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Ted Davis's avatar

OK. These suggestions come from an Old Guy perspective who still works. 1. Good chair = very big deal. My son kindly bought me gaming chair (Secret Lab Titan) with accessories and it makes this sitting life fine indeed. Pricey and worth it. 2. Google Meet - big captions and ease of use - important for the hearing challenged. 3. Do lots of one-one-one chat sessions to get to know people (larger meets are less useful in that regard). Important to ask good questions (that is your specialty) and be yourself on camera. Old actor saying "The camera loves you or it doesn't" But in this virtual age - make the camera love you by being open and entirely human, not a Facebook perfect image of yourself. You got this. As someone starting out again at 78 after 14 years of current (soon ending) job, my heart is with you on being the new kid when you are not longer the kid. I look forward to more wonderful Anna sessions with incredibly interesting people.

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Amanda Klein's avatar

1. Get a good chair - it's worth spending at least a few hundred dollars on, unfortunately. Your middle aged body will thank you.

2. Zoom > GoogleMeet or anything else! Zoom isn't perfect, but I find it more user friendly overall when it comes to sharing screens, seeing folks, etc. There's a super cool AI tool now that basically takes notes for you, too. Totally recommend so that you can free up someone else's head space in a meeting.

3. So most of my company is distributed throughout the country, but we're a small team. We have 3 in-person retreats a year, and they are TRULY retreats. The focus is on bonding not working. We all block off our calendars for the 2-3 days we're together, and while we do talk work and enjoy some presentations, we mostly bond through team dinners, fun activities, or just having free time to do whatever you want. And yes, we ultimately end up getting some work done while we're all together, but it's not expected and it's not the focus, and I find that to be critical in our work relationships. Our company founders started these years ago, and it truly speaks to our work's culture that we are all humans with real human lives, and unplugging and enjoying the time we get to spend together is more important than sending those emails.

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