Thanks for joining us on Season 5 of The Flourishing Culture Podcast, brought to you by The Best Christian Workplaces Institute. You’ll learn how to build a flourishing workplace culture that drives the ministry impact of your organization, your church, or your company brought to you by the Best Christian Workplaces Institute. Now here’s your host, BCWI president, Al Lopus.
For many organizations having a majority of your employees work from home is a new challenge. This new environment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, has challenged leaders to learn new ways of leading their virtual workplaces. Today we learn from the CEO of a growing, Christian company with 70 percent of their employees who have been working from home remotely for years. I know that you’ll benefit from this great advice.
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It’s my pleasure to welcome back to the Flourishing Culture Podcast Robert Bortins, Jr., CEO of Classical Conversations, in Southern Pines, North Carolina. Robert, good to be with you again.
There are two main ways to be successful in managing remote employees, that is, using the right tools and creating a rhythm.”
In this episode, you’ll hear about:
- The current pandemic intersecting with home-centered education (03:48)
- Ministries and organizations adapting to managing a stay-at-home work staff (05:17)
- First, make sure you’re using the right tools (05:54)
- Second, create a rhythm (05:56)
- Third, to curb feelings of isolation, create a virtual community (06:03)
- Tools like Zoom, Slack, WebEx, and Microsoft Teams (06:11)
- Share what’s going on each day, metrics and where you need help (06:43)
- Advice for Managers: Give grace, set expectations, review best practices with video conferencing (09:30)
- On a video conference, get verbal agreement from everybody (10:23)
- Start your regular meeting with good news (11:27)
- Build in some breaks (15:35)
- Leadership lessons: get down in the dirt with your people, give them hope, articulate the plan, have their back (17:49)
Additional Resources
Classical Conversations’ Free Resources during COVID19.
Buy Bryan Miles’ Book: Virtual Culture
Download the 8 Drivers Reference Guide for FREE.
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Read a complete, word-for-word transcript of the episode here

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