WLP253 Online Conferences and Virtual Retreats

21st Century Work Life and leading remote teams

This bonus episode is brought to you by Virtual Not Distant in London, and it continues the conversation between Pilar Orti and Tim Burgess of Shield GEO, looking at what’s been happening in both companies and the events they’ve been involved with.

Pilar took part in the IAF conference, which was a week-long single track event, taking place online for the first time.

Very different was Agile Tour London - also run on Zoom, but with the community conversation centred on Slack.

Finally, Pilar has just attended Repeople, which used to be the NomadCity event in person in Gran Canaria.

Also Shield GEO have run events online for their own distributed team, instead of their usual face-to-face retreats. Dividing their 17 regions into 3 blocs by timezone, they had fun online with trivia and so on, but also dived deeply into cultural exploration and learning from each other about each other’s locally lived experiences.

Pilar has run webinars recently on Visible Teamwork, and learned from participants that even when people know the theory, providing a framework and vocabulary for the interactions which support the theory is what makes all the difference.

If you enjoyed these conversations with Tim Burgess, do follow him on Twitter, and take a look at the special series on connection and disconnection in remote work that we produced in partnership with ShieldGEO nearly a year ago - when the world was a different place, but the issues were strangely evergreen.