News & Insights Articles

The hybrid workplace introduces a number of new challenges for managers. Identifying and understanding unconscious biases in the workplace is one of them. Unconscious biases are beliefs about individuals or a group that would be considered to be unfair, such as...

Research shows that employee burnout is on the rise after such a lengthy period of working from home. People have been trying to balance personal lives and professional responsibilities for many months now while dealing with the challenges of the pandemic, and...

Gradually, more and more remote workers are heading back into the office. Over three in five Canadians say that they want to return to their physical workplace or office, according to a recent KPMG survey. But there are still many people who prefer to work from...

Most Canadian employees like the idea of a hybrid workplace that gives them the flexibility to stay at home or go into the office when needed. Over 71% of employees surveyed believe a hybrid workplace, or hybrid office, should be the standard model for all organizations,...

The COVID pandemic created a massive “work from home” experiment. What this experiment proved however is that companies can give their employees choice as to where they work without having to sacrifice productivity.

Hybrid working isn’t new. What’s new is the need to create a scalable hybrid model that treats both your virtual and on-site employees with inclusion and fairness. Discover how to address both the challenges and opportunities to create the best hybrid workplace...

If the Covid-19 pandemic has proven anything, it’s that working from home on a large scale is a policy that can be highly effective and productive for all kinds of businesses. It’s also done a lot to make the case for flexible work schedules. After all, once...

As a follow-up to our blog on The Ultimate Guide to When Your Meeting Can Be an Email, we thought we’d dig a bit deeper into communication in the virtual office. After all, there are a lot of tools at your disposal from chat to voice calls to video calls to...

They say that jokes are funny because they’re true… which means that there must be something to all those “this meeting could have been an email” memes circulating on the Internet. And yet, if the joke exists, then clearly a lot of virtual and blended...

For virtual teams and leaders stuck at home, isolated with no ability to socialize, languishing is a real risk. Everyone may insist that everything is fine, but it’s clear that nothing is as it should be. Morale is low, motivation seems lacking, and while no...

The transition to the virtual working world was supposed to be a process. It started in earnest as the proliferation of good wi-fi, better internet speeds, and more reliable technology began to create a landscape where working from home could be as seamless as...

As more companies embrace fully virtual and blended work, interest in remote-monitoring “tattleware” is on the rise. Here’s why there’s a better way.

As the pandemic wears on, all of us have become well acquainted with virtual meetings. We appreciate their ability to help us stay connected, coordinated and in touch while working from home. Yet at the same time, virtual meetings can feel tiring and draining....

How and where we work has changed dramatically. Virtual workplaces, supported by technology and innovation, continue to increase in importance and desirability as shown by the most recent remote working statistics. Flexible working arrangements and virtual work...

Recent findings reported by the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) around mental health impacts from COVID-19 paint a picture of a nation under duress. Remote workers are not only subjected to the broader stresses of the pandemic, but you may be contending...

COVID-19 vaccinations are making their way across the world and it finally feels like change is on its way.  However, not everything is going to go back to exactly how it was pre-COVID. The way we work, for example, is one thing that’s undergone a permanent...

Virtual does not equal vacation. Remote workers are working harder than ever. A recent NordVPN Teams study paints this picture. A selection of countries from North America and Europe shared their average hours worked per day, pre-pandemic and then in March/April...

Creating a safe environment should have always been a goal of the HR professional in “normal” work settings. It is especially true now as teams continue to stay home well into 2021 (and beyond?). It's time for a new icebreaker.

With Millennials, who are now in their mid 20s to late 30s, compromising such a significant proportion of the workforce, articles have been around for years predicting that it would spark an increase in workplace flexibility with the adoption of remote work. That’s...

When the CEO of a company as large as Netflix speaks out against remote work – people take notice. Back in September, Reed Hastings labelled remote work a “pure negative” to The Wall Street Journal and it sparked a healthy amount of debate. Months later,...

When you think about virtual work, what immediately comes to mind? Skype, Zoom, GoToWebinar? Quiet – almost too quiet – workspaces? Perhaps it’s quite the opposite, workspaces with constant interruption from children, pets, spouses and deliveries. What you...

As the pandemic wears on, it’s difficult to imagine a time when the future of the workplace was talked about more. It makes headlines. It’s front-and-center in company town halls. And whether they love or hate it, it’s on the mind of your employees too....

Successful teams – including virtual teams – all tend to display the same key characteristic: resilience. A resilient team is one that adapts to the challenges of an ever-changing business environment, overcoming setbacks and finding ways to thrive. Virtual...

A new term is gaining traction in association with the pandemic: The Fake Commute. For many workers, one of the biggest perks of working from home is not commuting. Yet, there is reason to believe that the act of commuting actually possessed some key benefits...

Human connection is powerful. If leaders of virtual teams ignore this power, they miss out on an immense potential for fulfilling and rewarding work. By itself, this isn’t exactly news: if you Google “virtual teams”, you’ll get an endless list of articles...

American workers spend a lot of time in meetings – an average of 6 hours per week by some estimates, with the total number of weekly meetings across the country as high as 55 million. At the same time, nearly half of all meetings are rated as “poor” by employees,...

The COVID-19 crisis has forced many to work remotely. Now with the slow return to work, the realization that a hybrid work model may be emerging as the Now Normal work situation. However, mixing remote and on-site workers presents new challenges.

The fact is, working virtually is very different from working face-to-face. The communication skills required to work, lead, and collaborate in a co-located environment are different from those required when working virtually. Feelings of disengagement and isolation...

A year ago, I would have had an incredibly difficult time imagining a set of circumstances that would have kept me from a dear friend’s funeral. Yet, that’s exactly what happened when I recently found myself unable to attend due to COVID-19 restrictions. As...

Today we are going to be talking about making genuine connections with your virtual team members, and what that really means. Connecting with people virtually goes beyond simply sharing information about each other; it comes from genuine intention to grow relationships,...