LAUREL FARRER is a remote-friendly operations consultant and remote work advocate. She believes in “giving each worker the opportunity to choose the environment that inspires them best, no matter where that may be geographically.”

(https://www.laurelfarrer.com)

 


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Her tips for working remotely:

  • Work in the environments where you are most productive.
  • If you’re feeling stuck in one environment, try something different. For example, when Laurel needs extra motivation, she works somewhere public. Having people around can help you feel more driven.
  • Learn what you need to get your work done, and then craft a work style to meet your needs.
  • Update your management strategies. Don’t use traditional management strategies for a remote team.
  • Be intentional with your remote communication: create opportunities to share information with each other. Be articulate how and where you say/write things.
  • Create rituals to measure productivity: stand up meetings, retreats, etc.
  • Evaluate your workflows and processes regularly.
  • Be open and transparent.

 


Podcast production by Podcast Monster

Graphic design by Alfred Boland

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Original transcript

Lisette:  Welcome to the Collaboration Superpowers podcast. My name is Lisette and I interviewing people in companies doing great things remotely. Hello everybody and welcome to episode number one hundred and eighty seven, and before we get to the interview I just want to announce that my book is finally done and for sale on Amazon. Work together anywhere, a handbook on working remotely successfully for individuals and teams and managers. So head on over to collaborationsupperpowers.com/book and get your copy today. Today I am going to be interviewing Laurel Farrer, she is a remote friendly operations consultant and a remote work advocate, but before we get into the interview I want to give you guys this week’s one minute tip. This week’s tip comes straight from the interview and it’s something that I have been personally working on a lot myself lately and that is put boundaries on your work lifetime. As remote workers we can work any time anywhere but that doesn’t mean that we have to. So for example at 10 pm every night I put my phone aside and I don’t check emails or social media until after I have done my morning routine the next day, and I have noticed that it does give me greater peace of mind when I do that. So if you are feeling a bit overworked and overwhelmed and like you can’t seem to get enough of a break, put boundaries on your own time and see how it works for you. Okay that’s been this week’s one minute tip now let’s get on to the interview. Like I said before I am interviewing Laurel Farrer who is a remote friendly operations consultant and remote work advocate. She really believes in giving workers the opportunity to choose the environment that inspires them best no matter where that is geographically and she has great tips about how to be more in charge of your time, your tasks and your energy. So without further ado I give you Laurel Farrer. What does your virtual office look like? What do you need to get your work done?

 

Laurel Farrer:  That is a great question. I consider myself to be a bit of a hybrid between a digital nomad and a work from home. So my tools, my office is this my laptop, that is all. All of my work is cloud based, lots and lots of video calls and so it’s just me and my [Inaudible 02:50] book that’s it. So I like to, although I do work from home office and most of my time is spent at home I do like to unplug and drive to maybe a mountain top with a beautiful view or go to the library for the day or something I would like to just switch on my locations here and there. So it’s just me and my laptop, we just hang out and find a good Wi-Fi connection and get to work.

 

Lisette:  And are there certain tasks that you like to do in certain places, I mean do you take something like writing you do on top of the mountain or finding answers something, is there, there are certain things that you do in different locations?

 

Laurel Farrer:  Definitely yeah, so when am having a heavy video call day I will usually be in my office, my room, my office is a big sunroom so it’s got a lot of natural light and a good background so that’s usually where I spend my intensive collaboration and communication days. However if I want some deep heads space you are spot on. I will go drive somewhere where I am completely secluded and I will just hang out in my car and just write, and write and write since I don’t need connections for that. So yeah I just kind of depend, it depends on my mood, on what I need to get done. If I really need to be pushed to meet some deadlines I usually go to public that day because that, the engagement of people around me kind of keeps me focused on my work and pushes my productivity a little bit more than if am at home am a little bit more casual and a little bit more I feel like I am in more control of my schedule. So going in public pushes me a little bit, a little bit harder.

 

Lisette:  I find it very interesting that it’s not going in public with colleagues that are working on the same thing with you it’s just going in public that pushes it. That’s interesting.

 

Laurel Farrer:  I am very introverted, I do love social interaction, I love speaking with people but it’s really exhausting for me and so maybe that’s why subconsciously it pushes me to go further and to work faster is because it’s not a comfortable environment for me and really focused on getting work done so I can get out as soon as possible.

 

Lisette:  That is, I have the same thing, I also love people but I love being in my home office alone that is where I do my best.

 

Laurel Farrer:  Absolutely, exactly.

 

Lisette:  How long have you been working from is it from home or from anywhere, let’s say?

Laurel Farrer:  Yeah, you know this is my claim to fame right that I was a remote worker before it was cool, so I have been a remote worker for about twelve years now and I have loved every second of it but back in the day it took a lot of convincing, right. I had to, that was part of my, my pitch of selling my services was not just the services but also selling the work model of yes I can do this from home or you know I can get all the information that I need in an email or I can get all the Information from you in just one meeting a week and that was a huge hurdle that I had to overcome. The actual executive assistance services are operation services that I was providing, they didn’t care as much about it as me not being with them all day every day, so thankfully remote work has gained attraction, it’s much more popular now and I don’t have to explain what it is and sell it every single time I work with a new client.

 

Lisette:  Yeah, woohoo let’s say keep on going.

 

Laurel Farrer:  Hurray.

 

Lisette:  What was the reason that you wanted to go remote?

 

Laurel Farrer:  It just kind of happened, I started working for an event planning company that I was the operations manager for and it was a small business. It was an entrepreneur that she was working from her home and I was the first employee that was brought on and she said you know it doesn’t really make sense to invest in an office at  this point that’s a lot of overhead, I would like to keep expenses low, would you mind working from your home as well?  And I said sure that would be fine and that was it. So after, as I continued to work in that job and accept more clients I just kept working from home and it was a great match for me and my work style.

 

Lisette:  Would you ever go back to an office?

 

Laurel Farrer:  No. I actually do love being in an office environment, for the reasons that I said before. It’s very motivating for me, it’s an energetic environment and I feed off of that a lot, it’s why I find that I am, I love going to conferences, I love being in person. So I like to utilize that and capitalize on that occasionally but for every day it’s just, it’s a bad match for me and my work style. I can be so much more productive when I am home or in an environment of my choice that I can really control my environment and control my productivity so much more.

 

Lisette:  Yeah I am with you completely there, now I want to get into what you do because on your profile it says remote friendly operations consultant, and we talked about you advise companies ongoing remote, on being remote, tell us more about that, what does an operations consultant do?

 

Laurel Farrer:  Right. So I have been doing operations consulting for a lot of this time right, so I started as more of the executive assistance office management role and then it just kind of kept on growing from there. I became an operations consultant for startups and small business but in the past couple of years as remote work has been gaining attraction, I really just fell into this industry of remote work and had been writing and speaking a lot about how to make remote work, work and it’s something that I feel incredibly passionate about and so I have specialized my services to focus on companies becoming or strengthening themselves as remote friendly companies so that we can fuel this movement forward and help their operational work flows work in a distributed global environment. So that just means that I help them choose collaboration tools that they might need in order to work together as a team or it might mean that we, you know evaluate their work flows and processes and see how those are working virtually versus you know how they were as in office model before or whatever. We just help them make that transition because whether we like it or not remote work is different. It is different it’s not as simple as just walking away from the office and throwing away the key, it is different and requires new and updated management strategies and collaboration tools and communications styles. It requires a lot more intention and so that’s part of my job is to help managers recognize what those differences are and to update their work flows accordingly.

 

Lisette:  And why are companies moving, why are companies moving to remote work? I had too many thoughts at once. What I was going to say is a lot of managers really don’t like it, they are really hesitant, and they don’t want to go remote, so why are they doing it?

 

Laurel Farrer:  Yeah, well we see this all the time right, in the news we see big companies that are saying, no everybody come back, everybody come back and it’s a, I think a big part of that is because of the management strategies. We are trying to use traditional management strategies for this new model of work and they don’t match. So it’s, we just have to update our management strategies accordingly and again that requires a lot of intention and a lot of communication, style, updates, requires a lot of updates, but if we can match and use traditional styles of management in the office and remote friendly management styles for remote work it will work. It’s much, much better and much, it’s more seamless transition that way but we have to recognize remote work is different, it’s not just your location that’s different, it’s the entire collaboration process that is unique.

 

Lisette: Are there common challenges when people are going remote that you see over and over and over again, like people kind of make the same mistakes over and over again, like what are, and I see you as are shaking your head, so yes it looks like, what are those things that people struggle with in the beginning?

 

Laurel Farrer:  Yes definitely, communication is a big one. Communication and rituals. So communication, I will just start with that, is that gosh we are just so used to those spontaneous interactions, right, and that’s when we share information. So we bump into somebody in the hall and that triggers our memory of oh that’s right I owe you that report and that reminds me of this and we use those spontaneous interactions as… to fuel our memory and our schedules and to push information forward. So that is a big difference, we don’t have these spontaneous interactions in remote work, so again this is where that intention comes into play. We have to be much more intentional about where our information comes from. We have to be intentional about scheduling those reminders or scheduling those cross points to share information or to extend our sentences. You know there’s a lot of nonverbal communication that happens in an office that we don’t have virtually, so we have to be much more articulate in how we say things and where we say things, how we say things so that our messages conveyed primarily verbally or written depending on the medium, so yeah. That communication style and that intention you know developing these habits and creating these opportunities for communication that is a really, really big one, we can’t, it just takes a big transition from those companies to realize, oh I can’t just think about something until I see that person I have to write a Slack message or write an email or schedule a phone call with them. I have to be much more intentional and disciplined about, where and why and how things happen.

 

Lisette:  Yeah I can imagine, and to be fair communication, working together in an office is also an issue. I mean I haven’t heard a single company say like no, we communicate great like everything works totally fine. I have never heard that in person or remote. Remote it’s critical, in person you can get away with it, but remote you can’t. So and you also said rituals.

 

Laurel Farrer:  Yes rituals, so yeah, this is another big thing, this is why, to answer your question before, this is another reason why companies are hesitating to go remote because they feel like they have this loss of control they have this, loss of measurement, right, of productivity. So we are in an office when we see productivity we see productivity, we see people in the office, they are talking they are meeting, reports are being submitted, we are hearing the phones ring, we are using our senses to measure productivity. So we have to change that form of measurement to a new format and rituals are a really great way to do that in remote work. So we can schedule stand-up meetings. That’s a big reason why the agile model has gained so much attraction, right, it’s the set stand-up meeting is really great for remote workers to be able to measure productivity. What did you do yesterday, what are you doing today, what goals are you going to be accomplishing, what help do you need in accomplishing those goals? That helps us measure that productivity. So yeah, these rituals of meetings, retreats even you know consistent Slack messages, whatever these, these habits are in the culture of our company those help us now measure the productivity of our company. That’s a huge block for managers are hesitating to go remote as they feel like, how will I know if my, my workers are working. I won’t be able to see them in my office, I won’t know that they are working. So we just have to change the criteria of measuring that productivity to new formats.

 

Lisette:  And for management strategies like old versus new strategies I am wondering if you have an example that you can think of, something that an old strategy and something that’s new. I am putting you on the spot here, I know, I did, if you don’t have one it’s okay too, we will skip over it and, but if you can think of one am really curious because so many managers are struggling and they kind of know intuitively that they need to change but they are not quite sure where to start so I want to give them something tangible. Like okay, this was the old way of doing things and this is the new way of doing things.

 

Laurel Farrer:  Great. Well, I think an old way of doing things is how much we rely on cues right. So if we see our employee maybe having a bad day or not performing up to par we try to put the puzzle pieces together in an office. So we might stop by their cubicle, we might talk to some other people, some of their team members, we try to kind of sleuth our way to figuring out what is going on, and there’s nothing wrong with that it’s just a habit of tradition. In remote work there is no cubicle to stop by, we don’t have that benefit and there’s really not any opportunity to figure out what’s going on other than visiting their Facebook page maybe. So we have to update our methods and that is a big big jump in remote work is really a much much stronger verbal and written communication in distributed teams. So old management might be a little bit more subtle and a little bit more removed. We see that in you know hierarchical models that I have got the corner office the door is closed, don’t bother me just produce your results. So we see a lot more transparency in remote work models. They might still have a hierarchical model but we see them being much more open and communicative with their teams because of that if there is a problem we have to just talk about what’s going on. There’s no other option, we can’t figure it out, we can’t sleuth our way to the answer. We just have to be open about it and talk about it. So that is a big updated model of much more pure based relationships in, between managers and team members of, let’s talk about it. If there is a problem let’s talk, let’s be open about your salary and what it is and what my salary is. Let’s talk about your productivity, let’s talk about the results that I’m seeing that I would like to be improved or what would you like your job description to be? There’s just so much more transparency collaboration and open communication in remote management strategies.

 

Lisette:  That’s true, it does flatten the hierarchy just a little bit. I can imagine managers don’t like that. If you are motivated by status or power which is, which is possible, we all have different motivated, motivations. But if you are motivated by that then taking it down to the, to a less hierarchical level could be very confrontational.

 

Laurel Farrer:  Yeah and it’s a tough transition to make. This is why I exist, right, why my job exists as an operations consultant because if you just jump right from that traditional model into remote work model the default and what feels natural and safe is to micromanage like okay so I need to talk more, right. So am going to control more am going to ask what you’re doing at every minute of every day. Nope, it’s not about that, it’s about stepping back in your logistical role but stepping forward in your emotional role. How can I support you in what you are doing autonomously and independently?

 

Lisette:  Oh I love that. Stepping back in your logistical role and stepping forward in your emotional role. Totally different set of tools and personality types so I think for managers in order to do that.

 

Laurel Farrer:  Yes.

 

Lisette:  Oh interesting. So what are some of the, are there common tools that you see amongst all of your clients, that they are using is everybody using Slack. Does it vary a lot?

 

Laurel Farrer:  Yeah we are definitely seeing a standard, right we are seeing every team has a project management tool of some kind and that’s very diverse. That’s part of my job description as well is to figure out what project management tool is best for the personality and the work style of your team, of your company. What is going to work best for you specifically? So there’s a lot of options out there we see you know Asana and Trello and Jira and Base Camp. We see so many options. It’s just a matter of finding the right one to match for you but we do see that almost every single remote team uses a project management tool of some kind. I wish that I could say that there were more options for Slack not that I wish that against Slack but it’s pretty much monopolized the market. Every single remote team that I have ever encountered uses Slack religiously. So that, I think it’s become the new office, right? An office of a virtual team is where everybody hangout and talks about work and collaborates on projects and that is Slack. So I foresee, you know as remote work continues to evolve and progress we will definitely see some new tools coming up in the market but for now Slack is king, everybody uses Slack, and the long we stay in line Zoom is starting to monopolize the market as well, so.

 

Lisette:  Which is great, I think.

 

Laurel Farrer:  I know.

 

Lisette:  Because Skype is so terrible am like go Zoom.

 

Laurel Farrer:  I think I have had probably, six calls in the past, just the past week that I have been in Skype and every single one we have ended and hoped over to Zoom because it’s just so unreliable. So again we are seeing a lot of more platforms pop up for, especially internal video calls so we are seeing software like Sokoko and Work that place that are trying to unify all these tools and have one stop shopping for communication, project collaboration, video calls, everybody hanging out. They are trying to do all in one which is great if that’s a great match for your team, but it also important to remember that these tools are only going to be updated and have new competitors come up every single day I mean hours of my week. Every week are spent on researching all of the tools that are out there so that I can stay on top of my job and it’s becoming a pretty big time commitment every week because there’s just new tools all the time.

 

Lisette:  Yeah, which is great and bad at the same time because gone are the days when we all used.

 

Laurel Farrer:  Microsoft office.

 

Lisette:  Microsoft office suite, gone are those days, except for the larger companies. But I don’t know if you see this too but with larger companies I’m seeing they come and they take my workshop for example, they are tied down to the tools that IT makes them use and it’s usually some big enterprise tool like Microsoft office or Skype for business or something that everybody in the organization can use.

 

Laurel Farrer:  Right.

 

Lisette:  I don’t know if you have experience with this but do you talk to IT departments and as the operations consultant then say okay guys I know you love your Skype for business and it’s great that everybody has the same thing but can we update the toolset a little bit, I mean do you have to do that?

 

Laurel Farrer:  A lot of what I do in that circumstance is not so much the big brand, I don’t see that as much what I do see more are larger distributed companies creating internal tools, and that creates a new challenge, right a new little trick, because that means when you are onboarding new employees they have to learn the new tool every time. So that makes the on boarding process a lot more challenging and a lot more unique for each company. So that’s something that I have to talk to them about, is let’s try to make this as user friendly as possible and try to mimic the processes of tools that your employees already know so that this transition cab be a little bit more seamless, because if they are trying to learn their new job description, and learn how to work remotely and learn this internal system all at the same time that’s causing a huge roadblock for new employees to be able to transition into your culture well. So we want to make that transition as easy and natural and organic as possible.

 

Lisette:  Yeah I can imagine, and onboarding is definitely one of those areas where people especially remote, people think like okay you’re in, sink or swim and yeah. Probably a lot of training is necessary, I would think for on boarding.

 

Laurel Farrer:  It is, and especially, you know when you start a new job in an office you’ve got that comradery.  You have everybody around you, and you’ve got that anticipation of walking into the office and you’ve got you to know, your new clothes on, there’s a lot of, of you know, your senses are hard at work that day, you know. Just getting this big anticipation of I’m doing this am going to start my new job and there are all these people that are here cheering me on and it’s this big day, and it’s this big event, whereas, in a remote job it’s, you open your laptop then you think I hope this isn’t a scam that’s it, that’s your new job. You are in your pajamas and you are just saying well I mean I gave them my bank account information and my social security number I really hope that this is legit.

 

Lisette:  Right, right.

 

Laurel Farrer:  So that’s it. Another thing that I consult on is what can we do to make that on boarding process a little bit more intentional a little bit more exciting to give them that big day, that big anticipation, those feelings of excitement that will help their commitment in the long term that will help their brand loyalty, that will help the retention rate of the company, you know we need to really start this relationship on a good foot, how do we do that?

 

Lisette:  Yeah, now we have to say you know there’s been plenty of in-person jobs that I have had where I have shown up and they have shown me a desk and it doesn’t have a chair, it doesn’t have an external monitor and you just think oh no what have I signed up for? So even in-person it can be very demotivating.

 

Laurel Farrer:  Yeah, and what does that tell you? That tells you as an employee like ‘oh we don’t really care that you are here you are just another one of the drones,’ right, and in remote companies, you can send the same message of, oh is today your first day oh that’s right. Let’s get some paper work together for you and I don’t know I guess I will just do Slack and you can just introduce everybody there.

 

Lisette:  Here is our manual go read it.

 

Laurel Farrer:  Right exactly. So what can we do to make this stay a little bit more exciting and special? We can, you know, ship them a box full of branded items that they can use to deck out their office, and we can have a big group video call of everyone saying, ‘hey welcome we are excited to have you on the team or you know ABCD.’ There are things that we can do to recreate that same experience virtually.

 

Lisette:  Yeah, just has to be different. So wanted to go back a little bit to the tools and then we are reaching the end of the time. So I have got a couple of more questions but I’m curious about, you know a couple of years ago people were very hesitant to turn their videos on. Does that hesitancy still exist when you are helping people go remote, is it weird or is it becoming more normal?

 

Laurel Farrer:  I am always surprised by people’s reactions to impersonal communication. I think that’s the best I have been in remote work for longer recognized the importance if video calls, that we are able to connect as human beings much more easily in a video call than any other method. So we recognize the need and we all just say, yeah this is just part of the job we are going to turn on a video, that’s fine, and we are also going to be you know transparent and easy going like, dude if you are in your pajamas that’s cool whatever, like and you know we kind of turn it into this fun bonding experience that we all have in common. But I am, I am surprised by people that are coming into remote work that they think that remote work is about not having interaction with people ever. No I don’t want to ever be on a video call, I don’t ever want to go to an on-site event, I don’t want to you know have any communication or collaboration with people ever, they don’t even want to participate in Slack channels and I think that that is really doing themselves a disservice. Not only is that opening themselves up for isolation which is a huge problem in remote work but it is, they are removing themselves from the resources that they need to do their job well. So yeah I definitely encourage people to open up a little bit more and recognize that remote work is not about in office versus virtual. It’s not this competition, remote work and flexible work schedules is about designing the work environment that works for you, it’s not one or the other, it’s about understanding yourself more so that you can put yourself in an environment of any kind that fuels your motivation and helps you do your job better. So that might be in a coworking office, that might be in an actual office, that might be in a home office, that might be on a mountain top, wherever it is it’s just empowering the employee with the opportunity to choose the criteria around them to motivate them to do their job better.

 

Lisette:  Yeah and I think that that’s actually one of the things that make remote work very difficult is you have to know yourself really well, you have to know when you need a break and you have to know if you are pushing too hard and yeah if you are annoying to work with you have to know that too. The self-awareness that you need in order to be a good remote worker I think is maybe the most difficult part.

 

Laurel Farrer:  Definitely requires a huge level of self-management and self-awareness. The default that I always boil down to is are you in charge of your time, your tasks and your energy. If you are, if you are in control of those things then yes you can be a remote worker, you can be successful at this. If not you still can be but it’s going to take some work, it’s going to take some coaching, or mentoring and some intentional habit building but you need to be able to control those things. You need to be able to get yourself out of a distraction or a rabbit whole if you happen to you know, open up a Facebook page. You need to be able to meet deadlines on your own without external reminders or people in the office. You need to be able to find resources by yourself and problems solved by yourself if you are in Europe and and the rest of your team is west coast America, you can’t ask questions to them at that time so you need to be able to find information by yourself. So yeah it’s a much more, it requires a lot more independence a lot more productivity and so we need to update our self-management strategies as well.

 

Lisette:  Yeah it’s a fun journey but it’s a, it’s definitely a journey.

 

Laurel Farrer:     Yeah but then you can hear the people on the other side of it right, like all of us remote workers are saying no we could never get, never go back. It’s so great, so it is so great, it’s so, I advocate remote work for so many reasons not only for the individual but also for the company, for economies, I mean remote work is just has incredible ripple effects through every part of everybody’s life. We just have to figure out that transition, is that bridge between what has been happening in the business world for the past fifty to one hundred years and what is happening now, it’s not as organic and easy as everybody wants to think it is so we just need to come into this with intention and planning and just be aware that this is going to be a change and we are going to prepare ourselves for it.

 

Lisette:  Right, this is not sitting at home in our pajamas?

 

Laurel Farrer:  Yeah.

 

Lisette:  Yeah. As you can see we are above less…

 

Laurel Farrer:  It might be, don’t get me wrong.

 

Lisette:  Right it might be but, your benefits you’ve got to take care of but we can also be professionals.

 

Laurel Farrer:  Definitely

 

Lisette:  Please so a couple of more questions and one is what advice do you have for people who are just starting out? What would you advise them? Where would you start? There is a company that’s coming to you like hey we want to off our employees more flexibility, what are some of the first things that you ask them

 

Laurel Farrer:  Yeah and I think this replicates the conversation that we just had, right. The very first thing that would come out of my mouth is you’re going to need to work at this, you know it’s kind of a personal trainer. If you go to a gym and you say I want to have this amazing body, with no work whatsoever they are going to say this may not be the right fit for you. So it’s kind of the same thing that I would say right off the bat just burst the bubble just immediately. This is going to be hard, this is going to take intention, it going to take effort on all of your team members’ part. This is a group activity but if you are willing to do that and would make those sacrifices the other side of this is so great and everything in your company and in your team work will be better but you have got to be able to make, put the work in between here and there, and I think the same applies not only to managers and and businesses owners but also remote workers. I see this on a daily basis that these remote workers are scrolling Instagram and they say oh I want to work remotely, that looks amazing. So the next day they walk into work and they quit their job and they say I am going to be a digital nomad and then they come on to this Facebook group and they say, okay now what do I do?

 

Lisette:  Right or you are at the beach with your laptop and you’re thinking this isn’t as great as I thought it was going to be, like the sand is on the screen and there’s sand everywhere.

 

Laurel Farrer:  Exactly, and I have missed a deadline because my time zone change like ah! So yeah it’s a, we just need to recognize that this requires attention, it requires planning, it requires management, has a lot of requirements that we need to respect and we need to implement into our workflows. But if we respect that change then it’s great we just, we cannot take remote work granted and just think that it’s this easy natural convenient process.

 

Lisette:  Right. It’s not rocket science either, it’s just a whole bunch of little things, so.

 

Laurel Farrer:  Absolutely, absolutely. It’s matter of building a network with people that have been working remotely for longer. They can share those tips and tricks with you, you know utilize communities and resources it’s just a matter of thought sharing and you know sharing resources.

 

Lisette:  While on speaking of that, the last question is if people want to get in touch with you and know more about your services they need help going remote, how do they, where do they find you?

 

Laurel Farrer:  Yeah, well like I said I work with a lot of different remote work brands and distributed companies so I am, yeah I am a freelancer, that’s the nature of the business that I am always everywhere. So the most consistent place to find me is laurelfarrer.com and we will link to that in the show notes but that is, that’s my consistent that’s where I am and that’s the best way to get a hold of me no matter what project I am working on.

 

Lisette:  And you are also on Twitter and on LinkedIn as I found out I have been following you for a while so people if you just look up Laurel Farrer online you will find her.

 

Laurel Farrer:  Yes, I am the remote tip girl, I share a daily remote tip with my social media communities and have a lot fun doing it, so that’s a great way to get a hold of me as well.

 

Lisette:  Yeah and a great way to get a lot of tips, a daily tip, that’s a lot of work. I try to do a one minute for every podcast and sometimes am like ‘oh man I have done a hundred and eighty tips and am yeah,’ but there’s is always something.

 

Laurel Farrer:  You are running out of the tips, yeah there’s always something.

 

Lisette:  Always something. Thank you so much for spending your time.

 

Laurel Farrer:  Thank you, Lisette.

 

Lisette:  That was a tip chalk filled tipper, tip-filled interview, yeah. An interview chalk full of tips, that’s what I wanted to say. Thanks so much for listening, I hope you enjoyed that interview. If you like what you hear then leave us a review on either iTunes or Stitcher and if you want more great stories, tips, and tricks delivered straight to the inbox of wherever you are, well then sign up on Collaborations Superpowers newsletter. Every other week we send you all the best stuff on remote working. So head to collaborationsuperpowers.com/newsletter, and just a reminder that the book work together anywhere is finally ready so head on over to collaborationsuperpowers.com/book to get your copy today. A huge thanks to our awesome podcast producer Nick Jaworski he is the one that makes us sound so pro, you can hire him to make you star at podcastmonster.com and another big thanks to our dazzling designer Alfred Boland. He is the one that makes us shine so bright, you can hire him to make you look cool at thelondon.nl. Alright everybody until next time, let’s take charge of our time, tasks and energy and be powerful.

 

 

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