Remote gives more time and attention to ourselves — let’s never go back!

I always thought that I was lucky because I chose a more flexible work style either as a free lancer or business owner. A large part of my work can be done at a cafe or in my kitchen. I usually only have the meetings that are truly necessary, and no one is starring over my back, when I’m just surfing for serendipity, inspiration and new ideas.

Right now a lot of teams are going remote by necessity. And they are all doing it at the same time. It’s a unique situation for experimenting, that would otherwise never happen. I really do hope they will bring a much more flexible work style and a deeper understanding for what it means to be working remotely, and begin to mix local and remote work more seamlessly.

When we go remote we give people more time and attention to themselves. We give people the freedom to be more productive, without the distractions of the office and a life which isn’t divided into chunks of nine-to-five’s. Remote work allows us to shift to an ‘asynchronous’ work format. Today almost all companies exist on a real-time idea, where we feel we have to gather everyone every day, always stuffing way too many people, into way too many meetings — just because we can.

So many meetings doesn’t need to happen. They could be so many other things than a meeting. A presentation could be a short recorded video. A status meeting could be a write-up. A proposal could be a shared Google doc with commenting. Write-ups and recordings allow people to catch up when it works for them, and allow us to have less meetings. When we write stuff up everybody is on the same page, because they get the same information at the same time. Meetings are great for debating, not for sharing facts and information.

BUT …

… how do we know what people are doing and if they are working — we don’t! And we don’t have to because you know what — people can be trusted. Trust is the foundation of remote work, without it it just doesn’t work. We don’t trust someone more because we see them in person. We trust other people, when they continue to produce great work and contribute to the team. When we show people trust — guess what — they return it.

When most companies go remote they simply try to copy and paste the way they do things in the office into the remote. They usually start by adding a few remote workers. And they have meetings where five people are sitting around a conference desk and then have one person dial in from the outside. That doesn’t work! If just one person is remote everyone should be on their laptop in their office to level the playing field.

Remote teams don’t eat lunch together and don’t go out for a coffee. So we have to create time for people to socialise in other ways. There are so many ways this can happen. Swap the monday morning stand-up for a social activity, where people share what they did on the weekend — make some sacrifices. Have regular check-ins that prompts people to share how they feel, what they’re up to, what gets them going and what takes away their energy.

Originally published at https://belowthesurface.dk on March 23, 2020.