How Well Is the Remote and Digital Work Model Really Working?
I’ve been working remotely for nearly five years now. So unlike many, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, my work environment didn’t really change much.
But like many, my remote work experience has always involved a complex web of applications and platforms:
- for communicating and collaborating with my co-workers;
- for streamlining and optimizing my work processes; and
- for tracking, managing and reporting on my tasks and projects.
Oof.
In theory, these solutions are great. They make it possible for us to collaborate with team members across borders and time zones to make this whole remote work thing work.
But how well is it actually working?
The problem with the digital work model
Allow me to start off by saying I’m a huge advocate for remote work. It gives people flexibility: to structure their days around their peak productivity; to be more intentional with their time (good-bye commute!); and to create better balance between work and life.
But, BUT, in my experience, hefty digital tech stacks can and do add up to make a digital work environment overly complex and incredibly frustrating.
Conversations happen in various apps at once. Files and working documents are stored in several different locations — some of which are not even accessible to everyone. And there are often duplicate sources of the same data in various platforms, making it tough to know which is the most accurate and up to date.
And even though you know you have a team of co-workers, it can feel like you’re working all alone on an island sometimes.
What’s everyone else working on? Where are they doing their work? And how can I find what I need to do my work without continually bothering everyone?
At times I’ve wondered if I’m the one who’s doing digital wrong. After all, our tools are only as good as how we use them. But the reality is, this problem exists far beyond my home office space.
There’s a huge lack of transparency when it comes to digital work. And this leads to some pretty bumbling teamwork efforts:
- pinging one another for answers we should be able to find on our own;
- setting up a barrage of anxiety-inducing app notifications;
- trying to manually keep the task management platform current; and
- continually having meetings and asking for status updates.
If we could see what the entire team was doing a little more clearly, things could be a whole lot easier.
Why we need to work out loud in the digital world
We share our documents and communication channels with each other all the time to streamline teamwork. And we don’t feel like it’s invasive because, well, it’s all just work stuff anyway.
So why not broaden this?
If we really want to have better operational awareness and effective asynchronous communication with our teammates — which, in my humble opinion, we desperately need — opening up the entirety of our collective work days will do wonders.
I know. This makes you uncomfortable. But bear with me. It’s thinking about work transparency in a whole new way.
Creating a shared digital team environment where everyone can see everyone’s actions and interactions throughout the work day will dramatically reduce the need for mindless messaging and meetings. And it will unblock us all to move ahead with our work as we’ll understand where projects and progress stands — without wasting so much time on status checking and updating.
What will this mean? More time for focused work, for one. We could also start to be more selective and intentional about our collaborations and interactions with one another. We could use these opportunities to really drive strategy or to just connect more with one another on a human level—and who doesn’t need more of that right now?
Additionally, fully seeing the hard effort and contributions of our teammates (and ourselves, too!) eliminates the growing problem that is productivity anxiety. We know we’re working. And we know people are contributing because we can see all the output. So now can we all just stay the heck off Slack at 9:43pm?
But how will it all work?
Of course, creating a completely open and transparent digital work environment will have to be a reciprocal endeavour. The entire team has to contribute and see the value in empowering everyone — from the manager to the newest junior hire — to better understand the collective work environment.
It’s a democratization of work data.
And the ‘creepy’ definitely has to be taken out of the equation, too. We’re not sharing our moment-to-moment online activity with the team — that IS invasive.
What I’m proposing is just sharing our activity from the places we all agree are where work gets done for our team.
There’s a lot that still needs to be worked out with this concept. But I strongly believe it takes the progress we’ve made so far toward creating a better future of work just a few steps further.
Working out loud in this way can get all of us remote and digital-first workers closer to having more ownership over our productivity so that we can truly support work flexibility. And it can get our teams working together more efficiently and effectively by eliminating the distracting parts of our interactions and enabling more time for impactful collaboration.
The possibilities are endless, but we need to start having more of these conversations about how the current digital work model just isn’t really working.
This is what I’m working on. And this is where I believe the future of work is headed.
