Remote Work Productivity

Are you part of a real team? Or do you sometimes feel isolated, unclear, and disconnected, even though you're surrounded by colleagues? Early in my career, I naively believed that assembling a group of high performers automatically equated to a high-performing team. But reality proved otherwise. Instead of synergy, I witnessed friction. The team wasn’t meshing; it was like gears grinding without proper lubrication. Each high performer, while brilliant on their own, seemed to have their own agenda, often pulling in different directions. The energy and time spent on internal friction was enormous, and the anticipated results? Well, they remained just that – anticipated. It was a stark realization that a team's effectiveness isn't just about individual brilliance—it's about harmony, alignment, and collaboration. With our workplace becoming increasingly diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic this is no easy feat. So, in my quest to understand the nuances of high performing teams, I reached out to my friend Daria Rudnik. Daria is a Team Architect - specializing in engineering remote teams for sustainable growth. She shared 5 key insights that can make all the difference: 1. Define a Shared Goal ↳Why? A team truly forms when united by a shared goal that can only be achieved together, not just by adding up individual efforts, ↳How? Involve the team in setting a clear, measurable goal at the project's start. Regularly revisit and communicate this goal to keep everyone aligned and motivated. 2. Cultivate Personal Connections ↳Why? Personal connections hold a team together, boosting trust, support, and understanding for a more productive environment. ↳How? Begin meetings with a social check-in. Let team members share updates or feelings, enhancing connection and understanding. 3. Clear Communication ↳Why? It’s the backbone of a successful team, preventing misunderstandings and building trust. ↳How? Hold regular team meetings and check-ins. Ensure a safe environment for expressing thoughts and concerns. 4. Defined Roles and Responsibilities ↳Why? Clear roles prevent overlap and ensure task coverage, giving a sense of ownership and accountability. ↳How? Outline everyone’s roles at the project's start, ensuring understanding of individual contributions to overall goals. 5. Provide Regular Feedback and Recognition ↳Why? Feedback clarifies strengths and areas for improvement. Recognition boosts morale and motivation. ↳How? Hold regular, constructive feedback sessions. Publicly recognize and reward achievements. Remember, 'team' isn't just a noun—it's a verb. It requires ongoing effort and commitment to work at it, refine it, and nurture it. 👉 Want to supercharge your team's performance? Comment “TEAM” below to grab your FREE e-book and learn how to 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐦'𝐬 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 in just 90 days, courtesy of Daria.

AI isn't just a tool; it's becoming a teammate. A major field experiment with 776 professionals at Procter & Gamble, led by researchers from Harvard, Wharton, and Warwick, revealed something remarkable: Generative AI can replicate and even outperform human teamwork. Read the recently published paper here: In a real-world new product development challenge, professionals were assigned to one of four conditions: 1. Control Individuals without AI 2. Human Team R&D + Commercial without AI (+0.24 SD) 3. Individual + AI Working alone with GPT-4 (+0.37 SD) 4. AI-Augmented Team Human team + GPT-4 (+0.39 SD) Key findings: ⭐ Individuals with AI matched the output quality of traditional teams, with 16% less time spent. ⭐ AI helped non-experts perform like seasoned product developers. ⭐ It flattened functional silos: R&D and Commercial employees produced more balanced, cross-functional solutions. ⭐ It made work feel better: AI users reported higher excitement and energy and lower anxiety, even more so than many working in human-only teams. What does this mean for organizations? 💡 Rethink team structures. One AI-empowered individual can do the work of two and do it faster. 💡 Democratize expertise. AI is a boundary-spanning engine that reduces reliance on deep specialization. 💡 Invest in AI fluency. Prompting and AI collaboration skills are the new competitive edge. 💡 Double down on innovation. AI + team = highest chance of top-tier breakthrough ideas. This is not just productivity software. This is a redefinition of how work happens. AI is no longer the intern or the assistant. It’s showing up as a cybernetic teammate, enhancing performance, dissolving silos, and lifting morale. The future of work isn’t human vs. AI. The next step is human + AI + new ways of collaborating. Are you ready?

Are you using AI in the most productive way? Many people use AI for quick wins—like drafting emails or summarizing meetings. That’s good, but there’s a better way. Instead of just tossing tasks at AI, have a conversation with it. Delegate, don't abdicate. Here's what I mean:  ✔️ Good: Ask AI to conduct a search.  ✅ Better: Have AI do an in-depth review of studies, summarize key takeaways, and provide source links.  ✔️ Good: Use AI to draft an email or report.  ✅ Better: Write a rough version yourself, then tell AI what you don’t like about it so it can suggest improvements in the exact tone and style you need.  ✔️ Good: Ask AI to summarize a meeting.  ✅ Better: Have AI extract key action items, assign them to team members, and suggest next steps.  ✔️ Good: Use AI to brainstorm ideas.  ✅ Better: Give AI constraints like budget, audience, and timeline so it generates realistic, actionable ideas instead of generic ones. It’s not about replacing what you do—it’s about making space for your most valuable work. The stuff you do best! What’s another tip you'd suggest to improve the way we use AI? #productivity #success #bestadvice #davecrenshaw

Meetings aren’t for updates - they’re where your culture is being built… or broken. In distributed, remote, & hybrid teams, meetings are key moments where team members experience culture together. That makes every meeting a high-stakes opportunity. Yet most teams stay in default mode - using meetings for project updates instead of connection, ideation, debate, and culture-building. Fixing meeting overload isn’t just about having fewer Zooms. It’s about rewiring your communication norms: ✔️ Do we know when to communicate synchronously vs. asynchronously? ✔️ Are we using async tools that give transparency without constant live check-ins? ✔️ Have we aligned on our team values and expected behaviors? 💡 3 ways to reduce meetings and make the remaining ones count: 1️⃣ Co-create a Team Working Agreement. Before you can reinforce values, your team needs to define them. We’ve spent hundreds of hours helping teams do this - and have seen measurable gains in team effectiveness. Key components: ✔️ Shared team goals ✔️ Defining team member roles ✔️ Agreed-upon behaviors ✔️ Communication norms (sync vs. async) 2️⃣ Begin meetings with a connection moment. Relationships fuel trust and collaboration. Kick things off with a check-in like: “What gave you energy this week?” Or tailor it to the topic. In a recent meeting on decision-making norms, we asked: “Speed or certainty - which do you value more when making decisions, and why?” 3️⃣ Make team values part of the agenda. Create a ritual to recognize teammates for living into the team behaviors. Ask the question: “Where did we see our values or team agreements show up this week?” And check in on where could the team have done better. Culture doesn’t happen by accident - especially when your teams are spread across time zones, WFH setups, and multiple office sites. Your meetings can become a powerful tool to build culture with intention. Excerpt from the Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick

I've been working from home for 12 years and have fallen into all the common traps in the early days. Adding STRUCTURE to my workdays made a difference. The three things I suggest doing to stay on track when working remotely: 1) Pretend like you're going to the office and that you'll be with people. Do this by giving yourself enough time in the mornings to acclimate before work and getting dressed every day in work clothes. This way you're showing up in work mode, better prepared to tackle your tasks, collaborate with others virtually, and make a stronger distinction between when you're working vs. relaxing at home. 2) Focus every day on prioritizing the five tasks you'll complete, making everything else secondary and a nice to have. I make a list of five items in Google Keep daily to focus on what needs to be done in the short term and long term. This way I'm aware of what's important and high impact vs. filler tasks that might feel good to complete but don't account for much. 3) My structure is not your structure! How you get your work done is different than me and vice versa, so take my advice and adapt it to your workflow. 😘 😘 Maybe you make a list of three items you'll tackle in a day and every Friday you decide to work in your PJ's. My point is to add structure to your day in your own way that ensures your work week is productive, fulfilling, and helps you deliver on your responsibilities. Maybe you need more structure than me and decide to have every hour scheduled out, cool! Or you think my structure is uptight, that's fine too! Just don't wing it when working at home as it's a fast track to inefficiency, instead add structure to set yourself up for success every day. 🙏🏻 🙏🏻

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.

I'm excited to share my system for staying productive all day, every day. This system allowed me to sell over $100M in my B2B sales career, then build a 7 figure coaching business working an average of 40 hours/week. Most importantly, my nights and weekends are free to spend with my family. Here's are the 3 simple steps I take every single week: Step 1: Complete a Weekly Plan & Scorecard at the beginning of each week On Monday mornings (or Sunday evening), I print and fill out a Weekly Plan & Scorecard. On this document, I write down all the important tasks and action items I aspire to get done that week in no particular order. I then rank each task in order of priority, typically prioritizing RGA's (Revenue Generating Activities) for my business. I originally took this scorecard from a book called the 12 Week Year, then adapted it to include a "Rank" column, which allows me to prioritize each action item. Prioritizing the Action Items allows me to know where to start every day, and prevents me from getting overwhelmed. Step 2: Daily Task Blocking in Calendar Whitespace At the beginning of each weekday, I fill up all the whitespace on my calendar for that day with high priority tasks taken directly from the Weekly Plan & Scorecard. This ensures that the most important tasks for the week get done first and eliminates daily decision fatigue. The key is to put the specific tasks on your calendar so there's no empty space. If for some reason any tasks on the calendar don't get completed for that day, I move them to the next day in any open whitespace. Step 3: Weekly Scoring At the end of each week, I score my performance using the simple formula: Tasks Completed / Tasks Written Down = Score % My goal is to score 85% or higher each week, although admittedly there are many weeks where I fall short. If there are any tasks that didn't get completed that week, they get moved to the following week. I rinse and repeat this process every single week. This ensures that I SHOW UP every single day, and stay productive throughout the entire work week. Additional keys to success include: 1. Taking short breaks when you feel mentally drained. Stretching, a short walk, and standing desk do wonders to change your state. 2. Minimize the number of daily meetings on your calendar (4 or less is optimal) to stay focused and ensure you have enough whitespace to get deep work done. 3. Give yourself an hour lunch to break up the work day. Every day I have lunch with my wife, and that's also on the calendar. 4. Do one thing at a time 5. If you have an unproductive day, forgive yourself. Of course, this is all easier said than done... That's why next week, in our 2nd *Transformation Tuesday* LIVE training session, I'm going to walk you through exactly how to leverage The 12 Week Year (and Weekly Scorecard) to transform your productivity and your life. Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/gsPsq2XR Only 500 spots available due to Zoom webinar limit!

Anyone else suffer from meeting overload? It’s a big deal. Simply put too many meetings means less time available for actual work, plus constantly attending meetings can be mentally draining, and often they simply are not required to accomplish the agenda items. At the same time sometimes it’s unavoidable. No matter where you are in your career, here are a few ways that I tackle this topic so that I can be my best and hold myself accountable to how my time is spent. I take 15 minutes every Friday to look at the week ahead and what is on my calendar. I follow these tips to ensure what is on the calendar should be and that I’m prepared. It ensures that I have a relevant and focused communications approach, and enables me to focus on optimizing productivity, outcomes and impact. 1. Review the meeting agenda. If there’s no agenda I send an email asking for one so you know exactly what you need to prepare for, and can ensure your time is correctly prioritized. You may discover you’re actually not the correct person to even attend. If it’s your meeting, set an agenda because accountability goes both ways. 2. Define desired outcomes. What do you want/need from the meeting to enable you to move forward? Be clear about it with participants so you can work collaboratively towards the goal in the time allotted. 3. Confirm you need the meeting. Meetings should be used for difficult or complex discussions, relationship building, and other topics that can get lost in text-based exchanges. A lot of times though we schedule meetings that we don’t actually require a meeting to accomplish the task at hand. Give ourselves and others back time and get the work done without that meeting. 4. Shorten the meeting duration. Can you cut 15 minutes off your meeting? How about 5? I cut 15 minutes off some of my recurring meetings a month ago. That’s 3 hours back in a week I now have to redirect to high impact work. While you’re at it, do you even need all those recurring meetings? It’s never too early for a calendar spring cleaning. 5. Use meetings for discussion topics, not FYIs. I save a lot of time here. We don’t need to speak to go through FYIs (!) 6. Send a pre-read. The best meetings are when we all prepare for a meaningful conversation. If the topic is a meaty one, send a pre-read so participants arrive with a common foundation on the topic and you can all jump straight into the discussion and objectives at hand. 7. Decline a meeting. There’s nothing wrong with declining. Perhaps you’re not the right person to attend, or there is already another team member participating, or you don’t have bandwidth to prepare. Whatever the reason, saying no is ok. What actions do you take to ensure the meetings on your calendar are where you should spend your time? It’s a big topic that we can all benefit from, please share your tips in the comments ⤵️ #careertips #productivity #futureofwork

5 AI frameworks that save top performers 10+ hours every week I watched a CEO friend close his laptop at 2pm on Thursday. "Done for the day," he said. Six months ago? 8pm was normal. The difference? Not harder work. Smarter AI systems. PwC research shows: AI users see 4x productivity gains and earn 56% more. Here's what winners do differently: 1. The Brain Offload System - Turn repeating thoughts into AI prompts - Let AI handle small decisions - Save your focus for what matters most 2. The Batch Processing Method - Group similar AI tasks together - Use one knowledge base for all tools - Create prompts once, use them everywhere 3. The Tomorrow Prep Framework - Set AI to prepare what tomorrow-you needs - Train it on your best past work - Automate the setup tasks you hate 4. The Results-First Approach - Focus on outcomes, not process - Tell AI the goal, not just the steps - Review only the final product 5. The Connection System - Link your AI tools to work together - Build feedback loops between you and machines - Set up once, benefit daily 92% of businesses see real results from AI. But most use it randomly, not strategically. The difference isn't having AI tools. It's having an AI system. Which framework will you try first? ↓ Share below ♻️ Repost if this shifted your perspective 🔔 Follow Kabir Sehgal for more productivity insights

We just built a commercial grade RCT platform called MindMeld for humans and AI agents to collaborate in integrative workspaces. We then test drove it in a large-scale Marketing Field Experiment with surprising results. Notably, "Personality Pairing" between human and AI personalities improves output quality and Human-AI teams generate 60% greater productivity per worker. In the experiment: 🚩 2310 participants were randomly assigned to human-human and human-AI teams, with randomized AI personality traits. 🚩 The teams exchanged 183,691 messages, and created 63,656 image edits, 1,960,095 ad copy edits, and 10,375 AI-generated images while producing 11,138 ads for a large think tank. 🚩 Analysis of fine-grained communication, collaboration, and workflow logs revealed that collaborating with AI agents increased communication by 137% and allowed humans to focus 23% more on text and image content generation messaging and 20% less on direct text editing. Humans on Human-AI teams sent 23% fewer social messages, creating 60% greater productivity per worker and higher-quality ad copy. 🚩 In contrast, human-human teams produced higher-quality images, suggesting that AI agents require fine-tuning for multimodal workflows. 🚩 AI Personality Pairing Experiments revealed that AI traits can complement human personalities to enhance collaboration. For example, conscientious humans paired with open AI agents improved image quality, while extroverted humans paired with conscientious AI agents reduced the quality of text, images, and clicks. 🚩 In field tests of ad campaigns with ~5M impressions, ads with higher image quality produced by human collaborations and higher text quality produced by AI collaborations performed significantly better on click-through rate and cost per click metrics. As human collaborations produced better image quality and AI collaborations produced better text quality, ads created by human-AI teams performed similarly, overall, to those created by human-human teams. 🚩 Together, these results suggest AI agents can improve teamwork and productivity, especially when tuned to complement human traits. The paper, coauthored with Harang Ju, can be found in the link on the first comment below. We thank the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy for institutional support! As always, thoughts and comments highly encouraged! Wondering especially what Erik Brynjolfsson Edward McFowland III Iavor Bojinov John Horton Karim Lakhani Azeem Azhar Sendhil Mullainathan Nicole Immorlica Alessandro Acquisti Ethan Mollick Katy Milkman and others think!