• Read more about Dear Maggie Series: Health + Happiness

Dear Maggie,

When it comes to the winter season, I am all the more grateful I get to skip the commute and work from home! Nothing beats waking up to snow, and knowing you don’t have to leave your cozy house to get work done.

There’s just one thing - it seems there’s a direct correlation with the increase in my waistline and the decrease in my commute. Incorporating exercise into my daily routine has become increasingly difficult as the reasons for leaving the house have continued to diminish. Help! Do you have any tips for staying fit while working from home?

Frustrated in Frisco

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Howdy Frustrated,

You are not alone! It’s so easy to develop an unhealthy routine while working from home. Not only do you move less in a day, but you’re also within easy reach of that lovely space called kitchen.

In my experience, the key to staying fit is pinpointing the problem areas and identifying a solution that works for you. Here are a few tactics I’ve found successful throughout the years. Granted, while there’s no “one size fits all” these tips are definitely a step in the right direction.

Track your activity.

There are lots of options out there, the Fitbit Flex, the Misfit Shine, “UP” by Jawbone, and even most newer phones have some sort of built-in step tracker. Utilize these programs to track exactly how much activity you’re getting in a day. You can set daily goals for yourself, and even compete against friends and family in order to increase your accountability.

Track your calories.

You shouldn’t have any trouble finding a calorie tracking app on your favorite smartphone. Weight Watchers has an application to match their very successful program, MyFitness Pal can track your activity as well, and MyPlate by livestrong.com makes entries on the go a breeze. And if all else fails, go old fashion and keep a food diary. Simply forcing yourself to write down what you eat has an amazing effect on your calorie consumption and eating habits.

Get a workout buddy.

Anyone can create a gym schedule, but its all too easy to skip out when no one is expecting you there. Find a friend looking to go to the gym, and coordinate your schedules. Not only does this open up the possibility of ride-sharing, but at many gyms “couple” memberships offer a great discount vs. individual memberships, and you usually don’t have to kiss the other person to get the discount.

Put your desk to work.

This one might seem silly, but you’d be surprised how much exercise you can fit in WHILE you work. Keep a set of free-weights near your desk and take calls while doing a few lunges. Got a yoga mat? Set your computer to alert you every few hours for a 5-10 minute yoga break. Or why not invest in a standing desk? Whatever it is - you’ve got time - you’ve got the resources - you just have to get creative and discipline yourself to do it.

Pre-plan your hanger.

When it comes time to feed yourself, the easiest worm always gets eaten first and it’s usually disguised in sugary-salty goodness. My best advice for overcoming hanger snacking: buying healthy foods and planning your meals and snacks in advance. Apps like ShopWell allow you to scan the barcodes of items you’re considering for purchase so you can see healthier (and sometimes cheaper!) alternatives. If your problem is inspiration, Su Chef provides healthy recipes (by ingredient), or Blue Apron will deliver all the ingredients and recipe you need for an exciting meal. When you spend a little extra time pre-portioning and preparing - you give yourself a fighting chance for picking the healthier option.

Breaking old habits and getting into a healthy routine can be done! Just remember, working from home should enable a healthy work-life balance, not be an excuse for ignoring it. Take advantage of your work situation, find creative ways to stay active, and have fun doing it!

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Got an idea for our next post? Send your burning questions, feedback, or suggestions over to dearmaggie@intridea.com! We'd love to hear from you.

Also, check out Dear Maggie's advice on relationships and working remotely.

• Read more about DISTRIBUTED: 4 Ways to Crush Distributed Team Friction

Friction: it exists in virtually every company, distributed or not. Whether two team members can never see eye to eye or a manager and her employee just rub each other the wrong way, friction is an ever-present danger in the business world.

“Machines, human or otherwise, need to be maintained in order to run properly,” writes Merle Rein, certified mediator and conflict resolution trainer. “As managers, we are the lubricant, the substance that can reduce friction when it exists.”

If you want to cultivate a collaborative culture, it’s essential to cut through the tension and ensure your distributed team runs like a well-oiled machine. Here at Intridea, we follow four proven techniques to curtail friction within our team.

Friction Reducer #1: Don’t Overdo the Process

If you want employees to be self-driven and go above and beyond what's expected of them, the worst thing you can do is saddle them with a burdensome, overly complicated process. After all, nothing will kill creativity more quickly than a stringent set of convoluted procedures.

When you force employees to adhere to rigid guidelines, they’ll only do what’s required by that process—nothing more. This will box them in to a limited set of solutions, and they’ll be afraid to break through boundaries or even scribble outside of the lines.

According to Teresa Amabile’s research with her Harvard University team, external restrictions almost always squash creative thinking. These outside restrictions include everything from rigorous rules and overly complex processes to leaders implying that new ideas are unwelcome.

Too much process not only smothers creativity—it also suppresses self-motivation. “In today's knowledge economy, creativity is more important than ever,” writes Amabile in a Harvard Business Review article. “But many companies unwittingly employ managerial practices that kill it. How? By crushing their employees' intrinsic motivation—the strong internal desire to do something based on interests and passions.”

Amabile points out that managers don't intentionally slaughter creativity and motivation. Yet in the pursuit of productivity, efficiency and control, leaders inadvertently trample these desirable employee attributes.

Remember: as a distributed team leader, your goal is to hire self-motivated people and nurture that behavior. Yet, an overwrought process will quickly extinguish that behavior. When employees have to jump through hoops to get something done, they're less likely to try.

Friction Reducer #2: Don’t Micromanage

We covered the dangers of micromanagement in an earlier blog, but it’s worth mentioning again. If you want a team of skilled thinkers tackling problems in creative ways, you should never micromanage. Micromanaging will eventually turn a team of self-driven, autonomous employees into an army of robots. Trust your employees, back off and allow them to make their own decisions.

Friction Reducer #3: Embrace Autonomy

At Intridea, we make a point to give our team members the independence to tackle problems and make decisions on their own. If employees have to run every single detail by their manager or gauntlet of others, this slows down their creative process and saps their motivation.

“Well, what if I give an employee autonomy and he screws up?” you might be asking. If a self-driven team member makes a mistake, don’t feel like you have to approve every step he takes from that day forward. Instead, give the employee constructive feedback to steer him in the right direction and then back off. Remember, micromanagement crushes motivation and creativity…so it’s important to give your team members space to accomplish goals on their own.

In fact, research from the University of Washington, Foster School of Business reveals that the key to developing passionate, creative employees is giving them autonomy. “Context is very important,” says Xiao-Ping Chen, a professor of management and organization at the Foster School. “Teams, units and organizations that promote and support autonomous thinking and working will become more passionate. And, in turn, more creative,” he adds.

This heightened creativity will have a major impact on your distributed team’s success. That’s because passionate free thinkers are more likely to take risks that could pay off in huge dividends for your company.

Friction Reducer #4: Don’t Hyper-Focus on Failure

Don't make failure a point of friction. Instead encourage employees to take risks and go above and beyond the call of duty. Of course, employees who take big risks will fail from time to time. However, when you dwell on an employee’s failures, you’ll paralyze her into inaction. Instead of punishing the employee for her mishaps, use them as learning experience for the whole company—not as a point of contention.

“To dwell only on problem areas destroys the employee’s confidence and self-esteem, makes the employee more error-prone,” writes Human Resources expert Susan M. Heathfield. She adds that hyper-focusing on failures will quickly squash an employee’s motivation. “The challenge for employers is not to destroy that intrinsic motivation that every employee has.”

By embracing these four simple tactics, you’ll reduce friction, ignite creativity and cultivate a team of free thinkers.

Got any tactics for reducing team friction? Keep the conversation going! We'd love to hear from you.

• Read more about DISTRIBUTED: How to Spark Self-Motivation in (Almost) Any Distributed Employee

For countless decades, psychologists, geneticists and armchair scientists have debated about the impact of nature vs. nurture on human behavior. Although some research suggests characteristics like self-motivation and ambition are strictly inherited, we believe environment can also play a significant role in these traits. So while you may not be able to teach self-motivation to your team members, you can take steps to light the spark that already lies within...

“Ambition is energy and determination,” Dean Simonton, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis said in a TIME article. “But it calls for goals too. People with energy but no clear goals just dissipate themselves in one desultory project after the next.”

Light That Fire

We’ll be the first to admit that some employees just aren’t as driven as others. But when a remote worker seems to be completely unmotivated, it’s not necessarily his fault. He may be waning because his manager has failed to set clear expectations and deadlines for him. Often times, a little guidance is just the spark that an employee needs to light his fire.

Here at Intridea, if we notice a team member is fading, we make sure to give them explicit instructions and explain they’ll be held accountable for the quality of their work. By the same token, when an employee produces top-notch work, we shower them with praise.

We also ensure our employees understand their performance is measured by the actual work they produce; not the number of hours they work. We’ve found that newbie remote employees are often accustomed to the brick-and-mortar style of work, where clocking in and clocking out each day is good enough. Since there’s no need for a distributed worker to “show up” at an office, it’s all about the results they produce.

This is yet another reason to hire plenty of SMAIPs (Self-Motivated, Autonomous, Inquisitive People) for your team. (We discussed these highly desirable employees in our last two blogs.) These go-getters often serve as an inspiration for seemingly apathetic co-workers. No matter how indifferent they may seem, unmotivated employees will sit up and take notice when SMAIPs are consistently praised for their superior work—and this could be just what it takes to kindle their self-motivation.

Reignite Workers with Motivational Phrases

Whether you’re trying to motivate or congratulate employees, it’s important to choose your words wisely. Here are a few phrases we at Intridea use to push team members to try harder or praise them for a job well done:

• “I know you’re capable of more than this.”
• “I’ve noticed you haven’t been turning in your projects on time. Are you having any issues outside of work?”
• “In the past month, your work hasn’t been as high quality as what I usually see from you. Is there something blocking your way?”
• “I’ve noticed you’re falling behind on your projects. Can I help you prioritize?”
• “I can see you’re swamped. How can I help?”
• “The work you turned in on Monday was spot-on. Great job!”
• “I’m proud of you. Keep up the good work!”
• “Thanks for all your hard work. I really appreciate your efforts.”
• “We couldn’t have done it without you!”
• “Awesome job on that project! How did you do it?”

With the right words, plenty of encouragement and a clear set of goals, we believe you can inspire self-motivation in virtually any employee—even those who work from home in their PJ’s and fuzzy slippers.

• Read more about DISTRIBUTED: Do's and Don'ts for Keeping Distributed Employees Happy

In our last blog, we pointed out the three most important traits for successful remote workers: self-motivation, autonomy and curiosity. We call these highly desirable employees SMAIPs (Self-Motivated, Autonomous, Inquisitive People).

So once you’ve built a killer distributed team of productive SMAIPs, you can just let them do their thing right? Not so fast. Even if you’ve populated your team with the most self-motivated, autonomous and inquisitive employees known to mankind, you have to consistently nurture these traits.

Here are five do’s and don’ts we at Intridea follow to keep our distributed employees motivated, engaged and happy:

1: Don’t Micromanage. Do Give Guidance.

Because SMAIPs require very little direction, they absolutely detest micromanagement. That’s why we try to foster self-directed behavior by giving our team members plenty of independence and elbow room to get the job done.

If you hover over your employees, get involved with every small task and nit-pick every detail, you’ll stifle their creativity and send their confidence into a tail spin. In fact, people who believe they are being watched perform at a lower level, according to a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. So, back off. The more you micromanage, the less productive your team will be.

When leaders expect remote employees to follow overly complicated processes, this can also crush self-motivation. After all, enforcing inflexible rules and procedures is really just another form of micromanagement. We’ve found that if employees have to jump through hoops to get something done, they're less likely to try.

2: Don’t Play It Safe. Do Embrace Failure.

If you punish your team members for each and every failure, you’re going to end up with overly cautious employees who do the bare minimum. And who could blame them? They’d rather play it safe than face your dreadful wrath.

Far too many remote managers paralyze their teams with the fear of failure. Not only does this suffocate their inquisitive and self-driven behavior—it eventually transforms employees into brainless automatons.

At Intridea, we think it’s important to embrace failure and turn each botched attempt into an important lesson. In his book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, economic journalist Tim Harford writes, “Biologists have a word for the way in which solutions emerge from failure: evolution.” Harford says we need to learn to accept failure and constantly adapt, which involves lots of improvising. “Success comes through rapidly fixing our mistakes rather than getting things right first time.”

In fact, some research shows that failure is often the quickest path to success. People and organizations that disastrously miss their goals perform much better in the long-run, according to a University of Colorado Denver Business School study.

“We found that the knowledge gained from success was often fleeting while knowledge from failure stuck around for years,” Professor Vinit Desai, the leader of the study, wrote in the Academy of Management Journal. “Organizational leaders should neither ignore failures nor stigmatize those involved with them. Rather leaders should treat failures as invaluable learning opportunities, encouraging the open sharing of information about them.”

3: Don’t Overburden Them. Do Enforce Work-Life Balance.

SMAIPs are often prodigious in their output—which can be both a blessing and a curse. While leaders may be tempted to let highly driven team members pull long hours and work their fingers to the bone, this will quickly lead to employee burnout.

As we mentioned in a previous blog, it’s important to ensure your employees achieve a healthy balance between their work life and personal life. In the long run, work-life balance leads to happier, more productive employees.

“The business climate has become so fiery and competitive that leaders are focused on competition and getting the most out of their people,” John Izzo, author of Values-Shift: The New Work Ethic and What It Means for Business, told CNNMoney. “Everyone's working to their max.” This extreme pressure will quickly derail even your most productive and driven SMAIPs.

Izzo warns that an employee suffering from burnout becomes part of the “working wounded.” Because they’ve lost all of their motivation, they apathetically limp along through their work day. “Ultimately the biggest price companies pay for burnout is a loss of talented people,” he adds.

Because we realize SMAIPs will create Intridea’s most innovative work, we make a point to nurture these employees—not work them to death.

4: Don’t Dishearten Them. Do Give Positive Feedback.

Distributed leaders have to be careful about demoralizing SMAIPs with too much negative feedback. If you only offer a worker feedback when he does something wrong, you’ll quickly crush that employee’s spirit and deflate his motivation.

It’s important to give distributed employees positive feedback, even for normal day-to-day work. When you reward your team members for a job well-done, this will encourage further self-driven behavior. It also ensures they’ll sit up and listen in the instances when you need to offer them negative feedback.

Warren Greshes, author of The Best Damn Management Book Ever has also emphasized the importance of positive feedback. “If you want to point out the mistakes people make, get them to listen to you and fix those mistakes, you better be ready to recognize them when they do something right,” he writes. “Employee recognition is one of the greatest drivers of employee motivation in the workplace. Do you know anyone who doesn’t like to be recognized when they’ve done something right or achieved something special?”

If you only speak up when an employee has done something wrong, they won't bother to take risks that could turn into big wins for the company. In the end, your employees will stop caring because they know no matter what they do, you’re going to criticize them.

5: Don’t Dismiss Their Ideas. Do Set Expectations.

SMAIPs often formulate groundbreaking ideas, and they’re usually bursting with excitement to share these ideas with their manager. So when a self-motivated employee comes to you with her latest brain child, it’s important to give the idea the thought and consideration it deserves.

If you ignore or constantly shoot down an employee’s ideas, she’ll more than likely stop sharing altogether. In fact, more than a third of U.S. workers don’t speak up for fear of retribution, according to a DecisionWise Benchmark study. “These perceptions typically stem from a culture that stifles the free expression of ideas, and from leaders who contribute to or create that culture,” points out Paul Warner, Director of Consulting Services at DecisionWise. “Fear of speaking up is extremely detrimental to organizations, often causing an escalation of dissatisfaction among employees leading to absenteeism, non-productive work behaviors, low team identification, and eventually reduced performance and turnover.”

We’ve found that while it’s critical to listen to our team members’ new ideas, it also helps to set expectations upfront—even before the employee’s idea is hatched. For example, we encourage our team members to use a program called sparktime—an Intridea initiative to encourage side projects and exploration. When one of our employees submits an idea for a side project, our “approval” is contingent on a well-defined plan as well as good timing with other projects. This helps focus our employees and also teaches them how to set themselves up for success.

Check out our next to blog to learn how to spark self-motivation in distributed employees.