Suddenly Remote? Webinar Recap

Mary Halling

Mary is the Community Manager at MURAL. She's passionate about building relationships with people, especially if coffee and good food are involved. Only introduced to Design Thinking once starting at MURAL, she quickly bought in and believes human-centered design can be leveraged to affect positive change in the world.

Mark and Hailey introduced the 'Suddenly Remote?' webinar series and what we're aiming to do with it (TL;DR: help teams thrust into remote work reduce the amount of disruption faced, but also present short and sweet pieces of advice for anyone curious about remote work in general).

We're hosting these webinars to focus on helping teams who've had to suddenly pivot to working remotely get up to speed. In this first webinar, they presented a few different ways to approach tool selection for remote teams.

Think about: what tools help you communicate in real time, communicate asynchronously, share content, stay organized and think visually?

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In our second webinar, our gracious hosts talked about what to do in order to build a productive, trusting remote work culture. While tools are important to have and align around, we need to move beyond them and start talking about how we come together as a team. There are things you need to start doing to address immediate needs, and then you can transition to building a resilient culture around teamwork.

Think about: what can you do as an individual to contribute to a positive, supportive, inclusive and productive team culture?

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In our third and final webinar in the series, Mark & Hailey presented methods to make remote meetings awesome. From the beginning, they showed the importance of having cameras on during video calls, having someone share their screen, and sharing links to jump into a shared collaborative space (for us, that's a mural).

Think about: Beginning with desired outcomes, choose the appropriate methods, evaluate the agenda and iterate if needed, and invite only the relevant participants.