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Keep shoppingRemote Work Productivity: Focus, Teams and Boundaries [EN]
2,775 students
Remote Work Productivity: Focus, Teams and Boundaries [EN]
remote work | hybrid work | working from home | remote teams | online meetings | time zones | collaboration | focus
Last updated 8/2026
English
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What you'll learn
- Set up a home working system that holds: workspace, hours, rules with the people you live with, and a shutdown that actually ends the day
- Work under self-control rather than supervision, and stay visible without performing busyness
- Get real value from a one-to-one when it is the only guaranteed contact with your manager
- Read a message from a high-context culture correctly, and write one that will not be misread
- Work across time zones knowing that a deadline means something different in different places
- Run an online session where people contribute instead of watching, and close it with named owners
- Keep a distributed team connected using activities designed for a screen rather than adapted to one
- Diagnose a team problem before designing anything for it, using GRPI and the 4Cs
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
Explore related topics
Course content
13 sections • 36 lectures • 16h 35m total length
Requirements
- You work remotely or in a hybrid setup, or you are about to
- No tools or software required in advance. Everything is introduced and you choose what to keep
- Willingness to renegotiate something — your hours, your meeting load, or the rules at home
- English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- Ideally colleagues in at least one other country or time zone, since a third of the course is about that
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Remote work removed the commute and the interruptions, and then quietly took the boundaries, the corridor conversations and every signal that told you how you were doing.
Most people notice the productivity part first and the other part about eight months later.
What goes wrong once the office is gone
The day has no edges, so it expands until it touches everything. You compensate for being unseen by being permanently available, which reads as commitment and functions as a slow leak. Your manager finds out about a problem three weeks after a colleague sitting next to you would have. A message from a colleague in another country reads as curt and was meant as efficient, or reads as agreement and was meant as reluctance. And the online meeting has eleven people in it, four of whom have said nothing in a month.
None of this is about discipline or software. It is about a set of things the office used to do for you that now have to be done deliberately.
What the course covers
Thirty-six lessons in three parts. Working remotely first, ten lessons: the transition checklist, setting up a workspace and the rules with the people you live with, keeping pace when nobody sets it, the tool stack, motivation and socialisation when you are alone, health, and the skills remote work specifically demands — independence, tolerance for isolation, and written communication as your main interface.
Then staying connected. Six lessons on the one-to-one, which at a distance is not a nice ritual but the only guaranteed channel to your manager: the six formats, coaching with GROW, receiving and giving feedback when tone is the first thing the medium destroys, and how to make it standard.
Distance, culture and the meetings that eat the week
Then eight lessons on culture, because a distributed team is almost always a multicultural one. High and low context communication, which is why the same sentence reads as rude in one place and evasive in another. Feedback across a culture line and where Radical Candor stops working. Power distance, and who on the call is actually permitted to disagree with you. Consensus cultures against authority cultures. And time itself — planning horizons, meeting norms, and what a deadline promises in different places.
Then team connection and meetings. Team building designed for a screen rather than adapted to one, the GRPI model for diagnosing what is actually wrong before you organise anything, and six lessons on running an online session where people contribute, decisions get made, owners get named, and it does not need a follow-up call.
Who is teaching this
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply, a company distributed across dozens of countries, and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. My students are in 185 countries, which has corrected a fair number of my assumptions about how a message lands.
What is included
Lifetime access to all course materials
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
Udemy Certificate of Completion
Practical assignments and real business cases
A section with additional courses, tools and resources
The first thing to fix
Decide what time your working day ends, write it down, and tell one person. Not a plan to work less — a stated end. Almost everything else in this course is easier once there is an edge to the day. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.
Who this course is for:
- Remote and hybrid workers whose day has no beginning and no end
- People who moved to remote and found their output fine and their energy gone
- Managers of distributed teams who cannot see what is happening and are trying not to over-monitor
- Anyone working with colleagues across time zones and misreading their messages
- Freelancers and contractors who have no structure imposed on them at all
- Team leads whose online meetings are attended by silence
- People who feel invisible at work and suspect it is affecting their career