Meet Cynthia Watson, Executive Chair at Virtira

I’ve never worked well in an office, ever. While my business school classmates were finding jobs in downtown cubicles, I happily worked my way through university in the Parks Branch and on fishing boats.

I’m Cynthia Watson, Executive Chair at Virtira. Virtira is a company that’s imbued with a passion for working without boundaries.  We implement workflow improvements and facilitate remote project execution to make sure that everyone, whether they’re across the street or across the world, stays engaged, on track and accountable.

My first taste of remote work came almost before I could ride a bike. Visiting my brother in Palo Alto in the late 1960s, I remember being in quiet awe of his telecommuting set-up, connected via an acoustic coupler to the legendary CDC 6600 at Stanford. As a sales engineer in the 1980s, I convinced my manager to let me work from home, where my portable Texas Instrument Silent 700 could link up to IBM’s 370 mainframe.

From then on, I chose roles that meant spending as little time in offices as possible. To me, working in an office was inefficient, unproductive, and not particularly healthy. After the kerfuffle of getting ready, then the long commute, often through bad Canadian winters, you had coffee breaks, lunch breaks, people dropping by and chatting and the inevitable colds and flus that spread through hot-desked staff. It was difficult to accomplish very much.

So, since completing my master’s thesis on telecommuting in 1993, I’ve managed projects, teams and managers remotely from over 70 countries and counting – including Machu Pichu, Patagonia, the Galapagos, Ladakh, and even at the base of Mount Everest.

My first book in 2020 was an easy-to-follow guide, capturing our top 50 tips on how to be effective managing and working remotely. My new book, written with Virtira CEO Shane Spraggs, is a comprehensive roadmap for leaders seeking to accelerate performance for hybrid and remote organizations to sell better, grow faster, and be more productive.

Whether your team is down the block or Down Under, we hope this latest book will help streamline productivity by making remote teams more efficient. And, of course, Virtira walks the walk: we have always been, and always will be, a fully remote company.

To learn more, check out The Power of Remote.