Can my team work remotely?
This is a common question these days with many companies moving to remote work. Situations like COVID 19 have forced a lot of companies to re-evaluate this and grow into new ways of working. The question left unanswered is not "Can we work remote" (because we know the answer is yes), The real question is "can my team work effectively as a distributed workforce?"
A lot of jobs went remote at the start of the pandemic. Some will continue to be remote long after. Some are already trying to figure out how to safely bring employees back.
Having everyone remote and everyone in office has its own set of pro's and con's. The reality is that this format rarely works for most companies. While remote work provides great geographic flexibility, what an employee really values is flexibility in their work environment. Some employees may work better remotely, while others work better in an office, and a large portion of your workforce wants to be able to switch between these options based on their current project.
What is a distributed workforce?
A distributed workforce describes a group of employees working together who are both remote and in-office. This mix of location surfaces the real challenges of companies allowing this flexibility of remote work vs traditional office work.
What challenges?
Remote first work - the easiest mistake for companies trying distributed workforce to make is thinking it is the same as remote work. All remote work or "remote first" work centers around the idea that everyone will be connected via video chat or telecommunication.
For presenters in a meeting they instinctually think about emailing the PowerPoint presentation ahead of time, or how they will mute/unmute participants. For most distributed workforce meetings, you will find a mixture of remote vs "in the room" employees, all equally valuable for contributing to the meeting. But as soon as we step into these "mixed" meetings, you find that most of the attention is geared to the local employees.
Things that we do very naturally with remote work, such as scanning the participants list before starting, is skipped over because the presenter is focused on who is in the room with them.
Another challenge is "Schrodinger's availability". Without clear boundaries it is easy to blur the lines between working at home and being at home. Cross functional partners may be apprehensive to reach out if they see availability or status monitors changing from red to yellow to green. Swinging by someone's desk to ask a question suddenly feels like an intrusion because we have to actively reach out. Distributed or not, employees need to balance work and life.
Okay so how can my team work effectively as a distributed workforce in a hybrid work model?
An effective and successful distributed workforce starts with workplace culture. Being conscious of remote employees and setting up telecommunication meeting rooms to be inclusive of all partners. We also need to clear the stigma of remote employees and workload. Leadership of a distributed workforce needs to provide clear guidance to team goals and if needed, standards set around how that will be tracked. It can be deliverables or KPI based, but the expectation needs to be the same for both local and remote employees.
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