About remote working facts, struggles and reality
I had several discussions with detractors and supporters of remote working and in every discussion I had the feeling that tons of stereotypes and assumptions are used when exemplifying why should you allow or not remote working in your company.
There is not so much said about what are facts and what are opinions.
As I mentioned in my previous post I spent a considerable amount of time working remotely (5 years) and even when I have a formed opinion on that, I had to research deeply to find at what facts can we look that show some light on those discussions. This are my findings
# Opinions 🤹♀️
People opinion can be simplified with an image
But it can also be simplified with the following example
- When you try to find your on-site colleague but you cannot find him, where is he? It could be in a meeting 👨💻, kitchen 👩🍳, bathroom 🚽, maybe sick 🤒, doing some focus work 🚀 or a long etc. right?
Let’s ask this question again but with a remote worker
- When you ping a remote worker and you don’t get an answer within 5 minutes, where is he or she? 🏖😎🍻 … clearly
If you search for “working remotely” on google images the result is not so hard to imagine, people in unreal situations enjoying the weather, landscape and comfy clothes while having a relaxed session of “working” if something productive can come out of the situations there drawn.
This loose image of remote workers working conditions conforms the main source of detractors.
# Facts 🥊
To set some base of common understanding let’s use a common definition of remote working:
A way of developing your work in a more convenient space for employer and employee where similar productivity as in the office is reached
Remote working means that the employee chooses the space 🏖, it doesn’t mean that the employee chooses the working hours 📅, that’s freelancing and that’s not what I’m talking about. The only thing that changes is that just that on-site collaboration stops being the norm.
Hiring without barriers 🌍
By Embracing remote working you’ll be able to hire talent from everywhere , no matter where they are or live ✅.
You’ll no longer be forced to choose the best employee of those that want to move to your city and hire the one that really fits.
Asking people to get away from family, country, friends and start from scratch is asking too much for many people.
If you want to hire the best, why are you limiting your company with barriers and borders that you can avoid hiring remote?
A problem of space 🤯
One of the coolest experiments ever 🧪 was run by Nicholas A. Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts and Zhichun Jenny Ying from Standford business graduate school in collaboration with Peking university.
The case of Ctrip (an online travel agency based in Shanghai, China), is the case of many companies that after a big growth faced a common question:
Shall we get bigger offices or get ready for remote work?: This question needs to be seen in context of Shanghai and other cities with increasing and already high square meter prices
To take the best decision, they prepared an A/B experiment 🧪 where they sent half of their customer support department to work remotely and sat down to see what changed 🍿
This experiment is so exciting that I could be hours talking about it but then I would go off topic, so if you’re interested here’s a link to the TED talk given by Nicholas A. Bloom if you want to know more about the setup and results.
The results were clear 🔥
Productivity increased: and what’s more important, it improved in all employees, from performers to those with improvement needed
Resign ratio dropped by 50%: This one is very important because improving resign ratio ensures less money expended in training new employees, less knowledge loss and inherently means happier workers.
This experiments shows that there is a clear advantage for employers to embrace remote working: productivity and employee rotation improves significantly.
What this experiment doesn’t show is what it meant to the company culture and how this change can affected remote workers, that’s what my next section is about.
A communication problem 📣
Some time ago, HBR (Harvard business review) published an experiment where ~1100 workers (~50% remote ~50% on-site) were asked some questions about their work dynamics to detect most common remote working struggles.
What they found didn’t got me by surprise either...
“Overall, remote employees may enjoy the freedom to live and work where they please, but working through and with others becomes more challenging.”
“They report that workplace politics are more pervasive and difficult, and when conflicts arise they have a harder time resolving them.”
Non-necessarily only remote workers face this, teams spread across buildings also face this issue.
The result of the experiment is as simple as the title of the post:
The article goes a bit deeper and talks about what remote workers found to be the seven best practices from on-site workers to improve collaboration between remote and on-site workers:
Be available
Check frequently and constantly
Prioritize relationship
Use video or audio tools for contact
Demonstrate familiarity and comfort with technology
Exemplary communication skills
Make expectations explicit
I must nothing else than agree with each one of them, there is nothing more terrible than colleagues with attitudes that can make your day full of frustration and despair like:
- “Sorry, we forgot to dial you in the meeting”
- “Oh, Is there an app for that?”
- “If you don’t approach to my desk it’s not that important for you”
This can be a read as a consequence of this other study by Nicholas Epley and Justin Krugerb where it’s shown that a text-based channel (in this case email) where voice is not involved leads to communication gaps that are filled with stereotypes by the receiver, this leads to communication failures, which can explain the results in the post from HBR.
Improving people’s communication is key to keep remote workers happy and integrated in your company culture.
If you want to start remote working better do it when and where you don’t have a specifically intensive communication need.
Note: I don’t want to say that it cannot be done well if you need an intensive communication, but that not everybody will be ready for it, because you’ll need proper online tools, people attitude helping that culture and some experience in this scenario.
# TL;DR 🤣
Embracing remote working in your company is promising and look a lot like the future for many companies, but it’s important to understand the main difficulties that this would mean for your company culture and employees both alike.
Advantages 👍
Hiring without barriers (no matter where they are): Hiring people from outside your company country never come at no cost, remember that you’re taking people out of their countries, families and comfort zones.
Sustainable growth: You won’t need to grow your office to grow your team, you could use that slice of the budget to get better salaries for your employees, invest in that new technology or improve your processes.
Resign ratio drop: Happier people last longer, you’ll be able to avoid spending so much money on trainings and knowledge loss.
Productivity increase: As proven in the Ctrip experiment, productivity increases even for half-bottom performers of the company.
Challenges 👎
Communication: Non-verbal communication lead to communication gaps filled with wrong assumptions (in most cases) and a difficulty of inclusion of remote workers in your culture and company dynamics
People’s culture: People’s culture is one of the hardest things to change, and on-site workers non used to include remote workers in your
Loss of focus: One of the biggest challenges for a remote worker is to keep themselves focused, distractions are everywhere but there are lots of techniques about how to improve this (I already talked about some of them)
