McKenna Sweazey

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How To Win Friends And Manage Remotely

How do you manage a poor performer over Zoom? How do you casually deliver positive feedback via Slack? What's the most professional use of a gif? Management was hard enough pre-pandemic, and now, the difficulty in getting things done has dramatically increased. In face-to-face interactions, humans have thousands of indicators to tell them what the other party is thinking and how they are reacting. Resorting to purely digital communication obliterates these clues, stopping us from reading the subtle body language we've evolved to use in all interactions to become better leaders, kinder managers, and more effective cogs in the corporate machine. HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND MANAGE REMOTELY shares real-life examples, scientifically proven ideas, and distillations of tried-and-true business tenets—all mapped to a new virtual-first office. This book is a handbook—a step-by-step guide to common interactions in the workplace, using eight classic management examples: from digitizing your onboarding journey, to helping new recruits, to delivering useful feedback over video conference. Combining academic research and personal experiences across various companies, roles, and countries, this is a roadmap to get readers through the WFH (work from home) quagmire and help us all be more cognizant of others' perspectives in this brave new world. HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND MANAGE REMOTELY shows why expressing digital empathy is the most important factor in managing and working with others. Even as companies began going “back to normal,” it wasn't the normal that anyone knew pre-COVID-19. Two things are certain with this shift: First, we will never go back to “the way things were.” Second, we all must learn to live in a virtual workplace. If we are managers, that means we also need to know how to communicate with, motivate, and coach virtual teams. In the words of Dale Carnegie, how do you “win friends and influence people” in a virtual office?