12 Countries in 12 Months!

Recently, I was able to fly to Split, Croatia to visit the Remote Year Team!

Can you imagine having the opportunity to work remotely for 1 year and work in 12 different countries in 12 months? There is such a program and it is called Remote Year. One of our employees, Beth, a Know Your Talents Champion, is our Job Ready Manager for our Sister company, Learnkey. We approved for her to experience this remote year program and what a journey she has been on!I had the good fortune of providing a “Know Your Talents Team Impact!” session for the Remote Year team of 40 individuals while they were in Split, Croatia for a month. What a beautiful country with 2000 years of incredible history, wonderful people, food, weather and beauty! It was so worth the trip. If you ever have the chance to visit, make sure you can plan at least a couple of weeks. There is so much to experience and I didn’t have enough time to do all that I wanted to do!During our KYT session, I learned so much about what Remote Year is REALLY about! Talk about the need to be adaptable – WOW! Try to imagine yourself every month adapting to:

• a new country
• new food, culture, people
• a new roommate – sometimes 2 roommates, male or female
• get along with co-workers and work in the same work space every day where collaboration is taking place, yet 40 different companies are being discussed!

No wonder there were big energy drains and low satisfaction showing up in our ProScan report. However, most participants wouldn’t change this journey and their experiences for the world! It is truly a once in a lifetime opportunity and meeting friends and having memories that will be kept for a lifetime.Remote Year has a GROW event with personal development planned for each month. They invited Know Your Talents in to provide a Team Impact session which provided tremendous insight in terms of learning about themselves and each other. I had constant feedback that they wished they would have had this behavioral integration upon the onset of Remote Year starting. They said their relationships could have been so strong right from the beginning if they had the knowledge of everyone’s ProScan and behavior information within the first month to understand what makes everyone tick!The Remote Year Team had the highest traits of Patience, Extroversion and Dominance. Learning of the Patience trait gave the most insight to the group in that they acknowledged the need to have justification with change. Seeing how often change happens as you move from country to country, it is important for the Remote Year staff to have a well laid out plan…and they do. Learning of the Extroversion trait also gave tremendous insight in that the majority want to be liked, included and recognized. It was interesting to see that when working remotely, there are many missed opportunities for recognizing staff, especially when they aren’t close to home! This was helpful knowledge for all and they realized that recognizing each other more could help feed that need.Here was a testimonial from one of the participants with Remote Year: “Know Your Talents isa home run for our community and for all attendees as individuals. Our key-takeaways…as you know I am all about getting results. I now know that our community needs to recognize and praise each other more (and Beth kindly pointed out praise needs to be customized to individual preferences). Beth also pointed out that more respect won’t hurt either. Thank you for time, talent and energy. The GROW event was phenomenal!”Just as we do back here in the US, our Team Impact session helped a team from 40 different countries and continued to prove to us that behavior is EVERYWHERE – just taking a 5 minute assessment to help the understand the team, whatever team it may be, will help drive collaboration, respect, happiness, satisfaction and productivity and will be a game changer. No matter what country or what circumstance your team is dealing with.Even though I had to leave Split, Croatia too soon, my experiences with the Remote Year team is one of my fondest memories of the trip and I met wonderful people that hopefully will stay in touch with going forward.