We've all been reading a lot this week about working from home, managing remote workers, throwing our dog or cat off our desks, etc. I did read one good article that I can't find now (!) that said it's beneficial to actually CALL two people every evening and talk a while—not a conference call, not a question for a webinar. A conversation.   And, of course, any way you can electronically create those watercooler run-ins—Slack, Zoom, Google apps—do it. "Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions," Steve Jobs famously said. "You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say 'Wow,' and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas."   I have received a few good tips on working from home that I'd like to share. Thanks to SIIA's own Jenny Baranowski—who has magically and mostly invisibly run our CODiE Awards for many years—for the first five.   Connect on an IM platform. Many of us are al ...

Remote working continues to be a debatable issue. Many editorial departments for B2B publishers—Lexipol and Bobit Business Media’s Trucking Info to name a couple—are run without main offices, better to attract and retain the best writers. But other publishers—I recall Marijuana Business Daily—require some degree of coming to the office each week. In a fascinating and comprehensive SIPA webinar titled Remote Employees: When to Do It and How to Optimize the Arrangement last October, Heather Farley, COO of Access Intelligence, and Dan Fink, managing director of Money-Media, gave great insights on the work-ins and work-outs of remote work. One are where they agreed was on managers working remotely. Money-Media may be a bit more emphatic, but both executives see flaws in it. "Currently, our policy doesn't allow managers to be full-time remote when their team is located in a central office," Fink said. "We do allow managers to work part ...

In the SIPA webinar a couple weeks ago on managing remote working with Heather Farley, COO of Access Intelligence, and Dan Fink, managing director of Money-Media—see the whole SIPA webinar library here—they spoke about the importance of keeping employees engaged in meetings.

Towards the end of a fascinating and comprehensive webinar on Tuesday on remote working—after all the details of what makes a good remote-working relationship had been laid out—Heather Farley, COO of Access Intelligence, and Dan Fink, managing director of Money-Media, agreed on why all those details are worth doing.