How to work remotely as a team in the new normal
4 ways to stay connected with colleagues and clients when working from home
As the COVID-19 pandemic threatens and wreaks havoc on society and the economy, a change is afoot in the way industries continue to operate and workers continue to work.
Working from home part or full-time has become the new norm. Of course, this doesn’t work for everyone but it can work effectively for many.
Recently LinkedIn ran a survey asking participants about their experiences during the ongoing pandemic. The results found that two-thirds of survey respondents are being supported by their employer to work remotely during the COVID-19 crisis.
Recent data from global research and advisory firm Gartner suggests the move to work from home could be a permanent one.
A survey of 229 HR managers revealed that 41% of employees are likely to work remotely at least some of the time after COVID-19 — up from 30% before the pandemic.
Other research suggests that three in five Australians believe working from home will become the new norm, even once the restrictions on the economy have washed over. This seems significant.
So what’s changing?
Well for a start, standard 9–5 hours will seem more outdated than they did before. COVID-19 has substantiated the commonly held belief that work really can be regarded as a thing you do, rather than a place you go.
As some industries adopted a long time ago, others are now catching onto the idea that work can be measured on the outcome (deliverable) rather than the input (hours). I mean, it’s hard to monitor effort and sign-off on a timesheet when your manager has no visible oversight.
This leads to another change — leaders must become more flexible, understanding and trusting of their team. A manager who trusts their staff empowers them to take responsibility for their own work and deliver great results.
Further, traditional vertical management structures will suffer as a result of a geographical dispersion of team members. A shift to flatter and more fluid structures will enable remote team members to be more productive and collaborative in the virtual environment.
COVID-19 has forced us to rethink and retool the way we work as a team at Pragma Partners.
It has led to increased flexibility and an emphasis on the cultural intangibles of our organisation, not to mention an upswing in new communication methods and productivity tools.
After all, they say “necessity is the mother of invention”.
What should you be doing to work effectively as a remote team?
1. Communicate well and often with each other
The nature of remote work means that your team members are often dispersed, working individually or in very small groups.
Because of this we lose the ability to communicate with each other in person, which is a critical element of building personal and professional relationships as well as knowledge sharing and understanding the context of situations and projects.
They say communication is key though, and luckily there are ways to keep the dialogue flowing even when we can’t be face-to-face.
Don’t be afraid to over-communicate at first, even if it feels a little overbearing.
Creating an open channel as a team sets the foundation for strong communication over the medium-to-long term. And there are plenty of online communication tools that allow for this.
At Pragma we use Slack for team chat and general discussion of projects, and Microsoft Teams or Google Hangout for daily stand up meetings. These tools help team members stay connected and engaged by returning some of the positive aspects of a physical workplace through regular streams of conversational activity.
Our daily stand up each morning using web conferencing is a consistent practice that keeps our dialogue flowing and gives everyone the opportunity to share progress, check in with one another and raise issues on our projects.
Sometimes there is little to share on the work front, which is fine because we take the opportunity to share personal stories and enjoy each other’s virtual company.
As I said before, it’s ok to overcommunicate.
2. Break big projects into tiger teams and be agile
The bigger the project, the bigger the challenge for a remote team, right? Well, I think not.
Remote teams can adopt an agile approach to accomplishing projects that revolve around breaking the project into small pieces, prioritising tasks with intent and learning and adjusting at regular intervals to ensure the optimal outcome is achieved.
These small teams are often referred to as ‘tiger teams’, which are small specialised, cross-functional teams brought together to solve or investigate a specific problem or issue.
This process of working in a decentralised yet highly coordinated way is underutilised by many businesses.
Tools
In order to work remotely in this fashion, you must have simple and useable technical and collaboration tools that everyone can understand. At Pragma we often combine the Atlassian suite of products to ensure there are no gaps in planning and execution.
- Trello is a Kanban-style list-making application that allows users to create task boards and manage the progress of tasks from start to finish. The user experience is good as it is visually attractive and easy for anyone to use. Usually Trello is reserved for simple projects, company-wide programs and long-term work.
- Jira Software is used for issue tracking and project management, particularly for agile styles. It has more depth than Trello with knowledge management, more intricate workflow patterns and integration with other products. With Jira ticketing, team members assign themselves or other staff members pieces of the project and naturally fall into ‘tiger teams’ to solve problems.
- Confluence is a content collaboration tool that integrates with Jira to help teams collaborate and share knowledge efficiently through spaces, pages and blogs. Users can view, write and edit content at the same time, which is critical for remote workers who don’t have the ability to share a screen in a conference room or sit with each other.
- Miro is one of our favourite products for remote teams. Miro is essentially a cloud-based online whiteboard platform that enables many users (up to 100 at once!) to do modern creative work in a co-location. This work often includes sharing research findings, wireframing, creating service design concepts and building customer journeys.
Apart from the obvious accessibility benefits to remote users, these digital tools have also enabled open participation and inclusion, digital learning, and virtual management and leadership.
3. Communicate well and often with clients
In a similar vein to my first point about communicating with each other, we must also communicate well and often with our clients.
In fact, this is more important now than ever.
You know the saying, “out of sight, out of mind”? You do not want this to become a reality for your clients, especially if your working relationship relied on being physically present prior to COVID-19.
We love people and prefer to be onsite with our clients, so it can be hard to move to a remote model. In saying that, there are things you can do to ensure your clients feel prioritised and important in a remote relationship.
- Establish a consistent communications schedule that both parties stick to can alleviate any feelings of uncertainty or even abandonment that your client may have if you choose to go completely remote. This means scheduling a weekly update via phone or video conferencing to share progress as well as using email and instant messaging platforms for daily work milestones or questions.
- It is imperative that your client knows the best time and method to contact you if they need. There is nothing more frustrating than not knowing how to contact someone you need or trying repetitively without any luck because your schedules are misaligned.
- You should also place greater importance on establishing deadlines from the outset. By having a set of agreed deliverables and milestones, both parties can be assured that outcomes will be achieved in spite of a change in circumstances.
Performance against agreed targets will make or break your organisation even more in this new world.
4. Maintain a supportive company culture
The importance of company culture is rising to the fore during our COVID-19 experience.
For many people this is the first time they’ve worked remotely for prolonged periods of time, and for some come feelings of isolation and disconnection from colleagues.
A close, supportive culture that drives collaboration and excellence will raise the ceiling of what a company can achieve in good times, but it can also lift the floor during tough times.
For those people dealing with a shift to remote work, positive company culture can be translated into the home and make everyone feel more included and valued.
For organisations adjusting to the new normal, I would encourage you to cultivate a remote working culture and mindset. Get team members together to think about what is possible digitally and how your organisation can co-evolve effectively together.
For those seeking inspiration, I can share with you some things that Pragma has introduced to bring our people closer together (and it has worked).
- Increase the frequency of all-staffs: We have turned our monthly all-staff meeting into a weekly ritual via video conferencing. This gives everyone an opportunity to share company-wide updates and give kudos to their teammates for awesome work or achievements in their personal life.
- Chat, but not about work: A daily virtual coffee catch-up became a staple of the workweek for our teams. This helps to replace the in-person morning casual conversations you often have with teammates, which as explained earlier, forms a significant part of building relationships with those around you.
- Get fun and competitive: Every Monday we have a weekend photo competition to get the competitive juices flowing. Our team members share their favourite photo from their weekend, which often ignites discussion and gets people deepening their connections by talking about their hobbies, interests and families. Did I mention there is a prize for the winning photo?
So what’s next?
A first quarter 2020 survey of more than 5000 employees by Gartner found that 48% of fully remote employees exhibit high discretionary effort, compared with 35% of staff who never work remotely.
Despite these encouraging statistics, there is still considerable room for organisations to improve the digital experience for their staff working outside the office.
In fact, many organisations are still at the early stages of adopting a remote work mindset or are yet to invest fully in digital enablement for their staff. The impact of COVID-19 has accelerated this requirement even further, but it’s also opened up great opportunity and presented a real shift in the way we do things.
As I’ve learnt over the years: good things happen for those who embrace change.
Header image by Viktor Hanacek
