How hard can remote working be? Well, if you are only doing it for a few weeks, not very.
But if you are planning to make it the operational norm for your organisation – the shift from traditional ways of working to remote working can be more complicated than you think.
Mind you, this is all off the top of my head so it doesn’t actually get into the true nitty gritty. Just makes – I hope – the point – that this isn’t something that large organisations (and even most medium size operations – can simply flip a switch on and have it work straight out of the box.
First and foremost, refocus.
It requires a cultural shift from viewing everything through the ‘hours worked’ lens to the ‘results achieved’ lens. This is not anywhere NEAR as easy as you think in a lot of companies where being SEEN is considered as important as what you actually get done. A new approach to accountability also comes into play. These are major shifts and if you don’t get all levels and departments engaged, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
Second, tools.
Which tools will you use? It depends on what your company and teams do. Is security an issue? What about file size? How will your team, now multi-locational, share the information they need to share to achieve your end goal? Note, I said the end goal. This is not the time to try and replicate your exact work process – it will not work that way. There are a lot of different facets of teamwork:
- messaging
- project management
- document storage/sharing
- calendars
- virtual meetings
You’ll need to decide what to use for each. And there are more and more to choose from every day. Just off the top of my head:
- Skype
- Slack
- Convo
- Microsoft Teams
- Trello
- Asana
- monday.com
- Airtable
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
- Google Calendar
- GoToMeeting
- Zoom
Third, process.
Once the tools are chosen, the process for using and making them work for your organisation must be established. Schedules, guides and best practices, ownership of specific channels and streams, oversight. Just one example: running a virtual meeting. Have you done it? How many people in your organisation have? Even if you are all using video – this is not the same as being in person around a single table. You need to be conscious of several things – capturing real time feed-back, ensuring everyone is PROACTIVELY called on, assign someone to manage to meeting – facilitating a discussion involves everything from keeping everyone on topic to troubleshooting technology.
Lastly, infrastructure.
How does the connection and speed from the various locations of your distributed team stack up against that from work? Can both take the sudden shift in demand? How many people on each consumer provider suddenly in need of a wider ‘peak usage’ window – all during working hours? Is everyone using the same devices? Again – is security an issue with what you do?
The issue of desk vs beach is the least of the issues an organisation or individual faces when making this shift. Anyway – that’s a coffee’s worth of ‘thinking out loud’ for ya. If I have another, there may be more.