Channeling the Ripples of Crisis Towards Mastering Remote Work

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is facing an unprecedented crisis and are being forced to quickly adjust to a new way of working. All organisations — large and small are facing a trial by fire against drops in productivity with remote work tools as their arsenal.

This is a time to make lemonade!

Consider that embracing remote work systems will have a long-term net benefit within your organisation, even if you plan to ultimately revert to mainly office-based working. If done right, you get the best of both worlds with an infrastructure that is remote work friendly. 

While allowing all your employees to have the flexibility to be productive wherever and whenever you can still reap all the benefits of working in an office if you choose to. The result would drastically transform your workspace and have potential ramifications for many factors like how people balance their work and personal lives, where people opt to live, office spaces, and so on.

A remote-first mindset also allows you to hire the best candidates for the job irrespective of where they are located. With a remote-first mindset, you develop a thriving and socially connected work culture capable of effectively accomplishing goals.

All this sounds superficial, doesn’t it?

It is superficial if you try to implement a remote-first mindset by adding a bunch of remote work tools and expecting those to work their magic.

An effective remote work strategy is a perfect blend of culture and technology. To ensure that your entire organisation adopts the remote-first mindset along with you, you have to focus on developing a work culture that is inclusive of employees irrespective of where they are working from.

Remote work technology + Digital culture = 100% collaboration

Let’s face it — no remote work tool or a digital workplace is advanced enough to be used as a magic wand. Your organisation requires to undergo a culture shift while adopting new remote work tools. There is a lot of buzz about the need for redefining the structure to implement remote work without any lag in productivity and collaboration. Let me simplify things for you.

Consider your remote-first vision as a perfect 100 score. As I said, you need a mixture of culture and technology to reach that perfect score.

When it comes to technology, you have 3 options:

1. Buy an array of remote work tools and figure out a way to string them together
2. Buy a digital workplace platform that is inclusive of all the required functionalities of remote work
3. Build a digital workplace from scratch with a team of in-house developers.

Whichever option you opt for, it is impossible to score a straight 100.

Now, the remaining points are to be scored by enabling a remote-work friendly culture. The culture part is completely in your control and thus, you can optimise your strategy and reach 100. So, in case your technology is not upgraded enough, you can compensate by having a well-defined strategy in place.

Role of technology in your remote-first strategy

The ABCs of implementing remote work are to replace the physical aspects of a workplace enabling collaboration with digital ones. To get started, you will need to have tools that enable synchronous and asynchronous conversations. These include video conferencing and chat platforms. It is also a good practice to ensure that the tool has the functionality to keep synchronous and asynchronous conversations separate. You also need to have project management tools that help managers to oversee progress. Additionally, there are collaboration tools to implement distributed continuity of tasks and ensure clear ownership.

A group of tools or a platform that offers all these functionalities will give you a head start towards implementing a remote-first mindset.

Role of culture in your remote-first strategy

Culture is defined as how teams work together as a cohesive unit. Strong office culture is built on 5 pillars:

• Sense of accountability
• Rituals and traditions
• Team spirit
• Candid communication
• Constant motivation

While working together in a physical office space, all these pillars are already well-established. But, while transitioning to remote work, all these pillars need to be re-built or at least renovated. Without it, everything falls apart. Unlike a physical workspace, employees do not see each other daily. Thus, conversations happen only when absolutely necessary. A mere birthday celebration of a team member can build team spirit in the office while in remote work, it requires an extra effort. Effective and open communication is absolutely crucial in a remote team. A lag in communication leads to disconnected teams with no collaboration.

This is where you can step up as a leader. Create a set of guidelines on how to make the best out of remote work tools. Start new traditions and celebrate every small achievement virtually. Find ways to make employees feel that they are a crucial part of the organisation. Ensure that office cultural activities keep happening digitally. For example, when Kissflow started working from home to practice social distancing, we continued our weekly Friday Good to Great sessions on Zoom to keep up the team morale.

Combining technology and culture

Technology and culture should go hand in hand to successfully transition to remote work. You can either have an efficient digital workplace platform that is capable of handling all types of work and weave your organisation culture into it or you can build a strong remote work culture and add technology to fulfil the required functionalities.

Both approaches can prove to be successful if you strategically plan and implement it. It will definitely take multiple trials to get it right. Implementing remote work is an iterative process. With the right approach, you will surely get there sooner than expected.