Some changes, once they happen in a society, can’t be undone. Remote working will become a great example of this.

In dark times people cling to the tiny rays of sunshine which poke through the continually depressing news cycle. For many, remote working has been a rare source of joy.

I have found “remote” working or “working from home” to be as entirely excellent as I’d suspected it might be and I’m sure I’m not alone in believing that there’s going to be an almighty scene should companies attempt to herd their staff back into offices.

Any and all reasons why a company shouldn’t allow their staff to continue to work remotely have now been disproved. If companies insist that we should all, en-masse, resume commuting and sitting in one big room this suggestion should be treated with the skepticism it deserves.

Having been fortunate enough to work from home since the start of the pandemic I’ve been able to:

• Save money and time commuting
• Move further away from the office to where rent is cheaper
  • I actually bought a boat to live on but that’s a different post!
• Enjoy spending more time with my partner
• Eat a lot healthier
• Have long, uninterrupted periods of time for writing code
• Think deeply about how to address some complex business challenges
• Reflect on my own career trajectory and make some changes

Getting back an hour per day (the commute) and having the opportunity to work in an environment that suits me seems to be the way forwards.

Of course there are some people who sincerely believe that communication is better when everyone is sitting next to each other in a big room. That somehow the air becomes magical and filled with ideas bouncing off each other so we’re all unknowingly propelled in the same direction.

This theory is great if you want to run your business based on some sort of miasma which relies on chance and happenstance to get anything done. It just doesn’t come across as a winning formula to me…

There are challenges to overcome with remote working and those in favour of office based work wheel them out as proof that somehow remote working is not as effective.

What people fail to realize is that these challenges are actually the beneficial constraints which result in the creation of a functional, process driven business where everyone is informed as to the overall goals and values of the company.

Let me see if I can make this clear…

Communication and Processes

These things now have to become intentional, in other words Managers have to communicate a vision, reward the behavior they want to see, promote the values they want the group to embrace and provide actionable answers to questions.

Good managers do this anyway but for a remote team this becomes even more important to avoid everyone deciding for themselves what the goals are and how their work contributes to moving the business forwards.

Written communication is key here and shooting from the hip doesn’t work. All the questions employees might have about getting something done should be ultimately linked back to the values espoused and (often) repeated by senior team members. Those are guiding principles which don’t require micro-management.

Similarly, all businesses should be process driven and those that aren’t will seriously suffer when remote staff don’t know the protocol for getting something done.

Processes also need to be written down, they need to be linked to a measurable outcome and they obviously need to make sense. Having processes (documentation) with steps to follow means someone has had to think clearly about the whats and whys of something. In many cases that alone results in the process being improved because time has been taken to look at what’s involved.

Hiring and On-boarding

Following on from communication and general business processes, hiring and on-boarding also benefit from the rigors of having to conduct these activities without face-to-face interaction.

This encourages thinking deeply about what new job roles actually are, what is needed, how to evaluate candidates in a non-biased way and what constitutes a sensible interview question.

Then you need an on-boarding process which doesn’t rely on being able to prod the old hand beside you and ask questions, the answers to which haven’t ever been written down, just passed like holy tablets…

Finally career planning/mentor-ship and progress reviews need to be actually scheduled rather than consigned to a mythical future time when “we’re all less busy…”

Tracking work progress

A great concern (especially for Managers) is that they won’t be able to “see” people working. Great! Now is the perfect opportunity to embrace some form of tracking/task management tool to surface all of that work going on, whether it is in the form of completed actions or software artifacts, just have something!!

A cynic might argue that some managers are in fact averse to taking advantage of the structure task tracking tools provide as they highlight how little work is involved in actually, well… managing…

However, we’re not in this camp so the positives here are that task tracking tools (Jira, Trello etc.) are an amazing way to measure progress, to “surface” work being done and to share progress towards a much larger goal.

There’s almost nothing as depressing as hearing that “big bang project x is still being worked on” alongside the refrain of “it’ll be done when it’s done” when the alternative is actually knowing that about 50% of the tasks to reach the ultimate goal are actually completed.

Those who can’t track progress towards a goal have no hope of reaching it and since expectation management is the core of project management not knowing where you are (even vaguely) along a continuum of tasks works against this.

Remotely distributed working and customers

When it comes to customer engagements (delivering some feature or service) it seems that > 90% of the interaction with them is actually carried out remotely. Clearly the days of the traveling salesman and even the much hallowed “customer visit” are largely over.

Businesses no longer buy via a “vendor relationship” where influence is top down. If it’s not a committee of approvers most B2B sales are now driven by free trials, POCs and internet searches for solutions to a specific problem. No need to meet a salesperson or any sort of technical installation team at all.

If your sales process or customer interactions need to be carried out remotely, why do we believe that our internal communications have to happen in an office? Surely, if our most important business transaction (selling to customers) needed the highest chance of success, by current management logic all sales would be face-to-face as this is apparently “better” than working in a distributed way… The logic doesn’t stack up

Information passing and openness

Each time information has to cross a boundary effort has to be expended. Whether it is asking someone to do something, tracking activity for a certain project, getting the status of something, the information has to be passed from one entity (group or person) to another.

Now, with Covid, all information has to pass explicitly to someone or come from elsewhere. Office based happenstance just doesn’t happen so this requires openness and honesty from all parties as to the status of each activity.

Employees who recognise this are in a great position to benefit because they have chosen to take ownership of the quality, content and trajectory of the information they give out. They are pro-active in their supplying of valuable information to the rest of the business.

People who require others to chase them all the time are relatively less valued because chasing around after someone to find the status of a particular thing is just annoying because it requires expending energy.

This is why it’s always annoying trying to find anything on a company intranet.

Summing up

Successful remote first companies can talk endlessly about why this approach is better but I think the “remote” aspect is the icing on the cake, not the cake itself.

Business success relies on execution in an explicit, intentional way. It requires written processes, depth of thought when it comes to execution (programming, sales, marketing etc.) and a communicable vision. Without these attributes any business will suffer, remote or not.

Relying on some mythical “communication miasma” permeating offices is foolishness when people’s personal incentives don’t support this idea, let alone all the science which contradicts the statement that “people communicate better” when working in an office.

A distributed company is naturally more resilient and if it wants to succeed, has already undergone the pain of answering all the questions it needs to about how it fulfills its purpose.

Dragging everyone back into the office based past is foolishness, especially as the world has now proven that remote work… works.