Building a Thriving Remote Work Culture with Irina Bgatova

Before the pandemic, remote work only made up 5% of total workdays. However, it has now become widespread for workers across all levels, ranging from entry-level employees to CEOs, to work from home for at least some part of the week. Given the absence of a shared physical workspace, what strategies can be used to effectively discover, encourage, and cultivate a productive work environment? In this episode, our guest Irina Bgatova shares valuable insights on the current state of work culture and offers practical tips for enhancing engagement, fostering collaboration, and preventing burnout in the workplace, particularly for remote teams. She also sheds light on the innovative platform called Weljo, which provides a unique solution for remote teams to build and maintain strong bonds. Join us as we delve into the world of remote work and explore ways to create a healthy and productive work environment. --- Listen to the podcast here: Building a Thriving Remote Work Culture with Irina Bgatova Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We’re at an interesting cultural moment, especially with respect to our work culture right now. People have put in most of the pandemic or the fear related to the pandemic behind them and now we’re trying to decide what to make of our work culture given that a lot of people have gotten used to remote work, some people have even moved to other cities or other places to work remotely, yet there are some leaders of organizations that are concerned about how to foster the team camaraderie and some are calling for bringing people back to the office or some kind of a hybrid type of schedule where we can still have that camaraderie. It is a challenge that a lot of us are trying to solve and how do you really still feel close and still feel connected to your teammates. My guest today, Irina Bgatova, is a product manager with Weljo, a platform that helps these remote organizations find ways to foster better work environments as well as bring your co-workers together. This represents one of the possible solutions that we may have in this particular cultural moment. --- Irina, welcome to the program. Oh, thank you very much, Stephen. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I’m excited. That is awesome, and so, first, let’s start, tell us a little bit about Weljo, about what your product does. Yes, of course. Weljo, it’s a platform for remote teams that helps with engagement, collaboration, and avoiding burnout. And, actually, it’s like challenges, it’s team challenges that every week, for example, a team can make meditations, workouts, or collaboration challenges that every day, they have short meetings for 15 minutes where they exchange their ideas, learn something new about each other. We believe this kind of solution can help people to just improve their team bonding during remote work because remote work, we understand that it has some disadvantages and we want to help with it. What do you think are like the key advantages and disadvantages of that, you know, working remotely, whether it be from home or whether it be some of these nomads that we see that have a job and then just kind of move around? Yes, of course. We’ve done a lot of research on this topic and I can say that people usually mention that the main advantage of remote work is that you work flexible. Sometimes, you can not only work but, I don’t know, wash your clothes in washing machine or just do something else. You can go outside to walk. You can, I don’t know, cook your food for your lunch. And it’s all advantages. But, disadvantages, that you’re in your home, sometimes, your family can be at home at the same time and they just can distract you. Or if you’re working in the kitchen, once I heard, the girl said that you’re working in kitchen and you’re sitting near the fridge and it’s very difficult to when you’re nervous don’t eat something from your fridge, just you’re thinking, “Oh, I bought something tasty yesterday,” and it’s such kind of things, it’s like disadvantages. And also that, sometimes, family can distract you, someone thinks that you are not working at all, that if you’re at home, it means that you’re home and somebody can come to you and something, but, sometimes, people who is alone, actually, they’re feeling more isolation, they started to feel more loneliness, a lot of cases of depression or just lack of communication. People started to be more close or just such kind of things, and all of these, unfortunately, goes to burnout. Well, I would say that it’s the main disadvantage of remote work, unfortunately. Yeah, it’s tough because I was commenting this, I think I mentioned this to about four different people in different settings over the course of this week, this past week, that, right now, we have a setup like where theoretically someone could go a month without leaving their house. If they’re working remotely, they get all their food delivered, everything ordered, delivered through Amazon. To me, it doesn’t feel like there’s any way that that’s really healthy. As much as we love that flexibility, there’s something kind of missing from it. And so one of the questions I always had is because right now, there are some people who are thinking the only way to tackle these problems is to go back, to go back to the old way, but there’s a lot of evidence that the old way of work wasn’t working either. And I remember the Gallup Employee Engagement Survey from 2019, the year before the pandemic, saying that only a little bit over a third of all employees, and this is in the US, I think the number globally was actually even a little bit lower than that, are actually truly engaged in their work and there’s a number of different factors for this. So, do you envision a setup for work as we kind of look through all these factors, the positives and negatives about remote work, a lot of other people’s ideas behind hybrid or shared workspaces or other kinds of ways to set it up, where we can have it be better than what it was before the pandemic and have better engagement and, as you mentioned, burnout is probably a really big factor in that? I would say that everyone needs something personal. Yeah, for someone, it works when you are working at home, that they are not distracted by something. For someone, it works going to, I don’t know, co-working, for example, and they are working from another place. For someone, café works the best because, I don’t know, their music and they’re focusing more listening to music. I think that all such kind of things, it starts from understanding of yourself, just to observe what works the best for me. For example, I can say that, for me, in the beginning of pandemic, that it was very hard to work from home because I’m a very distractible person. If my roommate at home and she is, I don’t know, free and I can talk to her, good, and I can’t work during this time. Or if I know there’s really something tasty in my refrigerator or if I understand that, oh, I don’t know that, I just can’t be fully focused, I try to do something else, not my work, and then I started to observe what works better, when I can focus, and I also noticed that I can work from home, yes, just more effectively during the time from four to eight. From 12 to four, my focus is not so good, like I’m an old person, and then I just started to notice that, I don’t know, that, sometimes, for me works co-working place. I can be focused too that I have this feeling that they are working and I need to work. And, sometimes, I just want to be home and, for me, it’s absolutely a good fit. And I can say that for my colleagues, yes, for someone works cafes as well, for someone home, for someone co-working, for someone hybrid type of work, for someone fully remote, someone can’t without communication and they try to invite their friends, for example, to work with them from their apartment. That really depends on different people. And I can say that it all starts from understanding yourself, what works better for me, but for it, you need to try all these options and just to choose and don’t try to criticize yourself, try to understand how to improve it or just what works better for you, try different options and choose. Now, do people’s different work preferences, I guess, like once we will figure all this stuff out, when you’re working in a close team, do they ever get in each other’s way? Like does there have to be some sort of a collaboration with your team members where there’s some of the work that you’re doing together or some of the meetings you’re having where you have to have a conversation and maybe compromise a little bit on, say, your preferred times, say, like, “Well 12 to 4, I’m never focused, but, at some point and some days of the week, I might need to do a little bit of this 12 to 14 time because so many of my other teammates have that and that’s when we’re going to have our brainstorming session”? Yes. I would say that, again, in this case, the best thing just understanding of yourself and just what works for you. That collaboration of things, I can say that, now, we have a lot of, I don’t know, different tool that can be helpful in this case, that we can, for example, that we are in Weljo just try to implement collaboration through challenges, you can do it not every day, you can set up more appropriate time for you, for example, for you, it works like 9 a.m., for me, I don’t know, another time, but if we are a big team that more, I would say, that any way that someone who has similar time more closer to you, he will be in your company in this case, or just maybe it’s not your company, it can be another company where you can exchange your experiences and ideas and knowledge. But I can say that, in this case, that it’s not like every day you’re doing something like this,...