Innovation in Remote Work Solutions

I’ve onboarded remote hires across time zones, continents, and cultures. And here’s what I’ve learned: Remote onboarding doesn’t ⭐fail⭐ because of location. It fails because of assumptions. Assuming someone will “just speak up.” Assuming they’ll know what success looks like. Assuming they feel like they belong. Without hallway chats or shadowing, remote employees miss all the informal context that makes onboarding feel human—not just functional. Here’s how I’ve made it work: 💬 Over-communicate expectations and priorities 🎥 Use video, even for 15-minute check-ins 📅 Create a rhythm of connection—1:1s, team intros, buddy syncs ☕ Encourage informal conversations (yes, even virtual coffee chats) Remote doesn’t have to mean disconnected. In fact, with the right systems, it can feel even more inclusive. It took me many years of learning the hard way to build this out. And I’d like to share it with you, no strings attached. (see link in comments) That’s why I built these practices right in our Manager Onboarding Kit—to help leaders support their teams with intention, no matter where they are.

Remote work challenge: How do you build a connected culture when teams are miles apart? At Bunny Studio we’ve discovered that intentional connection is the foundation of our remote culture. This means consistently reinforcing our values while creating spaces where every team member feels seen and valued. Four initiatives that have transformed our remote culture: 🔸 Weekly Town Halls where teams showcase their impact, creating visibility across departments. 🔸 Digital Recognition through our dedicated Slack “kudos” channel, celebrating wins both big and small. 🔸 Random Coffee Connections via Donut, pairing colleagues for 15-minute conversations that break down silos. 🔸 Strategic Bonding Events that pull us away from routines to build genuine connections. Beyond these programs, we’ve learned two critical lessons: 1. Hiring people who thrive in collaborative environments is non-negotiable. 2. Avoiding rigid specialization prevents isolation and encourages cross-functional thinking. The strongest organizational cultures aren’t imposed from above—they’re co-created by everyone. In a remote environment, this co-creation requires deliberate, consistent effort. 🤝 What’s working in your remote culture? I’d love to hear your strategies.

Taking remote work to a whole new level! We’re not just working from home anymore. We're operating heavy machinery, performing surgeries, and managing high-risk environments all from behind a screen. Thanks to automation, robotics, and AI, remote work now includes things like controlling excavators from miles away. But the problem is navigating these environments using 2D displays. Not having depth perception is super dangerous, just try closing one eye and having a catch, it's highly likely your going to get hit with the ball. Depth perception, distance, spatial awareness - a second perspective on our reality once eliminated leads to accidents, slower decisions, greater risk, and more effort to interpret what you're seeing. Magnetic 3D displays the problem by providing real depth perception - no '3d' glasses or headsets required. You can instantly judge distance, angles and spatial relationships as if you were standing right there. That makes remote operations faster, easier, and safer not just for the person controlling the machine, but for everyone working on-site in those environments. Magnetic 3D displays are being used to pilot 3D submersibles to safely inspect oil wells in thousands of feet of water and safe handling of nuclear materials at Idaho National Laboratory. Flat screens have reached the limit of their usefulness in these instances - the future is spatial and for any companies looking to move faster while prioritizing safety in mission critical applications like these need to be leveraging glasses-free 3D technology. If you’re building in this space - let’s talk: Tom Zerega!

Our design team accidentally discovered a remote work hack that's transforming how we communicate at AirOps. It started when our head of design ditched traditional docs for quick video walkthroughs of her feedback. You'd see her cursor moving, hear her thinking out loud, catch her excitement about specific details. Our remote team across SF and NY loved it so much that the practice spread organically through the company. Rather than long Slack threads about product specs, they started sharing 2-minute videos explaining their thought process. Suddenly, everything changed: 🔰 Complex design discussions wrapped up in hours instead of days 🔰 Product feedback landed instantly without confusion or back-and-forth 🔰 Engineers started solving problems quicker without sitting through 20-minute meetings The best part is how natural it feels. No fancy process or rules. Just hit record, talk through your thoughts, and share. We never mandated this approach. But seeing how it caught on taught me that sometimes the best practices come from giving your team space to experiment. Watching this unfold at AirOps has changed how I think about remote communication. The tools matter less than creating an environment where better ways of working can emerge organically. Been thinking a lot about this lately as we scale across hubs. Would love to hear what unconventional practices have worked for your remote teams.

I was recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, to provide a perspective upon how technology is being used within businesses due to hybrid working, in some format being here to stay. Take a look at what I shared. The High-Tech Meeting With hybrid work here to stay, more office meeting rooms will be equipped with artificial intelligence, holograms, virtual reality and other immersive technologies that allow remote workers to feel like they are in the same room as their in-office colleagues. New technologies could address some of the challenges that come with hybrid video meetings. “They are looking in but they can’t see everybody or they don’t know who’s speaking,” says Nilesh Parmar, business area director of places, U.S., for Arcadis, a global design and consulting firm. To address these sorts of concerns, Arcadis is using a new strategy with some clients: motion detection cameras that automatically pan to whoever is speaking in the room. “You’re literally having a one-to-one conversation and then the camera will pan back out and then take the whole room in again,” says Parmar. Technological glitches are bound to happen on occasion with these newer technologies, such as a slight delay in the camera coordinating how soon it pans to the speaker. But Parmar says if there is such a moment, the camera will automatically pan out to show the whole room. The company also has some clients using virtual reality to make participants feel they are physically experiencing the same room even if they are in different locations. “You just put on your glasses, sit on your sofa, and you’re in the conversation like everybody’s in the conversation,” says Parmar. Meanwhile, some technology companies are even starting to offer holograph meetings, with participants as holograms, design consultants and executive coaches say.

A little while back, Bradford Church & I pivoted Village. We started on one problem, but kept experiencing a bigger problem; how you make remote & hybrid work, actually work. Here’s how we’re solving it👇 Quick context: we came from Uber, and originally started Village to build tech that creates way better relationships between marketplace platforms and the workers and suppliers that power them. But a few big things changed along the way. Our team was fully remote. That meant we were able to hire incredible people, but the day-to-day of remote sucked. You often hear high performing companies — Uber, OpenAI, Apple — referred to as cults. These companies make talented people irrationally motivated to hit insane goals. Remote kills that. The high trust and vulnerability needed is hurt by fewer close relationships. You need speed and direct communication, but ~50% of employee time in remote gets spent on informational updates and transactional video calls. Finally, ownership erodes. It’s not because people can hide. It’s because you don’t bond as a group and create a shared sense of ownership of something bigger than each other. So what’s the solution? We call it Atlas. It’s already made our team 10x more connected and productive working remotely. How does it work? It 1-click connects to all the tools your team uses everyday - Workspace, Jira, Notion, Slack, Teams, Asana etc - and uses an LLM and rules-based automations to synthesize all their content and data to create highly actionable summaries, insights, and levers to drive performance and productivity. Atlas lets leaders see around corners and have a direct line of sight into performance. It turns managers into supermanagers. It makes employees far more productive. It makes orgs way more connected. You can do some pretty magical things with Atlas: get perfect visibility into what your team or an org is working on, and how that relates to broader goals. Totally eliminate the 50% time spent on busy work and admin. Get way more real-time coaching and feedback on how you’re doing individually, or how your team or org is doing as a whole. Way better understand who someone is personally, and what they are working towards. I’ve heard Atlas described as ‘the iPhone health app for your business’ or a ‘Chief of Staff for everyone in the org’. Whatever the analogy is, our goal is to make managers and employees 10x more effective. We couldn’t be more pumped to start talking publicly about Atlas and sharing it. We’ll be rolling it out over the next few months - if you want to experience it for yourself, reach out - we’re giving it away free for the first 30 teams we onboard. 

A founder DMd me and asked: how can I ensure my remote team is doing as much work as they would if we were in office? I flipped the question back on him and asked: what are you doing to set your team up for success to be productive working from home?? WHY are we looking to remote employees to intrinsically know how to optimize their time and productivity, when we've never given them a roadmap or a playbook to learn how? Here are the 3 things we discussed that he's doing with his team now: 1️⃣ Establish a "not always available" standard. Encourage team members to time block Slack engagement. First hour of the day: Slack is muted and hidden, team members focus on email replies and their biggest work hurdles. *Bonus/up-level: His team works mostly across 4 American time zones, so now they're doing a 1-hour Slack Sprint in the morning and in the afternoon. Slack stays quieter outside of those hours, everyone "congregates" for cross-team questions and engagement during those windows. 2️⃣ Build a low-lift stack of efficiency tools and bake them into onboarding. For most remote employees, a good starting point is: - a Pomodoro plug-in tool - a text expander tool - a to-do list or task + note tool - a mental reset tool (I'm obsessed with Calm right now, the daily calms are a great midday reset) 3️⃣ Schedule a few team- or company-wide coworking sessions every week. This is called "body-doubling" and is a HUGE game changer. Here's how it works: Completely optional to attend, mics stay off, cameras are optional as well. Have a volunteer moderator kick off the hour with a simple prompt: What are you working on for this session? Everyone drops their "what" in the chat, then gets to work. 30 minutes in, moderator does a 5 minute check-in. Encourage a quick stretch, ask a fun question for a mini-conversation. Then back to silent coworking for 20 minutes. Wrap up with asking everyone to drop a simple end-of-session progress check in the chat. Could be as simple as "completed" or "half way there". These virtual coworking sessions have been known to 2-3x productivity when done for just an hour each day. That's it. 3 simple approaches. None of them have to cost a dime. All of them will increase productivity and improve efficiency. And if you're a remote employee or solopreneur, you can start doing these things tomorrow for yourself. I promise it will improve your quality of life. ------ Hi, I'm Jen. I've been working remotely since 2018 and have put sweat, tears, and countless hours into researching how to level up my work from home experience. I'm launching a community that is PACKED with tools, resources, and yes, coworking opportunities for remote workers, to help you make your remote work life your very best life. Doors open in September and I would love to see you there! You can add your name to the (simple but effective, because that's what we're all about) waitlist here: https://lnkd.in/e4B3XM4Y

Starting a new job while remote can suck. Imagine your first day: You get your laptop and login info. Set up all the software and benefits. Lovely HR folks onboard you but it’s all going through the process. You don’t actually meet your teammates though or learn about your work until later. That would feel kinda lonely, eh? 😔 Imagine a different first day: 👋Your manager posted an intro message in the company new hires channel (at Slack, we call this #yay). 📮People from different teams message you offering to chat or welcoming you to the company! ☕️You have virtual coffee invites already. I joined Slack in April 2020. Remote. Didn’t meet anyone IRL for over a year! Yet, I felt welcome and included because Slack’s leadership is very intentional about curating the culture (David Ard Robby Kwok would directly welcome people!) People from across the company DMed me. To my slack colleagues reading this, this might feel obvious. However, a lot of companies are still figuring out hybrid culture - across time zones, cultures and borders 🌎🌏🌍 Today, I try to carry on the torch. Every Monday, I message the new hires in our #yay channel. On lighter weeks, I do 15 min coffee chats. For the ones in NYC, we coordinate office days. We might be in completely different parts of the company and never work together, but that’s also an opportunity to learn something new. It might be just one message or meeting for you, but it can make a HUGE difference in someone’s onboarding experience. So, carry the torch - go make someone’s first day amazing 🔥

After collaborating with over 1,000 Virtual Assistants (VAs) at HelpFlow, we’ve uncovered the core ingredients to building a reliable and high-performing remote workforce. Here’s what our journey taught us—lessons too valuable not to share with founders, HR leaders, and remote team managers: - Prioritize Process, Not Just People: While hiring for culture fit is critical, airtight processes are the backbone of reliability. Well-documented SOPs make onboarding seamless and safeguard against disruptions. - Communication Cadence is Everything: Daily standups and weekly deep dives ensure clarity and accountability. Structured check-ins foster rapport, prevent isolation, and quickly surface roadblocks before they escalate. - Feedback Loops Drive Growth: Constant feedback (both ways) empowers VAs to achieve more and feel genuinely invested. We learned that transparent performance metrics and frequent recognition help VAs and managers align on growth targets. Invest in Tools AND Trust - Technology enables efficiency, but trust cements loyalty. Secure collaboration platforms paired with transparent leadership build long-term dedication far beyond what a tech stack can offer. These lessons didn’t come easy. They were forged through trial, error, and a genuine commitment to people and process. Curious about leveling up your remote workforce? What’s the #1 challenge you face in managing remote teams? Let’s share insights below!

The Empathy Edge: 8 Ways to Maintain Emotional Connection in a Remote World In a digital age where screens replace face-to-face interactions, empathy is the bridge that keeps teams human. Here are eight strategies to nurture emotional intelligence and foster trust, even through a monitor: 1. Send “How can I support you?” instead of “What’s the status?” ↳ Reframing demands as offers shifts the dynamic from surveillance to collaboration, reducing defensiveness and building trust. 2. Start every meeting with: “How are you really doing?” ↳ A simple check-in sets a tone of care and reminds everyone that people come before tasks. 3. Celebrate the “invisible” work publicly ↳ Highlighting silent efforts boosts morale and reinforces the value of each team member’s contribution. 4. Turn cameras ON during conflict ↳ Body language builds empathy faster than words alone, helping to de-escalate tension and foster understanding. 5. Create a “No Judgment” virtual zone ↳ A safe space for sharing struggles encourages vulnerability, strengthens bonds, and sparks innovative solutions. 6. Replace emails with “human” video chats ↳ Cameras humanize interactions, turning pixels into people and creating moments of genuine connection. 7. End every call with clarity + gratitude ↳ Closing with “Thank you for your time. Here’s our next-step plan.” combines appreciation with structure, leaving everyone feeling valued and aligned. 8. Send one unsent message this week ↳ A simple note of recognition—like “I noticed how you [specific action]. Thank you.”—can have an outsized impact on morale and engagement. Remote work doesn’t have to mean robotic work. By intentionally weaving empathy into digital habits, you build teams that feel seen, heard, and valued—no office required. 📌 Which of these strategies will you try first? Share below! ♻️ Repost to lead the empathy revolution in remote work! Follow Natan Mohart for more science-backed soft skills.