This site is for promoting my research into Remote Team Design & Implementation.
Author: Dr. Stephanie Eubank (AKA Dr. Bear)
Hi there! My name is Stephanie Diana Eubank and I am a doctoral student at Concordia University Chicago in their online program for Doctorate of Business Administration. My Masters' degree was completed also online at Southern New Hampshire University in Operations Management with an emphasis in Project Management. Prior to my dissertation completion, I will be getting married and once completing my DBA program I will become Dr. Mrs. Stephanie Diana Eubank (Dr. Bear). All the while working full time as one of the country’s experts in Condo Mortgage Underwriting Compliance.
The focus broad topic of my dissertation is remote employment which has never been timelier with the recent lockdowns of quarantine during the COVID-19 crisis.
While discussing supply chain management and the effects on customer and vendor relationships during pandemics, the topic of sending Valentine’s Day gifts to one workplace came up. I remember being sad and jealous of coworkers whose partners and family could send them flowers. Still, security had to dismantle and reassemble the gifts because of safety guidelines, especially in the financial sector, where security was heightened after 9/11.
However, after working remotely for over 12 years now, I and others like me have been able to enjoy gift-giving and receiving without issues. However, this does not mean there are no risks in working remotely and others knowing your address. This is a topic to be mindful of, and that is a different TED talk. But my husband is able to send flowers, and there are no issues as he’s just sending them to the house.
For all those who are celebrating Valentine’s Day or Galentine’s Day, etc., enjoy the holiday and Thursday of savings on Valentine’s Day candy.
If you enjoyed this content, like and subscribe. Also, if you are interested in consulting services, please reach out through my social media. Remember remote is here to stay.
I talk a lot on my YouTube channel about teaching within the California State University (CSU) system. As national news reported, the CFA (the Teachers’ Union representing the faculty of all 23 CSUs) went on strike this past week. Where I am a member of the CFA Union, I will stay away from political criticism or other commentary. I will comment on one trend noticed on both sides of the negotiation table, which kept repeating the topic of sustainability.
In business, when discussing sustainability, there are three categories discussed. The three categories are:
Financial,
Business Longevity, and
Ecologically.
When discussing all three types of sustainability, remote work is a positive benefit to ensuring sustainability in business. Yet, the narrative from leadership is that remote work is a hindrance to all aspects of business. Even though COVID proved all that spin from leadership and concerns noted in research from the leadership perspective since 1985, it is and has always been wrong.
So, using the controversy of the teachers’ strike as an example, I want to look at how remote work could have been used to address sustainability concerns at the negotiating table.
Financial, Offering more remote or hybrid course options would help teachers save money on commuting, clothes, and other resources professors must provide to teach. Offering more remote and hybrid courses will help the university save money. Money on utilities was spent on faculty, staff, and students taking time off due to the COVID-19 resurgence. More remote therapists’ options allow the universities to afford more mental health services and generally at a less expensive rate. No longer needed buildings can be retrofitted to provide housing for students, staff, and faculty. This would create many financial opportunities for the university and keep land usage in line, helping to
provide more enrichment to all.
Making more room for remote and hybrid learning and the money the whole university system makes and saves would leave room for lower tuition costs, enhancing student enrollment. It will also create room for more returning students who are in their careers and want to finish their degrees, opening up more student demographics.
Business Longevity and students and faculty are screaming out for more remote and hybrid work and courses, which will boost enrollment. Remote and hybrid courses and remote work would help give students and staff more of a work-life balance. Which has been proven to decrease issues of Workplace PTSD and workplace violence (this includes school shootings). It will also help students be set up for success and lower stress in higher education. Both for faculty and students. So, many faculty members work more than one job,
and so do our students to afford life with inflation. Remote work would lower commutes for all involved.
Decreased traffic and commuting to campus will also help reduce stress for students and faculty.
Economically.
With more students going to class remotely and more opportunities for remote work for faculty and staff, there are several ways the campus can evolve and become even more of a sanctuary of knowledge for the community, such as developing on-campus housing for faculty and students, keeping affordability in mind, and allowing faculty to spend less on coming to campus. We often forget the costs of going into the office, and many professors do not make that much, so any cost saving helps a lot.
If you enjoyed this content, like and subscribe. Also, if you are interested in consulting services, please reach out through my social media. Remember, the remote is here to stay.
For those who are new to my channel, I teach Business Administration and Operations Management at Stan State. However, for the past 20 years, I have worked in the mortgage compliance arena, specializing in Condo Mortgage Underwriting. Which is a whole TED talk of its own. I was lucky that one of my mentors took a shot at me when she was developing a department from scratch and was doing so remotely. She had disabilities, and remote work helped her make her work the focus instead of her disabilities. This is one of the wonders of remote work that I champion working from home, allowing the disabled community room to focus on their work and how remote work increases diversity and inclusion. Although this opportunity stems from the adage, “It is not what you know or who you know. It is about who knows you”.
I have been fortunate enough to be a millennial in the financial industry, which means I have been experiencing Myspace, LinkedIn, and Facebook in my formative years. This helped me learn an important lesson I try to teach my students. That lesson is the importance of networking.
In my doctoral research, I learned about the types of isolation common in remote work. Specifically, professional isolation is prevalent. I got to see firsthand how companies, especially during the reconstruction era after the financial crisis of 2008 how contractors were unceremoniously laid off with no notice. However, my research found that remote workers also have experienced the feeling of being treated as a number and being treated as expendable. This is because remote workers tend to be isolated from leadership it was easier for leadership to not become attached and lay off remote workers indiscriminately.
Fast forward to 2024, we see the onslaught of forced Return to Office, also called RTO. Which has an added insidious business practice. The practice of RTO attempts to force remote workers back to the office or to quit so that companies can have a layoff without following the WARN Act and steal workers’ insurance, like unemployment rights, from their workforce.
This is where networking becomes necessary for our remote workforce’s career health and growth.
Networking is a great way to help the workforce regardless of modality gain:
Better mental health,
Skills in self-advocacy and connecting with leadership to stave off professional isolation,
Develop community,
Help find jobs, cultivate references, and
Stay up to date with changes in the industry.
I have been lucky to have so many friends and mentors (they all know who they are) in my field with whom I have stayed in touch remotely for over two decades. A couple I have not even met face to face outside of Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Skype. Having my circle of friends in my field to talk about issues and successes has not only been good for my and their mental health but also helped us survive the now two economic downturns and changes that welcomed remote workers into the norm of the workforce. We have worked remotely for between five and twelve years each. We have all gotten to experience the benefits of remote work creating a work-life- balance. This has made many of us more connected to our families and friends and lowered stress. Not to mention that we have all helped each other with our job hunts and references. Community is an important part of developing work culture. Unfortunately, while business trends and laws adjust to this new norm in remote work, the workforce must learn to develop their community.
. If you enjoyed this content, like and subscribe. Also, if you are interested in consulting services, please reach out through my social media. Remember, remote is here to stay.
Many companies are still pushing the Return to Office or RTO as a method of dodging the WARN Act to violate workers’ rights. This tactic has continued since 2013 when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayers banned remote work with a mandatory RTO. This is detailed in the Forbes article by Goudreau (2021), where the then-CEO Mayer discusses (and I so hate this word) increasing workplace synergy as the reason for calling back remote workers. Many workers at that time were women and working parents who could not afford to return to the office and were forced to resign without unemployment benefits. This is the first example of leadership working to skirt the Warn Act, although, at the time, remote work wasn’t as pervasive as it is now.
Fast forward to today, and many companies are dealing with having low application turnouts and complaining that “no one wants to work anymore” due largely to return to office/ RTO policies and harsh hybrid policies. However, many, like me as consultants, have strict contracts that many HR companies overlook. Several companies are trying to bully remote workers by forcing RTO or forcing requirements not detailed in their contracts. For being in stand-up meetings not detailed as a requirement in their contracts on time zones three plus hours ahead (sorry, 6AM is not a reasonable time to want anyone to present in a meeting if they are consultants or researchers), trying to force duties outside of the worker’s skill set and contract, among other well-known methods to basically force someone to leave an organization. These tricks are so well known they are borderline cliché, and the media wonders why the workforce has developed a disloyalty and distrust of business leadership.
Although the laws are still trying to catch up to remote workers’ rights on the federal side, there are ways to advocate for yourself. Such as:
If you have a contract that details you are being hired only as a 100% remote worker, have a lawyer review. Often, companies that draft those contracts leave open-ended language to allow them to shift you to in-person work. However, ambiguity benefits the person who did not draft the contract. Be prepared to stand your ground and be sure to always have savings to obtain legal representation.
Remember that HR is not your friend. As HR reps are often trained in several aspects of employment benefits, we forget their job is to protect the company. My students often freak out when I point out that companies developed HR as a method of Union Busting, as people are less inclined to join a union if the company has a representative who is meant to help them. It drives home my husband’s saying, “Don’t trust the people you are not directly paying.”
If you have a documented disability, note in writing if you are being asked to return to the office or RTO for continued remote work because it is disability accommodation. Ensure a worker’s rights lawyer is in line and all items are in writing. The company can file against it, showing that it is an undue hardship, but it will be required to prove how it would be. Again, always make sure that you talk to a lawyer.
You can also petition to negotiate remote work. Point out if you have high performance, and include a lawyer in the process.
You can work to get your company to unionize if they are not already. This will create better negotiating power for you and your company to protect your rights.
You can always look for a company that respects your time and skills and is willing to have remote work.
In the end, sometimes the answer is no, and if you want and thrive in remote work, the best thing is to look elsewhere. Always know your workers’ rights and speak with local legal professionals to better help you protect yourself. Especially if you are a business owner or an independent contractor. If you enjoyed this content, like and subscribe. Also, if you are interested in consulting services, please reach out through my social media. Remember, the remote is here to stay.
So, it is common in both remote and in-person modalities that there are a lot of meetings that are just unnecessary. We have all dealt with this issue at one point or another. You may be dealing with this now. However, this need for constant needless meetings is a carry-on from in in-person-only-only modality.
Constant meetings that could or should be meetings are bygone concepts often used within in-person work to help people who have no quantifiable way to justify their employment to be seen. However, in the age of remote and hybrid work, there are easier ways to quantify your necessity in an organization. Such as:
Organizing Zoom meetings with leadership on quick status updates on your projects.
Make time with your manager to discuss contributions and where you can develop skills or find additional challenges to help you stand out.
Make time with team members to have a group Zoom lunch to socialize and see where there are opportunities for collaboration.
Keep logs of your work and projects and share them regularly with leadership to show your work, as some software systems that track work only track how many files you open per day instead of how many times you must open them per day. In project management, this sort of quantified tracking is important for CYOB (COVER YOUR OWN BUM) but can help show your skills.
This brings us back to the constant meetings that, in all honesty, could just be a well-detailed email. Or shorter meetings were broken up into multiple days just to show support on projects. The old-school methods of morning stand-up meetings can be broken down a bit more, so people have more room to get actual work done. That way, employees don’t feel like it’s Oprah giving away. These tips are as follows:
Make a clear agenda and allow people who are not pivotal to miss the meeting if they must.
Limit how many are held in a month and how long for all-hands meetings. These boundaries give more room to get actual work done.
Make pre-recorded videos of detailed emails to help those who learn auditorily and not visually. But be sure to make room for questions.
Give meetings with leadership so that if a company is keeping a ladder method of leadership instead of a flat one, this helps give leaders room to lead. If you are doing flat leadership or shared leadership meetings with each team, it is better so items that don’t apply to one group are not slowing down another.
These are great ways leaders and followers can address communication and meetings to keep flowing productively without stressing from meetings. If you enjoyed this content, like and subscribe. Also, if you are interested in consulting services, please reach out through my social media. Remember, the remote is here to stay.
So, one of the questions that came up in my dissertation focus groups and comes up a lot in consulting on leadership is the home life distractions. A lot of Bossware and leaders in remote work spend a lot of time trying to catch employees who have already completed their work trying to take their government 20-minute break and do a load of laundry or put food into a crock pot or air fryer, read a book, do some yoga, etc., during business hours.
Now I understand when leadership is upset about poor performance, that is a cause for concern when a team member is seeming distracted with other household things. But in most cases, it is more common to see team members and leaders take a couple minutes to rotate the laundry, order some groceries, and throw some food together. These little home chores are a form of self-care and have been studied to lower stress levels in the workplace and declutter the mind.
This tactic for stress relief is especially good for employees who work in a high emotional labor capacity and those who work in leadership. Especially those in leadership. We have all had a manager who was mad in front of us and not at us. This can become toxic in a remote workplace as remote workers deal with a totally different atmosphere and can become turned off to leadership if they must manage their managers’ emotions.
This concept becomes a toxic leadership trait when leaders are in “I am gonna get ya” mode. This is where a leader is more concerned with catching employees doing something they shouldn’t instead of being more concerned about the productivity and quality of the work being done. When, as leaders, we seek faults in our team members, we ignore the achievements of our team. This neglect can bring morale down and ruin the organizational culture in remote work. When we learn to nurture and help our teams grow as staff members, we grow as leaders. If all we look for is weeds in the garden, we ignore the flowers. This is a typical concept when studying x and y theory leadership.
So, the lesson today is for leaders and followers to take breaks. Remember self-care and break up the monotony with quick tasks in your home while remote to help decrease stress. If you enjoyed this content, like and subscribe. Also, if you are interested in consulting services, please reach out through my social media. Remember, remote is here to stay.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@WickedbofthewestWebsite: wickedbofthewestremoteconsulting.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/WickedBoftheWestBusinessConsultingInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/wickedbofthewestconsulting/Twitter: @SDEubankBlog: drstephaniebeardbaremoteresearch.orgLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-diana-eubank-dba/
With the influx of women being diagnosed later in life due to advancements in research on ADHD, we are now seeing new management methods. And not just for the management of symptoms but how, as managers, we can use these concepts to better help a diverse community of organizational teams. The Neurodivergent topic I want to tackle today is called ADHD RAGE.
ADHD rage can stem from untreated ADHD and what is called emotional dysregulation. This symptom needs to be addressed with a medical professional. However, ADHD rage is one aspect that every business professional has had to deal with, regardless of whether it is neurodivergent or not. And that’s when people interrupt or break one’s focus. We have all experienced it. In the office, this looks like being in a zone working on a consuming project, and someone comes up to you and starts talking to you. Or you are talking to a group or leading a meeting, and someone jumps in while you are speaking. It feels like Luna Lovegood from “Harry Potter” describes an idea fading behind our eyes. And this can trigger anger that would inspire William Shakespeare to write, “Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Scorn”.
In remote work, I have found it easier to put boundaries up and stay in my hyper focused to keep my productivity high. However, the interruptions come in the form of phone calls. Which can be rage-inducing, but there are ways to set boundaries to make sure that distractions are kept to a minimum and keep productivity high. However, these methods only really work well in remote work. For a lack of a better way to explain why these methods don’t work in person and hybrid methodologies is because well… the workplace is too peoplely.
Using Microsoft Teams to establish regular quiet time is helpful to create space to control the interruptions.
Setting your phone on silent after letting teams and those who may need you know you need space to get the work done.
Turing off notifications during quiet times.
This comes with the caveat of business communications of needing to know how your team prefers to be communicated with. An example of this can be found in the Forbes article, (Baskin, 2023); where it was studied that in remote workplaces there are clear statistical differences in preference of communication depending on generation. Which is part of why the old concepts in business to hire teams to revolve around managers instead of managers to revolve and evolve with their teams is a change in leadership we need. Toxic leadership concepts of managers needing to be in control and making teams bend to their communication tactics is not acceptable. It makes for high turnover in person and in remote modality. We can’t design workplace structures that mirror the 49ers and make a team revolve around the quarterback’s skills instead of a flexible quarterback that revolves around the talents of the whole team.
Using these methods can help create calm and more focus in the workplace remotely. Remote work has shown an increase in productivity and mental health benefits for those who know how to manage it. Once we learn better skills as leaders and followers, we can have a more inclusive work culture.
If you enjoyed this content like and subscribe. Also, if you are interested in consulting services please reach out through my social media. Remember remote is here to stay.
There is a concept called “Spoon theory,” and there is an excellent TED talk by Larner (2019) that discusses what spoon theory is (you can find the link in the work cited). As a layman and Wicked B, I refer to my spoon management as F’s I have to give on any topic. Spoon Theory or F Theory is where one has a select number of spoons or F’s to give to a person or subject. Those like me who are neurodivergent have fewer spoons or F’s to give per day than neurotypical people. So, it is easier to mismanage our F’s.
The concept is a good rule of thumb as a business leadership and followership principle related to burn-out prevention and stress reduction in the workplace. Administration operating with fewer spoons, like neurodivergent ones, will allow more delegation of issues and better long-term time management planning. This also helps to support the better mental health of the workforce.
I refer to my spoons as F’s because there are items that, in life and work, I just have no emotional bandwidth for. Like office gossip and office politics, that doesn’t directly affect me. That just makes the vibe for me. I have no F’s to give about the topic. Also, sweating small details that are not compliance concepts or incredibly detrimental to a project is not worth my Fs. It’s kind of like when you are planning a fancy Thanksgiving dinner and forget the napkin rings. You just fold the napkins instead. If people talk about it negatively, I have no F’s to give to that or into being upset with myself about forgetting napkin rings. It won’t make or break my event, and I have no control over other’s thoughts. This frees up my emotional energy to focus on bigger things like the hard work I put into my turkey and doing the turkey injections or Turkey Botox, as I call it. I care more that my friends and family are happy and healthy after eating my cooking during events like Thanksgiving/ Indigenous People’s Day to play to the metaphor.
Decreasing stress in leadership and the followership members of your workforce is key to keeping productivity high. Better-managed workplace stress reduces turnover and lowers workplace PTSD and workplace violence probability.
If you enjoyed this content, like and subscribe. Also, if you are interested in consulting services, please reach out through my social media. Remember, remote is here to stay.
After working for eleven years in a remote modality (which means I have been remote before; remote was cool), I get a lot of questions from friends, colleagues, faculty members, students, and online followers asking how do I stay productive? These questions grow when people learn of my Dyslexia and ADHD diagnosis. To be fair, it has been a long journey to get a diagnosis of ADHD, like many women in our 30’s, as we do not present the same way as men or boys. (Women and girls must emotionally mask symptoms to fit in as a natural defense mechanism). There are also helpful tools that I have gained from my work within the disabled community, nonprofit sectors, and the college educational sector. One of those tricks to helping to increase my motivation and productivity remotely is body doubling.
Body doubling, in a nutshell, is being able to double where you choose to work with one or more people in the room. This is further explained as a motivation tool (Washington, 2023) and how it helps workers and students function more effectively. For many ADHD people, it is the feeling of accountability as there are others in the room to give that vibe of people counting on you or people watching you.
For me, I do what is called audio processing (Gomez & Condon, 1999); in essence, I talk it out even when there is only me listening. I find it funny when working from home, and my husband hears me talking and goes, “Huh?” thinking I am talking to him. Although he is used to my symptoms and my imaginative responses of, “staff meeting, sorry.” Thinking out loud is a normal part of ADHD and Dyslexic adaptations to address complex information I am working with, especially in data analysis and qualitative results.
However, when working from home and it’s just me and the fur babies, especially post-COVID, I use the same method we use for the fur babies when no humans are home. I turn on the TV or leave an Amazon music station on. I am a wicked B of the West. I own that I need background sounds, so I trick myself into not being alone so that I have a faux body doubling.
Although it is a warning to people wanting to implement this trick for themselves. Please be sure to be in meetings to mute yourself. Sometimes, your musical stylings are not welcome. One of my mentors who recently passed had forgotten to mute himself using this skill and was singing Snoop Dog’s “Gin and Juice” and only realized everyone heard him because they all sang together the song’s hook. I have been caught belting Lin Manuel Miranda’s masterpiece “Hamilton” songs. Or, when singing with my kids while working, we sing Eminem and Dr Dre’s song, “Forgot About Dre,” as it has been a good tool with my son’s speech delay to help with the E sounds they used to get stuck on. The moral of the story if body doubling in whatever method works for you. Be sure your audience is suitable to your plans of audio processing and your ability to carry a tune.
I have had participants in my dissertation research detail getting into joint Microsoft Teams Meetings to help give a remote feeling of being back in the office to help spark more creative problem-solving. When they feel like they need to body double, they all get into a Teams meeting and chat together while they work. I find it a creative method for addressing social isolation that often affects remote workers.
These ADHD tools can be helpful for business leadership managing a remote and hybrid workforce but require more understanding and an evolution in organizational culture that welcomes new ways of thinking, along with a culture of inclusivity. We can’t afford as business leaders to not grow and change, which means tossing to the side old methods that don’t serve us anymore and embracing new ways to enhance the work experience.
If you enjoyed this content, like and subscribe. Also, if you are interested in consulting services, please reach out through my social media. Remember, remote is here to stay.
Gomez, R., & Condon, M. (1999). Central auditory processing ability in children with ADHD with and without learning disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 32(2), 150–158. https://doi.org/10.1177/002221949903200205
It is not a secret that toxic leadership has been linked to workplace PTSD and has been shown to inflame other mental health issues. This is evident when a workplace culture has over-explained employees who feel every decision they make must be presented to the Supreme Court.
These feelings of needing to document to the point of malicious compliance can increase symptoms of workplace PTSD & can have additional emotional health effects. Not to mention how this can affect your organizational culture in the long term. Organizational culture and the workforce sociologically have been studied and found to be like an evolving organism prone to grow and change as the outside world grows and changes. As the culture changes, we forget in a company to train our leadership so that they grow and evolve with the changing culture.
We see this in both remote work and in-person work. Leaders do not work to develop trust with their teams and thus refuse to give autonomy, which is part of what seasoned professionals enjoy about remote work. In my dissertation research, remote leaders who were only remote during COVID either enjoyed and embraced remote work or could not wait for in-person or hybrid to happen as they missed being able to use in-person management skills that, in truth, are displaying serious control issues as the root reason.
Letting go and developing trust with one’s team can transform leadership. This transformation can also have the added benefit of remote work, allowing more room for leadership to develop a work-life balance and lower stress that can inflame mental health concerns for leadership and followership. In the end, it really is about trust and communication.
If you enjoyed this content, like and subscribe. Also, if you are interested in consulting services, please reach out through my social media. Remember, remote is here to stay.
Dr. Stephanie Diana Eubank DBA Remote Team Research (AKA Dr. Bear) 