The Remote Work Experiment

With organisations forced to turn to remote work overnight due to COVID-19, is there something for them to learn from this?

In the recent past, the allure of remote work has tickled the fancy of almost all modern, web workers. Quite possibly, the only real criteria for remote work is a working internet connection and a laptop with good battery life. Organisations like GitLab, Automattic and Zapier have shown that fully remote companies can be wildly successful. Almost all of these companies have written extensively on the benefits of remote work. The founders of Basecamp - a project management tool - even decided to write entire books on it! The trend towards remote work had been catching on at a steady pace but recently, things have changed rather swiftly. 

The global pandemic COVID-19 has forced organisations to make the shift to remote work overnight. And this shift has had a major influence across the entire web ecosystem. Remote tools like Zoom and Slack have seen generous spikes in user growth. Thousands of blog posts on remote work have been flushed into the interweb. Every web worker has a new dedicated space in their house called ‘office’. The web is truly remote now.

Even with the world turning desolate due to this pandemic, executives in these organisations are secretly hopeful that they could get to taste the proclaimed benefits of remote work.

A few weeks after going remote, organisations will start to notice that their employees are showing significant boosts in productivity. Developers start writing a lot more lines of code, content writers take a day instead of two for their blog posts, designers have their wireframes ready sooner and sales make more demo calls in the day. Everybody, and especially the people on top, are loving this new found trove of productivity in the organisation.

It’s easy to ride this new wave of productivity but alas, all waves do crash. Will organisations be prepared to sustain this momentum indefinitely? To answer this question, organisations will first need to ask themselves - what was hindering their employees from being productive before going remote? If you look at the differences on paper, only the employee’s location has changed from the office to the living room (or bedroom). So, what really has brought in this rise of productivity? It cannot just be a location thing.

The answer is simple. It’s more focused work. Employees have more time for deep, concentrated work and this results in better work done faster; which in essence, means better productivity. Remote work has also forced employees to communicate better and more often leading to better collaboration within the teams.

This new global batch of remote organisations need to look at this forced experiment with remote work as an opportunity to uncover gaps that lead to reduced productivity in the physical office space. The executive team in these organisations need to use this period to investigate why focus and communication was a blocker for employees before and how to provide for an environment that can unblock these hurdles when they come back to office later this year.

The hope is that when the dust settles and everyone can resume work in a physical office, the organisation and its employees would have had a taste of how powerful great focus and communication can turn out to be. The hope is that employees will now have a new instilled sense of confidence and accountability. That they are more aware of their time and what to do with it. That their managers would have realised the importance of keeping their teams in constant sync. And that the executive team will realise why it’s critical to keep sharing the vision and mission with others. And for me, selfishly, I hope that everyone will realise that some meetings could have just been emails and most emails could have just been messages on Slack.

There is scope for some of these organisations to completely adopt remote work when things get back to normal as they might have a product and culture that supports it. However, there are some organisations that cannot adopt it for whatever reason and that’s alright; not every organisation needs to be remote. But, it is my sincere belief that every organisation can learn a lot about productivity from remote work. I implore the executives, managers and employees from these organisations to take a step back and see what they can take away from this forced experiment.

This global pandemic has a lot to teach us. But are we ready to learn?