If your business is working remotely – but only temporarily – you need to read this!

Much of the insight, education and guidance for remote workers and remote managers is geared toward fully remote or remote-first organizations.  But, particularly at the moment, many businesses are partially remote but, whilst they may intend to continue to offer flexible remote working, they don’t intend to become fully remote.

In my conversations with remote workers, a huge gap is emerging between those who are making remote work a part of their business and adapting how they operate and those who are just “temporarily” working remotely and have made literally no adaptations beyond a sudden, and for many, life-blood sucking, zoom habit.

I’ve put together my top 10 tips for businesses temporarily embracing remote work:

1. Take some time to re-imagine how you work

For many employees currently working from home, their businesses have not changed a thing. Nothing. Nada.

The result is that employees are working harder than ever to keep up with everything, are stuck in an endless succession of zoom or team meetings so are unable to do their day job and so end up doing their work into the evenings and weekend – hence a key issue for many remote workers, is work-life balance.  Because suddenly, they’re not getting any.

People – you are likely to be working at home for another 6 months, minimum.  Once you go back, things won’t quite be the same again. Fact.

Therefore, taking some time to rethink some of your work processes now, will really help smooth things out for the foreseeable.  What to change? Well, read on to find out:

2. Shift your communication to asynchronous

Remote-first companies, that started remote, set out with a different set of expectations, processes and systems in terms of communication, than those who have traditionally been office-based.  Specifically, their lack of immediate interaction with each other, and an increase in time-zone differentials means that their default communication style is asynchronous, which means they use comms tools which are not live.  So think, slack, basecamp, video-recording solutions like loom and voodle, messaging apps, email – technologies that enable their co-workers to respond in their own time rather than be present live.  Obviously, they still have plenty of synchronous comms too, but their day to day work is achieved through project management tools that capture everything in one place or against a specific project.  The benefits of doing this?  It enables you to be more productive because you….

3. Think like a (lean) agency

A key advantage of thinking like an agency is that you’re obsessed with man-hours (or woman-hours, we really ought to have found another word for that by now).  This obsession means you use your team more strategically and productively.  Think about it – if you invite 8 people into a zoom meeting for an hour – it equates to 8 woman-hours of work. That’s an entire day, and if you think about what you achieved in that entire day you’ll see it really wasn’t the best use of 8 hours-  imagine what your team could have achieved individually in those 8 hours!

The reality is that at least 3 people in that meeting only needed to be there for the last point on the agenda, 1 of them probably didn’t need to be there at all.  If your team’s days are comprised of 2 or 3 meetings like this, you’ll quickly clock up a week’s worth of hours, with not much output.  Plus, you’re forcing your teams to perform their day jobs outside of their normal hours because they can’t attend all those meetings and still produce work. If you behave as if there’s a direct cost to each man-hour clocked up, you use your team more productively.  For example, if you switch instead to asynch tools, then you can create a specific project, have your team members load up their progress, questions, updates. They can @ people for specific, targeted responses, and team members can quickly catch up on progress, in their own time, in a fraction of what it takes in a meeting.  You’ll still meet online, regularly, of course, but when you do meet it’s just to finalise key outstanding issues rather than to go through the entire project blow-by-blow.

4. Create some non-negotiables, that suit your business and your team

Work-life balance is certainly an issue for remote workers, mostly for the reasons outlined above. It’s important that your business leads from the top in terms of expectation of workers as you interact remotely.  Do you have a culture that allows teams to manage their own hours, with a specified overlap time, or do you need everyone on the same core hours?  Do you insist in video meetings that everyone is video-on, or do you let employees decide for themselves?  How frequently do you ask your managers to have one-on-ones with their teams?  How are you managing and monitoring employee wellness, remotely and is this standardised across the business?

5. Allow for variations between teams

Once you’ve worked out your hard and fast rules, the non-negotiables of working from home, you’re half-way to creating a remote work policy.  Next, make sure it’s articulated and documented and readily accessible.  However, you’ll also need to think about the extent to which you allow Managers to dictate the remote work rules, how much flexibility are you prepared to allow, to suit individual team’s core roles?

6. In doing 5, be aware and cautious about creating different sub-cultures and envy opportunities

Creating flexibility in your remote work rules comes with its own set of issues – it needs to be handled very cautiously to ensure you don’t end up creating sub-cultures and opportunities for employees to feel unjustly treated and envious of their colleagues. So proceed with caution, that’s all.

7. Foster a culture of trust and empowerment across your teams

Whilst this one is all the way down at 7, it’s actually one of the most important.  Google conducted a study which showed that the most effective work cultures were those where team members enjoyed “psychological safety” in other words, the team’s felt like they had each other’s backs – they could make a decision, autonomously and feel confident that their co-workers and managers trusted them sufficiently that they would back that decision, even if it turned out to be the wrong one.  This becomes even more important for remote workers, because employees don’t have the opportunity to lean across the desk and get that immediacy of validation before making decisions. They need to operate autonomously but to do so without being micro-managed they need to feel and be trusted.  Focus on developing the right skills, knowledge, processes and culture so that “the way things are done around here” imbues everything, so that making the right decisions is an almost self-evident task. Focus also on building trust and empowerment and transparency between your team members to nurture this.

8. Shift the focus to output not presenteeism

Remote-first businesses are all about the output – and to achieve this, they’re also all about the processes. They have a stack of tech in place that creates clear work-flows and goals, systems and processes to log that workflow and track those goals and trust in each other that progress is getting made.  If you’re clear about expectations of employees, it matters far less that you can’t “see” them, it removes temptations to micro-manage them because it’s not about the how of what they’re doing but the end result.  This is transformative – but, particularly for traditionally in-office workers, it’s tricky and really requires some deliberate and thoughtful rethinking of the way you operate!

9. Re-think your tech stack

It’s astonishing how many workers are currently operating remotely, with no tech changes to in-office than regular video conferencing.  Get to this urgently – you DO need to do things differently, whilst working remotely and this is beyond a temporary stop-gap so is worth reconsidering and investing in.  We’ll be talking to a different tech expert each week as part of our expert interview series and they’ll be sharing their tech stack with you, for inspiration – so sign up to keep abreast of new interviews as they’re available.

10. “Mind the gap” between in-office and remote workers

Last but not least – this is going to become a big issue for employers, as we start to return to the office to some degree.  Some workers may be in-office, others may remain remote, perhaps temporarily or perhaps permanently.  When everyone is remote, or in-office, it’s a level playing field but when you have a mix of both there’s a whole world of potential pain, with the risk of getting the worst of both worlds rather than the best of both.  This needs thoughtful and careful planning – how do you ensure your remote employees don’t feel like second class citizens?  Some businesses, like dropbox are taking a very deliberate approach to their partly-remote workforce, they intend to bring everyone back together for specific tasks and opportunities, rather than risk creating two tiers of employees.

11. Look after employee wellbeing

Bonus 11^th point – employee wellbeing is critical and never more so than for remote employees  – particularly those working in non-remote businesses.  Issues can be harder to spot, when you’re not in-office together, and the enforced isolation of Covid19 in particular is creating real mental health concerns for many.  Look after each other, look out for each other, make protecting employee wellbeing a central part of your business culture, not a second-thought.