The Checklist

Are you ready for remote?

More and more people are wanting to work remotely. As a leader, how can you say yes and be confident that your teams will be successful? We have provided a list of questions to help you decide if you’re ready to go remote.

1.Do you trust your team to complete its work in an unsupervised environment?

Without trust, remote working doesn’t work. If you don’t trust your team then you’re doomed to failure because you’ll end up interrupting them just to reassure yourself they’re working.

If you do trust your team then you’re one step closer to saying yes and enabling your team to remote work.

2. Do you already allow for work-from-home days?

Working from home and remote working aren’t the same thing; the goals are different.

Working from home gives a team member temporary leave of absence from the office. If the setup isn’t right then the risk of an employee missing out on key pieces of information, or being unproductive, is limited. Typically they are back in the office in a couple of days and any issues can be resolved relatively quickly.

Remote working gives a team member the ability to work away from the office for weeks or months at a time. Any issues with the setup can cause problems if they aren’t resolved quickly, seriously impacting on productivity and undermining the success of any remote working initiative.

If you are able to support working from home then you should have some of the building blocks in place to enable remote working.

3. Does your team spend over 75% of its time mediating its work through a screen?

This is a no brainer. If your team members spend most of their time completing their work digitally, then they are already prime candidates for remote working.

There are two things likely to stop your team from making a success of remote working, they are:

1. If the tasks they spend the rest of their time doing cannot be moved
to a digital channel.

2. If there is limited external access to the tools/systems they need to
do their job.

If the team members spend most of the rest of their time in meetings then you should ask yourself if they can be conducted via a video conference using Zoom, Skype for Business or Google Hangouts. Most people are used to teleconferencing but modern video conference tools can provide a much better remote meeting experience.

If your team spends the rest of its time in design/code reviews, this can be achieved digitally with tools such as InVision, GitHub or Visual Studio online. For other fields, you’ll be surprised what tools are available to replicate day-to-day activities digitally.

With some common-sense guidelines (such as ensuring the tools they use pass through authentication for integrating with your company’s active directory) you can be sure that you’re still in control of your company’s data.

ACCESS TO TOOLS

If there is no external access to the tools and systems your teams need to do their jobs, then remote working may not be possible without lots of workarounds. While it’s possible to email yourself all the files you need, this is a surefire route to becoming unproductive, and can have significant security implications.

At the very least a VPN will be required to allow access to internal file servers and tools. And, given most people’s experience of using a corporate VPN, a better solution is using secure file syncing tools such as Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive or DropBox. These tools make it much easier to access documents without interrupting your colleagues to send you the most recent versions.

4. Do you use a digital collaboration tool as your primary mechanism for coordinating work?

This is critical. If you’re already using a collaboration tool as the bedrock for coordinating your team’s work then you’re 95% there. A remote worker needs confidence that when they’re not in the office they are still ‘involved’ in the project, and are not being left out of key conversations.

If you are not using these tools already then this is the first step. It seems strange at first to use a collaboration tool to talk to a colleague you’re sat next too, but it’s essential for creating transparency and clarity which is a fundamental principle of remote working.

At its simplest, all you need is a chat client with persistent groups (group chats that don’t expire). Invite your project team and use that for all future team and project discussions.

When we first started remote working, we used Skype with a couple of named groups to run a team of 6 UX designers for 6 months.

When setting up your collaboration tool, it’s typical for most conversations to happen in private chat sessions. As we’ve already said, this should be avoided; all conversations should be in open channels unless privacy is absolutely critical, such as when discussing project financing or team performance.

To make this openness bearable everyone should change their notification setting to only be notified when they are @mentioned or @channel mentioned. The onus is on the person posting the message to notify the right people when they want to draw their attention to a message.

Using open channels for communications has the secondary benefit of helping everyone become more aware of what’s happening across the whole team. It also ensures that the team is more likely to offer help and support each other which becomes even more important in a remote working environment.

WOULD EMAIL WORK?

One of the key drawbacks of using email is that conversations happen in private channels, unless you just include everyone. But, as everyone knows from bitter experience, this can get very frustrating.

It’s also very difficult to ensure you have the most up-to-date view of a project, as conversations tend to go off at tangents and sub-conversations are created without all participants knowing they exist.

5. Does your team have clarity about the work it needs to complete on a daily/weekly basis?

When people work remotely they need absolute clarity on what you want them to achieve, and by when.

Make use of project management tools, such as Trello, to detail the ‘in progress’ work and ensure that the team keeps the board up to date. That way you’ll all have a clear idea about what’s being worked on and what’s up next.

This is an extract from our book Ready for Remote. It’s our manifesto for the future of work. It tells the story of how we build and nurture remote teams; the tools we use and the principles we follow.

It’s a story of freedom, purpose and productivity. In the book we openly offer up some best-practice advice for anyone thinking of building remote teams.

Available now on paperback or digital

At 22 North and Ready For Remote, we’re changing the way people work for the better, by challenging the status quo and helping companies work remotely. We help companies create and nurture remote teams; the mindset required, the tools to use and the principles to follow. If we can help, we’d love to talk to you.