Question: I’m a business owner and I am considering having most of my staff go fully remote. My employees are on board, but what steps should I take to make sure my team stays engaged and productive?

We asked Erin Bury, co-founder and CEO at Willful, to tackle this one:

At Willful, we are fully remote and have been for the past four years. My husband and I – he is also my co-founder – moved from Toronto to Prince Edward County, Ont., and we now have a team of over 20 people spread out across the country from the east coast to the west coast, and we absolutely love it.

There are two big concerns when going remote: performance and culture. How are we going to make sure we continue to have a really productive, accountable workplace? And how can we ensure that we’re giving people the opportunity to engage and connect when we’re all sitting behind a screen?

I think it all starts from your company values. We’re almost eight years old at Willful and early on, we took the time to define our company values, which include things like accountability and empowerment. When we thought about going remote, we started with those values. For example, our culture has always been outcome-focused, not time-focused. We don’t have a culture of micromanaging our team members.

My husband and I have two toddlers, so we need a workplace that’s empathetic to a kid’s sick day or daycare drop off. We’ve instituted what we call our core hours policy. Monday to Thursday, from noon to 4:00 p.m., everyone is expected to be online. That’s when we typically hold our team events and meetings. Outside of that, people organize their time however they want. I’m a morning person, but other people are nighthawks and they like to stay up late and do their coding at 11 p.m.

It’s the idea of creating an environment where people can work when they do their best work and step away to do a workout, do school pickup or take a walk without feeling guilt. About a year ago we also instituted half-day Fridays, so our core hours on Friday are 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. It’s been really well-received.

The next thing that I think has been so instrumental for us as a remote-first company is having a company operating system that provides structure and accountability. We use EOS (entrepreneurial operating system). It’s a strategic planning framework and it involves setting annual plans as well as quarterly goals for each employee that they call ‘rocks.’ It provides that high-level strategic plan so everyone feels like they’re rowing the boat in the same direction, and also ongoing goal-setting frameworks. I know at any given moment what the top two or three priorities are for every single person and those are transparent across the business.

In addition to regular virtual meetings and events, we do one annual in-person retreat. In the past, we’ve gone to the Dominican Republic and Mexico, and this year we went to Prince Edward Island and it was amazing. It’s not cheap, but we take what we would spend on an office and all of the associated costs from snacks to office cleaning and we reallocate it into this full company in-person retreat. We also give each team a smaller budget to do an in-person retreat, usually in a place where several team members are located, like Toronto or Montreal. And we encourage folks when they’re in each other’s city to meet up.

Having gone remote-first, we have seen zero drop in productivity. If anything, we’ve seen an increase in productivity. I mean, I’m an extrovert who loves to chit-chat. I am way more productive working from home than I am in an office. And if I want that in-person interaction, then I take the train to Toronto for the day and I meet up with colleagues and I can get that.

To avoid AI rotting your brain, use these tips for exercise

Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick warns against the anchoring effect: Once you see AI’s ideas, it becomes much harder to think outside those boundaries.

“So how do you get AI’s benefits without the brain drain? The key is sequencing. Always generate your own ideas before turning to AI. Write them down, no matter how rough. Just as group brainstorming works best when people think individually first, you need to capture your unique perspective before AI’s suggestions can anchor you,” he says.

These women are guiding adventurers through the Rockies

“You can’t have a set plan up here,” said Jocelyn McDonald, owner of Peak Wyld Co., an adventure company based in Fort Nelson in Northeast B.C. “A beginner might find that hard –it’ll be a reality check. But I tell people that if you have two feet, I can get you there.”

Since the early 1900s, women have been at the forefront of hiking and mountaineering culture in Canada. Among the many famous Canadian female explorers was Caroline Hinman, who started one of the first touring companies in the Canadian Rockies called Off the Beaten Track in 1913.

Ask more, tell less: How a coaching mindset can help you be a better leader

We all are familiar with sports team coaching. This is different, because a sports coach still tells you what to do – they are giving you drills and exercises and telling you what plays to do on the field. Coaching in leadership is a low tell, high ask dynamic. I’m not giving answers. I’m asking questions, and more specifically, questions that start with ‘how’ and ‘what.’

If you come to me with a challenge, instead of solving your problem, I will say, ‘What do you suggest? What would that look like? What have you already tried?’ It’s rooted in curiosity.