Reducing the productivity impact of sudden remote working.
Whilst the current global COVID-19 pandemic event has created the need for businesses of all sizes to invoke business continuity plans and thrust workers into immediate telecommuting, many of those plans focus primarily on providing the tools and connectivity but fail to address the fundamentals of staff productivity. Lost productivity whilst teams and leadership navigate their tools and ways of working can quickly amount to significant bottom line impact.
This paper will provide you with some immediate practical guidance to significantly reduce the speed to competency and thus significantly reduce lost productivity.
The productivity & risk concerns that stopped you enabling wide scale remote working prior to the pandemic haven’t changed -
and your workforce likely isn’t prepared.
Across USA and Canada more than 10% of all corporate staff have been telecommuting since 2003. In 2009 Forrester estimated that by 2016 over 40% of the US population would telecommute at least part time. Yet in 2013 Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer famously terminated their work from home benefit citing, amongst other things, that “people are more collaborative, more inventive when people come together” but conceding that with the right setup and lack of distractions “when people work from home formally, it works really well”.
Whilst the past decade has seen significant advances in the cloud tools and broadband capabilities that enable remote working, tools alone don’t ensure a productive workforce; the answer lies in psychology. Scientific research puts it down to beliefs and attitudes towards telecommuting and self-efficacy.
Good tools aren’t enough – you need trust!
If large scale remote working were a planned program for your organisation; you’d spend months on change management and training. Therefore, when you don’t have that luxury, how does one rapidly create a highly collaborative remote working team with the right tools and psychological safety to make it sustainable and successful?
In my experience, two discreet steps invoked by leaders immediately and implemented well can build trust, significantly reduce the speed to competency and thus significantly reduce lost productivity.
Agree the new rules
Set up the rituals
You’ll note this isn’t an exhaustive list; it’s not intended to be. It simply seeks to demonstrate leaders can implement some immediate steps to start the journey; once the basics are in play we can expand. To add some colour, let’s explore these further.
Step 1 - Agree the new rules.
Whether you’re prepared and everyone has a company supplied device or you’re left with little option than to adopt BYOD (perhaps it’s both) you need to be sure that your data is secure yet easy to find and everyone is playing the same game.
This means immediately agreeing on:
Work Organisation tool – where decisions are recorded, and work is tracked e.g. digital Kanban.
Content Sharing location/tool – file storage location / team intranet site / wiki (company data needs to be accessible by all and secure, it can’t live on a BYOD)
Real time communication tool – video conferencing
Asynchronous communication tool – text-based communication
Etiquette – for example, will we will keep our cameras always on?
The workday – what is our agreed start and end time for the team?
Some organisations won’t have prescribed tools and teams will have to scramble and iterate. Other organisations will have multiple choices available that need to be narrowed to one. What is important is that a decision on which tool will be used for each purpose made as a group. This is not only the first step to trust and safety, but it allows each member of the team to own the decision and self-police if anyone forgets.
Etiquette and working day decisions are critical to team morale and employee health. The former sets the tone early for team participation and expectations. In the early stages of remote working this may be controversial and uncomfortable; but it takes away any doubt that your colleagues are ‘at work’. The latter is largely to ensure the ability for staff to balance work and home life and ensure the majority of people are ‘at work’ together. Recent studies in Japan found that remote workers often struggled to balance work and domestic chores leading to stress. Agreeing a time to start and end the day sets a clear expectation when staff should be online and importantly when to ‘log off’.
How do I make this real?
The leader of each team should immediately schedule a short (no longer than 1hr) meeting to discuss and agree as a group. The agenda and time for discussion is clear; a decision for each point must be made and everyone agrees to abide by the decisions. Encourage a sufficient amount of discussion to secure buy-in but don’t meander; get to a decision.
Step 2 - Set up the rituals.
Remote working can quickly become impeded by distractions, similarly organic hallway conversations can no longer occur. This means it’s all the more important for team rituals to provide some regular touch points for the team.
These should include:
Daily ‘stand-up’
Daily Huddle
Team Happiness check
Retrospective
Stand-up is 15 minutes at exactly the same time each day where every member of the team talks to the days expected outcomes and updates the team on yesterday’s achievements. In the early days, this will help team members by forcing each to focus on planning their activities for the day and making a declaration to the team creates a sense of commitment.
Huddle is the 15 minutes immediately following stand-up where team members can break out into side conversations about the days’ work; for example, to agree times to collaborate or simply to ask for assistance or advice. Who huddles with who and on what topic is dictated by the needs of the team on the day, the intent is simply to ensure that everyone in the team knows that they can be sure they catch their team members at a prescribed time without the need to book a specific meeting.
Happiness check (renamed from ‘health check’ given recent events) is a once a fortnight activity facilitated by the leader where each individuals can anonymously (or acknowledged when the team is comfortable) rank their happiness from 1-5 like an uber rating and offer insight into “what’s working” and “opportunities for improvement”. It should seek to provide the leader insight into how to improve the ways of working; the summation of the survey feeding into the retro for discussion and the happiness score being tracked and trended. When happiness is high discretionary effort increases and team members find less excuses for distraction. Some studies suggest that happy remote teams are in fact significantly more productive than collocated teams. Where an individual’s happiness is low and abnormal from the majority the leader should seek to make this a focus of their 1-1.
Retrospective is another fortnightly activity. It’s an opportunity for the team to collectively decide the topics they’d most like to discuss as a team with the goal being to agree and commit to changes proposed to ways of working in order to improve the team happiness. There are numerous tools on the web that enable this virtually.
How do I make this real?
The leader of each team should immediately schedule each of the rituals into the calendars. These meetings are immutable and except for exceptional circumstances unmoveable and mandatory. It may seem counter intuitive to espouse team buy-in and decisions yet advocate for mandatory dictated meetings, however studies suggest that a significant component of remote work productivity comes from activities that engender positive beliefs in the practice, particularly from leadership. In simple terms, leader led change.
Where to from here?
Whilst this all seems simple enough it can be intimidating for leaders who have limited experience in remote working and dispersed team to build trust and unlock the potential of remote work. Encourage leaders who have the experience in your organisation to set-up virtual brown bags (a short webinar over lunch) where they can share their experiences with their peers.
If you think your leadership team could use more help, consider a short training session followed by some periodic one-one coaching and/or facilitated team rituals over the first few weeks.
Sources:
Bort J (2015) Marissa Mayer defends her famous ban on remote work: 'I hope that's not my legacy' https://www.businessinsider.com.au/mayer-still-defends-remote-work-ban-2015-11?r=US&IR=T
Kazekami S (2020) Mechanisms to improve labor productivity by performing telework. Telecommunications Policy Volume 44, Issue 2, March 2020, 101868 www.sciencedirect.com
Neufeld & Fang (2005) Individual, social and situational determinants of telecommuter productivity. Information & Management Volume 42 (2005) pg1037–1049 www.sciencedirect.com
Schadler T (2009) US Telecommuting Forecast, 2009 To 2016 https://www.forrester.com/report/US+Telecommuting+Forecast+2009+To+2016/-/E-RES46635
Schwantes M (2009) A New Study Reveals Why Working From Home Makes Employees More Productive https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/new-study-reveals-why-working-from-home-makes-workers-more-productive.html
Staples S, Hulland J & Higgins C (1998) A Self-Efficacy Theory Explanation for the Management of Remote Workers in Virtual Organizations. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 3, Issue 4, 1 June 1998, JCMC342, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1998.tb00085.x