You’ve sent all your employees to work from home. And now what?
In days when news reminds apocalyptic plots from catastrophe films, I am more and more attracted to reflection.
The world is forced to switch to a remote format of work and communication, and what, according to our wildest expectations, was supposed to happen in the next 5–7 years, is happening right now, changing the business environment on the go.
Those who persistently told me a couple of months ago that remote was not an option or a very distant prospect for them now enthusiastically talk about their first video conferences, enthusiastically share the new routine of working from home, discuss the necessary software, and some, after a week outside the office, even claim themselves experts and write articles on the topics like “The Best Practices of Remote Work”.
I have quite mixed feelings about this. At first, I, like many in the remote community, was excited that most companies will finally recognize remote work as a standard, along with an office; finally, the world will see the benefits of such flexibility; finally this and that …
But pretty quickly it came to an understanding that a conscious transition to a new format of work, as well as building a 100% distributed team from scratch, does not at all equal emergency measures to isolate employees at home. Creating a virtual office requires not only physical measures and the Internet at home, not only the installation of Zoom and Slack, but also many other steps, such as developing communication rules, internal policies, cultural considerations, paying attention to information security, legal issues, as well as physical and mental health of employees.
Frankly, I am horrified to see an increasing number of newly-minted experts of remote work, flooded the air of social networks. The more infected by a coronavirus, the more experts. Damn, that reminds me of the situation 2.5 years ago, when every third person in LinkedIn declared himself a cryptocurrency advocate, just by investing in some tokens or raising a couple of hundreds on Bitcoin volatility.
Having worked remotely for the past 8 years, I am still discovering many new practices to increase my effectiveness. And instead of vanilla delights about the fact that I can make calls with colleagues in my pyjamas and not waste time on commuting (I still really appreciate all this!), there has come an understanding of the increased responsibility for my daily routine and mental health, support of live communication skills, the need for constant training in new tools for remote interaction, taking into account the cultural context of the team. And most importantly, the balance of being at home and personal communication with colleagues at joint, not virtual meet-ups.
It is soft skills, that will help you and your employees successfully implement remote work in your business processes. Of course, the toolkit is also important — for communication, collaboration, training and information security — but nevertheless it is secondary and quickly implemented, thankfully there is enough information about this online.
Having sent people to work home, pay attention to several key points:
- Communications.
The most obvious, but also, due to its breadth, the most vulnerable part of the work that you will encounter. It is not enough to buy a license from Zoom (or Teams or any other software), install Slack with the #general channel, but to continue to discuss working issues 1 on 1, or in email correspondence with a limited number of recipients. Understand, that from now on everything that is not written and not shared with the team, in fact, does not exist. Having installed Slack, make sure that the whole company uses it to discuss any work-related (and non-work-related) issues, employees know which channel is intended for which issues/projects, and after a video call, an extract from the discussion/decisions made or even just audio recording of a call is shared. This is doubly important for those who continue to hire new people. All that will be available to them is what you wrote down earlier.
2. Collaboration.
There are no more papers to be taken from a colleague’s table, there are no flipcharts and whiteboards in the meeting rooms, all interaction goes online. When creating shared folders on Google Drive, remember about the privacy settings, or better yet, transfer all the documentation to Notion — the wiki for your company, where everyone can enter all the necessary information. I think the project teams, even before that, working in the office, have already got used to using programs such as Trello, Asana, Jira or similar. Moving to the remote arrangement, you need to pay attention to the integration of these tools into a common system, i.e. synchronization with the same Notion, Slack, Zoom, etc., and among themselves. The deeper the integration of tools, the easier the transformation into a new mode of operation will take place.
3. Physical and mental health.
Due to the lack of need to spend time on commuting, the amount of free time at first is sharply increased for all converted to the remote. And in principle, it is common to think that people work less at home. In fact, it’s just the opposite. In the absence of the necessary level of self-discipline, work will soon begin to fill all your free time and home space. There is a temptation to catch more, an illusion of greater efficiency, the need to adapt to different time zones. And one day, unexpectedly for ourselves, we notice some kind of strange apathy, lack of energy, survival, or something like that. All this can be aggravated in quarantine when there is no way to go for a walk, visit the gym or ride a bike. Pay attention to how many hours a day you actually work (you can even set up a Toggl time tracker for this), whether you disconnect from work issues while eating and when you spend time with your family, or persistently continue to reply to messages in Slack. Organize your limited workspace and resist the temptation to work on your laptop from the bedroom. Spend your time in the morning and evening for exercise, meditation, or a good book.
4. Work and children.
In a usual situation, remote work does not mean that at the same time the employee is engaged with children (we are talking about full-time work, we are not considering part-time and freelance now). But Covid-19 and the subsequent introduction of quarantine and the closure of schools in most countries have made adjustments to our usual schedule. While many of my friends without kids now have got more free time, in our family with two children it became even less. The eldest son is transferred to the on-line training mode, which in fact means that he regularly receives assignments from school and must study during the day. The whole load to organize the learning process, to explain and control fell on the shoulders of parents. And the youngest is still too small to occupy himself, it is necessary to play and study with him from morning to evening. In order to fully work, and at the same time not to put children behind the tablet for the entire day, my husband and I had to schedule shifts, who works when and when we deal with children. Try to be as flexible as possible with those employees who are in a similar situation. Provide the opportunity to adjust their schedule, choose hours of work, considering, of course, that the planned tasks are completed and there is at least a short overlap when all employees are available online simultaneously.
This is not a complete list of what you will need to pay attention to in the coming days. Rather, it is a first-aid kit that allows you to quickly fix the situation, minimize losses and tune in to further long-term steps.
The term “The Future of Work” somehow has lost its relevance because the future has come today. Despite all the horror of human losses and hard economic consequences, I really want to believe that the world uses this test as an opportunity. Opportunity for transformation, growth, new perspectives and discoveries. A competent approach to building a remote team can be one of the first steps to this for you.
