Shauna Moran
Founder of Operate Remote
Shauna Moran is the founder of Operate Remote- an accredited and award-winning executive coaching agency that empowers CEOs and their remote teams to create and build more emotionally healthy, engaged and sustainable organizations- so they can scale and grow with confidence, regardless of locations.
For several years, Shauna has combined her knowledge and research in fields such as psychology, business, innovation management to uncover the most sustainable and effective strategies for building highly functional remote-first organizations.
From working with hundreds of organizations like Webflow, Shell International, Enterprise Ireland, Shopify, and many more all over the world, Operate Remote has been recognized as one of the Top Leadership Training and Coaching Businesses in Europe for 2020.
How did you get to become an expert in your key topics?
Since 2014, I’ve always worked remotely in the West of Ireland, regardless if I worked for multi-nationals or startups. I’ve built, managed and coached remote employees and teams throughout my career, and that has allowed me to see the benefits and challenges that remote working provides for individuals and companies.
Having worked fully remote and within hybrid environments, I came across multiple communication, culture and leadership issues. Back then, we didn’t even understand what remote-first meant, let alone how to create amazing remote team cultures.
I’m a life-long learner which led me back to University while working to study and research what made remote teams successful. Soon, I was able to change the processes and strategies within my own company for the better! My team and I could see the positive impact adopting remote first strategies could have.
Soon, I started being approached by a lot of founders in my network. They wanted to build a remote team largely down to the access of talent it provided, but they didn’t know where to start. Operate Remote was born.
Quite soon after consulting with many of these global companies, I realised that my clients needed to be empowered. It wasn’t just the tools, strategies and policies they needed. They needed a change in mindset, perceptions, behaviours and beliefs to be truly successful at remote working, which lead me to qualify as an executive and leadership development coach.
I’ve always been entrepreneurial, so it wasn’t a surprise to anyone when I created Operate Remote. It took several years to gain the ‘real-life’ experience of managing and building remote teams, academically studying communication and culture in distributed teams and training as an executive and business coach.
Even though I didn’t realise it at the time, every job, interaction, degree and experience have allowed me to be where I am today. I’m passionate about combining academic research along with proven strategies, expert coaching and real-life experience to enable my clients to not only be successful in what they do today but be successful long into the future.
I can relate and empathise with my clients, I know the complexities involved in engaging remote teams, I see the impact of poor company culture, and I understand the skills a leader needs to navigate successfully in a remote environment.
What sub-topics are you most passionate about?
How leaders can develop emotional intelligence in order to build trusting relationships within their teams and engage them in an authentic way.
How we can create flexible autonomous workplaces that embraces and celebrates diversity while also creating a customer value that’s exceptional.
How we can change the world when we create happy employees.
Who influences you within these topics?
My clients – being on this journey with them, throughout the highs and the lows means I’m seeing behind the scenes of everything. Working closely with teams at all levels means I can zoom out from the day-to-day and really see what the root causes are.
My clients are driven, ambitious, hungry to learn and grow and are just wonderful human beings. I learn so much from partnering with them on this journey.
What challenges are brands facing in this space?
Companies are finding change management challenging- the past 18 months has been a wild ride and many teams are struggling to understand what working model will work best for them. I empower to clients to collect data and stop wasting time experimenting with ‘what ifs’. When we commit to accepting that remote is always going to be apart of our futures, we can create amazing remote-first cultures and processes that will support our team long into the future.
The other big challenge right now is around team burnout. 70% of the workforce has experienced burnout in the past 12 months (Monster, 2020) and I see this come up time and time again when prospects approach me. The key to this to develop emotional intelligence within your team so that they can take responsibility for their own wellbeing AND create remote processes that provides more flexibility and structure for remote environments- and gets everyone off back-to-back meetings all day. Because that’s not remote work.
What do you think the future holds in this space?
I think we’re living in the future of work now- it’s just some organizations are choosing to accept and embrace it and others are resisting it. Remote working isn’t going anywhere and once we have more options in the future for in-person, I think it’ll be about bringing remote teams together a couple of times a year to create amazing in person experiences
If a brand wanted to work with you, which activities would you be most interested in collaborating on?
Podcasts, webinars, whitepaper, speaking opportunities & video interviews.
What are your passions outside of work?
What would be the best way for a brand to contact you?
Send me an email.
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