Working remotely: the future working standard

Doesn't that picture look fabulous? Wouldn't you want to be able to do your work like that woman is? Relaxed and yet focused on your work? If you got a skeptic reaction to the above you won't like this article ^_^ but if you felt inspired, welcome to the circle of "wannabe remoters"! Joke aside, whether skeptic or believer, I encourage you to read on as I always try my best to keep my provocative thoughts somewhat entertaining so that even the other side can enjoy the read. :)

A lot of articles are written nowadays about working remotely, though they usually turn around employees getting just a little bit more flexibility at work to take care of their kids or deal with emergencies. What I want to propose instead is working remotely as the new working standard of the not so far future. After all, our society is based more and more on technology that allows us to work anywhere and still accomplish our goals. A lot of us have jobs heavily reliant on email communication, which can be done from anywhere as long as you have a laptop or phone with you. Others, like programmers and artists, can easily work from home and integrate their work via VPN directly in the system used by their company like if they were at their office desks. Customer service employees could answer calls and chat with customers from their home, and the same goes for social media/community management roles. So the main blocker with working remotely becoming the new work norm is not so much its "difficulty", rather than our own mental blockage and by "our" I mostly mean blockage from companies/management. This article talks about this blockage and explains why it would be a win-win situation for both companies and employees to consider working remotely as a viable way to work. 

 Lack of trust = if they stay at home they'll do nothing and make me pay for it.

From my experience most of the concerns related to people working remotely aren't concerns you would necessarily mention out loud because they relate to a lack of control, and therefore, a lack of trust. Decades after the first management theories stated that control is not the best way to get results, most of our companies are still functioning with a control management style. The biggest elephant in the room when it comes to remote work is that we don't want to say that we think people cannot be trusted, it's not good for company PR or for our "i'm a great boss" reputation. The fact of the matter remains that the big fear companies have regarding remote work, and why they still resist it, is that they'll pay people to watch TV all day. 

Now, if you're an employee willing to work remotely there are 2 main counter arguments you can have to this:

1) Most people can be trusted. They will have an ethic responsibility to do the work they are paid to do. My management philosophy for example is to default to trust with teammates, until proven wrong by their behavior. They can work remotely as long as they seem to be producing the results I'd expect if they were at the office. If it's not the case, then I would revert it for the individuals who are taking advantage. I've had to revert back on authorizing work at home a couple times because some people couldn't be trusted to use that flexibility effectively, but most people can be trusted luckily. However the majority view in management as mentioned above is that people cannot be trusted. So don't be surprised if you get eye-rolling and awkward grunts if your ask for remote work using the "you should trust me" argument. Luckily there's another thing you can point to.

2) There are ways to control results at home, like at the office. A lot of the concern around working remotely seems to be rooted in this belief that as a manager you have no way of checking whether someone did their work or not...but you do! It's all a matter of shifting your focus from the how to the what. Instead of focusing on where people work (the how), focus instead on their results (the what). After all, what exactly are you really trying to control here? You want to make sure people do their work = they give back value for the salary you pay them. Wether they give that value back from the office or from home should be irrelevant. Once you've gone through that shift it's a lot easier to see how one can still control results even if employees work remotely. You can still have meetings via technologies like Skype or via phone. You can still ask the employees to send reports on a regular basis. You can still check their results in the system as they input their work in it from home. You can double check their work by contacting clients or talking to peers.

With that tackled, let's shift gears a little and ask yourself: honestly, can you do all this with 100% confidence even if the person works in the office? Can't the person lie about all this in the office too? Tell you that things are progressing, while they're not and that sort of things? Of course they can and they do.

The illusion of control = because they are here and I can check on them face to face, people are working. Who hasn't heard of (or seen) a peer browsing Facebook most of the day? Or bragging about how little they have to do? Or seen coworkers spend most of their time in coffee and cigarette breaks? (especially common in France) Thinking you control people more from the office than from home is in grand part an illusion of control. And in a way you can even have less control in the office compared to remotely because your confidence that you are controlling people by your mere presence in an office blinds you to the fact that there are many ways people slack at work without your knowledge. After all you can't be everywhere, checking everyone at once. Well, unless you're that guy in the picture above of course. But who among us managers want to be that guy?

Similarly, the idea that people being in the office equals them being more productive or working a full 8h is flawed. The people who indeed cannot be trusted to work from home, cannot be more trusted to work in the office. They know what gives the illusion of work, they know your habits and how to make it look like they work, they know that befriending you will make you more lenient etc... in short they know how to be seen as a model employee even if they don't do much work. For sure the temptation from home is higher, and there are more distractions, and for sure some work is lost there, but some work is also gained by not driving to work for example. Or by compensating by working in the evening. But good employees will give you the value back for the salary you give them wether at work or at home. And bad employees won't wether at home or at work. It's as simple as that and it is unfair to black remote work to all because of behavior of a few.

An other, easy, wide-spread example to showcase how easily our perception can be biased is working hours. In a lot of companies, the hours you put being in the office determine how performing/committed you're perceived to be. If you're always there first and leaving last, you're the best employee ever, even if you spend most of your day browsing the internet. If you leave early, you're looked at as non-committal, even though you've achieved your results for the day. Isn't it awkward?  We are talking about the business world, where limiting the amount of input, increasing the amount of output in itself or within a given amount of time are crucial tenants. And yet in our day to day work we focus on the number of hours put in, not what came out of them. How does something so obviously flawed can be a foundation of most of the working world today? If you wonder why as a company your costs are not going down, or your results not going up, consider having a closer look at your company's work habits and values to see if you're not, in your own ways, encouraging people to focus more on the how = the illusion of work, than on the what = getting the work done. Another side effect of this is that your high performers learn to perform less to be appreciated as you're not rewarding them for working more effectively or for producing more in the same amount of time as others or in a shorter time. I'm often very bored at work because I don't have the workload for 100% work days but it doesn't mean that when an email come in or I'm needed I don't jump on the work right away to get it done. It also doesn't mean I have less work than others. It can mean I do it faster. And while I often get disconnected and bored staying at work pretending to have something to do, I feel much more motivated by my work when I'm home and can spend that unused time doing other things like groceries, laundry, watching a course online etc...and I feel grateful to have a role that gives me that flexibility and trust, while if I'm stuck in the office for 8h no matter the workload it makes me want to change jobs.

Working from home = working more

I already mentioned above a couple ways in which working from home might actually lead to more work: you can work instead of driving 2h to the office and back, you feel a sense of responsibility to your work so you actually work a full 8h, while in the office you probably wouldn't have and in some cases you're so focused on your work (because there are many distractions at work too that we often prefer to not mention) that you actually produce much more than if you were in the office

In some cases the above points will win you the right to work remotely if you so desire, providing you still produce the same results. If so: congratulations! (and be glad that you have a good manager who cares) In a lot of cases though, because "being in the office = work" is such an entrenched belief you might have to actually produce more out of home if you want access to remote work and here is why. In the 1900s the world went through a vague of industrialization that then lead to automation. Machines were producing more and faster than humans could and demand was rising, so humans were slowly replaced by machines...

Though the rest of the jobs can't be automatized in the same way (that is until AI robotics catches up with us :)) you will find management/companies thinking very much like if you were in manufacturing. Meaning they want more and faster. Therefore even if you show them you can get the same results by working from home it won't be enough. You've only shown you can work the same or faster from home, not that you can produce "more and faster".

The sad truth is more often that not if you want to get the opportunity to work remotely you might have to produce more results for it. In addition to trust issues and manufacturing bias, there might be a "what are you giving me in return?" mentality at play, where companies will consider it a favor to allow you to work from home and therefore will expect increased results as compensation for that favor. As we often are drawn to working remotely to get more flexibility/autonomy on our schedule, it's important to be aware of what the costs might be. You might be asked to produce more and therefore not gain much from that extra time you thought you would be able to spend with your family as a reward for your good work.

Huge potential for big gains on both sides = win-win situation

Because companies are big on control, are used to seeing themselves as providers to employees (forgetting that employees provide their work/time in return) and are resistant to change, working remotely will take a while to develop as more than just a mere way for parents to have a better work/life balance. However there is much to gain for companies in considering remote work as a new work standard for the future:

- lower fixed costs like office rent, office equipment...

- wider range of employees available as location is not a factor anymore

- lower employee costs as employees would be assessed on results/effectiveness/efficiency and not on illusion criteria like number of hours spent in the office. By assessing people this way, the productive people would easily be defined and kept on staff while the unproductive ones would be asked to get up to standards or leave. Companies would find they can work on less staff than they thought without higher workload for the remaining people contrary to what happens during random massive lay offs.

- higher employee satisfaction, retention and results. High performing employees will remain in the company despite personal events like creating a family and would probably produce more as a result of being able to manage their time according to the flow of their day, and have higher satisfaction level.

Note: there are 3 main ways to approach remote work in that context:

1) You can adopt the already used pay/hour system for contractors and freelancers. This system can encourage effectiveness if employees are allowed to take on different contracts at a time. If they're not, this is a loss for the employee as working faster do not provide them with an opportunity to increase their income accordingly.

2) you can continue to pay people the way you do now. As long as you see results coming in, in an acceptable fashion, you will pay people 8h/day no matter how many hours they actually worked. Doesn't encourage extra-effort but promotes financial safety and flexibility if the expected work is done.

3) you can pay people based on results. For example: you have A hours to do B and doing B in that time frame will bring you C$. If you finish early you are free to use the time left in the week at your leisure and a new assignment will be given for next week. Money is guaranteed and free time becomes the bonus for effectiveness. You can also offer a new assignment right away if you have one or allow the employee to take on another assignment in the meantime.

As for employees the benefits of remote work are:

- No commute

- More time with family

- Autonomy on schedule

- Rewarded for being effective (good for high performers)

- Can make a lot more money for your time if paid/h or /projects and allowed to take on several jobs

- You can better use your 8h/day if paid like in office and you used to not have enough work to fill your days

Conclusion: Outsourcing and external vendors are heavily used, why not working remotely for local employees?

I'm a very effective person and therefore love to be able to manage my schedule the way I want to as long as I provide my results. That freedom motivates me to do even more for my company, not do less, because it is so hard to find and I want to keep this lifestyle. It's not that I don't care. On the contrary, I want to remain sharp. I would actually love to push it one step further by being able to take on other jobs if I don't need 100% of my time to provide results on my main job but being a project manager this is a hard sale (hence my interest for consulting in the long term). The thing is that like the manufacturing bias mentioned above, there are a lot of assumptions on the role of a manager that make it harder to be left to work remotely, after all you're the one supposed to make sure people do their work right. You're supposed to be there first and there last to make sure people do their hours etc...On the other hand being in management theoretically allows for more freedom with your schedule as you're not producing anything, you're supervising, so your presence doesn't impact the schedule like a missing programmer would. It's quite interesting... Certain roles however, like programming and UI/graphic design, are taking full advantage of working remotely and the number of remote roles in those areas expand each year. My hope is that the practice will continue to expand through roles and industries to allow more people more freedom to be productive at work and live their lives without having to make a choice between the two or having to become a freelancer/consultant.

The funny thing is, companies already adopted outsourcing to foreign countries as a common practice, or using external vendors, and both have the same characteristics as remote work: there's a risk as I'm releasing direct control, they're far from my sight, but I can still guarantee results through contracts linking money to deliverables. So why not allow regular employees to work remotely? Companies would gain a lot more than they fear to lose, especially if mechanisms are in place to check the work on a regular basis. With most of the work now being done through computers and the internet, implementing check processes is easily done. We (Companies/management) just have to let go of the illusion of control we get from having people in the same location as us and start trusting one another more. We have to change our mindset from how to what. After all isn't one of the premises of good management "focus on the what and let people figure out the how"? :)