What is the correct way to do remote work?
Spoiler alert: It depends! There are many ways to make remote work “work” - and the exact configuration for your company depends on, well, your company. To be more precise, it depends on the clarity of your purpose and your expectations. The clearer you are about what you expect and what you can offer in return, the closer you are to a sustainable remote policy.
Comparing “remote work” to “work in the office” is a bit like comparing “living in Portugal” with “living in France”. Whether you prefer one over the other depends on the details. Lisbon is more similar to Paris than to a rural village in the Castelo Branco province. Similarly, consistently working from the same coworking space is closer to working in an office than being a digital nomad.
The real question is: What do you want collaboration to look like?
If you are considering remote work, or work from home: do you expect a specific schedule, a specific time zone, or is it all about results? Who pays for the office and IT equipment? Who is responsible for lunch breaks?
If you prefer your employees to come to an office, how many people do they share the space with? How flexible are schedules? Is there a canteen or a coffee corner available for employees? How about child care on site, for example when schools are closed?
Remote work and in-office work can only be successful long term when company values and employee expectations meet. This requires honest communication, starting with how you talk about the company during the hiring process.
Not everyone is looking for total flexibility. If you require a defined work location for security reasons, you can attract people who value predictability and stability in their current life phase. Focussing on mostly asynchronous and written communication (including written interviews) makes you a good fit for employees who enjoy writing. Optimizing for flexibility and digital nomadism will speak to a specific subset of possible candidates, and not to another one.
Three topics to discuss with your leadership team
Instead of discussing whether you are going to opt for remote work, work from home, a hybrid model, or a classic office environment - discuss the following topics. Once you are clear on your priorities, how you organize work will be (almost) self-evident.
Schedules and communication: synchronous or asynchronous
The way you communicate doesn’t have to dictate where people sit. It has a big impact on availability and expectations though. If most of your work happens in synchronous discussions, you’ll want your team to be available during similar hours. If you are happy to push ideas forward via written communication, then you don’t need extensive overlap in work hours. Most companies will fall somewhere in between the two extremes. Define how many core hours or which times during the work week are absolutely essential - and don’t be afraid to experiment.
Role dependent security considerations
You may not be comfortable with your sales team having conversations with important leads in a coffee shop. Maybe you get nervous thinking about someone peeking at proprietary code while a developer works on the high-speed train. Those are valid concerns that require some research to figure out what works for each individual role. Laptop screens can be obscured through privacy shields. You can create clear rules for different types of work. An office isn’t the only solution.
Expectations for people managers
What is the role of your team leads, of your middle management? Are they first and foremost responsible for the well being of their team? Is their main focus the performance? Do they take part in the front line work, or are they mostly in charge of admin and management as such? Those are important questions - because the less you see each other in person, the more important it is for someone to keep tabs on how everyone else is doing.
Mind you, this is just as important in an office, it’s just less obvious. As a manager, this might mean for you to change the number of personal interactions, or to update the requirements for daily (or weekly) standups. There are literally thousands of options on how you can design your own remote leadership style, and it requires actively experimenting with ideas.
Don’t model your remote policy on pandemic work-from-home
Whatever you decide to focus on, do not take the pandemic work from home experience as your blueprint. Working from home during a pandemic is crisis management, not proactive employee engagement design. That means you might have to learn what’s possible, even now, years into the pandemic. Find out what others are doing. Try out new tools. Experiment.
Remember: no one has it figured out on day one, or year 10. As our environment shifts, as we learn, as we grow, we can become more ambitious in how we lead and how we support and empower those we are responsible for. Make sure to keep track of those learnings, and then share your insights. Share them with others and help us to create a network of growth that we can all be part of.