Paula Rizzo interviews Bianca Laugher on managing hybrid work. They cover setting boundaries, communication norms, meeting rules, and productivity tools to help both managers and employees stay effective when working partly remote.
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Hey there, welcome to Inside Scoop. I'm Paula Rizzo. Remote work is A1 on my list. You know I love it. I love working from home. I love being able to just, you know, set my schedule, do what I can do. And I may or may not be wearing slippers right now, right? That's how it works. These are all the pros of working remotely. But there are some cons, of course, too. There's some challenges, I'll say, especially if you're a manager. Do you know if your staff is actually doing what they should be doing? Or if you're an employee, you want to stand out. You want to make sure that your boss knows, hey, I'm doing just as much as I would if I was in the office. So today we're all going to talk about how to make sure that you set yourself apart and you stand out in a hybrid world. And I have a great expert to introduce you to in just a moment who will help us work through that, because this is, this is the life. This is what we're doing now. Some of you will be in the office, some of you will be remote or, you know, any, any combination thereof. I have a great freebie for you before we dive in on list making because, you know, I'm a big list maker. Putting this stuff on your list really gets it done. If you go to paularizzo.com/list, you can check out my list making starter kit and you can grab that there with all kinds of interesting things on how to be more productive, successful, less stressed. I'm also a LinkedIn Learning instructor and I have a whole bunch of courses that will help you in all areas of your life, especially Hybrid work. And, you know, you can check out that on— if you go to LinkedInLearning.com. But also, there's something really exciting that's happening. It's called this Learning Path that LinkedIn has put together. And my guest today is also on the Learning Path. She is also one of the LinkedIn Learning instructors. Her name is Bianca Laugher. And Bianca, I would love to bring you on, say hello, and have you here to chitchat with me a little bit.
Hello, welcome! Hi Paula, thank you guys so much. Thank you, appreciate being here, and it's just a joy to speak with my fellow Pathfinder.
Yeah, I love it, it's such a fun idea. So the idea behind it is that, you know, we want to make sure that people are all hooked up when it comes to hybrid world working. You and I have been working in this remote world for quite some time, but it's new to a lot of people.
Totally. Um, yes, I've run a, uh, full remote company, semi-fully. There's like 3 of us that come into our, our headquarter office in Santa Barbara sometimes for the past 6 years. And so, you know, when the pandemic hit in 2020 and as everybody kind of made that shift, you know, this was sort of old news already in our, in our world and, and things that we'd been doing all the time. However, I will say the emergence of more people working remotely and working in now pretty much these hybrid roles has taught me a lot as well about some of the ways I could optimize and be more efficient with my team. So it's interesting journey.
Oh, OK, we're going to dive—
we'll dive into all of that.
I love that. Yeah, exactly. We're all trying to improve, you know, and if you're watching this, leave us questions below in the chat box. We will get to those questions there. So if you have questions about remote working, how to do it better, if you have something that works really great, if you have a tool that you love, leave them in the chat boxes below. Tag a friend who you think might be interested in this. And of course, check out our LinkedIn Learning courses for even more information. So let's talk first to the managers. OK, we'll do a little bit of manager stuff, a little bit of employee. So as a manager, how can you sort of strengthen your relationships with people you might never meet? I mean, I have always had a remote company. You know, I worked in television for, for years and years, and now I work for myself. And most of the time, you know, I've met most of the people that work with me, but not always. So as a manager, how can you sort of strengthen that?
Yeah, I mean, I could talk about this all day long, but I think one of the top things that I always suggest to people— this is universal whether you're in person or not, but I think it's often overlooked and extra important when you are remote because of the sort of social distance, if you will, that you have. You really first and foremost need to study your team, right? Understand who— meet people where they are and who they are and what their personality styles are. Is it more introverted? Is it more extroverted? Understand what makes them thrive in terms of a work style. Also do that for yourself as a manager. You know, that includes you. You are part of the team. So understanding how you work and operate and understanding what your boundaries are. Sometimes we make assumptions in our own head about what works for us. And as a manager, you can assume that that's how everybody else should do it. But they don't, they don't know that. So things like, for example, you know, do I prefer Slack versus email or what types of things do I like on my DMs, you know, versus what should be dropped into my inbox? Right. Of course, scheduling, right? Time blocking and scheduling, making those boundaries of when you're available and when you're not. But just kind of what are my work norms and then being very transparent with your team about what those are like. This is my work style. This is what I prefer. Me about yours. So I think having those conversations, um, opening up with that and kind of, you know, laying the boundaries and, and then not letting it go, you know, like not kind of being like, oh, okay, we did that once at the beginning. Um, but really constantly talking about, because it evolves. Sometimes I find myself being like, you know what, this actually doesn't work for me anymore. Yeah. Um, so I think, I think those are, those are some of the top, one of the top things.
Yeah. It's interesting. Just like studying your team, studying yourself, knowing, I always talk about your productivity style. I've written about it a lot and knowing like, how are you most productive? When are you most productive? You know, as a manager, you can sort of decide that and say, hey, here's when I'm working, here's when I'm not working, here's when I'm, you know, going to be doing meetings, here's when I'm not going to be doing meetings. This is, you know, how it works. As an employee, though, you kind of have to roll with the punches a little bit more, right? Uh, and so you have to build those relationships too. It might take a little bit more initiative there. So if you're a team member, what would you say?
Yeah. So it's kind of on the other end of that, right? You're asking those questions of your boss and also understanding when is a good time to talk about the thing I want to talk about, right? Because when you're remote, it's really easy to just, you know, run that through your Teams or Slack or whatever and be like, you know, and be really reactionary. You know, not just your manager, but your teammates too. They're probably in the middle of something, right?
Yeah.
So sometimes the way that you can be, you can disrupt their day and you don't mean to. You're not meaning to, of course, you know. So I think everybody needs to kind of take a beat and understand, is this urgent? How urgent is this? And this is the advice that I give to my teammates. I'm like, you know, Slack me. Will you Slack, Slack me if it's like something that really needs, it's like, it's urgent. We need to talk about this right now. You know, also know that if you do Slack me, I might not respond because I'm in the middle of something. So that expectation that, that things are going to be kind of, you know, right back, you know, immediately. Can't always be the case if I'm sort of— especially if I have a time block, if there's something that I'm in the middle of doing. But I think as an employee, you have to be adaptable to that and just understand that, you know, you know, there's a human being on the other end of that and your manager isn't a superhuman. And it's not because they don't care about you. Right. I think that employees can really take that, and especially work, it's— that's all you've got. Sometimes the Slack or that conversation is all you've got, and so you're like, oh my gosh, like, they're ignoring me. Yeah.
Um, it is about knowing and understanding. Like, I remember that too, like, as a, as a producer for many years, you know, working with, uh, you know, um, anchors and reporters and people who were very busy and not always, you know, in, in the office when we were, you know, managing and knowing, like, if I send them this email, they'll be in the middle of doing something and they won't see it, they'll ignore it, so I'm gonna send a text later, or I'll call them real quick. Back. Yeah, you know, tone matters a lot too. And I think, you know, anytime you can leave a voice memo or a video or something that you think like, hey, this might get misconstrued, I want to make sure they get exactly what I mean. I'm not upset about this, it's just that I wish it was different, or whatever it is. So I try to, I try to do that, you know, uh, whenever possible. But it's interesting to, you know, knowing people's preferences, um, but also overcommunication. How do you— I mean, I try to do that, you know, I try to say, hey, I'm gonna put this here because I'm doing this right now, but like, you don't have to look at it till tomorrow. This is not an urgent thing. What about communication?
Drop it in my inbox. Yeah, yeah, no, you're so right. And I think that's, that's it. You gotta over-communicate. You gotta constantly do it. So certainly the advice isn't like, oh, hold back because they're busy. You understand the appropriate methods to make sure that your communication is coming across in the strongest and best way. Yeah. Um, so especially with like things that consider a little more thought that maybe your manager has to think deeply about. And if you are the manager, things that your team needs to think deeply about. Email is really good for that, right? It needs a little more elaboration. You know, should this be an email?
Should—
do we need a meeting about this? Like, how do we get this conversation to have the best, you know, possible outcome? Collaboration tools, obviously. I mean, this is now something that people talk about all the time. But we're Google Docs kind of peeps over here. Yeah. And so there's, there's, you know, everything in the cloud now. But how do you drive conversations to where, you know, what I do a lot is I add a comment to a Google spreadsheet. Right. And so we didn't need an email. We didn't need an instant message. Yeah. She can comment back when she gets to it. And we're talking directly about that thing we need to work on. We didn't need to set up a meeting. We didn't need to. Do all this stuff. We actually just dealt with the issue really quickly via comment on, on, on Google Docs. And I think that's what overcommunication is about too, is really utilizing all of your tools and not just, you know, constantly having these disruptive instant messages, but really being focused and really thinking about the best method of that communication because each issue deserves, you know, a specialized approach usually. So it's true about that.
What are your thoughts on meetings? Because, you know, there's always been the meeting— like, corporate America overdoes it for sure. They need to get, they need to get it together. But hopefully this is a way to sort of like rein in the meetings and say like, hey, not everything has to be a meeting. You can really just leave a voice memo and the person will know. And if you have to meet about it, you know, sometimes Ali, my producer who's behind the scenes, sometimes she and I, you know, we have a meeting every other week or whatever it is. Sometimes we don't need it. Sometimes we're like, we're good, we went through all the stuff. Or it's like, hey, let's just get on because I want to just talk through this one thing that we keep ignoring looking at. And I just want to, you know, let's look at it together because otherwise, we will continue to ignore it and not do anything about it. You know, let's look at this, you know, my LinkedIn newsletter or whatever it is that we dedicate that time to do it. So what kind of, you know, best practices for meetings do you have?
So this is a really loose rule of thumb. I think that there's something that goes— there's a lot of caveats to it. But I kind of think about it, if it takes me longer than 10 minutes to write an email about it, or if we need to talk about it longer than 10 minutes, we need a meeting, right? And think about that, right? Because sometimes you just need to think deeply about things. And sometimes extroverts such as myself, we need to talk to think. Yeah, you know, that is my work style. I actually need to talk to get my thoughts out. So you can prepare ahead of time to shorten those meetings by writing them down first. Making sure you understand what you need to get out of those things. But yeah, I like the 10-minute rule. I think if you need to kind of have a little bit more back and forth, that's going to take longer than 10 minutes, then, hey, we need to dedicate some time to chat about this. And always, always, always, what is the goal of the meeting? You know, document what it is that you talked about and understand what everybody's going to walk away with. It doesn't always happen. It's not perfect. But I do think that the virtual world helps facilitate that a lot better because you basically have all these other collaboration tools that you can lean on. Whereas in an office, the old school practice was, okay, we need to get together. All these tools do that for us so we can lessen the amount of time that we spend in like, oh my God, I want to claw my eyes out. Totally.
I've been in those meetings. Yeah. And it's just much more intentional this way. It's much more purposeful and saying like, hey, this actually needs to happen. We need to be in the room together to do this.
This is the goal.
It makes it much more focused, for sure. Um, you know, the, the boundaries are an issue because you can work, so you do work, right? And so that— there's, there's that, uh, setting boundaries. You know, I have a whole course on LinkedIn Learning all about how to set boundaries, and so, you know, you can check that out at linkedinlearning.com. Um, but you know, it, it is difficult, right? Like, it, it's not easy the first time or the second time that you try to create boundaries. In a remote world. What are some of the— if we're going to pick, right?
I love rules.
If we're going to pick a couple of boundaries to start as a starter kit, a boundary starter kit for remote working, what should we put on our list here?
Yeah. I kind of, I think about it as like the self-care guide and very much inspired by— I love your courses, Paula Rizzo, and especially the Remote Work Boundaries, because this is Everything. This, you know, you want to be great at being a remote worker, especially if you're working from home. Okay. There's a difference between working from home and remote work. Sometimes remote work is you're everywhere. Working from home has a lot of challenges because you're, as we all know, you know, I don't need to elaborate this, the bleeding of the personal life and the work life, of course. So I think that first and foremost, it does start with kind of something we were talking about at the top of the conversation. Understanding what your own personal needs are, right? Are you somebody who needs quiet space and time? Right. How can you set your— you are the facilities team, I always say, you know, so how can you set your environment up to meet your own needs? You know, and that means communicating with your roommates. I call them my, my two children and my husband. Or maybe it is actual roommates that you have that, you know, maybe they pay rent. Um, just say, hey, you know, um, you know, create a Google Calendar that you can share with them. I invite, uh, my husband to meetings sort of behind the scenes all the time. So he knows, you know, I need this quiet time. You need to keep these children away from me. Like whatever it is that we need to do, we are, we, those are the types of boundaries that you need. Like if I need to focus for this amount of time, I need to be selective about that, and I need to be able to communicate not just with my team, but with the people that are involved in that remote work life of you. Right now, I'm actually in my office. I have one of our employees here. And, you know, for example, I'm like, hey guys, you know, I'm going to be talking to Paula Rizzo. Quiet on the set. Yeah. You know, it's basic stuff, but I think people overlook that stuff because when you're in a work from home or remote environment, You, you're trying to be part of two worlds at the same time, and you don't— you kind of think you have to accommodate it in, um, in ways that you can kind of try to enclose yourself. But if you make them a part of what you're doing and understand, and they have some transparency into what your needs are, you know, it makes it the flow much easier. Everybody kind of had to respect that, and, um Likewise, you know, understanding what those needs are and understanding your own team, if you're the manager, and your team members, what their environment and needs are. I think having that full understanding is really good for boundaries and setting to say, hey, this is what my needs are to be able to be successful here.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I do that. My husband and I are both working from home, obviously. And so, you know, I, I'm very much like, hey, here's what I have on the, on, on the docket this, this today. I'm going to be in a video call, you know, shooting this, I'm doing this, I'm doing that, and then I'll be out, and then we we should go take a walk and we should go do other things. So you can, you know, incorporate the rest of your life. I mean, I think this is where planning and schedules and list making really does come into play. You know, I, I very much am a proponent of doing a home list and a work list and having them— they can be on the same page, but they need to be separate from each other because, you know, then that gives you a chance to look at one and really focus and say, okay, what am I doing work-wise? What am I doing home-wise? What has to happen? Um, you know, because yeah, you can throw in a load of laundry in between, you know, your video calls or whatever, it is. Like, that can happen. I mean, it's part of the beauty of working from home, you know.
Sure.
Uh, it's pretty nice. But, you know, you want to set up boundaries so that it's like you're not in two worlds all the time. You're not feeling like, hey, I'm kind of here and I'm kind of there. You do need focus time, so it's important to set those boundaries. Um, you know, what about— you know, we're talking about remote work, but what about hybrid? You know, if you're going into the office as well, like, you know, you want to have some mirrored, you know, mirrored boundaries there too. What do you think?
Yeah, same. And I mean, literally, you know, that's what I'm doing right now. I actually happen to be at the office today. And I think that that is your, your point about to-do lists is very important. And one of my favorite tips as well, because I can, you know, people are like, what's your most, you know, top tip of remote work? A virtual to-do list. Digitize your to-do list. It is so, so important. I mean, I don't even know where it is. I'm still kind of like an old school. I won't let go of my notebook. But I've started to forget it here and there because I absolutely have leaned on the virtual to-do list. And I do use two separate apps for my work life and my home life.
What do you use?
I use Google Tasks for my work life. OK. We use the G Suite. So all of that is you can integrate it in your calendar. It's right there in my Gmail. Right. See it all day long. You can organize it. Some of the top features I like is you can organize it by folders. So for me, it's like the departments of my company. What does marketing need? What does finance need? And then you can make subtasks so you can sort of have some project management. But it's a very simple tool. And I'm a pretty big fan of simple tools like that when it comes to just kind of your day-to-day, like, you know, optimization of productivity, which you're a master on. For my home life, I use something called Todo Cloud. I don't know this one. Yeah. So my husband and I, I've actually, it's funny, he had like a different version of the app and I'm like, why does yours look different? And so I emailed the company and turns out I've been using this app since 2015 and they were like, whoa, like super user, you're old school. We have a new version.
Here you go.
Kind of a thing. And I was like, okay, great. But It worked for me, so it didn't really matter. But I had— we can collaborate on that. We can share lists, grocery lists. Those are great things. And look, the reasons why you need that so much is because you are jumping from the office personally now, airports again for me. And so I can't lug this notebook around. I need to constantly be able to reference this thing. I need to be able to make sure that that my thoughts are even just where I jot down my thoughts sometimes. I mean, I have like a whole folder that I'm just like, just things that I am like, ooh, that's a good idea. So that collaboration and any kind of transparency into it. So I mean, again, the collaboration piece, but when you're a manager, these are things you can delegate possibly. These are at least things, agenda, that you're going to talk about later. So, you know, having that in a digital place to where you can be in the office and access that, be at home, be at an airport, be wherever you you are. Um, if you do nothing else, do that. Yeah, if you're a remote worker.
And I really love that you have two separate places for your two types of life, you know, because it really is important to have a focus here and not to have them all jumbled together, because otherwise you don't know what to look at. You're not sure what to do. Like, who am I today? Where am I going? Is today Saturday? What am I— you know, it's just like, you 100% know, right? Like the difference there. So this really great. I'm glad that we, we dove in a little bit on, on lists and home and things like that because it, it is really important. It's important for everyone to, to figure out this for themselves too. Like, you and I could sit here all day every day and say like, this is what works for us, this is how we do it, this is how I like to set it up. And you know, I've done, done many, many talks where people say, what pen do you use? What notebook do you use? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You know, it's examples.
Yeah, it's examples, right?
We have to try.
Yeah. And there's, you know, what a time to be alive, right, Paula? There's, there's so many companies that have so many different versions of these things. So test it out, try it. Like, I've tried— I like these things. I've tried so many other ones. Evernote, for example, it's a great tool. It doesn't really work for me, but it's— I still really appreciate the features and like the, you know, just the elaborateness of how you can capture information on the internet and kind of keep it all together. But yeah, for me to feel less overwhelmed, like I need something more simple. And that's the thing, you have to experiment, you have to innovate in your own life. Yeah.
And you need different things for different purposes. Same for me with Evernote. It's like there's too much. And I wrote about this many, many years ago because I don't get it. Like, why does everybody love Evernote so much? I just like, I'm overwhelmed by all the things that it can do. But now I use it very purposefully. I use it when I'm planning trips and I have my packing lists in there.
Oh, that's a good idea.
That is where I keep it because then I have this ongoing— I have like a template there of my packing list so I can add to it, I can change it up. And then for each trip I put like, what's my itinerary? So I write that out there. And so I know that's where my travel stuff goes. And then, you know, I clip things from the internet if I see like a cool gift idea. Yeah, flip it and put it in that notebook, and that's where they are. That's what's in Evernote for me for right now. So like having— yeah, like compartmentalizing in your mind. Like, I know, like where, you know, you're gonna put your keys, you can find them here. It's the same thing for me. It's like, oh, I'll find that in that app, right? So, you know, trying those things out. I always say give yourself 2 weeks, try it out. If it works for you, if not, you can abandon it, delete it off your phone. It's okay to let it go, you know. Yeah. And that's that. But yeah, anyone who's watching, if you have tool ideas or things that work for you, leave it in the comments below. We'll check that out for sure. And Bianca, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for, for being here and giving us all your great tips. It's been wonderful. And, you know, I want to encourage everyone to check out your course on LinkedInLearning.com. Of course, there it is, How to Stand Out Remotely and in a Hybrid World. You can check that out along with my courses as well that are, that are all there. So Bianca, thank you for being here.
Thank you, Paula. I really appreciate it. Thanks everyone for watching.
Of course. And of course you can— of course, you know, those lists are important. I'm not going to stop talking about it. So I want you to go get my list-making starter kit. Uh, if you go to paularizzo.com/list, you can check it out there. And leave us some notes and messages in the comments below, and we will see you next time. Thanks for being here.
