INTRODUCING THE
Reimagining Remote Virtual Studio
The most comprehensive, people-centered program for leading a virtual work experience that builds trust, belonging, and engagement.
Program dates: October 25 to November 21, 2020
No spots remaining for our fall 2020 session!
There are no spots remaining in our fall 2020 session, but...
Who this program is for:
Organizational leaders
who want to build a sustainable and successful remote or hybrid workplace that unleashes the fullness of your people and business potential
Team leaders
who want to build high-performing, collaborative remote teams where team members feel trusted, valued, and engaged
HR leaders
who want to develop social and cultural cohesion, and a shared organizational identity that inspires all members of your workforce to do their best work
Community managers
looking to cultivate an inclusive and dynamic virtual community where people trust that they can show up as themselves and are eager to participate
Remote work isn’t a moment, it’s a marathon
The pandemic thrust many of us into remote work — and widespread work-from-home arrangements are predicted to become permanent over the long-haul.
While many organizations made due with a rapid remote transition, there’s a realization that their current remote approach isn’t sustainable and pitfalls are emerging. It’s becoming clear that we need to think more broadly about how to lead people forward into a lasting remote future.
The longer people spend taking endless videoconference calls at the kitchen table, struggling to set healthy boundaries between work and non-work, and feeling isolated, disenfranchised, and unhappy, the more obvious it is that workers lose far more than physical space when they lose their office. Many are losing their sense of human connection to colleagues, to organizational culture and norms, and to common purpose and their performance is stagnating or deteriorating accordingly.
Learn how to lead your people forward into a lasting, more human remote future
Simply attempting to replicate online virtually what happened naturally in on premises settings is unlikely to be a winning or complete strategy. Working from home in an effective and enduring way goes beyond just giving employees a laptop and a Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Basecamp account.
Organizations and leaders need to reimagine, re-architect, and rethink for remote work. And if they really want to cultivate a thriving remote future, it’s not about technology or tools. It’s about intentionally supporting people, community, and connection so that human potential is unleashed in the virtual work world.
The Reimagining Remote Virtual Studio will equip you with practical and pragmatic strategies, frameworks, and approaches to do just that so you can effectively lead your team forward into a more human remote future that your people want to be a part of. You’ll develop a foundational, practical understanding of the most transformative people-centric topics when it comes to leading sustainable and highly productive virtual work.
4 weeks, 4 transformative topics
Program dates: October 25 - November 21, 2020
Over the course of the synchronous four week online program, you’ll focus on four transformative topics broken into modules so you can quickly learn and apply practical insights essential to moving your organization toward thriving virtual and hybrid ways of working.
MODULE 1: Building Belonging
MODULE 2: Aligning on Shared Purpose and Culture
MODULE 3: Crafting Trusted Communications
MODULE 4: Mastering Meaningful Meetings
You're in the right place, whether you're...
- Struggling to maintain engagement, alignment, and community as your team has switched to remote
- Exhausted by the endless virtual meetings that lack attention, human connection, clear purpose, and momentum
- Frustrated by communication hurdles of endless chat messages, deluges of emails, and the challenges of synchronizing with colleagues in different time zones
- Feeling like it’s a challenge to connect human-to-human across digital devices and engage in honest, vulnerable, crucial conversations
By the end of this 4-week interactive online program,
you will have learned practical ways to:
Propel
an organization-wide shift toward lasting remote- and people-first ways of working
Activate
a diverse and inclusive, decentralized community aligned around your organization’s purpose
Create
trusted, brave spaces for challenging, human conversations in virtual environments
Build
new habits of practice that boost trust and increase your workforce’s sense of belonging and engagement
Communicate
with clarity, purpose, and care to bolster community and productivity
Reduce
unproductive meetings and better leverage a workforce spread over multiple time zones
Design
engaging online gatherings that ignite organizational culture and inspire your people
But above all else...
You’ll learn how to implement a pragmatic and elastic way forward and unite your virtual or hybrid team with tried-and-tested principles and practices intended to compensate or avoid the core limitations of working remotely.
You’ll learn practical frameworks and habits to fully leverage the flexibility that remote can offer so that you can lead virtual work in a way that cultivates human connection and unleashes the transformative power of human potential.
Our learning model
- 4-week interactive online learning experience
- 4 core themes + digital toolkits that focus on practical and pragmatic concepts you can apply in your own context
- Enrollment intentionally limited to a small cohort for an intimate learning experience
- 3 hours/week actively participating in LIVE, immersive virtual group sessions led by professional facilitators
- 5 hours/week on average engaging in asynchronous work to deepen your learning with sense-making, internalizing, and applying
- Dedicated, private Slack community to support asynchronous learning and connection
What's inside the Reimagining Remote Virtual Studio...
Module 1: Building Belonging
Working together virtually can be energizing, empowering, and highly productive. It can also give rise to a more diverse and tightly interconnected community whose members are better engaged than when they are co-located. At the core of these seemingly magical remote and hybrid teams is a strong sense of belonging.
A strong sense of belonging helps both people and organizations thrive. Building this is one of the most important responsibilities of a leader and one of their most powerful levers. Workplace belonging leads to a 56% increase in job performance, a 50% reduction in turnover risk, and a 75% decrease in employee sick days.
In this module, we’ll focus on how to build trusted virtual spaces that acknowledge each and everyone’s unique, personal identities so we can create the human connection that allows for empathy, compassion, and a sense of belonging that all participants can enroll in. You’ll learn how to hold space to activate diversity on a consistent basis — to celebrate and harness differences while also centering on our similarities.
- Differentiate between belonging and fitting in, and how to do so with your team. By separating the two, you’ll see how connection, innovation, and creativity can emerge spectacularly in virtual settings.
- Learn how to acknowledge identity politics while also including everyone in the minority AND the majority. We’ll first look at our identities in the ADDRESS framework and go beyond this to build elastic frameworks for inclusion that make sense for your workplace and that welcome all members of your team.
- Co-create shared agreements with your team that level the playing field for how to engage with one another. These build expectations for a more inclusive and engaged team and establish the guardrails and safety nets that allow people to be their authentic selves and move up to a posture of full contribution.
- Celebrate, include, and activate the diversity within your team with The Avengers’ Philosophy. This new outlook will create the conditions to leverage the smartest person in the room: the room itself.
Module 2: Aligning on Shared Purpose and Culture
Especially in times of uncertainty, having a shared purpose to rally around is essential to setting a North Star for your organization. It anchors, unifies, and helps enroll your team. From there, you can co-create and carry out a handful of clear, consistent priorities, and more intentionally define culture, i.e. how you will effectively move forward together.
This clarity and alignment is essential to empowering and unleashing high-performing teams. It’s also the kindling that ignites a cohesive group identity, one that is strengthened by the diversity of your organization
In this module, we’ll explore how to translate purpose into a simple, adaptable set of strategic priorities that shines a light on where your team is at and gives clarity to how you will effectively move forward together.
- Get clear about and consistent in communicating your strategic priorities. Effectively planning amidst uncertainty is one of the most difficult challenges facing leaders today. Leaders need simple and adaptable frameworks to simplify strategic planning so that their effort is meaningful.
- Distinguish between community and culture so you can strengthen both. We often use the words community and culture interchangeably, and while they’re related, they’re not the same.
- Know the key differences when leading for innovation vs. mastery. Knowing, emphasizing, and practicing the best fit leadership for each context can help you lead more effectively and better set your teams up for success.
- Make shifts from compliance to autonomy. Reduce micro-management and empower team members to do their best work.
Module 3: Crafting Trusted Communications
Communication and community are strongly related. Trusted communication is the key that activates and stitches a community together and builds organizational resilience. Yet, while everything communicates, most organizational communication is unclear, uninspiring, underwhelming, and unintentional.
Many organizations are stuck on internal communications autopilot. While some workplaces have updated their approach to adapt to the pandemic and a rapid shift to remote work, they’re now finding themselves stuck in new default settings that aren’t serving their purpose or their people in a sustained remote or hybrid context underpinned by ongoing uncertainty.
In this Module you’ll take control of the way you approach your organization’s internal communications so you can activate and engage a resilient remote workforce. Learn practical, Trust-Centered principles, approaches, and frameworks that put people and trusting relations at the centre of your communications and remote or hybrid community.
- Put people first by applying human-centered design principles. We often put tools and tech above personal communication and wonder why we feel disconnected. We’ll flip this so you can help your virtual or hybrid teams feel connected like a co-located team.
- Switch from lagging to leading communication. This switch helps you be more responsive, drive change more efficiently, and get results quicker.
- Set intentional communications patterns within your organization. By relying on pattern-matching and co-creating culture, you’ll be able to communicate more accurately and quickly within your community and break through the default approaches that are no longer serving your organization.
- Learn the fastest way to improve feedback culture. Feedback is an essential tool for continuous development. It also has a great influence on team dynamics. Improving feedback culture can have big payoffs for psychological safety, cooperation, accountability, and innovation.
Module 4: Mastering Meaningful Meetings
Meetings are expensive. Given the amount of time, attention, and money that organizations spend on meetings, improving their effectiveness should be an important goal. And it’s one that can be achieved with some thoughtful design, and in some ways it’s easier to do so as we go remote.
Especially with Zoom fatigue kicking in and the sheer overwhelm of non-stop remote meetings, it may be difficult to imagine meetings that people look forward to, are engaged at, and leave feeling energized instead of having their soul removed from their body.
In this final module we’ll pull back the curtain and share our best practices and tried-and-true professional facilitation methods with you so that you can lead high-value remote meetings that enable connection, communication, collaboration, and co-creation. A nice side-effect is that your in-person meeting facilitation game will improve too!
- Learn our ADEPT Facilitation framework, a powerful lens to design and lead relevant, high participation, collaborative gatherings. We’ll break down how we’ve used this practical framework throughout the entire Studio to build an awesome, engaging experience.
- Use the “Penn & Teller Method” to ensure you can be fully present AND make the most of the technology while minimizing potential glitches. Running meetings can be stressful, but this method inspired by magicians will dazzle participants and keep your own stress levels down.
- Re-evaluate meetings in general. You’ll discover new ways of thinking about and scheduling meetings, as well as contemplating whether they need to exist or not.
- Convene and close with momentum. Learn ways to convene so participants are eager to arrive on time and engage AND ways to close so that you are guaranteed to end your session on an up.
There are no spots remaining in our fall 2020 session, but...
100% Money-back Guarantee
We’re so confident in the value you’ll receive from engaging in this program that if you have fully participated in the Virtual Studio and you still feel like it wasn’t effective, email us at refunds@spotlighttrust.com and we’ll happily refund 100% of your registration fee.
Don't take our word for it...
Here’s what leaders who have participated in some of our other virtual learning programs have had to say about their experience…
Still have questions?
The program runs from Sunday, October 25 to Saturday, November 21, 2020.
You can download the full schedule for the Virtual Studio in PDF format here.
Reimagining Remote is a live, online, synchronous learning studio, not a passive massive online open course.
On a weekly basis, we’ll gather together on Zoom from 10 am to 1 pm PT (convert to your time zone here) for a live interactive workshop hosted on Zoom that goes deeper into that week’s topic and toolkit.
These sessions are about participating and learning together as a cohort, so please come prepared to engage and contribute.
Please note that these live sessions will not be recorded.
Live synchronous sessions happen every Thursday throughout the program from 10 am to 1 pm PT (click here to convert to your time zone).
During these sessions, we’ll all jump on a Zoom call together to go deeper into the content for that week and learn from one another.
Here are the dates to mark in your calendar:
- Thursday, October 29, 2020 at 10 am PT
- Thursday, November 5 at 10 am PT
- Thursday, November 12 at 10 am PT
- Thursday, November 19 at 10 am PT
You can download the full schedule for the Virtual Studio in PDF format here.
It will range from 30 minutes to 3 hours.
Participants will spend roughly 8 hours per week on average working through the program. This will be spread out between 3 hours of live group sessions and ~5 hours asynchronously diving into the weekly toolkits, engaging in Slack conversations, and applying their learnings in their own contexts. We’re not promising easy answers or silver bullets, but if you show up and do the work consistently it will pay dividends.
You can download the full schedule for the Virtual Studio in PDF format here.
This is a 4 week interactive, cohort-based session. The other members of the Virtual Studio are counting on you and every other student to be fully present. You can download the full schedule for the Virtual Studio in PDF format here.
The short version is that we ask that each member of the program to allocate the time to take this process as seriously as the rest of us.
The program is fully online. No need to travel or gather in person.
Set-up is simple. You’ll need:
- A stable high-speed internet connection
- Preferably a desktop/laptop connection
- A free Zoom meeting client installed
- A quiet space so you can fully engage in the live sessions (headphones might help!)
- Ability to type into Zoom’s built-in chat during live sessions
- To test both your audio and video to ensure they work before the Virtual Studio begins
We’ll also be using Slack. We’ll send you a link to join the Slack community the weekend before the Virtual Studio begins.
For more information on Zoom, check out tech tech section of our Live Events Guide.
If you require an accommodation or service to fully participate, please contact us at hello@spotlighttrust.com at least 10 days prior to the start of Virtual Studio on October 25, 2020. If an accommodation would be helpful and the lead time is less than 10 days, please let us know so we can make every effort to ensure the accommodation is available.
Creating a successful live event is a shared responsibility of all those involved. Spotlight Trust™’s Community Agreements offer requests to help all involved in our Virtual Studio understand what is expected of each of us so we can more effectively co-create, implement, and ensure inclusive and respectful spaces.
Here are our requests for all Virtual Studio participants:
- Participants, not passengers – Success depends on participation. Show up on time and come prepared to actively participate and treat everyone with dignity and respect. Be clear and brief in sharing ideas to allow for more voices to be heard. Be accountable for the impact of your actions and words.
- Let’s learn together – We are all coming into our interactions with different sets of experiences and knowledge. Everyone knows a little and together we know a lot. We encourage everyone to approach conversations, problems, and challenges with good intent, curiosity, and an openness to learn and grow.
- Please remember Rule #6 – We don’t take ourselves so seriously. This is an invitation to show up as our best and true selves to a space that encourages bravery, and to see and connect with others as they are – even when things feel tense.
- Confidentiality – You’re welcome to share your lessons learned from your event experience, however please refrain from sharing names and identifiers of your fellow participants.
- Zero tolerance for harassment and discrimination – We will not tolerate anyone intimidating, humiliating, or sabotaging others in our events. We also prohibit wilful discrimination based on age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, racial, religion, and/or disability. We can’t create an exhaustive list, but harassment includes bullying, intimidation, direct insults, malicious gossip and victimization.
We’re small on purpose. We cap the size of the Virtual Studio at ~25 students to ensure an intimate student experience.
No problem! That doesn’t mean you’re not a leader. The Reimagining Remote Virtual Studio is designed to provide you with flexible, practical frameworks and strategies that can be used in leadership even if you don’t have a formal title. Now is a great time to develop these essential leadership skills and practices so when you do step into a formal leadership or management role, you’ll be prepared to get to work and lead your team to success.
The Reimagining Remote Virtual Studio is geared towards senior, mid-level, and emerging leaders. Our approach and frameworks are designed in a way that you can apply the lessons as the leader you are today to develop into the leader you seek to become. Leadership is a skill, just like writing code or cooking, and the best way to learn and develop your leadership skills is to commit to a consistent practice in a supportive setting – which is exactly what you’ll do in the Virtual Studio.
Depending on where you live, the cost might be tax deductible.
Additionally, as more and more forward-thinking organizations are understanding the value of continuous learning, your organization might cover some or all our the program fee. It’s worth asking your boss/manager/HR rep about this. When you do talk to them, consider focusing on the benefits that are most vital to your specific organizational context.
To get you started, here’s a “Letter to your Boss.” You can make a copy of this, or cut and paste, and then customize to your heart’s content. Good luck!
Upon your full completion of the program, we’ll provide you with a certificate that may be helpful with reimbursement. That said, we want to be explicit that the Reimagining Remote Virtual Studio is informal, unaccredited, and non-bureaucratic. If you’re looking for an official course credit or professional designation that gives you a fancy acronym you can put after your name, this isn’t for you.
We accept payment securely via PayPal, which also accepts all standard credit card options, including Visa, MasterCard, American Express.
We’re not currently set up to bill your organization directly, so we ask that you expense this if permitted.
There are no other costs beyond the program fee.
As long as you have access to a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone, a webcam, a high-speed internet connection capable of streaming audio/video, and the free Zoom and Slack apps will be using, you’re all set.
Yes! We have a limited number of scholarships available to ensure cost is not a barrier to those who could really benefit from participating in the Virtual Studio. Please email us at hello@spotlighttrust.com for information.
The Reimagining Remote Virtual Studio is a mutual commitment. We commit to welcoming you into a small, focused cohort of professionals, and doing everything we can to deliver on the promises of the Virtual Studio. In return, we ask you to commit to investing the time, energy, and work it takes to learn at the same time you contribute to enriching and others in the program.
We understand that life can interfere and that plans change, and we’ve tried to create a cancellation and refund policy that respects you, our students, and our mutual commitments.
Part of your payment goes towards a $250 USD non-refundable deposit.
Cancellations are accepted up until 12 noon PT on Friday, October 23, 2020. If you notify us of your intent to cancel before this time, we will fully refund the rest of your payment.
Please contact us by email at hello@spotlighttrust.com to notify us of your intent to cancel.
Cancellations are not accepted after 12 noon PT on Friday, October 23, 2020.
If, in the opinion of the Virtual Studio leaders, you’re not honoring the Community Agreements, we’ll let you know. If you’re still not able to actively participate, we’ll ask you to withdraw from the Virtual Studio. In this situation, no refund is possible.
We’re so confident in the value you’ll receive from engaging in this program that if you have fully participated in the Virtual Studio and you still feel like it wasn’t effective, email us at refunds@spotlighttrust.com and we’ll happily refund 100% of your registration fee.
Most definitely! Completing the Virtual Studio as a team can be a helpful way to accelerate the application of your ideas into your workplace.
You may also consider making the Reimagining Remote Virtual Studio a team or organizational learning opportunity with a private corporate session that is more tailored to your organization’s specific needs. Contact us for details.
No. Having you regurgitate the same material we give you helps no one. The most effective way of learning is by doing, so while there are no tests, you will have to apply your learnings and do the work to make the change that you’re seeking.
The honest truth? So are we. But we’ve made the commitment as professionals to show up and help you show up as well.
That tension you’re feeling? The fear? Those are all signs that you’re on the right place for growth.
You’re right, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to leading virtual work, and we’re sure you and your team are unique, diverse individuals. Part of being a good leader is knowing how to adapt and pivot, and our program is based on that philosophy.
The Reimagining Remote Virtual Studio is built on flexible and practical frameworks, principles, and strategies, not specific scripts, answer keys, or prescribed solutions, so all of our material is flexible enough to hold up in many different situations leaders and organizations might find themselves in.
We’ll be delighted to offer you a digital certificate of completion when you successfully complete each module of the Virtual Studio, or mail one to you directly if you’d like. Please be aware that in order to receive a certificate, we do require your participation at all 4 of the live sessions.
Even better than credentials though, we encourage you to find a peer group in the Studio who will personally vouch for your contributions.
While we provide a certificate upon completion of the program, we want to be explicit that the Reimagining Remote Virtual Studio is informal, unaccredited, and non-bureaucratic. If you’re looking for an official course credit or designation, this isn’t for you.
No worries, dear friend. Please email us at hello@spotlighttrust.com and Lisa or Rick will respond to you as soon as possible.
