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Friday Faves is our weekly blog series highlighting a few select pieces from the REG team’s reading lists. You can catch up on past Friday Faves on the archive. 

Happy new year, and welcome back to our Friday Faves for another year! It’s been a wild start to 2021 in terms of world news and current affairs, while covid continues to wreak havoc as well. Even in places where cases remain low like Australia, it steadfastly refuses to fade into the sunset.

While we recover from a very different festive season thanks to covid and get ready to get back into the swing of our regular Friday Faves posts, we thought we’d take a look back on our top posts from 2020. It was an unusual year to be sure, and as we head towards a year since SARS-COV-2 turned our world on its head, we can reflect over the past year to help us prepare for year 2 of life in a pandemic, and think ahead to what that might mean for organisations – and ourselves – in 2021.

Have you set any personal or business goals for 2021? If you’re willing to share, we’d love to hear them! Let us know in the comments or on social media. If you haven’t, though – maybe some of the thoughts and pieces shared in our top 5 Friday Faves posts from 2020 will inspire your thinking. Here’s to a great 2021!

Working remotely – reframing reality

Before diving into our top 5 Friday Faves posts from 2020, we thought it useful to revisit our number 1 post from 2020, which we shared just after we all went into lockdown (posted 18 March 2020).

We shared the top risks for going ‘suddenly remote’, based on a study from the UK:

• A reduction in sense of community;

• Lack of social interaction;

• Reduced knowledge transfer;

• Harder to learn from others; and

• Loss of informal collaboration.

We shared our perspective as a fully distributed team, that this would not be ‘remote work as usual’:

But this time, it will be different. This is something more that includes levels of anxiety, concern for others, and people unfamiliar with being physically dislocated from colleagues. … This is not just working remotely, this is now expecting people to work in environments that are typically set up for other uses. Not everyone will have a home office or study – or if they do, they may need to share it with others. And if you have children, schools are closed, adding another layer of distraction.

As we saw through 2020, many organisations who did not already have collaboration and communication tools to connect the employees at scale were able to broaden access to the necessary tools, speed up existing rollout plans or implement brand new technologies to help employees do their jobs and, importantly, engage with each other and with the organisation from wherever they were. For many organisations – and for many people – this was seen as a stop-gap, an emergency response to a crisis, and not necessarily a new way of work life. As we approach year 2 of the pandemic, organisations will be well-served by focusing on how to get more from their technologies by taking an intentional approach to redesigning work for new technologies and future ways of working.

Read: https://rippleffectgroup.com/working-remotely-reframing-reality/

24 April 2020

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Our most viewed Friday Faves post for 2020 was posted on 24 April, and we were focused on distractions, implications and cognitive surplus; delivery by dog; and that feeling called ‘blah’. Notable in our Friday Fives links were articles looking at how far-right extremist groups were behind protests against covid restrictions and social media being used to spread pandemic misinformation.

Read: https://rippleffectgroup.com/friday-faves-what-were-reading-this-week-147/

11 September 2020

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This week, our key pieces were on listening to the sounds of the office from home, whether watercooler moments can work when you’re remote, and why every year (but especially 2020) feels like the longest year ever. Amongst the interesting links in our Friday Fives, in September we were looking at ‘Trump v China’ and ‘Australia v Facebook & Google’.

Read: https://rippleffectgroup.com/friday-faves-what-were-reading-this-week-167/

17 April 2020

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In our third most popular post, we took a look at articles on an elegy for cash, the technology we might never replace; the parents are not alright; and pandemic fashion. We also sang the praises of nurses (and everyone in healthcare) with our cartoon of the week, while our Work Friday Fives were all articles focused on remote work and the ‘end’ of the office (at least as we knew it).

Read: https://rippleffectgroup.com/friday-faves-what-were-reading-this-week-146/

12 June 2020

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This week, we honed in on work with articles on the state of community management 2020; 8 ways to build an amazing online workspace; and 5 cognitive biases and how to avoid them. As Black Lives Matter protests continued around the world, a number of our Friday Fives looked at protest and outrage, racism, bias, and discrimination.

Read: https://rippleffectgroup.com/friday-faves-what-were-reading-this-week-154/

1 May 2020

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Rounding out our top 5 Friday Faves for 2020, we go back to the beginning of May where we had a mixed bag of pieces, sharing thoughts on articles about isolation, fear and time; Bill Gates’ views on moving forward; and why Mormonism is the best religion for cyborgs.

In amongst the other great links in our Friday Fives, one article title still stands out immediately: “5 changes to expect in the workplace after COVID-19”. After covid. From May last year. How quaint!

We may not be anywhere near the after covid just yet, especially globally, but it is a brand new year. While it will undoubtedly come with its own challenges (just look at how it’s started!), we come into it armed with the experience of 2020 and the knowledge we’ve gained, giving us wisdom for moving ahead that we did not have this time last year. Here’s to a better and brighter year in 2021 for all of us, personally and professionally, and for our businesses and organisations as well.

Read: https://rippleffectgroup.com/friday-faves-what-were-reading-this-week-148/

We’ll be back next week to kick off our Friday Faves for 2021 – see you then!