Over the past year, teams have adapted to remote working, learning new skills and tools to stay productive and connected—in fact, they've been so successful that productivity increased 5%. But with the pandemic coming under control in the US, leaders now are evaluating the return to the office. These books will help you navigate the return to the office—whatever that looks like for your team.

Learn how to optimize your remote video production setup for employee interviews. To learn even more about filmmaking and video production in a digital world, connect with me on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/elenavaletine1/)

Recruitment marketing in 2021: flexibility, adaptability with Stories Inc. storytelling best practices + Yearly Content Flex Plans.

Being remote doesn't mean you can't share compelling video content.

Most company owners would agree that the most important asset is their employees, and one of the biggest challenges of building and…

It's a little "let's all hold hands!" for my taste, but this article talks about how you build a sense of team spirit when your team is remote and you only get together once or twice a year. But the points raised remind us that the macro trend of remote work is increasing (and unlikely to change), so you need to re-think what your culture and brand might be when your people don't sit next to each other all day.

Further evidence of companies embracing that the world really has changed? Chevron managed a virtual summer camp for its employees' kids. If your company cares about you, is there anything you care about as much as your kids??? So while this kind of thing will be common in the future, I love seeing companies pivot to embrace stuff like this.

It feels reasonable to me that in a time of virtual/remote everything, the thing that will help bring people together and build connection and increase productivity is shared learning. What we learn together is what keeps us together. That holiday zoom class where everyone learned to make gnocchi in their own kitchens was the highlight of your Q4? Keep that in mind and start supporting shared learning experiences at work as a means of developing culture.

Working remotely means more virtual meetings. Yay? Rather than play conference call bingo, here are great tips on how to run a virtual meeting more effectively for everyone.

Speaking of communicating, Recruiter buried the lede over on this article on how to be a better communicator when everything is Zoom/Teams/Hangouts-based. The best part is at the bottom, where they talk about the importance of being memorable. While i'm enjoying my tour through everyone's dining rooms, it is hard to tell one conversation from the next these days. So yes, spend a few minutes thinking of (on-brand) ways you can be more memorable in your conversations.

I mean, if your brand position is all about letting people bring their whole selves to work (or the dining room), this is a way to build a policy to cement the idea in place. This article from Google talks about how to make people working from home feel more included, even if they aren't naturally inclined to shine via teleconference.

Lately, I've been talking about the four drivers of your employer brand (See article on ERE): Culture, Leadership, Options and Policies. Since we're all working from home, you might be realizing how distracted we all are: kids, pets, life in general, etc. So what if you suggest making a formal policy to help employees feel more comfortable working like this (I still hear people apologizing about their kid in the background asking for a snack: dude, that's all of us!).

HBR has a nice post about what new employees should do to ensure a remote on-boarding is still effective. I say, take this advice and internalize it. Work with your on-boarding manager/team and implement the ideas proactively, but look for places to insert your employer brand messages. Remember: new employees are more likely to accept your brand because they've only known a company with your brand in place.

I'll admit that I started reading this article on how data can help make remote teams work better to see what kind of data they were looking at, but it's really a different article. The premise is that if you give your staff more of the data/context/info on how leadership makes its decisions, other staff will likely make similar decisions, Further, with that info, they can do better work with less oversight, thus supporting a more remote work space. Why should I care? Because this is a great way to show a candidate what you mean by "we give people lots of opportunity" or "we empower our staff," both of which are functionally meaningless. But talking about how much data and info you share internally to support this claims makes those brand claims infantely more believable, credible and clear.

Speaking of remote work, I admit I started reading this article on building a long-term remote work plan to see how we EBers could influence the process, but I was struck by their process. They start with an ideal end in mind and think backwards on how to achieve it. Have any of you considered what your ideal EB situation would be and worked backwards from there? I might be trying this soon.