s not, not, it is an echo chamber, but it’s, it’s finding the people that it’s, what’s the word, fractional. Fracturing thought a little bit.

Sharon: Yeah. Actually, the way you describe it there, I wonder if almost there’s a tension there that on the one hand we’re saying work can only move to people if it stops being about people being in the room at the same time.

So fewer meetings, more documentation, more async first collaboration. But if we are only focused on outputs. That it starts to atomize the people involved to the extent that we are not having those moments of connection that are not necessarily output focused. So there, I think there does feel like there’s a tension there to say, okay, right, in order to enable people to do their best work flexibly, remotely, whether that’s in a D different country or just from home.

We do need to move away from supervision and your eight hour day towards what you get done while at the same time not losing those moments of connection that give us purpose and make work human. And there is a sense that if we redesign work to the degree that as I’ve been talking about, effectively it could be done by anyone, anywhere.

You almost could build a, a, an infrastructure of outsourcing that your job can instead of, you know, moving entire offices to different countries. You can atomize work and, and send it out to people working undercutting people all over the world. So it becomes kind of a new, new class system with people with passports and flexibility at the top and everyone else locked out.

You know, are we talking about offshoring of, of labor in tiny chunks? Digital sweatshops. Sorry, that was a rather depressing note to move that one too. But, uh, it’s actually, you know, are we designing work for dignity and connection or just for cheapness?

Chris: Well, exactly. I mean, that’s the point, isn’t it, Sharon?

What is the. The what is the business we’re in, right? And like I said earlier, you know, just because a, a business fails, right? If the demand for what they do, those people will probably get a job in a different business, right? In exactly the same, uh, service. The question is how do we make business sustainable?

And my view is that it’s via those practices. Making it sustainable work is, is work that isn’t going to burn people out and isn’t going to exploit people and isn’t going to, put uh, one group of people above another because that will not work in the long term. We have to find those sustainable ways of working, which can include asynchronous.

Sharon: And sustainable work is resilient work as well. When work can be done in any location, it means that, things like that we may be facing around cyber threats or extreme weather or any of those kind of big, uh, mega forces facing us in the, in the future of work is something that we might be able to weather better.

So it’s not simply about designing work for people who wanna go on a massive holiday. You know, I remember reading somewhere. Oh, good few years ago now they said that by 2030 there’ll be a billion nomads bullshit. There aren’t a billion people whose jobs could potentially even sort that, you know, suit that type of work.

But it is, you can definitely imagine a future where there are millions of people who can do work globally without having to disrupt their lives. So work can work for the lives people currently have or want to live, rather than people having to adapt their lives to, to work in the same way or be excluded from work altogether.

Chris: I think we ought to wrap it up there ’cause we’re, we’re at 46 minutes and we, and I think that’s a good place to, uh, to draw a conclusion.

Lisa: I knew this was gonna be an interesting conversation. These conversations always are interesting ’cause we know some lovely people, but I feel like we’ve covered some massive topics there as well as talking about biscuits, which feels quite apt. Chris, what have you got coming up in the next week or so?

Chris: Well, uh, yeah, in the next week or so, really we’re sort of thundering towards the end of January and really, I’m just thinking about work, right? There’s loads of things going on around, in the house and whatnot, kids going back to university or whatever. But the, um. I’m thinking about work and we’ve got an event coming up at the end of February, a kind of practitioner’s AI event.

We’re talking about, you know, how we, for example, implemented AI across the software development lifecycle in, you know, in various areas into, you know, whether it’s requirements or collaboration or coding, and. And that’s keeping me up at the moment. ’cause I’m, I’m, I’ve got some presentations to do and I need to build those.

So I’ve got, I wanna get all those done by the end of the month. So that’s, that’s focusing my mind. And I’ve got a few places to go and I’ll be down in London end of the month seeing a few people too. So really it’s just getting through this month and making sure everything I need to get done is done right.

So it’s, that’s why I was looking at the start of the program. I was. With, in some horror, the, the, the bathwater running out and as the, or the sons of time maybe. How about you, Lisa?

Lisa: So we’ve got a couple of events coming up over the next couple of weeks. I’m doing a webinar with Suzie Robinson and a clear box folks next week talking about intranet and digital workplace trends and the latest.

Massive ch of the Clear Box report is due out at some point in the next fortnight. I’m not sure when the actual launch date is, but at some point in the next couple of weeks, which is more pages than almost anyone in the world will ever read about reviews of intranet software. I’m a but a minor contributor to it and I’ve still not read the whole thing.

And also we’re doing a meet the author as we, my co-author, Matis Il Neli, and I are doing a thing with VMA group next week talking about accessible communications. And in between that lots of client work ’cause it’s all ramping up again. How about you Sharon?

Sharon: Uh, my business partner Jonathan, is gonna be in tomorrow, which we haven’t actually seen each other face to face before.

Since we were in Berlin, like last May, so ages ago. Amazing. Um, but we are running a workshop with the guys over at Swoop Analytics on Wednesday. So tomorrow we’re getting together to do some planning for that. And then we do the workshop itself on Wednesday. And in between I’m meeting a whole load of intra nerd.

And we are having a Boral, which is like Dutch for eating some snacks, um, and having a few beers, um, with some sort of digital comms, intranet, digital workplace folks. So that’s the big thing this week. I’m really excited about that because I, I basically work in this office on my own most of the time, so it’s quite nice, uh, being in a room with lots of nerdy humans talking about stuff that I like.

So that’s my big thing. I am also. What else am I up to this week? Got some random stuff coming up. So I am going to a talk with the historian Timothy Schneider on, uh, the Arise of Tyranny. So that’s gonna be cheerful. Uh, I think I’ve got a gig or something. There’s, oh yeah, I’m gonna see a comedy show on Friday.

There’s a PowerPoint based comedy night that I go to regular. I have delivered a award-winning presentation there in the past. That’s about it, I think, and probably lots of spin classes. Because that’s how I roll.

Lisa: Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us today. I think that’s it. Well, thank you for having me and yeah, have a lovely week whenever you listen to this.

Sharon: So thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us all over the interwebs@wbfortypodcast.com and on all your favorite pod catchers.