Relaunching the Workplace, part II
Hoist the Colours! We’re continuing our journey to a new world, where remote and onsite work complement each other
In part I of this article, we envisioned a future — already a present for the most agile organizations. Like pirates on a quest, you’d split your time between a mothership office, smal satellite offices, social places, and sometimes on your own on personal endeavours.
But Internet has not only disrupted where you can work, it has actually changed the way you work. Let’s tackle how we can use time, then we’ll also look at tasks and jobs that can’t easily be done remote.
Make the most of Time
Time is the most valuable asset in life. A true Pirate of the Caribbean works as much for the fun as for the bounty, don’t you think? Internet gives you a tool to cut on the wasted, exclusive, idle time spent at work doing nothing valuable.
Leverage the Millenials’ multitasking super power
Have you seen those millenials playing video games while watching TV while talking on Discord with their friends? I’m not saying this is a good thing that should be applied to all activities, but the fact is some tasks require more focus than others. Let’s start with those that require low focus.
There’s nothing more boring than waiting in a meeting room for late coworkers, sitting at my chair doing nothing. OK, I can scroll my Facebook wall, or do small talk with Mr Black-and-white Tie. Except that my phone doesn’t get good coverage in that room and Mr Tie only talks about his collection of action figures. — Stacy
Do you like listening for one hour to a boring instructional one-way presentation, doing nothing else, when you could fold your clean laundry or do some workout at the same time — and use that precious time later for a focused activity.
Working from home gives you the freedom to quickly deal with any personal concerns or issues at an appropriate time without any disruption to others and ensures that you can keep a clear mind for work. — Gary Blair in The Second Great Working From Home Experiment, but What Happened to the First?
But these tiny time optimizations are nothing compared to the privilege of adapting your work cycles to your state of mind, mental fitness or fatigue. “I’m only creative between 9am-5pm”, says no artist.
Do you consider yourself an artist? Follow your chronotype!
Creativity can arise in your shower or on a forest trail. Information processing jobs often involve creativity — or they end up being automated. So, why not take advantage of sunlight to walk out, get some fresh air, vitamin D and adjust your melatonin rate to sleep well tonight?
30 to 40% of people, who can be called night owls, don’t fit in the 9–5 pattern. Let’s bring some sleep equity! Here is a game changer for one’s well-being: by spreading the workday or workweek, inserting longer breaks, you could actually get more productive, and do what you love doing at the best time, with your loved ones. Be like that CEO who goes playing golf in the middle of the afternoon!
That said, how do you collaborate with your coworkers if every one has a different break schedule? Here’s a keyword: asynchronous work.
Enter the Flow: cut interruptions
We already do it a lot, sending and receiving emails, issues, requests. Once your company has gone through the trouble of setting up online tools for collaboration, such as Slack or Teams, asynchronous work becomes the new normal. No more interruptions by someone coming to your desk.
Of course, you will probably accept being interrupted by phone or chat notifications in a specific channel, for emergencies. You will also schedule meeetings to discuss specific topics and make collective decisions. I’m not saying to throw your calendar away. On the contrary, use it to take control of your day!
Being able to focus for more than one hour is the condition to reach the Flow, a mental state of full concentration, enjoyment, and lack of stress or boredom. You get the impression that time flies. But then, when you have escaped the routine of an office job, it still feels that a lot of time has passed when you look back at your previous month!
A pirate is focused on the current action in the quest. If you end up in a different timezone from your colleagues, schedule all synchronous meetings during the overlapping hours, then work without interruptions. Learn more about productive workflows: 7 ways of keeping track of your Todos. Actively organize your time to chase focus!
Is it for everybody?
Among your coworkers, you’ll always have those who really love going to the office. Yes, look at your sales representatives extroverts who enjoy social life at the office — it’s probably not about flirting, if they work in software development companies, although relationships do happen in the workpace — and competition. Also look at the folks having built their favourite routine in the neighborhood where their office is located. Look at moms and dads who happily escape their household a few hours a day for peace of mind! Let’s them be the solid ground members of your inner hub, the ones you can count on to make it a thriving place.
They could also help a lot with your recruitment of new hires, especially the junior ones. Let’s focus on that for a minute.
Enrolling and training newbies
New hires are up for learning a lot in a short time. Not only explicit company procedures and knowledge, but also the company culture, ie. what are the appropriate social behaviours.
That is even more relevant for juniors. One common mistake for juniors is to not dare asking for help when they are stuck. On site, you would notice them struggling, go round in circles, if their screen is always showing the same pages after a while, and you could offer — if not impose — your help. So, even if you’re working in an alternative workplace such as a café, I would suggest to offer them a seat next to you for the first few weeks. Granted, you could find some technical solutions for seeing their screen or even filming them all day long! But is this a good signal for the autonomy you want them to build? — let alone Zoom fatigue and the acceptability of such Big Brother practice in the western world. And for them to learn how interaction happens in the company, they also need to hear you, their boss, working. So, if you are a digital nomad, why not fly to their city, or invite them to yours, and work as a tandem for a few weeks?
Anothe risk, if a junior coworker starts remotely, is to lack a sense of meaningfulness, since all they do is typing things on a keyboard, after all, not meeting anyone IRL. Unlike senior staff who are already settled in life, they haven’t got bored of office life yet: they want to feel the difference on between in a startup or in a major company, and they probably want to experience those coffee-machine moments as a journey to adulthood.
If they come straight from the university, they also might want to find that sense of fun and chaos you can get in large groups of people.
If you don’t have a choice but to hire remote newbies, you’ll need an extra care such as quick answers, frequent calls for feedback, hands-on help (such as peer programming using screen sharing or muti-user live coding, for software engineers), and maybe some creative way of tracking their time. You should also schedule mentoring calls, outside of the concrete work calls, to take a step back and let them talk of the whole experience. NoHQ covers the case of remote interships in this guide.
If you work in software development, you already know that open-source teams have embraced remote collaboration for many years. You will find a lot of tools build to facilitate remote software project management.
Staying in the loop: the challenge of an hybrid model
Now part of your team works in a office, while others work remotely. What could possibly go wrong?
People at the office will happily meet at the coffee machine and talk— also gossip. Those conversations not reaching outside that circle, there’s a risk of splitting the community, ie. making uneven social bonds — but this happens in a full physical office anyway: obviously you can’t force people to make friends with everybody. More concerning, impromptu meetings may produce information, if not decisions, de facto bouncing remote coworkers out of the loop.
This effect may be mitigated by work processes based on written documents and channels, enforcing a remote-first mindset. Daily online stand-up meeting and goal-oriented management seem to be popular in that field.
But sometimes, your team can simply enter a fast iteration phase by gathering in a common place for a short time. You have to make sure decision makers are all on the bridge. If this is not physically possible, you could invest in telepresence equipment: why not try those little robots acting like an avatar of a remote coworker? Or, less sci-fi but still fun, one of those video conferencing tools looking like platform games from the 80s (Gather Town, Work Adventure, TeamFlow, Topia, Lemverse, etc.)
Organising one-to-many live events: remote or IRL?
Organizing a conf call with a small team is usually not difficult, as you can let everybody speak. If some are less talkative, you could ask for their opinion from time to time, much like you should do in IRL meetings.
Sometimes, you want to announcements news to a large community of colleagues, in the form of a live event. This format of conf call, available on tools such as Teams, allows one (or a few) speaker(s) to be heard and seen, while the audience is participating in the chat. Questions can even be anonymous and moderated.
This format, well known by watchers of Twitch-streamed video games, is now widely used by e-learning companies, so you could attend a training on any topic to see how it’s done. As for any presentation, the main speaker is responsible for catching the attention of the viewers using the rhythm, for managing expectations and for turning to the viewers for feedback. Ask them to submit questions or ideas, to vote, etc.
If your colleagues are playful, you may soon see running gags appear and entertain the audience!
But then again, these events won’t cement your teams as much as real grand-messes with petits-fours and champagne (or burritos and vodka shots). These events always bring some serendipity: when two colleagues from the same company, who have never met, are sharing a taxi to come back to their hotel, they might innocently talk about an idea that will become your next awesome product!
A new class struggle?
Now, we’ve been discussing about people whose work is about transforming information, ie. office workers. What about all others jobs in services to people (doctors, cashiers, gym coaches), manufacturing, transportation, and so on?
Those jobs just can’t be done from anywhere. A majority of people are still ‘Somewheres’, as David Goodhart calls those who are attached to a place, whose jobs are being uberized, who might be afraid that immigration change their neighborhood. In his view, ‘Anywheres’ are the privileged, digital natives, living the dominant liberal dream and open to diversity.
We should respect those who are not dreaming about our freedom of movement. Then, if we, as a society, want to offer equal chances to all who are up for some adventure, let’s offer opportunities for job exchanges. A skilled salesperson could work in an outlet in a different city or country, provided they speak the local language. Why couldn’t a bus driver from the Midwest US get a bit of training and exchange their job with a fellow driver in a medium asian city for a few months? Bringing their children to a great eyes-opening summer experience of learning another culture, discovering incredible food and hiking in lush nature?
I think platforms that facilitate workers’ mobility, such as Staylance, will grow and might become as popular as Airbnb and booking platforms for tourists. People haven’t even waited for existence of the internet to offer help in farms (see the wwoofing movement) or in families around the world (au pair). Many young adults already take advantage of Working Holiday Visas to spend months in remote countries, working in hostels for example.
The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”–attributed to St. Augustine
After all, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers way before they settled for farming. Our human body and mind has evolved to adapt to survival in those long times. Moving from area to area, to surf on seasons and opportunities, find food and escape natural disasters, slowly built-up in our DNA. Even industry started at home. Real-estate property has surely been a thing since then, but some people now question what they call the rat race. Isn’t the meaning of what you do greater than the amount of properties you will have collected at the end of your life? Isn’t the journey more important that the goal? Isn’t mobility the best way to get resilient as the environment goes wild?
Conclusion
Now that time and space are no longer a constraint to process information, we finally can perform productive work *and* fullfill our adventure or family dreams. The office will mutate into a series of hubs where people sharing the same goal meet and talk desires, strategy, get creative together and also socialize and have fun!
Be cool, be a pirate!
Do you have experience working in a remote company? Please share your feedback and advice in the comments!
