Remote Teams – Building Performance and Wellbeing

The move to remote working has brought personal benefits to many by eliminating commuting time and allowing more investment in family and personal lives. However, on the flip side it also imposes significant challenges around wellbeing, performance, and resilience. Informed by his experience managing remote teams, his wide training across multiple coaching and personal development disciplines, and up to the minute research, Nick explores the key challenges to performance and wellbeing in the remote working space and provides a range of practical and proven solutions at the individual, team, and manager level.

• Understand the challenges for remote workers and for their managers in terms of physical and mental wellbeing and performance
• Understand the research on the effects of remote working in these areas
• Understand some important structures and frameworks to support remote workers
• To provide some skills for managers in interacting with their remote team
• To provide guidance and skills to remote workers on how to set themselves up to avoid the negative impact of remote working and to maximise productivity

• Outline pros and cons of remote working on performance and wellbeing
• Structured engagement approach with employees – time, availability and use of appropriate platforms
• Rules of engagement and boundaries
• Structure and facilitation of remote team social activity/interaction
• Emotional support – skilled questioning and active listening
• Research on emotional intelligence – team takes cues from leader.
• Establishing a ‘high performance state’
• Setting up your virtual workspace
• Managing your wellbeing in the virtual space

Nick offers a unique combination of skills in the UK insurance training sector – an industry sales specialist and a professional coach and trainer. Nick is an Economics graduate with over 25 years corporate insurance broking experience. He was a highly successful sales producer in the UK broking market before progressing into regional and then national sales leadership roles. As National Development Director at HSBC, Nick was one of only 40 people from a global workforce of 265,000 selected as part of the STARS programme to recognise exceptional performance. He is a highly trained consultative sales specialist, and his experience includes a secondment with a major management consultant to design a best practice sales process.

In the mid-2000s, Nick developed a chronic health condition; his journey to recovery fostered a new range of interests, and a passion for health, and performance. He studied widely, qualifying as a Master Practitioner in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), obtaining a Diploma in Life Coaching, before going on to study Corporate/Business Coaching with The Coaching Academy. Nick is also a qualified Holistic Lifestyle Coach and Advanced Exercise Coach.

In the last two years Nick has worked in a self-employed capacity in training, coaching, and consulting. He works with a specialist adviser in Insurance sector M&A (Mergers & Acquisitions), and through Nick Thomas & Associates.