The one about remote working

I’m afraid that this is another one of those remote working articles — look away if you have already had your fill of reading about how teams have embraced remote working in a slick and professional way, but lean in if you want some thoughts about how we are all learning to deal with some of the trickier human aspects of our new world.

I am enormously proud of the way in which Cancer Research UK has adjusted to our overnight shift to remote working — but if you are struggling with making this shift then it may be helpful to know that this didn’t just happen overnight. We spent a vast amount of time and energy in 2019 implementing Microsoft O365 (plus Slack as we felt it filled a gap in the Microsoft toolset) and rolling out new laptops. You can read about the Future of Work programme in some of our earlier blog posts. We thought we were doing it to move into a new office as it was triggered by our move to Stratford last year — little did we know that the value would actually be in allowing us to move out of the office.

Whether you were already set up to work remotely, just about cobbling it together or like us still trying to sort out your final intransigent applications, most organisations now seem to be set up to work remotely. Disruption is a great driver of innovation and this has been shown time and again as organisations re-form around our new reality.

We were hugely fortunate to have had this platform in place — but I think the fact we spent so much time looking at ways of working and giving people time to experiment with different virtual formats and patterns of working has been crucial as well. Our goal in doing that was to give people meaningful input into designing new ways of working, but also to give them confidence to embrace an experimental mindset — something that we see as fundamental to a more digital way of working.

We are all experimenting now but it’s worth emphasising that to be successful, experiments simply need to be conscious and also reflected on. This doesn’t have to be a big deal; just acknowledging that you are trying something that may fail and then giving people time and space to reflect on what did and didn’t work can be enough. This works well for working out meeting formats or for figuring out how to move your set piece meetings and rituals online.

There are areas where this is not enough and we tend to use more structured evaluation methods for, for example, tool choices. This is partly to address the need to cover off areas like infosec, data governance and user needs, but is also a way of dealing with the culture wars ensuing as you get people to choose between Miro and Mural as your virtual whiteboard of choice, as people have a lot of feelings about this stuff.

Our current struggle is with the explosion of new tools and experimentation and helping colleagues make safe choices about what they are using without slowing down the pace and innovation that comes at a time when everything is up in the air. Here too we are leaning into our digital methods and applying test and learn principles to ideas as they emerge.

But the biggest adaptation at the moment is the human one; how we are slowing down meetings to make sure we take time to check in with each other and how we are making time for the domestic interruptions that we see as part of this new rhythm rather than trying to pretend that everyone is working exactly as they were before. We are making time for virtual catch ups to replace the chats you have while settling in to work for the day and we are trying to support each other to find the patterns that work for us. I know that we are not the only people doing this, but if you need inspiration then have a look at this excellent piece from the Co-Op digital team on how it’s ok to do what you need to do.

It will be fascinating to see which of these changes stick when we all emerge from lockdown. I think any sceptics who weren’t convinced by remote working will have to accept that the genie is out of the bottle, and I think we will also all be more thoughtful about how we use face to face time as we reflect on what we have missed about being physically together at this time. I hope we will spend less money on post-it notes — and less time trying to figure out what we wrote on them afterwards. I hope we will continue to embrace the idea that different people work to different rhythms and continue to design our work around that, instead of rigidly expecting people to fit into a 9–5 pattern that even more than ever seems like an artefact of another time.

All charities are going to come out of these difficult times changed — I hope that our ways of working are one of the positive aspects of this change.