Sabbatical policies can benefit both employers and employees. But these extended leave arrangements need careful design and inspection.

Tech proliferates into our lives with the promise of improving communication and giving us access to information. But it’s also left us more disconnected and busier than ever. In this post, I reflect on my years growing up and whether a subtractive approach to using tech, may lead to a more enriching outcomes in life and at work.

Forcing functions are constraints that nudge people towards desirable behaviours. In this article, I discuss five forcing functions to promote effective meetings.

It’s the holiday season of 2023, so I want to share a few goodies with you.

Middle-level and people managers play a crucial role in companies, but they also model many corporate dysfunctions. It’s time for people managers to get back in service of the people they lead.

The agile movement was about freeing developers from the baggage of Dilbertesque corporations. But in the 2020s, “doing agile” often comes at the cost of agility. Teams and companies sacrifice common-sense at the altar of a hustle culture, that looks agile, but is far from the spirit of the movement.

Our time is a zero-sum game. We don’t want shallow work commitments to steal our deep work time. Shallow work is unavoidable, but we can control it. In this article I explain four ways to do so.

We wrongly apologise for switching off from work or work related communication, when we have enough reason to do so. Such apologies undermine our professional contracts and set us back in our attempts to achieve work-life balance.

When we leave cultural characteristics open to interpretation, we run the risk of creating toxic cultures. The loudest voices usually undermine diversity. It makes more sense for distributed organisations to do the boring work of defining culture. It isn’t as sexy as a secret sauce, but writing things up fosters a consistent and healthy culture.

Copy-pasting office-centric practices rarely works for remote and distributed teams. Three such practices suck, when you attempt them remotely.

In the corporate world we often reach for training as silver bullet solution to performance problems. But building and practicing new skills is hard and if we don’t recognise the real-world difficulties people face, it’s likely that many skill-building initiatives will fail.

You won’t hear from me for the next few weeks, because I’ll be out practicing my hobby; i.e. photography. I believe everyone needs a hobby that they practice for its intrinsic value.

Cal Newport’s “slow productivity” philosophy advocates for multi-scale planning at the quarterly, weekly and daily levels. While Cal recommends his excellent time-block planner, I’ve found my humble calendar to be an effective tool for this way of working.

It’s easy to look at headlines and imagine that all tech workers are headed back to the office. While some part of this assumption may be true, the narrative deserves more nuance.

The “whiteboard effect” refers to a deep work phenomenon that occurs when two or more people problem solve together in spells of intense focus. The presence of this effect doesn’t mean, however, that we must always be in whiteboard mode.

We must soon retire the word “hybrid”. It does less to clarify work patterns and more to confuse people.

When people can identify themselves in all their interactions with each other, it reflects a high psychological safety. But just like a failing test can be invaluable in coding, you need the test of “anonymous contributions allowed” to test if your psychological safety is indeed as high as you’d like it to be.

For remote workers the boundaries between work and life can often feel blurred. In this article I discuss seven strategies to achieve work life balance.

Audio and video can add a new dimension to asynchronous communication. In this article I explain how we can be effective at communicating with audio and video.

The sooner a new team can norm, the sooner it delivers value to its stakeholders. This article provides a recipe for leaders of distributed teams to accelerate team norming.