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E-Mentoring Remote Workers Way back in the Pre-COVID Days, Commuting was quite a chore. To get to work, one, sometimes, had to spend hours in cars on clogged freeways spewing greenhouse gases, polluting our environment. If one was conscientious about it and used public transportation, they got to spend their commute time in crowded subways with people who may not have showered. Also, companies were limited to having team members who were close enough to actually make it into the office, lest they pay the moving expenses as long as that potential team member actually wanted to move to the part of the world where the company is located. Work from Home seems like it is a good deal for both the company and employees, so why was everyone so reluctant to implement this until COVID 19 forced their hand?    Along with the advantages to remote work, there are also barriers. There are several barriers to remote work which could limit its effectiveness. Dan Schnabel(2018) found that despite the benefits that telecommuting provides, remote workers feel isolated, lonely, and out of communication with their company and fellow team members. They lament the lack of relationships, and they see themselves not working at the company long term. These problems are causing companies to reverse their telecommuting initiatives and utilizing their budgets on real-estate for their employees to work, despite the advantages of Working from Home (Schnabel, 2018).  There are, however, actions that organizations can take to make remote work arrangements work. One of these actions is E-Mentoring remote workers.   E-mentoring is when a senior employee takes a junior one under his or her wings to “show them the ropes” of the job or provide career advice.  E-mentoring remote workers allow the organization to relay such factors as company culture and values as well as job know-how. So what I did, was interview some remote workers, and I found out for myself the five essentials for e-mentoring remote workers to be effective:  The remote worker must want to work remotely and be the type of person who can start themselves. Some people just love working from Home while others simply cannot stand to do so. The telecommuter must also be someone who follows boundaries and knows how to prioritize tasks. They must know how to use tools like their calendar and the Pomodoro Technique. When their spouse asks him/her to get kitty litter during work hours, they can tell them that they will do it after working hours in a way where they don’t have to call a divorce attorney later that day. Technology must be in good working order. Low speed, public internet connections that are available at coffee shops do not work. Too much time is spent getting the technology to work. High-speed, private internet connections with VPN should be used for optimum results. Ideally, the company can provide the remote workers with training in tools like Google or Zoom to facilitate their work. In the absence of face-to-face, use video conferencing. The visual connection between the mentor and the mentee helps in relationship building. The remote worker feels like he or she is indeed part of the group.  An occasional on-site meeting does wonders for morale. Yes, I know this isn’t easy during COVID. Still, the team should be periodically brought on-site for team-building activities. Occasional on-site meetings also help deal with the isolation.  Relationships were the key to promoting self-efficacy among remote workers. On-line team building, such as Zoom Parties or games to replace that collaboration time at the water cooler, help provide a virtual space for collaboration, much like the fuzzball table provided that space for brainstorming in the physical environment.  The relationship factor is quite possibly the most important part of the e-mentoring remote workers equations. Businesses could benefit by recognizing the competitive and cost advantages of maintaining a remote workforce. E-mentoring Remote Workers is a vital factor in the equation. Employees also benefit from decreased commute times and a better work-life balance. For telecommuting to work, there must be good communication. Candidates for telecommuting positions must be people who can manage distractions. Organizations should do what is possible to ensure that relationship building is occurring in a virtual workplace, including using technological tools such as video conferencing and periodic face-to-face meetings. With these tools in place, telecommuting can be advantageous to the employee, business, and society.  To set up a free strategy session on e-mentoring remote workers, Click Here To find out more about Dr. Work from Home and Dr. Jeffrey Levine, Click Here To read Dr. Jeffrey Levine, Academic Writings, Click Here REFERENCES LEVINE, J. H. (2019). Understanding E-mentoring and self-efficacy with telecommuters. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.proxy- library.ashford.edu/docview /2236393376?accountid=32521 SCHAWBEL, D. (2018, November). Survey: Remote workers are more disengaged and more likely to quit. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 1-4. [Retrieved from EBSCOhost]

Dealing with Disruptions On February 24th, 2021, Fry’s Electronics shut its doors for good, citing “changes in the retail industry and the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.” I used to go to Frys, and it would take me 15 minutes to find a parking space, browse the shelves for hours, and then stand in line for 10 minutes to check out. What happened? Frys was unable to deal with the disruptions and do business in the new reality brought forth.  I had pointed out in my last article several disruptions that have occurred over the past several years, COVID only being the most recent. Well, guys, guess what? That wasn’t the last one! I may not be a clairvoyant, but the one thing about the future I do know is that we will be faced with further disruptions. Take a moment to be with that statement {Jeopardy Theme playing in the background}. The good news is that although the disruptions may be new and unpredictable, you can systemize the solutions to dealing with disruptions. There are seven steps to systemize the solution. The first step is to identify the disruption. Identifying the disruption The first step to dealing with disruptions is identifying the disruption.  Before you can dealing with disruptions, you will need to identify that the disruption occurs: the sooner, the better! One of the reasons that COVID has been so devastating is that our leadership did not recognize it as a disruption. Our political leaders were promoting that it was just another flu. By the time the disruption had been identified, COVID had been spreading for months. By that time, it was already wreaking havoc on people’s lives and the economy. Had it been identified sooner, a solution may have been implemented that did not cause as much damage to people’s lives and the economy.   It is not just with COVID but with every disruption. Does anyone remember Montgomery Wards? Wards had been a force to reckon with in retail for over 100 years. Back in the old west, when frontier families wanted to buy something, they went into the Montgomery Wards catalog and ordered it. Wards had built a business from the disruption of the western expansion. One hundred twenty-nine years later, and it could not successfully pivot to the Dot Com Era. Had Wards realized the disruption that the dot com boom was to retail, it may have been able to pivot to a new business model, thus avoiding bankruptcy, and we all may have been buying our stuff at Monkey Wards rather than Amazon.   Declaring that it is a disruption The second step to dealing with disruptions is to declare that it is a disruption.  If you don’t say that there is a disruption, you could bypass it. Declaring the disruption makes it real inside of your language. Without something being real, there is no urgency to dealing with it and setting things in place to thrive during the disruption.   Grieving the loss of the old reality The third step to dealing with disruption has to do with grieving.  There may have been parts of your old reality that you really enjoyed. I cried when I heard about what happened with Frys. The place was a nerd’s paradise, and I enjoyed wandering through the store to see the gadgets on the shelves. I am sad that I will never be able to do that again, so I must be able to grieve that. I have also lost people in my life due to COVID, and I have to mourn them. Until I do that, I remain stuck in a reality that no longer exists, and I am incomplete with it and thus trapped to a certain extent in that reality.   Reviewing your strategic, tactical, and operational plans So you’ve realized that the reality you had been operating in has moved on. You are well on your way to dealing with disruptions. Your plans may have been great for the old reality, but they may be unworkable in the new reality. For instance, when I was a financial advisor, I used to find prospects by having a luncheon. I would pay for the prospects’ rubber chicken dinner and crack bad jokes while promoting long-term care insurance. Today there are no restaurants with indoor dining, and the target market is a high risk for COVID. That model is no longer workable. Parts of those plans, however, may have been salvageable. Although the rubber chicken circuit may no longer be viable, giving away free stuff to build a funnel might still be. You must ask yourself what is still feasible! Pivoting Of course, without implementation, any plan to deal with disruptions is a waste of time. With any change, you will have resistance, which is why Change Management practitioners make the big bucks. All the stakeholders in your project have their ideas, and you have to get them on board. Dr. Get in Focus has a methodology for dealing with disruptions, so click here if you would like a strategy session (Normally $599.00, but free for a limited time). Change management is essential as without having your team on board, your grand plan will be consciously or subconsciously sabotaged. Realizing that the plans are living documents, They do change. When one is dealing with disruptions, one must realize that plans always change.  We all know the analogy of the moon shot, how the course needs to be corrected quite frequently. No plan is written in stone. When circumstances are not what you thought, or there have been sub disruptions, you may need to change the plans. There is nothing really wrong with that. See what is really going on and then act accordingly. Repeat this procedure at the next disruption. Of course, the main key in dealing with disruptions is realizing that there will always be disruptions, and that is neither good not bad. If you could plan for them in advance, they would not be disruptions,

5 Business Disruptions that have Shaped Our World   Over the past year, we have witnessed some pretty massive business disruptions to our way of life and our way of doing business. These may have come as a complete surprise to us all but have been in plain sight all along. Several disruptions have occurred in the 21st Century that, have come about as a surprise to us although they have been in plain sight. Dot Com / Dot Bomb Subprime Mortgage  Social Media Donald Trump Covid The Dot Com Boom: The first business disruption to discuss is the Dot Com boom and the subsequent Dot Bomb.  Back in 1965, Some Government types invested in this thing called the internet. The internet ended up revolutionizing communications; by the ’80s, you could go on a Bulletin Board and argue politics and play games with friends. Is it any wonder that someone may have figured out how to sell stuff on the internet sooner or later? Does it take a rocket scientist to get that people would instead order things from home rather than fighting traffic to drive over to Monkey Wards? Yet retail was totally caught with their pants down when the shift. We lost several long-time retail establishments like Montgomery Wards, even though Wards created its own disruption in the 19th Century. The Dot Bomb:  Of course, a part of this business disruption is the other side of the coin, what was called, The Dot Bomb if a business is not showing a profit, its value will not rise. After months of stock gains by firms that were not even taking in revenue in the dot-bomb, just because they had “dot com” in their name. You could have a company called, hemroids.com and it would skyrocket in price. Economists were touting how there was a new economy. Finally, people realized that the emperor had no clothes, and the whole tech sector crashed. The NASDAQ peaked at above 5000 in March of 2000. It then crashed, and it took until March of 2014 to again hit 5000. People gained and lost fortune, even though it was well known that it wasn’t worth anything if a business had no revenue. Scotty may have been able to break the laws of physics, but the dot-commers, as much as a disruption as they were, could not violate the laws of economics. The Subprime Mortgage Crisis: One of my favorite lines in Star Trek is when Scotty tells Kirk, “I canna break the laws of physics.,” which is what I think of when I remember this business disruption.   The laws of economics are maybe a little more forgiving, but not by much! When people borrow money, the rule is that it gets paid back. When people loan money to those who don’t have the means to pay it back, there will be problems. It has been that way in the entire history of money. If there is no money to pay back the loans, there will be a negative economic impact – no matter how you might want to structure or restructure the loans, Yet when that’s how it ended up, everyone was surprised. Firms that have been around since day one, like Bear Stearns, went belly up. No one saw the crises coming even though the disruption was right in plain sight! Social Media: Social Media was another business disruption.  Social media permeates our lives. Hard to fathom that a few years ago, people were like, “Face What?” I remember laughing for hours over the name of Twitter, thinking about what a stupid name that was. Well, silly name or not, it has become a part of our lives. It has been used by celebrities, politicians, business leaders, and everyday Joes to spread their message. Remember the days when if you wanted anyone to read your excellent opinion piece you wrote, you had to get it published in a News Paper? Back in the 80s, there were these things called BBS’s where you could use your 300 baud modem to connect up with the BBS and write whatever you wanted to write, where people would read it. Eventually, someone would be bound to expand this. Donald Trump This one will be controversial; although I disagree with Donald Trump and his movement, I do not disagree that Trump was a business disruption.  Arguably, the orange-headed former reality show host has been one of the most transformative trends of my lifetime. When Trump announced his candidacy on Trump Tower’s escalator, Many thought he was merely doing another stunt to promote his business or TV Show. Trump had always been an over-the-top personality who would create notoriety and then capitalize the notoriety. Suddenly, though, he and his Make America Great Again movement caught the imagination of millions of people, and he unexpectedly was elected president. This transformed the entire nation. and the world is a much different place than it was in 2016 when he was elected At first glance, Trump came out of nowhere, but actually, the movement had been in plain sight for years. People had been growing increasingly upset with Governmental structures not responding to their needs. Technology and globalization have long been eliminating jobs and changing the world. Manufacturing jobs were leaving the country, and as far back as 1992 and 1996, H. Ross Perot and his “Huge Sucking Sound” drew over 8% of the voters. COVID: COVID was probably the most significant business disruption of my lifetime. The pandemic and its fallout have transformed everything from healthcare, entertainment, education, employment, dating, and fitness. We have found new ways to do almost anything in a manner that minimizes human contact. This is a massive interruption. People grieve over the lost pre-covid reality with people at various Elisabeth Kübler-Ross grief stages, from denial to acceptance. This new reality COVID has seemingly created has given us stuff that will stick around, such as Zoom Dating, Video Medicine, Streaming, and working from home. These all have

So, You’ve got the Work from Home Blues Last year, we all started hearing about this thing from China called The Corona Virus.  At first, I laughed it off, thinking it was just another thing that the media was overreacting to. A month later, though, I realized that this was no joke; over two million adults and children have fallen victim. I have had family members in agony for the last weeks of their lives, only to ceremoniously die alone.   The quarantines and other preventive actions have caused longstanding businesses to cease to exist. COVID is turning out to be the worst thing I have witnessed in my lifetime. Also, I lost my mother to cancer last fall. I would love to be able to hibernate till it was all over. That, however, is not an option. Life goes on, and as a self-proclaimed remote work guru, I still want to help people improve their businesses and their lives; here are 5 ways I am dealing with the Work From Home Blues: Use systems to manage your daily tasks:  Two systems I recommend are the Google Calendar and the Pomodoro System. Letting your calendar run your life is a great way to boost your productivity and boost your sanity. The Pomodoro system allows you to structure your schedule into sprints where breaks are built-in. Allowing your schedule to run your life sounds easy, but it takes a lot to break habits that have been around for years or even decades that it takes to do that. Some people also have limiting-beliefs such as “I need to be impulsive,” which makes this more difficult. Don’t forget about scheduling your sleep and meal breaks. Zoom Dance Parties:  Much of the difficulty I am having is from being alone all day in my office working. I am in one room, and my wife is in another room working on our respective projects. Because Human beings are social creatures, we need the company of others to survive. I find others who are sitting in their home offices by themselves and have a Zoom Dance Party, where someone plays some music and we all dance. This adds the sense of community that I long for and also gives me some much-needed exercise. Personal Development:  I have always been one to want to better myself. Fortunately, we live in an age where there are several low or no-cost religious and secular personal development programs. Go on YouTube, Google, or your favorite search engine and search for Guided Meditations.  I just did and found over 10 million results. You can also take free or low-cost classes on sites like Coursera and Udemy. There is also professional development available. Check out my TOP TRAINING tab for some great professional development classes in some subjects that are very in demand. Get outdoors:  Human beings need to spend time outdoors. I am assuming that you are a human being, so this means you! No, this doesn’t mean you go to the Super bowl with thousands of people and catch COVID, but it does mean to go outside for a walk or to take a socially distanced walk along the beach. Outdoor gyms have been cropping up. You can avail yourself of these and get some fresh air and place your attention into the distance as a balance to the close-up work you have been doing. Sometimes, nothing works better to get rid of the Work from Home Blues than just getting outdoors and soaking in the sunlight. Gratitude and Forgiveness. There were times when you may not have behaved according to your standards during the pandemic. I myself have lashed out in anger over the situation. You nor I could have done anything to stop the circumstances of 2020. There is no quid pro quo in COVID or anything else that has happened. You doing well does not cause someone else to not do well. Allow yourself to grieve people you have lost and the reality that had existed before COVID. It’s OK to acknowledge that you miss going to the game and wolfing down a hotdog and a beer. Missing being able to go on a happy hour with your teammates at work does not make you an evil person. You must be able to grieve the loss of people and the reality you had grown used to and remember to feel gratitude. I can imagine that there is still stuff in your life to feel grateful for Yes, I have The Work from Home blues, and I imagine I am not the only one. If you have gotten this far, I suspect that you are another with The Work from Home Blues. Resistance to it is futile. Our old reality is not coming back and these times, IMHO, suck! However, life goes on despite the Work from Home Blues; Life doesn’t even care that you are blue! If you need to talk to someone, give me a holler! I have helped others to thrive even with the Work from Home Blues. I want to see my friends happy so I am providing a no-charge 30 minute discovery session to help you lick your work from home blues. To book your Discovery Session and lick your work from home blues: click here.  I am here to help, so remember to book your session

Work from home success is made out of people! Back in the 1990s and 2000’s the craze in management was something called Six Sigma. The six sigma warriors’ battle cry was, “It’s the process, not the people!” The Six-Sigma Grand Poo-Bahs’ goal was to get product defects below 6.9 per thousand, but in 2008, it was found that there was a sixty percent long term failure rate on Six Sigma (Del Angel & Froelich, 2008). When some brilliant researchers chased this down, they found that although Six Sigma is very useful in measuring quality using statistical analysis, it comes up short for behavioral factors (Del Angel & Froelich, 2008).  I have found this to be especially true in a work from home paradigm;  Work from Home Success is made out of people.  The focus of this methodology, developed by Motorola, is to limit the process variation, in other words, to fix the process, not the people (Crouch, 2012). A 60% success rate shows that neither the products, process, people, or the company are being fixed. Perhaps what is missing regarding long-term sustainability is people, not process; I’m talking about the workplace’s qualitative stuff: the “soft stuff” that builds employee morale. Increasing the attention on these matters could perhaps add workability to a company’s strategic initiatives. Increasing Efficiency It doesn’t take a doctorate to increase efficiency, at least in the short term. It is quite simple to yell at the employees to work faster, have endless overtime, and threaten people’s jobs. Eventually, however, that will backfire. Businesses did that sort of stuff and worse during America’s gilded age. Ultimately, the workers demanded unionization. There was government action to reign in the management abuses that increased workers’ happiness but decreased short term efficiency. Let’s say that one is riding a horse cross country. The horse is whipped the whole way, and it gallops full speed. The horse is never fed or watered so that you will make great time in the short term. Still, sooner or later, the dehydrated, hungry horse is going to drop dead from exhaustion, leaving the rider in the desert to die. Long term, that strategy can prove to be very inefficient. An example of this is companies that will place productivity over safety. Although this may seem expedient, productivity will eventually be compromised due to accidents on the job and employee absenteeism, which can cost a company quite a bit in lost production. These days, based on the penchant for companies to put short-term profits ahead of long-term gains, Companies can lose sight of this and end up dying alone in the desert. In contrast, the company that takes qualitative factors into account will make it to the finish line and eat its desert. It is often thought that employee morale and efficiency were mutually exclusive (Sirota & Wolfson, 1972). The thought was that by making things more efficient, morale would suffer. Sirota & Wolfson (1972) had found that this is not necessarily the case. What is important is that employees are heard. Their input is received on any changes needed to increase efficiency. If employees have input and a grievance channel, they can have high morale and be efficient (Sirota & Wolfson, 1972). Company stakeholders are an essential part of the change. Per Kotter and Cohen (2006), Communicating for the buy-in is sharing the vision so that the employees make it their own vision. Employee Morale and Customer Satisfaction Happy employees also mean happy customers—high employee morale results in increased productivity and customer satisfaction. According to Andy Denka (2009), the key to keeping employee morale high is communication and training. This fact is especially true during times when business is not what one would like it to be. No matter what the budget, management can communicate with its employees about what is being done to increase business and contribute to the action. There are also low-cost training options available such as mentoring programs to keep the employees trained. Recognition of accomplishments also boosts morale in any economic situation ( Denka, 2009). Having a talented staff will help retain employees, which will help provide better service for the companies situation ( Denka, 2009). Remember that hard economic times and pushes to increase production can be quite stressful for everyone, so to keep morale up, the company will want to relieve that stress. Stressed-out employees make mistakes and are more prone to illness, and can cost the company money and business. Upon Steve Job’s return to Apple in 1996, the company was just a few weeks away from bankruptcy. Despite the company pushing production and efficiency, employee morale was very low(Isaacson, 2011). The employees had gone from being totally complacent about the situation to having a false sense of urgency, not knowing what to do (Kotter, 2008). When Jobs took over as CEO, he immediately fired the board of directors, condensed the product line, and most importantly, communicated his vision with a sense of urgency. Employee creativity and an excellent customer experience were stressed. Morale picked up significantly, followed by a significant increase in production. During this era, Apple released the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iTunes, and iPad. At the time of Jobs’s death in October 2011, Apple was the most valuable company on earth by capitalization, at one point having more cash on reserve than the United States government (Isaacson, 2011). Once Jobs had given up some initial emphasis on productivity to work on the company vision and morale, profitability for Apple increased exponentially. (note: Jobs did not waltz into the company and say, “Ok guys, what we are going to do to turn this company around is put in Six Sigma and Lean; we have 100 Six Sigma Black Belts coming in to improve the processes so that there are only three errors per million”). Jobs concentrated on people, not the processes. Remember, Managers love stability, but leaders love change (Lawler & Worley, 2006). Get your damned dirty hand off of me you Stinking Black Belt

What techniques can I use to skyrocket Work from Home Productivity? Back in the late ’90s, when Corona was just a beer you put a lime in, it seemed preposterous for anyone to be working from home. Yet, there I was at 9 am on a Monday, kneeling under my desk at home trying to fix my dial-up computer modem that had just crashed.  It was the dawn of the dot com era, and my friends all thought it was ridiculous to work from home. “There’s no way you can be as productive working from home? Don’t you get lonely? Doesn’t your wife take advantage of you being home all day with honey-dos? You’ll be invisible to management working from home, and you’ll never get promoted”.  My friends did have their point. I was always burnt out, distracted, lonely, and isolated, which eventually affected my productivity and the company’s bottom line. It seemed like remote work was a good idea, but some kinks still needed to be worked out. After months of convincing my bosses to let me work from home,  I was determined not to go back into the office and endure the 20-mile commute that often took two hours. I set out to prove that remote work can lead to greater productivity, effectiveness, and profitability for both companies and their employees. So I studied hard and got my Ph.D. in Organizational Development and Leadership, continuing to find ways to make remote work more effective. I even wrote my dissertation on remote work. Over the years, I’ve developed the CAUSE system that has helped companies and employees achieve peak productivity while working from home.   In this COVID reality, it is no longer a matter of whether a company should implement working from home but rather applying for peak effectiveness and profitability. Companies are finding the lower costs associated with working from home beneficial.  Studies show that 43% of Americans now working from home due to COVID19 would like to continue remote work after the pandemic clears up. Therefore companies need to invest in remote work development for their team because it is often cheaper to train and develop systems within than to fire and hire.  You do want to implement to skyrocket Work from Home Productivity Despite today’s lightning speed internet and new technology, working from home still carries the same challenges I faced back in the ’90s. Difficulty unplugging after work, loneliness, distractions, difficulty communicating, collaborating with colleagues, and, of course, spouses who still ask team members to run errands during work time. These challenges eventually reduce productivity and affect the company’s bottom line.  To help businesses face those challenges, I developed The Doctor Work from Home system, which will take a remote workforce that is CHALLENGED by tech, burnout, and distractions to AWARENESS of triggers that cause low productivity. The workforce will be UNDERTAKING preemptive actions to return to top productivity by developing SYSTEMIZED solutions to improve productivity, transforming the challenges into an EFFECTIVE workplace. 5 Tips to Skyrocket Work from Home Productivity So how would an organization maintain a successful virtual workplace that will skyrocket Work from Home Productivity? Here are five tips from my CAUSE methodology that can help companies develop more productive work from home employees and teams:  Have team members use an iterative time management system such as the Pomodoro Technique to set work up in sprints. Developed by Francisco Cirello in the late 1980s, The Pomodoro Technique is a time management technique using a tomato time to break down work into 25 minute intervals, with 5 minute breaks. The Pomodoro Technique is kind of like a miniaturized, individualized Agile Scrum where team members can determine what they need to get done in a 25-minute Sprint, break, rinse, and repeat. Set work hours and maintain them; when the workday is over, stop working. One of the pitfalls in working from home that I found in my research is team members not knowing when to stop work. At first, this sounds good for an organization. Upon examination, this decreases efficiency because work-life balance suffers, and the team gradually becomes more efficient. Also, there is the situation, like my wife asking me honey-dos in the middle of the workday. In my research, I was not the only one who had spouses or family members who did this. Keep in mind that these folks would never dream of asking their spouse to run an errand if they worked out of the office. During work time, one does work. Some systems can be set up to monitor a team member’s production so that they can skyrocket work from home productivity. Have ergonomically correct home offices, give your staff an allowance to set these up. The last thing an employer wants is skyrocketing workers’ comp claims. Some companies will go out to your team member’s home office and install an ergonomically correct workstation at a low price. Make video conferencing readily available so people can collaborate and brainstorm: a virtual water cooler. Have virtual mixers to allow the staff to get to know each other, kind of like a virtual cocktail hour. Loneliness can be a pitfall to working at home. When I worked in high-tech, many ideas were born at the foosball table. Several video conferencing tools are available in the marketplace to enable a virtual watercooler or foosball table, where team members can collaborate.   Work with a qualified HR professional or attorney to ensure your virtual workspace complies with all the multitudes of workplace regulations. A Work from Home environment doesn’t mean you can ignore workplace regulations. Find someone who knows HR regs to guide you. You can also enroll in a service such as Legal Shield to provide guidance when needed. Work from home has numerous benefits. No two-hour commutes, parents can be home for their children, and cleaner air to breathe without all those cars spewing carbon monoxide into the air. With all those advantages, and following the tips above, a business is bound to be more productive.  Remember,

The Work from Home Chief Learning Officer Although people have been Working from Home for several decades, for a vast segment of the workforce, it is new due to COVID. However, the workforce has been moving to this model for quite some time. Working from Home presents a whole new adventure in corporate training and brand new experiences for the chief learning officer (CLO). A good CLO can align the organization’s learning programs with the mission, vision, and objectives. the primary techniques of the Work from Home Chief Learning Officer use to accomplish this are measurement, coaching, engagement, mentoring, and course training. Measurement The CLO should also be adept at measuring training results, which is not as simple a simple task as you may think. Per the guru of training measurement, Donald Kirkpatrick, there are four levels to measure: Reaction, specifically how the student feels about the training Learning, or how well the info was grokked by the student. Can the student pass the test Behavior, Is the student applying the information Results, what impact did the training have on the business With a non-centralized workforce, The Work from Home Chief Learning Officer needs to measure these as the staff is not centralized. A manager cannot just walk to someone’s desk to see how a teammate is doing, so the measures are the only way to tell. So what you may be asking yourself is now that we know what the learning officer needs to measure the success of a learning initiative. How can the CLO increase the organization’s performance and bottom line while decreasing the costs and risks? Five functions are vital to this task; Coaching, Engagement, Mentoring, and Management Training. Coaching: The CLO supports and trains an individual to be fully competent in attaining a skill or a goal. For instance, the team is working on completing a coding project. The CLO will support that team member to learn any technical and social skills required. An example of technical skill would be learning a new programming language and a social skill, collaborating with teammates worldwide. The CLO, in a Work from Home situation, may also need to train team members on time management or collaboration tools. When teams are distributed worldwide, they cannot just take a walk to the Fuzee-ball table, play a game, and discuss ideas about the project. They would need to use available collaboration tools such as Zoom, Trello, Slack to get the required collaboration.   There is also no supervisor standing over their heads to make sure they are not spending too much time shopping on Amazon. Time Management and collaboration are among the many skills to teach remote workers.  In Work from home Learning, the CLO must pay particular attention to the soft skills. In addition to the technology, the team also needs to know the softer skills such as working with each other remotely, Zoom etiquette, and time management skills to keep themselves productive and keep them safe and healthy. When I was a child, watching Star Trek after school, my mother always admonished me for sitting a meter away from the TV Set. “You’ll go blind,” or “The radiation coming from the TV will kill you!” Hyperbole aside, mom was right! It wasn’t healthy for me to be glued to the TV for hours on end! That is essentially what we are doing in a Zoom conference; sitting a meter away from the TV set. The worker must manage time to not only deal with distractions but to combat Zoom fatigue. Engagement Engagement is also referred to as The Buy-In. The CLO must ensure that the team member is invested in the learning process and the project’s aims, and the company. The CLO has numerous tools at his/her disposal, including but not limited to Kotter’s 8 step model. The CLO must also measure the effectiveness of the training.  The Buy-In is perhaps the most essential part of the CLO’s job. The staff must be aligned with plans, including the learning plans; otherwise, it will either consciously or subconsciously sabotage any efforts that are put forth. With a remote workforce, you can’t just make an announcement, “Hey, let’s have a team building session after work tomorrow, and all play bocce ball at the pub.” I doubt staff working from Home in Timbuktu would want to make the journey. The CLO must come up with different ways to build consensus and team building. Mentoring Let’s take mentoring, for instance. This process primarily involves relationship building and communication between the mentor and mentee. Thus  The Work from Home Chief Learning officer has the responsibility to ensure this is happening and stepping in as needed if the relationship is not working.   My Ph.D. Dissertation was about mentoring online or e-mentoring. The CLO needs to ensure, mentoring is available and that both mentors and mentees have access to the technology necessary for this Work, such as high-speed internet connections. It is also vital that the right people are paired with each other based on mentee and mentor goals. Tools such as DISC and social styles can help with this. Also, technical skills are not the only thing to be mentored. Your team probably wants also to be mentored on their careers and even stuff like the company’s vision, mission, and core values. That way the company culture stays alive even though there is no central location Management Training Working from Home is NEW! Middle management needs to learn how to manage differently than what he or she may be used to. A manager cannot manage by watching the employee work (Not that this ever worked). The manager must manage by Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). This is something that also requires training.  Training the management team is vital, given that even the best skilled and trained team members will falter in the face of poor management. The CLO is responsible for ensuring that the management team is practicing the specific skills and competencies related to management functions. So what is

Taking your Virtual Business to the Next Level Whether or not you have a virtual business, it ought to be making a difference in the world only by the actions of doing business. Virtual businesses (Work from Home, Remote Business, WFH, etc.) can be fully self-actualized. It can be making a difference in the world by the action of what it was being. I am referring to the process that a business would take in doing this, Transcendence.  At this point, the virtual business executive may be wondering what exactly Transcendence is. I checked, and Siri defines Transcendence as “existence or experience beyond the normal physical level.” So how does a business operate beyond the normal physical level? Well, have a look at Steve Jobs and Apple. Apple transformed the way society relates to technology. Apple made technology cool, not just the domain of a few of us nerds. Amazon attained Transcendence in the realm of e-commerce. I still remember the days when my friends and family were amazed that I did all of my holiday shopping online. Now it is a regular occurrence. Both of these companies transcended. So, what is the process a company takes to attain Transcendence? Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was an American psychologist who created a hierarchy of needs. At the base of the pyramid, there are physiological needs, such as food and shelter. The next steps are: safety, then love/belonging, Esteem, topping off with Self Actualization (If you are interested in learning more about Maslow and his hierarchy, there is plenty of information on Google, I encourage you to look up as it is not my purpose to teach you humanistic psychology). For a business or organization, these can be translated as follows: A business first needs to be profitable. Unless it is profitable, there is no money to hire and train staff or pay for facilities. The investors get angry, nag you constantly, the team are all grumbling rather than happily doing their work. Eventually, the business dies; its purpose – never attained. Rather sad! Once profitable, the business must sustain its profitability, and be in it for the long haul and sustain its growth. It must then take actions to ensure loyalty and build its reputation. Then it can transcend and attain its purpose and change the world! Let’s take a look at Apple. Steve Jobs came back to a company that was weeks away from bankruptcy. First, he got rid of the unprofitable lines like the Newton concentrating on where his bread and butter, The Mac, releasing the iMac. Once the company was profitable and able to sustain, he released things like the iPod, iPhone; he built both his employees and his customer’s loyalty. Apple products changed the world! Virtual Business Transcendence How does this apply to a virtual business? First, just by the very function of its existence, the virtual business is transcendent from traditional companies. Not sitting in traffic for hours a day cuts down on greenhouse gasses, making our air more comfortable to breathe and helping the planet’s health and the health of every living being. Also, not spending that time in traffic means your team members can be spending it with their families or just doing whatever the heck they want to do, engaging in leisure or educational activities.  Your Virtual Business Transcendence  The question to ask yourself is what level on the triangle your virtual business is. If you are at the very bottom, you must attain profitability and take the steps necessary to become profitable without losing your view of the top of the pyramid.  We all know about some of the failures of the first decade of the 21st Century, Enron, Worldcom, and Global Crossing. They have attained profitability but then lost sight of the top of the pyramid. However, that doesn’t deny that a virtual business must be profitable to make a difference. Per Maslow, a person must survive before they can move on to the higher levels.  Once a virtual business is profitable, the next step is to sustain that profitability. There are too many examples to list of companies that attained profitability but couldn’t maintain that profitability. That is why a business must be sustainable and pay attention to its mission, vision, and core values. If it is successful in doing that, it will build up customer and stakeholder loyalty.  As the virtual business builds loyalty by delivering excellent and focusing on its mission, vision, and core values, it creates an excellent reputation. Then it can transcend to the next level. When that happens, the virtual business becomes a force to be reckoned with, and the vision is attained. Then Transcendence has occurred! But before that happens, you need a virtual business that understands the company culture and aspects such as the mission, vision, and core values. When your team is not centrally located with key stakeholders and team members working out of the office, things need to be done a little differently. Please contact me, and I would be happy to help you with this To learn more about me, click here For a discovery session to see how you can transcend your business: Click Here

Work from Home Effectiveness Work from Home effectiveness depends on the adept use of the two forces in the universe, always working against each other: the force of order and the force of chaos. I don’t think this is news to anyone. Let’s say you have a house. The force of order works on it when you maintain it, the force of chaos when things break down, termites come, and all that stuff.   Life implements order on the physical universe. The physical universe implements chaos on life. This is a constant process, yet sometimes we think that we can bring order to a system and it would just stay in order. That is not the case; chaos never gives up. As soon as you put order into an area of your life, chaos enters into the picture: You wash your car, and dust immediately accumulates You finish everything on your to-do list, and more tasks accumulate You build up a strong economy, and a pandemic comes out of nowhere to wipe it out You live, love, build a business, and then die. You clean your kitty’s cat box just in time for her to use it. Remember, the universe is a chaos maker. This is especially the case in regards to Work from Home effectiveness. As you continuously attempt to make your life orderly, the universe continuously attempts to make it chaotic. It is a constant battle. It has been going on since the day of the caveman: order, chaos, order, chaos… Fortunately, for Work from Home Effectiveness, you don’t have to eliminate the chaos (an impossible task, you just have to know how to deal with it. Dealing with the Chaos Work from Home can generate oodles and oodles of chaos. Suppose businesses are to hop on board the Work from Home bandwagon. In that case, they will have to accept the fact that there will be chaos. There is even worse news in regards to work from home effectiveness: It never ends, it never goes away! There is no rest. The second you do rest, chaos starts to creep into the system.   Work from Home amplifies the chaos side of the equation: Distractions from spouses, children, and pets. Social and other media interference Technological failures Physical Chaos such as clutter in the home office or no real office to begin with Loneliness: Work from Home can get lonely allowing negative thoughts and attitudes to creep into your mindset, causing chaos For instance, I have been involved in the Work from Home community for a couple of decades. My doctoral dissertation is on e-mentoring and Work from Home effectiveness. Yet, I still have to deal with the chaos of the cat jumping in front of the computer screen and the disruption to the meeting it causes. I put order into the system by moving the cat, and she adds chaos back into the system by scratching me. I put in order by placing a band-aid on the scratch, and there is the chaos of the cat who then wants to play with the wrapper. When you work from Home, It just never ends! But what if you just accept this fact and continue to put your life in order anyway? What if you allowed the chaos to creep in and then deal with it. Dealing with it may not be straightforward. This requires a plan of action. It requires delineating the tasks and putting regular times in your calendar to deal with the chaos. Different jobs may require different intervals of time to deal with them. For instance, I clean my body daily. I clean my office weekly. Wash my car monthly (Hey, I am in California, we are short on water). There is also putting time and communication in order. It may sound complicated, but working with others makes it much more fun and more manageable. Remember to, you don’t want to order things just for the sake of order. Great projects sometimes add lots of chaos into your life.   Business leaders, if you want to make sure your business is thriving even in the age of WFW, you must structure your business.  What is really important is that you have fun dealing with these two diametrically opposed forces! To that end, stay tuned. I will be leading a Reboot Your Life Challenge to help each other order our lives to increase our productivity (And have fun in the process).  Although it will be geared towards the needs of the Work from Home community, anyone can benefit. It will include organizing physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual life while still completing your tasks and reducing distractions, interruptions, technical challenges, and increasing collaboration. Chaos will creep in, but life doesn’t stop! We will learn to maintain the balance in The Force. The Solution It is easier for people to get distracted by internal or external stimuli. Family members make demands, Technology fails, people feel lonely working by themselves all day. People may need to find new ways to organize their time, space, tools, inputs, and outputs in new ways. Work from Home, implemented with alacrity, can cause a new renaissance. By transforming chaos to order, we can make Work from Home effective. That is why I do what I do. Dr. Jeff Levine is a thought leader on work from home effectiveness. His clients call him Dr. Work from Home; he is available for consultations about Work from Home and Organizational Development. To learn more about me, click here  

The Source of Work from Home Resistance The driving factor behind Work from Home Resistance is that Human beings hate change; some would rather die than change. Yes, I know that is a very bold statement but Change implementation tantamount to driving a high-performance Maserati down a city street riddled with potholes and jay-walking pedestrians. There could be severe damage to your expensive car, and worst-case scenario, someone could get killed. This holds when attempting to implement a Work from Home model. Work from Home Resistance is sure to be encountered from several different types of stakeholders. All is not lost; however, a lot of smart people, through the years, have been hard at work figuring out how actually to implement change. I could get into the gory details on the history of change management and talk about all the researchers, but that would be wasting your time. You do not need to know that to implement a Work from Home paradigm. The change model I like is one developed by Dr.John Kotter at the Harvard School of Business. No, this Kotter was not the one who taught the sweat-hogs back in the ’70s. This Kotter developed an eight-step model for implementing change which may be useful in overcoming work from home resistance. These steps are: Increase Urgency. Build a guiding team. Get the vision right. Communicate for Buy-In. Empower Action. Create Short-Term Wins. Don’t Let Up. Make the change stick. (Kotter) I remember working at a company that shall remain nameless. One fine afternoon, all the employees were called into a meeting. The company’s CEO gets up on the rostrum, welcomes everyone, and then spends the next hour telling us all the significant changes. People just fell asleep in the meeting and ate the cupcakes the company had so graciously provided. After the meeting, everyone just went back to doing what they were doing before. The changes were not implemented, productivity went down the toilet, and the last I heard, that CEO was on unemployment.  This CEO failed in not attaining the buy-in of the stakeholders. He thought that he could bark the orders and that the change would occur, but you have to have the stakeholders’ consensus. In the case of Work from Home, the change may not have been by choice. Some love Work from Home; others hate it with a passion! But a worldwide pandemic forced the issue; the choice, despite any work from home resistance, the choice became Work from Home or not work at all.  If this were a remote work situation, you could say there was work from home resistance. Some who Work from Home may find an issue with that. Some may not want to Work from Home. You tell those folk the advantages of Work from Home, and it just goes in one ear and out the other. You try to make Work from Home effective, and they consciously or subconsciously sabotage the situation.   What do you do to solve that situation?   Do you try to force the situation? Well, you could, but that doesn’t work.  What does work? Well, what you could do is allow them to express their concerns, really listen to them, acknowledge them, and then build a consensus. Sounds simple but maybe not as simple as you think – but it is essential. That is why it is crucial to hire someone adept at change management to implement your Work from Home initiative. Another problem to be aware of when implementing a Work from Home paradigm is the Work from Home environment. For the change to succeed, you must implement it into a supportive environment lest all the efforts be for naught as the resistance from that environment would ultimately cause it to fail. An example of this is that if you rehabilitate an addict and then put him or her back into the prior environment, they will revert to taking drugs as that environment is not supportive of a drug-free lifestyle. In an environmental change model, the environment must be made more conducive to change; otherwise, there will not be long-term, lasting results. The problem with this is that in Work from Home, management does not always control the environment. Team members Work from Home, their cats pushing keys deleting entire documents, the kids screaming at each other from the next room, and some two-bit politician on the TV threatening a coup to make the country great again. Not an environment that would not be conducive to implementing the changes needed to make Work from Home effective. However, this barrier is manageable by someone adept in the intricacies of change management and Work from Home. Implementing Work from Home can be like herding cats (like that cliché’ isn’t overused!) The road to change is not always a high-speed freeway. The change agent can encounter resistance from several different types of stakeholders, rendering the change unchangeable. Also, environmental factors can cause the change to be unchangeable. This effort can be quite time-consuming. As a C Suite executive, one must concentrate on revenue, cost-cutting, and risk abatement. Implementing the changes necessary for Work from Home, though, are essential. Solution? Bring in a highly skilled Work from Home Specialist to usher in the change. That person can bring your initiatives to fruition with alacrity. Please contact me for a no-cost consultation. I will listen to you and give you your options without the high-pressure sales pitch; remember, I’m a doctor, not a used car salesman, so give me a call. I promise you value! To learn more about me, and to learn how to overcome work from home resistance in your company,  click here Reference:  Kotter, J. P., & Cohen, D. S. (2006). The heart of change. Boston: Harvard University Press.