Remote work — an opportunity you’d better get ready for

Do you remember when MP3 started replacing CDs, and the music industry fought the new wave instead of surfing it? The history repeats with the remote work.

You can force people to go back to the office, or take the strategic advantage from it. If you opt out for the number two, keep reading.

Let’s quickly dissect part of the problem

There are three main concerns among executives about remote work:
culture, productivity control and mental health.

Culture — a few managers believe it is impossible, or too difficult, to create or influence the company’s culture remotely, what might be true, but the question we need to make ourselves is: “why?”.

Why do we need to create or influence the culture of a company?

First of all, culture is how people behave based on what they believe.
It’s not use being physically present if people don’t admire the leadership.

It’s necessary to influence the culture to achieve certain behaviors more effective than others to ensure we get to a given result, such as autonomy and proactivity.

Productivity Control — many managers are used to (believe they) know what’s happening all the time and they believed that, if people are under the same physical building, they are under control.

However, if you don’t have smart processes and metrics in place, people may be right under your nose and you still don’t know what they’re producing.

Mental Health — many companies are afraid their employees are working even more and getting more stressed with the remote work, what might be evidenced by this McKinsey research.

Opportunities

Despite the concerns, there may be way more opportunities than constraints with the remote work, depending on how you architect the organization. So, instead of thinking “what can or cannot be done remotely”, think “how to I enable an effective remote work”.

Cost reduction

This is the 1st and most obvious. Less transport costs, less electricity, less snacks, less offices, etc.

Mental Health

Don’t forget that the remote work started because of the pandemics, and the cause of the stress may not have been related to the remote work, but the lockdown.

With the end of the lockdown, people can now work travelling, or make a pause to jogging in the middle of the day, play with their sons or take a nap.
Would it cause higher stress levels than facing the traffic to go to the office?

Maybe what causes the stress it’s not the remote work, but the non-remote management model applied to the remote work.

The chart below evidences that company’s lack of clear vision on the future of remote work is one of the key causes of anxiety.

Access to a world of talents, literally

Sooner or later, with traditional money or crypto coin, companies of all sizes will legally access talents all over the world and, while before COVID remote people got indeed excluded from the team, full remote work eliminates completely this team integration problem.

In any case, if this seems not enough to you, it’s a good moment to start investing in mitigation plans to the talent risk:

Inclusion — the end of bias?

As we almost don’t need to see people anymore, and without geographical restrictions, the only things that matters are the results and minimum soft skills. Some people will deliver it alone in a bedroom, other ones will prefer to talk about it with the colleagues, what can perfectly be done remotely, since led by mature leaders.

Enough of micromanagement

There’s no way to know if people are sited in front of the computer for 8 hours or if they found a way to get things done in 1 hour and watched movies during the other 7. Or even if they had a great idea and worked during the weekend, by the way.

So, the only metric now is the result, wasn’t that what always mattered?

While non-remote work used to give the false sense of control, now the only way to get there is through data, what, by the way, comes from good processes, running over good technologies.

Slow thinking

In the best seller “Thinking, fast and slow”, by Daniel Kahneman, and in many other problem-solving books, you learn the difference between trusting on the fast thinking instead of taking the proper time to mature a given decision.

When we are, every single day, with our boss and colleagues, there’s a natural tendency to throw ideas into the wind during the coffee or the lunch without enough analysis. It might be good in terms of collaboration, but might also be a great waste of time with poor ideas.

With remote work, if you want to present an idea, you need to think about it before schedule a meeting to present that.

There’s no shortcut, we need to rely on the system

During years we have been investing in improving the value chain to ensure the company was going to a given direction, and the archenemy of this effort was exactly this set of intrinsic beliefs, behaviors and informal agreements created during the coffee or lunch, that seldom was aligned to the strategy.

To deal with this, we work the culture. Without this, we work the system.

Now, there’s no friend in IT team, or a way to exchange a chocolate by a favor. There’s only one way to get what you want: following the process.

This brings both a risk and an opportunity. There’s a fine line between bureaucracy and effectiveness. Be careful!

Autonomy

Last, but not least, we have been fighting hard to ensure that people act autonomously. Now, there’s no alternative!

Remote work may bring way more benefits than consequences, but just as music industry needed to come from physical CDs to streaming, the organizational structure made to manage physical presence will have to be reviewed, and employees already know that, as it turns clear on the chart below from a McKinsey research.

If you go back and remind why we have adopted certain practices, you’ll see that remote work is a gift, and it’s our chance to build really smart processes.

In that scenario, start ups will, once more, come out ahead big companies. Initially remote work will be adopted because it’s cheaper, and then they will naturally reap the strategic benefits coming along with this.

By investing in smart, lean and automatic organizations, remote work represents the opportunity of the decade. Get ahead, or get out.

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