Beat Buhlmann is the General Manager for EMEA at Evernote. He has also written books about virtual team management, digital transformation, and his latest book is about personal development. It’s called “Become the CEO of Your Own Life!“. In this interview, he explains his technique for creating your own work life balance and shares experiences and tips for hiring and managing remote teams. For more stories, visit www.CollaborationSuperpowers.com.

For ages, people have been working from 9 to 5. Every day we commute - some of us for more than an hour each way - to lifeless grey offices, many filled with cubicles. I call them “day prisons”. But of course, they didn’t used to be day prisons. We used to have to go to a specific location in order to access the tools and information needed to do our work. But mobile devices, centralized data, and all kinds of apps and software are helping us stay connected to each other no matter where we are. And the ability to access information from anywhere is making the traditional 9-to-5 grind unnecessary for many of us. For more stories, visit www.CollaborationSuperpowers.com.

In the "Up and coming tools" series, I highlight a few tools that looked particularly interesting and great for the remote community. This week's episode features Collaboration Supercards, Dr. Clue's treasure hunts, Jurgen Appelo's Personal Maps, Linoit, and Bonusly. For more stories, visit www.CollaborationSuperpowers.com.

Scott Hoppe is the Founder of www.HoppeTax.com, a 100% distributed accounting firm that files tax returns for businesses in the US. He left the traditional "up or out" accounting world to start a company that valued happiness as well as profit. In this interview, he gives us his tips on finding your purpose, hiring people with the right mindset, and the tools his company uses to do great things. For more stories, visit www.CollaborationSuperpowers.com. 

Every once in a while, life delivers us bad times. I'm going through one of those bad times right now and through reading self help books and talking to friends, I've collected a long list of tips for great self care. These tips are not specific to remote workers, but instead, they are for everyone. I hope they are useful for you. For more stories, visit www.CollaborationSuperpowers.com.

Peter Smit is the Founder at Collabogence, a company that helps measure how well your teams are collaborating and how productive they are. They use big data analytics to measure collaborative performance before and after a company makes a major transition (for example, going from colocated to remote). We discuss where leadership is failing, the importance of social networks, and the value of searching for more information. For more stories, visit CollaborationSuperpowers.com.

We often talk about all the advantages video has for remote teams with respect to increasing engagement in meetings, creating camaraderie, building trust... I could go on and on. But in today's episode, I want to focus on some of the disadvantages of using video conferencing. For more stories, visit www.CollaborationSuperpowers.com.

The number one roadblock I heard time and again in my interviews when asked why companies were not going remote was shockingly swift and direct: Management! Managers simply fear the loss of control. They don’t trust that people will work without oversight. In this episode, we explore the things that make for a good remote team manager. For more stories, visit www.CollaborationSuperpowers.com. 

It’s not uncommon for colleagues in an office to get together and work on a project. And remote teams can do this too! More and more online tools are being built specifically for simulating an office (co-working) environment: Google Hangouts, Zoom, Sococo, and PukkaTeam, just to name a few. For more stories, visit www.CollaborationSuperpowers.com.

Nenad Maljkovic is a cultural creative, network entrepreneur, and permaculture advisor who work works with a global organization of remote volunteers. He also wrote the Virtual Team Quick Guide which outlines a series of principles for virtual working. We talk about what they struggle with and how they make remote working more comfortable for themselves. For more stories, visit www.CollaborationSuperpowers.com.