One month remote work transformation Recipe

Taking an organisation remote in 1 month

Goal

The goal of this article is to present a minimum viable program to shift an organisation or team to effective, fun remote-work.

How?

The plan presented here is based on decades of remote work experience and many years studying future-of-work ideas.

The suggestions here are based on extensive study of best practices and patterns for effective remote work, effective teamwork, and modern organisation and leadership in a VUCA world.

Future article: Effective Teamwork Mastery — month 2 and beyond — level-up team work everywhere

Do it yourself

You can get the points from this article as a trello board to copy and execute easily.

Why remote work?

Remote work has been slowly seeping into the mainstream but the 2020 covid crisis has thrust a great millions of companies and tens of millions of people into their first remote-work experiment.

However remote work requires a modern organisation style and good leadership as well as personal responsibility and organisation from everyone. Fortunately these are exactly the attributes that teams require in a VUCA world — an effective team is effective whether it is remote or co-located, the principles of success are exactly the same — trust, responsibility, communication, leadership.

I hope that this realisation will enable more people to embrace this chance as an opportunity to improve teamwork in general, not just remotely.

Why this guide?

Without a map we are lost.

Whilst remote work has many benefits for both organisations and individuals, it can also be very painful for everyone if implemented thoughtlessly.

Nevertheless implementing even just a few best practices will help any organisation get through this forced remote work experiment without unnecessary stresses.

Crisis Remote Work Basics

The following suggestions if implemented over a month will help avoid the biggest challenges of remote work making an organisation or team comfortable with remote work.

Participative Online Townhall /all

Organise an interactive company all-persons townhall with CEO/upper-management and all employees, done in such a way that everyone has an opportunity to discuss in small groups, ask questions and have them answered by management.

Goals

• reassure, give hope, address the covid elephant in the room
• give space for Q&A

shows everyone how powerful online tools can be for bringing us together

Actions

• Conduct an interactive town-hall

Further Readings

• https://expertprogrammanagement.com/2017/11/town-hall-meetings/
• https://www.digitalconnectmag.com/what-makes-a-company-town-hall-meeting-successful/

Parents Support /all

Parents with stay at home children are struggling the most. It is imperative for the company to support them.

Goals

• Support parents
• Show the organisation cares about it’s employees with children

Actions

• Assign HR hands or get consulting for parents in particular
• Catalyse parents mutual support through:
• creating dedicated parents communication channel
• daily sharing resources on how to keep kids happy, learning occupied
• organising <Your Org>-Kids calls online (so kids can talk)

Collaboration Blockers Audit /all

Conduct a quick survey to all staff to understand what is blocking them from effective remote work.

(max 3 questions, asking for 90%+ participation rate)

Goals

• Identify collaboration barriers

Actions

• conduct survey
• openly share anonymised results

Collaboration Tools Audit /all

In order to understand if organisation is technologically ready for remote work RIGHT NOW conduct a quick poll asking all employees what tools they DAILY use for collaboration (max 10 questions, asking for 80%+ participation rate)

Goals

• Review what collaboration tools are used in fact
• Identify collaboration barriers because of inadequate tools
• Search for quick-wins for what tools need to be added to the palette or which tools need better training to achieve wide-spread adoption

Weekly Watercooler /team

All experts on distributed teams recommend that the team create time for general non-work conversation. There are different ways to do this such as a video-conference lunch or end of week beer or just a general “watercooler” call where people are free to discuss anything. We propose to facilitate a weekly watercooler call per team creating an open space for free-form conversation and connection. Using our watercooler playbook ensures that conversations become meaningful and a highlight of the team’s week.

Goals

• Create team social space
• Make sure everyone is connected
• Improve team communication
• Teambuilding, build better relations through mutual understanding

Actions

• Give each team the invitation to try a weekly watercooler/remote-lunch/beers
• Choose one watercooler host in each team

Daily stand-ups /team

Especially in these unusual times, especially for a company just learning remote work, regular scheduled live-interaction is very important. Without regularly scheduled catch-ups there is a huge risk of ad-hoc meetings overwhelming everyone’s work schedule or some people getting lost, not knowing what they are doing or just taking remote work as paid time off.

The standup is a short meeting where a team gathers together to briefly announce their achievements, goals, and obstacles. The standup, which should last no more than 15 minutes, asks each team member to answer the following questions:

1. What did I accomplish yesterday?

2. What will I do today?

3. What obstacles are standing in my way?

Goals

• Create a pace of regular updates
• Makes sure no-team-member is left behind (no work, too much work, lost, etc.)

Actions

• for 1 month ask every team to do a daily stand-up
• give learning materials about daily-stand-up to each team (links below, etc.)

Further Readings

• https://medium.com/waat-ltd/5-reasons-every-team-should-implement-a-daily-standup-a016f0530044
• https://martinfowler.com/articles/itsNotJustStandingUp.html
• https://inside.6q.io/team-building-benefits-stand-up-meetings/

Random Coffee /all

This is a great idea to reduce social isolation, especially in bigger companies or companies without strong small teams. In Random Coffee employees from the whole organisation are matched up randomly to get to know one another over a cup of coffee (or beverage of choice).

This is easy to implement, and great at a time like this enabling people to connect, share, feel a sense of unity.

Goals

• Make sure everyone is connected
• Create cross-team communication opportunity
• Show how working remotely can be fun

Actions

• Make someone responsible for implementinng remote coffee using random-coffee.com or other tool

Additional readings:

• https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholmes/2017/12/11/how-2000-random-coffees-changed-my-companys-culture/#4afbf9b24ffc
• https://www.random-coffee.com/
• http://www.randomcoffees.com/
• https://www.tenthousandcoffees.com/
• https://news.umich.edu/random-coffee-meet-ups-spur-innovation-at-u-m/
• https://codeascraft.com/2015/09/15/assisted-serendipity/

Healthy Remote Work Habits /all

Remote work requires more discipline, self-responsibility, improved communication and time management. All these habits are important anyways but in remote work can be overwhelming for some.

It is important that everyone in the organization is aware of the need for new habits and is supported in learning these habits.

Goals

• Make sure everyone understands the most important remote work habits and how to apply them

Topics

The following are some of the topics which will be covered (list not complete)

• Let your calendar do the hard work. (gcal/apple/MS) — learn to use your calendar effectively
• Organizing time
• Staying focused
• Designing your work environment
• Fighting procrastination
• Communication habits that get work done
• Pomodoro
• Setting up a routine
• Dealing with notifications — not too much not too little.
• Take a sabbath every week
• Share your best practices with your team, co-workers and the world

Actions

• Share articles, videos with advice for healthy remote work as learning points
• Enable those who want to get training in this area to do so (give time, budget, etc.)

Turn the Ship Around /leaders

For remote work traditional 20th century style management does not work, new approaches are required based on leadership for effective team work through building trust, responsibility and pushing responsibility to those best capable of making decisions. Depending on a manager’s style and personality this can be very easy and natural or it might require changing a lot of habits and patterns.

The turn the ship around book, and talks show how a very, very, very traditional organisation (a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine) switched to a completely new management system and the resulting successes this gave them. (from worst to best in fleet in 2 years)

Goals

• Make leaders aware of different management styles and their impact on team work

Action

• Share Turn the Ship around book and video with all leaders
• Organise a shared viewing & discussion

Additional readings

• Turn The Ship Around!: A True Story of Building Leaders by Breaking the Rules by L. David Marquet
• David Marquet: Turn The Ship Around! at WORLDWEBFORUM 2016

Remote Work Learning Journey Design

Based on existing online e-learning resources, design a remote work learning journey for team members and leaders.

There is an overwhelming amount of learning resources available about remote work and it takes an expert to choose something which provides maximum benefit for the limited amount of time each of us has.

Goals

• Curate available learning resources
• Create a shared learning journey

Action

• Create a proposed learning plan for upper management, team leaders, team members about remote work
• Make available budget for everyone to take some training

Working Out Loud intro /all /team

Knowing who is doing what is one of the biggest communication challenges in a remote working environment. Working out loud is a set of ideas and practices which helps teams.

Goals

• Make everyone aware of working out loud principles and ideas and how to implement them in their daily working life

Actions

• Share working out loud ideas with everyone
• Train the trainers — train HR, team leaders, etc. on how to train their teams

Foundations of Remote work

The suggestions above are based on the latest research and developments about effective teams and happy workplaces including (but not limited to):

• Google research on effective teams
• Agile
• Management 3.0
• Learning Organisation (double loop learning)
• DDO — Deliberately Developmental Organisations
• Reinventing Organisations aka “Teal”

We are living in an exciting time when the world of work is being reinvented, a scientific understanding is developing about how to create great teams, good collaboration and happy workplaces. Our experience tells us that effective remote work and building great distributed teams requires application of many of these new ideas.

Future article: Effective Teamwork Mastery — month 2 and beyond — level-up team work everywhere

Effectively implementing large-scale shift to remote work in an organisation can seem overwhelming, get help from experienced remote-work trainers or consultants to make this shift quickly with minimum pain.

Do it yourself

You can get the points from this article as a trello board to easily copy and execute.

Get Help

Reputable remote work consultancies include: vorski.com, greaterthan, worldisyouroffice, collaborationsuperpowers, and many others…