Remote working takes more than sending people home

On paper, remote working is a no-brainer. Increased productivity, reduced costs, access to a much larger, diverse talent pool and flexible schedules for employees. The technology is there, too. It’s been there for the past 10 years. So why haven’t we all been sitting at home for the past decade doing home workouts and joining videoconferences?

Marissa Meyer famously backtracked and declared a no-remote-work policy around 5 years ago as CEO of Yahoo!. High-profile companies such as Reddit, Best Buy or IBM followed suit. Citing Marissa: “to become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side.” Why have some of the biggest companies in the world shied away from the panacea of work culture?

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They weren’t ready.

As many companies and workers have been forced to find out during the last months, there’s a little more to making remote working work than sending people home, giving them a bunch of tools and having a good internet connection. Just as you cannot make a better runner by buying him better shoes, you cannot improve a team’s performance just by allowing them to work from home.

Many companies focus too much on technology and too little on the process. To reap the benefits of a remote workforce, you must first nail the basics of any successful team, and then adapt them to a remote environment: coordination, communication, and culture.

Coordination

Coordination refers to the ability of your company working together to achieve common objectives. If it’s hard to have your employees working in harmony to achieve lofty goals when they’re sitting next to you, imagine when they’re spread out between San Francisco, Madrid and New Delhi. For team coordination to work in a remote environment, it should run like clockwork. Leveraging tools like Asana or Clickup can definitely become enablers for more effective collaboration, but they will get you nowhere without a clear, solid process behind them.

Regardless of the framework you use (OKR’s, MBO’s etc.), there are some general guidelines that should be met to ensure effective coordination. Every team member should have no doubts about the company’s mission, the current priorities, their role and responsibility, and how their performance is measured. Every objective or task should be as SMART as possible, and every project and process should be documented in detail, and teams should know when and where to provide updates, review progress and communicate decisions.

Communication

Effective teamwork starts and ends with communication, and let’s face it, most companies struggle with this one regardless of the environment: remote or physical. In a physical environment, any lack of information flow can be made up for through spontaneous outreach. This usually comes at the expense of productivity through unwanted interruptions. The more complex the organization gets, the tougher information flow becomes, and the bigger the need for clearer communication processes and guidelines.

In a remote environment, designing a clear communication system is necessary and crucial from the beginning. Rather than a threat, this can become a huge opportunity. Which channels will you use? Which tools? For what purpose? With what frequency? In which situation? Every employee should be crystal clear where and when they should communicate for any given purpose. Your whole communication system must be perfectly designed and implemented to ensure communication flows seamlessly and effectively.

Culture

Arguably the most important aspect of the three. As Ben Horowitz famously put it — “Your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there”. And in a remote environment — you’re never there. Your work is done mostly in isolation, and whilst a good communication & collaboration system might be effective for a while, it’s a strong culture that fosters engagement and sustains performance in the long term. Culture is all about generating trust through common values and customs.

There are two main layers to trust. Cognitive-based trust refers to the confidence you feel in another person’s accomplishments, skills and reliability. Affective trust on the other hand, arises from feelings of emotional closeness, empathy or friendship. While cognitive trust is relatively easy to replicate in a remote environment, affective trust is definitely a challenge.

Affective trust is strongly driven by emotion and relational factors that are tough to develop remotely. There are different approaches to make up for this. You might need to bring the team together for short periods of time. Some managers devote extra time to one-on-one conversations with employees, or generate a deliberate space for group informal conversation. Regardless of the method, focus should be on fostering an informal space where people within the company can let their guard down and connect by recognizing each other as human beings, understand how they feel and share insights into their personal lives.

Remote working is not a fad, it’s here to stay. Nevertheless, a post-crisis scenario where it becomes instantly widespread is unlikely. Its implementation is broader and deeper than most organizations anticipate and to be successful, a structured approach is needed, coupled with significant investment to change corporate culture. While the current pandemic has undoubtedly accelerated its adoption, we still have a long road ahead of us to make remote working, work.

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