Getting Remote Work Right
It’s a social imperative. And when done correctly, a source of tremendous added value.
What is Remote Work?
Remote or distributed work is any situation in which one or more employees aren’t sitting in physical proximity to other members of their team. This can take a lot of forms: organizations with Work From Home (WFH) policies, teams working on different floors or in distributed offices, and teams with members who work full-time from a cafe, co-working space, home office, or somewhere else. Even a team member who leaves the office to do field research is temporarily remote.
If your organization fits any of these descriptions, then congratulations, you’ve got distributed workers. And if you want to get the most out of them, there are some facets of remote work that your organization needs to operationalize.
Remote First
It’s helpful to start by looking at organizations that use remote teams successfully over the long term. Whether they have an identifiable headquarters or not (or even a fixed office), the most effective distributed organizations are those that decided to support remote working from the outset. Distributed working, like any operational process, requires a well thought-out set of principles that work in a…
