THE 3 FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF REMOTE WORK
There are three fundamental principles of remote working:
1. Trust
2. Clarity
3. Visibility
These values underpin successful remote work. It doesn't matter how good your tools are, if your organisation doesn't embrace these values then your remote working practice will not succeed in the long run.
1. Trust
Trust is the most important value.
As a leader, you must trust that the people who work for you will do what you ask of them, to the best of their ability and that if they are unable to, they will be honest enough to tell you as soon as they are having difficulties.
When you're leading a team in an office, your team is continually signalling what they're doing. You can know if the project is on track or if the team is working hard just by looking around the room.
As a passive recipient of all that information, you have a good idea of the state of the team and can take any action that's necessary to ensure that things remain on track.
You don't have to 'trust' that your team is delivering; you can see if for yourself.
When you're working remotely, a lot of those signals are lost. The only signals you get are the ones you choose to transmit. Due to this loss of information, there's an urge to overcompensate by scheduling more regular meetings and using tools such as always-on video connections and app tracking to reassure yourself the team is working.
Resist this urge, as it is counterproductive. It interrupts your team limiting its productivity. It also erodes trust that will eventually lead to the breakdown of the team.
Instead, you should start from a position of trust, assume your teammates are working to the best of their ability. Focus your effort on creating the clarity and visibility your team needs to do its work effectively.
Empower your team to take responsibility for its work. This will build trust, Making it easier for you to do what you need to do to ensure that your projects are delivered successfully.
2. Clarity.
As a leader, your job is to create the clarity your team needs to achieve the project you're asking them to do for you.
How do you create clarity and what the differences are when you're remote working versus being in the office?
In an office, it's easy to hold an in-person meeting, describe outcomes and then let the team go to be productive. More often than not, you get what you've asked for, and all is good in the world.
However, when you analyse how people complete their tasks, you will see many tiny course corrections which are the by-product of all the impromptu in-person chats because of them being together.
For example, Sue can see that Bob isn't doing quite the right thing, so a quick question or two and everything is put back on track.
When you work remotely, the usual signals that we get from our teammates about their work aren't there, and the course correction won't happen.
You need to create alignment by writing up the outcome the team is working towards, and you must work with them to break it down into smaller tasks. When someone is assigned a task, it's their responsibility to ensure that the task status is updated regularly.
Use a digital project tool such as Trello, Asana (or the many others available) to manage your project. Ensure the whole team has access and use it to ensure that your team knows what they need from you, and each other to complete their tasks.
It's your team's responsibility to keep you updated on the progress, by adding status reports. These can be done asynchronously by creating a channel in your collaboration platform (usually Slack or Teams) named ‘team-reporting’.
Still, you must review the updates as frequently and provide timely actions to ensure that everything is on track. There is nothing worse than having a project review where it's evident that people have not read the status updates. It wastes time and undermines the importance of the process you're using to create the clarity people need.
You must also keep an eye on how your team is collaborating, so clarify any misunderstanding early. When this happens, you should immediately step in to help the team to resolve the issue. Typically by moving to a better mode of communication to resolve critical issues, for example, moving from chat to voice or video call.
In short, you have to model the behaviour you expect to see in the team. You have to ensure, either through your presence or the tools and processes you create, that your team has and can create the clarity it needs to deliver for you.
3. Visibility.
When you move from office-based to remote work, you learn pretty quickly that it takes practice to ensure your team can collaborate as effectively as if they were in the office.
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As a leader, it is your job to find the tools and processes you need to ensure the team is as available to each other as if they were in the same office.
Tools
One of the first things you must consider is what digital collaboration platform you will use.
A digital collaboration platform is the digital version of your office. It's where the team goes to do their work.
Slack and Microsoft Teams are the most popular collaboration tools available (there are alternatives for smaller sized organisations, be sure to check out our toolkit page to browse the ones we recommend readyforremote.com/tools).
When selecting a digital collaboration platform you need to make sure you look for the following things.
1. Public spaces (Public Channels) for team and project collaboration and private spaces (Private Channels or Direct Messages) for private or sensitive conversations.
2. One of the first steps you should support people in understanding is being able to easily configure notifications to make it easy to mute any notifications that don't mention you specifically. Notification curation is essential when using public channels to ensure that people don't get overwhelmed by all the different conversations going on. This way people can focus on what is relevant to them with fewer interruptions.
3. Video meetings, yes, we are bias towards async, but you need video meeting capability to be either built-in or through an integration with a third-party tool.
4. Available as both desktop and mobile applications making it easier for your team to access shared documents or conversations from either platform, without having to copy and paste content from one app to another.
All your team communication should happen here. You must not fragment your conversations across multiple systems as knowledge fragmentation impedes productivity because people don't know where to look to find the information they need to do their jobs.
Consider banning email for all internal communication in favour of the digital collaboration tool, only using email for external messages.
You should use a supplementary project management tool such as Trello or Asana (or others such as Planner if you're a Microsoft Teams customer), to track project progress, but the digital collaboration platform is where all project-based conversations, file sharing and collaboration should happen.
How to be visible while remote working
When remote working, you have to create the digital practices and rituals that amplify those missing social cues, progress indicators, so that you can easily 'see' the wellbeing of the team.
Remember, what's important is that the work is getting done.
As a sign of good remote working practice, we focus on progress indicators, and not evidence that someone is chained to their desk from 9.00 am to 5.30 pm.
In an office, people can be present without being productive. Remote work makes it so much easier for us to focus on impact and output.
Consider the following:
1. Create a team-status channel so that people can post a message letting their teammates know they're not going to be available.
2. Create a team-checkout or reporting channel with an automated message at 4.00pm asking people 'What did you work on today? Please take a minute to reply to this thread'. Set the expectation with your teammates that they should answer as thoroughly as possible at the **end of their working day**. Encourage people to add context with a voice or video message, where they can show and tell what they've done. The checkout enables a person to show progress and ask for help while respecting their teammates' time, who can then reply at a time convenient to them.
3. Create automated hooks which will display a message to a channel when something useful happens. For example, when a designer publishes their designs to a shared folder post a message to the project channel. Hooks shows progress as a by-product of doing the work, without requiring any additional work.
4. Not all messages need a written reply, use emojis and reactions to respond to messages. For example, if a designer needs feedback on some design options, they should post the image to the project channel and use reactions (1,2,3,4) to vote on the most preferred options. These add context, allow for quick responses and can be completed when people have a spare couple of mins rather than occupying the whole team in a design review meeting.
As you can see, there are a myriad of different ways for people to show progress indicators when working remotely.
We draw the line at installing app usage tracking technology which undermines trust, and instead, we look for ways to amplify progress indicators as a by-product of doing work. It's more natural and can usually be automated.
Further reading:
If you'd like to learn more about remote or hybrid work, we'd love to chat. Get in touch at readyforremote.com
I find this quite interesting. Whilst remote work is not for everyone, it is something we should all consider at least every now and then, Gary.