Before the pandemic, remote work only made up 5% of total workdays. However, it has now become widespread for workers across all levels, ranging from entry-level employees to CEOs, to work from home for at least some part of the week. Given the absence of a shared physical workspace, what strategies can be used to effectively discover, encourage, and cultivate a productive work environment?

In this episode, our guest Irina Bgatova shares valuable insights on the current state of work culture and offers practical tips for enhancing engagement, fostering collaboration, and preventing burnout in the workplace, particularly for remote teams. She also sheds light on the innovative platform called Weljo, which provides a unique solution for remote teams to build and maintain strong bonds. 

Join us as we delve into the world of remote work and explore ways to create a healthy and productive work environment.
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Building a Thriving Remote Work Culture with Irina Bgatova
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We’re at an interesting cultural moment, especially with respect to our work culture right now. People have put in most of the pandemic or the fear related to the pandemic behind them and now we’re trying to decide what to make of our work culture given that a lot of people have gotten used to remote work, some people have even moved to other cities or other places to work remotely, yet there are some leaders of organizations that are concerned about how to foster the team camaraderie and some are calling for bringing people back to the office or some kind of a hybrid type of schedule where we can still have that camaraderie. It is a challenge that a lot of us are trying to solve and how do you really still feel close and still feel connected to your teammates. My guest today, Irina Bgatova, is a product manager with Weljo, a platform that helps these remote organizations find ways to foster better work environments as well as bring your co-workers together. This represents one of the possible solutions that we may have in this particular cultural moment.

 
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Irina, welcome to the program.

 

Oh, thank you very much, Stephen. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I’m excited. 

 

That is awesome, and so, first, let’s start, tell us a little bit about Weljo, about what your product does.

 

Yes, of course. Weljo, it’s a platform for remote teams that helps with engagement, collaboration, and avoiding burnout. And, actually, it’s like challenges, it’s team challenges that every week, for example, a team can make meditations, workouts, or collaboration challenges that every day, they have short meetings for 15 minutes where they exchange their ideas, learn something new about each other.

We believe this kind of solution can help people to just improve their team bonding during remote work because remote work, we understand that it has some disadvantages and we want to help with it.

 

What do you think are like the key advantages and disadvantages of that, you know, working remotely, whether it be from home or whether it be some of these nomads that we see that have a job and then just kind of move around?

 

Yes, of course. We’ve done a lot of research on this topic and I can say that people usually mention that the main advantage of remote work is that you work flexible. Sometimes, you can not only work but, I don’t know, wash your clothes in washing machine or just do something else. You can go outside to walk. You can, I don’t know, cook your food for your lunch. And it’s all advantages. But, disadvantages, that you’re in your home, sometimes, your family can be at home at the same time and they just can distract you. Or if you’re working in the kitchen, once I heard, the girl said that you’re working in kitchen and you’re sitting near the fridge and it’s very difficult to when you’re nervous don’t eat so...