The road to remote-first

In the week or so since I published my last post there are more signals that workplaces aren’t going to return to the way they were. The UK government has signalled that those who can’t work from home should return to work - but with public transport already strained and both employees and employers unsure how to make working environments safe, the majority are still staying home.

Meanwhile, a string of big tech companies have told workers to work from home for the rest of the year (or forever), and commercial real estate investors said “the future of the office is not clear”.

So Matt Ballantine and I picked up our conversation on how organisations can move to a remote-first way of working. We began exploring some of the themes in a little more detail. Our aim was to understand what comes next in terms of thinking or resources.

Systems

SaaS has been standard in most organisations for a decade. And yet in most organisations these are still used in much the same way as their legacy ancestors.

So for instance, most users have little awareness of the breadth of functionality in the Microsoft Office 365 suite. They just churn out Word files. Regardless of how far these tools have evolved, many (most) organisations still run on email and documents. When you think about it, it is kind of weird that for most knowledge workers the primary artefacts of work are linear documents, designed to be printed, and frozen in time at the moment of completion.

The systems have existed to facilitate remote working for many years, and for the most part organisations already have these tools in place. They’re just not getting the value from them.

In general, moving from recovery mode to fully remote requires tweaks rather than a complete overhaul of systems.

• Take a user needs focused approach to selecting and onboarding new systems. That means taking the time to truly understand the needs, pain points and experiences of home or remote users
• Help people to understand the tools they already have and to use them effectively
• Embrace - as far as is possible - ‘bring your own software’ (or Shadow IT)
• Think about hardware to support home working. Facebook provided a Portal device for each of their workers to use for video chats on Workplace (it’s a great device for the price and frees up laptop real estate for work). Others might consider provision of webcams, green screens, second monitors and headsets to help people be more productive
• With organisations moving to agile working, the technical security models employed by the organisation need to move to what is known as “Zero Trust”

Structure

Organisations generally have both formal and informal hierarchy. People know who’s in charge.

Hierarchy gets a bad rap for being overly rigid and reductionist, but those organisations who dispense with it often find themselves bringing it back (officially or otherwise). That’s because clear chains of command are useful in ensuring decisions are made and people held accountable for delivery.

And yet there is a tension between this and the realities of remote working, where rigid hierarchies can create bottlenecks. 

Remote-first organisations need to be more adaptable and flexible, balancing both accountability and flexibility. 

And so there are lessons we can learn from the military and their long experience working in the field and beyond the standard 9-5. General Stanley McCrystal’s Team of Teams provides one useful model:

• Where workers operate alone yet toward a common set of goals, they need to be both empowered and networked
• Everyone needs to have a holistic understanding of the whole organisation’s work and not just their own narrow field or team
• This must be coupled with the development of shared consciousness, with people sharing information and building genuine relationships and trust (and as Matt commented, we have the technology in the workplace to enable people to work autonomously, but on the other this can also be used to surveil - we need to get the balance right to ensure this doesn’t undermine trust)
• Once trust is established, empower people to execute. Allow people to take action without needing approval as long as they provide all contextual information and document what was done 
• This allows leaders to take a more hands off approach to management, so instead of executing they can focus on fostering an environment conducive to shared consciousness and empowered execution
• Organisations need to act as networks of teams, with strong trust relationships between teams as well as within them

To thrive in a post-Covid world, organisations need to be robust and adaptable. More networked, high-trust environments that focus on outcomes rather than outputs are better able to adapt to the uncertainties of the coming years (for example, by moving away from the standard working week to allow for society-wide ‘demand management’ for transport and retail).

That may mean sacrificing efficiency to increase agility. 

Shared values

Organisations express their identity through physical places. From the shiny logo on the side of a gleaming tower to the posters and shade of paint in the office. Even the biscuits provided (or not) in your meeting rooms say something about what you stand for.

But values run far deeper than offices, logos and visible brands.

Matt introduced the analogy of a tulip (which, as an adopted Amsterdammer, is one that appeals):

• under the ground, the roots are the shared values
• the values themselves determine the attitudes, which we can think of as the bulb
• the stalk of the tulip is the behaviours
• the flower at the top represents the physical things, the most visible manifestations of the culture

The roots and bulb aren’t visible but they’re critical. If you go over the tulip with your lawnmower, next year the flower will grow back exactly the same because it springs from what’s invisible - the bulb hidden below ground. 

Remote-first places a new emphasis on employee digital channels and touchpoints. The digital employee experience is one of the primary ways people experience their employer brand… and that experience is often quite a poor one.

But the emphasis moves away from visible semiotics to those invisible indicators, to the interactions between people and the interactions you have with the work itself.

In the short term, at least, in-person onboarding and offsite alcohol-based bonding exercises are out. Organisations need to map the end-to-end employee experience from the perspective of someone who rarely or never comes into the office. 

Skills and roles

We initially had these as two separate themes, but on reflection they’re two sides of the same coin. To turn remote work into a strategic advantage, organisations need to ensure their people have the skills and support to be able to work effectively.

There are three 'meta skills' that are critical in a remote first environment:

• Collaboration
• Communication
• Digital literacy

It’s assumed that people are good at collaborating, but this isn’t necessarily the case. Collaboration is a skill that requires knowledge and practice. To thrive as a remote-first organisation, teams will need dedicated support to guide planning within the team and structure collaboration between teams. 

Collaboration while distributed demands people work more asynchronously, sharing more regularly and deliberately, which requires good communication skills. People will need to learn how to summarise and share what they are doing regularly.

We shouldn’t make broad generational assumptions about digital literacy. All generations currently in work have been regular users of IT, and those who are oldest had to deal with it at its most complex (when it was far from plug and play!). Workers of all ages will need coaching and guiding on how to use the toolset available to get work done.

Managers will also need to adapt to running distributed teams, with a focus on softer skills to help combat feelings of isolation and foster greater trust.

In summary, a move away from the office means means shifting resources away from supporting physical spaces and towards supporting, coaching and training people to work in more distributed ways.

Strategy

In the world before Covid, most organisations saw remote working as a barrier to reaching their strategic goals. 

The rapid switch to remote has put more recalcitrant organisations if not quite on the road to Damascus, then on a kind of Damascene ringroad, circling the possibility of ditching the office for good.

Leading organisations are now looking at remote a positive enabler of strategy, delivering operational and strategic advantage. But for organisations to become comfortable with that vision that they need to: 

• find ways to recreate some of the perceived advantages of the office (for example, creating space and opportunity for spontaneous collaboration)
• identify the commercial and strategic advantages of being remote (such as the ability to hire from a global talent pool)

The Covid crisis has forced rapid learning on the former, but organisations need to take a hard look at the latter before they take the sliproad toward remote work Damascus.

Matt and I will explore the last four themes - spaces, corporate communications, organisational communication and support - in our next whiteboard session. In the meantime, we’d welcome your thoughts, comments and suggestions on what we shared above. What’s this vision missing? What’s stopping it from happening? Let us know in the comments below.