Remote Working Does Work, You Just Don’t Know How To Do it

Photo by Javier Esteban on Unsplash

We are living in the Information Age. In a world where we are more connected than ever before. With the average global internet speed up to 11Mbps (I know some of you with Gigabit connections will probably be laughing at that but it’s a 20% increase over last year). With 81% of people living in the developed world having an internet connection. On top of that, in 2016, Millennials became the largest generation in the work force, and that’s a key factor.

The younger generations, starting with the Millennials, have grown up surrounded by this level of interconnectivity, this level of speed, and this level of unprecedented access. For a lot of the younger generation, instant messaging has been their primary method of communication for the majority of their life. I know for me, personally, I grew up maintaining multiple chat windows on MSN. Spent my teenage years and early 20’s with a permanent position in a Team Speak server and in more recent years, engaged with multiple Discord servers simultaneously. For me and others from the younger generation, this has been the only thing we’ve ever known (especially if you’re an avid online PC gamer). But there’s one thing which you need to remember, one thing which always fails to get talked about when the topic of Millennials comes up… For all the complaints you hear from management about Millennials, this is a result of the world they grew up in, it’s only going to accelerate as technology does. But Millennials isn’t the focal point of this article, that one is still to come, the focal point of this is working remotely, I just wanted to lay the foundations. I’m also not going to be focusing on the benefits of remote working, that’s been covered extensively by many people much smarter than me who have tangible data to back it up.

Millennials are a result of the world they grew up in and it’s only going to accelerate as technology does

So why is it, that given that the majority of the workforce basically grew up online, able to form strong relationships with people online (some of which they’ve never met, I’ve had many a friend from World of Warcraft that I’ve never met whom I would consider a good friend) and maintain more lines of communication than ever before. Why are we still tieing people down to work out of a single physical location?

As far as I see it, it boils down to 3 things. Fear, Mistrust and Lack of Understanding.

Fear

The fear of failing. Many organisations are too scared to try piloting remote working as they are scared of what the cost would be if the experiment fails.

The fear of security. Many organisations believe that the only way they can secure their documents and data is for them to be stored on a closed network in-house.

Mistrust

“But if they’re not in the office, how do I know they’re working?” This is the classic command and control mantra which you’ll never hear said to your face and only ever uttered in ‘manager only’ meetings. It’s something I talked about in my article ‘Why do you care how many hours I work?’ where I talk about the number of hours that my bum is on the seat is inconsequential. What matters is the outcomes that I deliver, and when you measure someone by the outcomes and not the input then the time spent doing it becomes negligible. People have an incredible ability to live up to the expectations you have of them. If you believe the worst in people, that they’re lazy and useless, then guess what… they probably will be. But if you believe the best in people, trust them absolutely to act reasonably and mature, then they will. I mean, if you don’t trust them… why did you bother hiring them?

Lack of Understanding

The leadership of organisations don’t appreciate the sheer level of tools and technology available now to help with working remotely. If you’re not a knowledge based worker, like a factory worker for example, working remotely just won’t be possible. But we’re focusing primarily on knowledge based working. In fact, I’m amazed that call centres are still a thing. Why is their entire call routing software not cloud based, with every employee provided with a VOIP phone and capable of signing in from home and doing their job? I digress. There’s also a lack of understanding on the psychology of motivation and how to have an engaged workforce as proven from the latest Gallup report from 2017 where it found that only 15% of the global workforce are engaged at work.

All these things are all very valid concerns and should be at the forefront of your discussions for how you best make it work for you. But none of them should stop you from trying.

But now that we’ve covered what the most common reasons for not doing it are, and we agree that there’s no good reason to not at least experiment with it, let’s look at what you can do to give your experiment the best chance of success.

As far as I see it, it boils down to (again) 3 things. Technology, Mindset and Etiquette.

Technology

In this day and age, the knowledge based worker has nothing holding them back from working wherever they are. The most common reason for remote working experiments failing is because they jump into it without having the proper infrastructure and technology ready for it. You will need:

1. Video conferencing software and equipment. It doesn’t matter which one you use, there is a plethora of options, as long as you choose one and agree to all use it for simplicity. You need to ensure that every member of the team has a good microphone (I can’t stress enough how important this is), a webcam and a decent set of headphones. You also need to make sure that every member of the team has their own license for the VC software you’re using. There’s no point going to all that effort to then only give the team leader the ability to start video calls and become the bottle neck of the team. Most importantly, you need to extensively train all the team members how to use the bloody software. How to set up external inputs and change the inputs and outputs on their machine. Otherwise you end up spending the first 15 minutes of every meeting with the infuriating, “can you hear me? I can’t hear you… hang on let me just…”
2. Chat software. You need to be able to IM each other, in a 121 fashion and in a group conversation. Everyone knows how invaluable this is.
3. Phone/Voice chat. Some things are just a little bit too complicated to explain through text, but they don’t need a full blown video call. An old school method to solving this is the trusty telephone for a quick chat, or having persistent voice channels for you to just jump in or out of. This is why Discord is my favourite solution for the chat software for the ease of having voice comms.
4. Collaboration tools. A good exercise to do in the build up to your remote working experiment, is every time you have a meeting in person in the weeks leading up to your experiment, to make a note of the things you did which you think would be difficult if you were remote. Sketching things out on a whiteboard is the most common thing, but there are solutions to that online. Take that list of difficulties and do some searching for solutions online. I guarantee you’re not the first person to encounter this problem and there will be a solution out there.

Mindset

As with anything that requires a mindset change, this is probably the hardest challenge to overcome, and often the one that gets overlooked. This is partly why I spent so much time in the opener talking about Millennials. Because they grew up in this environment of being constantly online, constantly engaged in some thread of conversation, that they naturally have the mindset required.

• When you’re working remotely, you can’t just disappear. You need to be readily available (unless you’ve agreed terms of engagement).
• You need to learn to filter what chat you need to follow and which chat you don’t need to follow. You don’t need to be part of every conversation and thread.
• And the flip side of that, you need to learn when a conversation needs to be taken out of a public channel and into direct messages or even a voice chat.
• You need to prioritise your channels of communication based on urgency. Something urgent which desperately needs someones attention now? Send them an IM or ring them. Something which you want to flag which might be a problem in a couple days if nothing is done about it? Drop them an email and they’ll look at it when they’re next available, but don’t then send them a message to let them know that you’ve emailed them!
• You need to learn that you don’t have to wait until you next see someone in person to have that conversation you’ve been wanting to have.
• You need to learn how to best collaborate asynchronously. If you’re all swarming on a single piece of work then that will naturally require you to all be actively working on it at the same time. But if you’re all tackling individual things within the sprint, things can be done asynchronously.
• You need to be very clear and concise in your messages. Communication is always the most important thing, and enough people fail at it in person, let alone when they’re in a different location. So you have to be conscious of how your message could be interpreted and make sure that it was received with the intention it was meant. As the recipient you also need to be a bit more thick-skinned and not just assume that someone is being rude because that’s how you’ve read it.
• You need to be very self-aware. Am I easy enough to get hold of? Am I communicating clearly in my messages? How well can others hear me during a call? Without this level of self-awareness you’ll struggle to make the experiment work.
• A big thing that you can do is to just hang out in a voice channel. Just having a chit chat while you’re doing stuff. It’s great for team bonding and feeling a little less isolated.
• But most importantly, if you’ve got just part of the team remote and the rest are together in the office, you have to still act as if the entire team is remote. And that’s where the 3rd and possibly the most important factor comes in.

Etiquette

There is a number of rules that you need to set yourselves in order to give your experiment the best chance of success. You’ll need your ‘Working Agreement’ and ‘Terms of Engagement’.

Your ‘Working Agreement’ will consist of lots of parts.

This will cover what schedule you’ll be working to. You don’t all have to be working 9–5. As long as you have a decent level of cross-over to have conversations that need to happen, you could have some people starting at 7 and others starting at 11.

It will cover remote behaviours like don’t talk over each other during a conference call. Always be sharing your screen if you’re talking through something. Always have your webcam active during video conference calls. Things of that nature. It’s vitally important to remember that these remote behaviours will be crucial if you only have part of your team remote and the rest together in the office. If you have even a single person remote, then these behaviours absolutely have to be followed.

It will cover ‘house rules’ such as, all meetings start on time (a personal pet peeve of mine). So that when someone inevitably turns up late, you can reference the working agreement and remind them that meetings start on time, something that they agreed to, and a standard that they should hold themselves too. Other house rules such as the agreed standard for documentation, code review SLA’s, chosen collaboration tools, etc.

Ultimately, the working agreement should cover all the agreed expectations you have of each other as a team, and what standard you’re going to hold yourselves to to ensure success.

Finally there’s the ‘Terms of Engagement’. This is where you decide on all your communication channels and have an agreed approach to how you use them. Such as:

• For urgent matters ring or direct message on *insert chosen instant messaging platform here*
• For general work related chat keep it open and transparent in Channel X
• For non-work related chat and chit-chat, keep it in Channel X
• For anything that isn’t time sensitive, use email

A ‘Terms of Engagement’ will help you as a team to know what is the best method of getting an individuals attention for a specific issue. It also helps to reduce the noise. If you know, categorically that emails are never time critical or urgent then you can safely ignore them other than pre-allocated times during the day where you catch up on your emails and turn off those notifications which only act as a distraction. It also means that if you see that you’ve got a notification on your chat app, or if your phone is ringing, then it’s going to be important and you can safely divert your attention away from what you’re doing to this important matter. One thing that I’m a fan of is actually having 2 different instant messaging apps or servers. One for chat and one for urgent things. For instance, I want to be able to just send someone a DM asking how their weekend was without worrying about them dropping everything they’re doing thinking it’s something urgent. So if you get a DM on Slack you can safely ignore it until you’re at a natural break and turn notifications off so they don’t distract you, but if you get a DM on Teams then holy smokes Batman, drop everything, Gotham needs saving. Learning how to filter out communications that you don’t need to look at right now is a skill in itself and can be very difficult, but once mastered makes you an absolute powerhouse of productivity.

Once you’ve got all that figured out, or at least a first draft of it, you’re ready to start experimenting with remote working. Try small, just a few days a week, and review it regularly on what the challenges you’re facing are and how best to overcome them and if you keep at it then you can very easily get to a point where you never actually need to be in the office other than to get some face time with the team.

To summarise. Before you even start trying to implement remote working, sort out your tech, practice the mindset and agree on your etiquette.

I am available to give talks in England on how to build a culture and environment that breeds productivity and fulfilment through effective leadership. Connect with me on LinkedIn and let’s talk some more: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martyn-puddephatt-14b08757/.

Follow me on Twitter @mistermartynp