What Remote Workers Need for Success — A Guide for Leaders
We’ve discovered with COVID-19, that there are benefits for companies, the environment and local communities when people work from home.
If you commute less, it doesn’t take much effort to realize that there is less pollution created. Roads and airports are less busy. And, those people that do need to move around (for deliveries and essentials) can get to their destination faster. There is less load impact on roadworks and infrastructure, which saves tax dollars.
Also, the usage of fossil fuels drops, which benefits the environment. One side effect of COVID-19 is that in Italy, satellite images show a severe reduction in pollution levels. In China, the lockdown likely saved 77,000 lives because of a drop in pollution in the country.
Revitalized Local Communities
Local communities bloom when people are around to use local services. We are social beings, so people will stay within their community and build community ties. This drives down the cost of housing because people live where they want to live and not where they have to live for work.
I saw this in action in Mobile, Alabama. This was a city that was decimated by job migration. The running joke is that all roads in the Southern US lead straight to Chicago, where the jobs are.
But, in the past decade, Mobile became a hub for game app companies. Leadership in these companies wanted to reduce costs and encouraged employees to work remotely. When this happened, many packed up their belongings and moved back to Alabama, where housing is affordable.
This saves companies millions on infrastructure costs, saves employees millions on housing, and creates a flourishing local community of coffee shops, foodie restaurants, pubs, and Mom & Pop grocery stores.
What Do Remote Workers Need for Success?
Thinking of the future to a world beyond COVID-19, what do these people need to be successful? As a business leader, how can you set-up remote workers for success?
One of my craziest projects involved one massive team distributed in 7-cities (London, Hyderabad, Calgary, Detroit, Kraków, Beijing, Paris), speaking countless languages, and collaborating with the customer in Australia.
This project was successful, and I gained a lot of insight and wisdom about distributed work, which I hope to share below.
1. Workers need access to shared workspaces
It’s unrealistic to think that when teams are remote that they will never physically interact. Humans still need to communicate and collaborate in non-digital ways.
Face-to-face time is highly beneficial for building team morale and forging bonds. For the “crazy” project above, we created a concentrated “connection hub” in London for times when the team needed interaction. This was the chosen location because it was central and an accessible airline hub.
As such, giving access to a collaboration space(s) empowers people to meet when necessary. Examples of companies that make face-to-face collaboration easier and cost-effective are CoWork, The Collective, beacHub, Betahaus, and Breather (to name a few).
I know many startups that had their beginnings in a Breather. One such company holds monthly collaboration sessions with their team in a shared workspace. Their team works from home for the rest of the month.
They made a choice to do this because it allowed them to save $5000 a month in rent. And, there was no need to contend with things like cleaning, coffee logistics, utilities, etc.
This saves them a bundle of cash and has reduced stress because office space logistics are taken care of by someone else.
2. Workers need secure remote networking tools
Video, VPN and remote networking services are booming with COVID-19. Companies that are already set-up for remote work see little impact when employees shift from work to home.
But not all companies are set-up for remote work. Being able to work with teams in different locations requires a high-speed connection, access to video and audio technology (Skype, Meet, Zoom, Hangouts), online collaboration tools (Drive, Slack, Asana, Trello, Airtable), development tools if needed (GitHub, VS, AWS, Google Cloud), and knowledge of how to use all these things.
Luckily, thanks to COVID-19, companies like Google and Microsoft have opened their enterprise systems up for free use during the pandemic (until July) to help companies that are not set-up for remote work. This is an opportunity to try these enterprise tools free of charge.
3. Workers need rapid fulfillment of hardware assets
When employees work remotely, how can a company quickly provide tech support when computer equipment gets compromised, lost, stolen or broken? As a remote worker, you need quick access to secure computer hardware to continue work.
I am a known “spiller of liquids” (laptop) and destroyer of cellphones. This clumsiness gives me the chance to see how quickly a company can fulfill a new device — for example, Google set-up its workforce for the rapid distribution and protection of hardware. When I spilled soup on my Google laptop, I had another in less than an hour (and a keyboard protector).
The “Google machine” relies on cloud storage that can deploy your stuff onto a new machine at login. It’s as simple as logging into a new Android phone: enter your password and grab a coffee while the data loads.
When my encrypted ThoughtWorks laptop was stolen at an airport, it was immediately wiped (from my phone), and I had another computer within 48-hours. It took that long because it had to cross an international border. Re-deploying laptop content was done via Dropbox. I’ve also used AWS and Box.
One key to success is the elimination of purchasing restrains. For example, a good quality mic/speaker combo makes it easy for remote workers to contribute to a conversation and not constantly have to ask for repetition or clarification.
However, in some companies, ordering a $30 speaker/mic combo on Amazon is akin to buying a new car and shipping it across an international border. The purchasing-permissions cycle can take many months and cause bottlenecks, equipment hoarding, frustration, and interdepartmental fights.
There are more than a handful of teams out there for whom I’ve purchased and donated speakers, mics, cameras, and old clunky laptops because it was too difficult for those teams to go through their company’s purchasing process.
When I see this, it tells me that a company is focusing on pennies while the dollars flyby.
Seamless access to collaboration technology saves time because it reduces productivity friction and frustration. Shopify’s leadership showed their understanding of this when they gave every employee $1000 to outfit their home office for remote work.
4. Workers need trust
Trust is probably the most critical item on the list but perhaps the toughest and most complicated thing to build. In order for remote employees to work effectively, they need to feel safe enough to work together.
What exactly does this mean, you ask?
It means that leaders and teams trust each other to do what is needed for the team and company to thrive. It means working together to accomplish a well-understood goal.
This doesn’t mean micromanaging every single task and booking tons of meetings to check progress. It means working, failing, sharing, showing, discussing, laughing and celebrating success together as needed.
If none of these things happen, there is a problem and questions should be asked.
Building a trust relationship means speaking up and asking the right questions. Leaders trust that employees will work and highlight blockers as they arise. Employees believe that leaders will listen and remove these blockers but not get in the way of productivity.
5. Workers need to understand the nuances of remote working
To build trust, teams need to understand and respect the “unspoken rules” of remote engagement. For example, one “unspoken rule” for distributed teams is that communication needs to be often and ongoing for all members of the team (sometimes twice-as-much).
This could mean explaining something that is physically happening in a room to everyone on video. It could mean that before every stand-up, the team sends updates over Slack, and during stand-up only discuss blockers and issues. It could mean explaining everything twice.
This is one hidden cost of distributed or remote work.
Leaders need to understand that remote working dynamics are different from in-person dynamics. On a video call, you are unable to see physical nuances that people pick up subconsciously when you’re in one physical space. This is further affected by the size of teams and their respective locations.
The dynamics in one-on-one conversations are different from the dynamics of one remote worker working with a co-located team of several people. In a one-to-many situation, effort is needed to bring the lone team member into the conversation (the tendency is to drift away).
The dynamics of working with a Brady Bunch team (<9-people working over video) is different from working with two large teams from two locations.
Working with a Brady Bunch team is manageable because everyone on a video call understands the technical experience. Whereas with two large groups, you frequently see power struggles as each location vies for dominance over the call.
Understanding the different dynamics can help leaders unpick collaboration struggles as they surface.
Ultimately, we can’t completely erase the need for people to meet face to face because we are a social species. There’s innovative “pixie dust” surrounding the office water cooler that’s difficult to reproduce in 2D.
However, what we’re going discover with COVID-19 is that a remote work world isn’t so scary, and there is a benefit to both society and company leaders.
