Navigating a Virtual/Remote Workplace During COVID-19 with Erin and Julia from CanWaCH

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Show Notes

This is the first episode Sujani sat down to record since COVID-19 became a pandemic. And we know that it is a tough time for every single one of us. We are new to physically distancing ourselves from families and friends, and holding game night and coffee chats over a video call are just not the same...and we now have to adjust to having children and the entire family at home 24/7, and for some, the transition to working from home has been tough. We will be the first to say that we don’t like this way of living and wish things were different. But, it’s so important for us to sacrifice these things, and to bear some of this pain because it does save lives!

Given this current situation, and acknowledging that we may not be mentally ready to focus on building our careers the same way, we wanted to change things up for the next couple of podcast episodes (or more). These episodes will focus on slightly different topics ranging from tips to help you cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as fun behind the scenes reflections of PH SPOT to give you a bit of “entertainment” listening. If you have other ideas do email them to us, and we will incorporate them into a future episode. Once we feel that we are ready to get back to our regular show, we will start rolling those episodes out!

In this episode, Sujani sits down with two members from the Canadian Partnership for Women and Children’s Health (CanWaCH). CanWaCH catalyzes Canadian collaboration among 100 Partners who are improving women’s and children’s health in 1,000 communities worldwide.

The interesting part is that CanWaCH is a completely virtual workplace with 22 employees across Canada. Given they have been working in virtual workplace for a number of years now, we reached out to them so that they could offer up all of the lessons they’ve learned to help you, your organization and employees manage working in a virtual environment as a cohesive team. I talk to two individuals from CanWaCH’s team – Julia Anderson who is the Chief Operating Officer and Erin Jex, the Gender Equality Officer at CanWaCH.
You'll Learn:

• About the physical environment that Julia and Erin work from to give us a picture of their workspaces (Julia lives with 8 other people, and Erin has 1 other person)
• The makeup of the CanWaCH team, and their environments
• Whether COVID-19 has changed anything for them or their team, with respect to working from home
• The technology and tools that their team uses which enables them to work collaboratively and efficiently (and tips around this)
• The challenges they still face, despite having been a virtual workplace for a number of years
• As management, the importance of setting your intentions right from the beginning and reiterating it (constantly); and equally important is the trust you must build with your team
• Onboarding a virtual team member; how orientation is set up for these employees
• Tips and considerations to build relationships with your team members given the absence of regular face to face interactions
• The silver lining in working from home, and what they enjoy about a virtual workplace

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