More and more people are wanting to remote work. As a manager how can you say yes and be confident that your team will be successful?

My checklist below will help you decided.

Are you Ready for Remote? checklist:

1. Do you trust your team to complete their work in an unsupervised environment?
2. Do you already allow for work from home days?
3. Does your team spend 80%-90% of their time mediating their work through a screen?
4. Do you use a digital collaboration tool as your primary mechanism for coordinating work?
5. Does your team have clarity about the work they need to complete on a daily/weekly basis?

Do you trust your team to complete their work in an unsupervised environment?

Without trust remote working doesn’t work. If you don’t trust your team then you’re doomed to failure because you’ll end up interrupting them just to reassure yourself they’re working.

If you do trust your team then you’re one step closer to saying yes and enabling your team to remote work.

Do you already allow for work from home days?

Working from home and remote working aren’t the same thing; the goals are different.

Working from home gives a team member temporary leave of absence from the office. If the setup isn’t right then the risk of an employee missing out on key pieces of information, or being unproductive is limited. Typically they are back in the office in a couple of days and any issues can be resolved relatively quickly.

Remote working gives a team member the ability to work away from the office for weeks or months at a time. Any issues with the setup can cause problems if they aren’t resolved quickly, seriously impacting on productivity and undermining the success of any remote working initiative.

If you are able to support working from home then you should have some of the building blocks in place to enable remote working.

Does your team spend 80%-90% of their time mediating their work through a screen?

This is a no brainer, if your team spends most of their time completing their work digitally, then they are already prime candidates for remote working.

There are two thing likely to stop your team from making a success of remote working, they are:

• What they spend the rest of their time doing, and if those tasks can be moved to a digital channel.
• What external access is there to the tools/systems they need to do their job.

Remaining time

If your team spends most of the rest of their time in meetings then you should ask yourself if they can be conducted via a video conference using Skype for Business or Hangouts? 

Most people are used to telephone conference but modern video conference tools can provide a much better remote meeting experience.

If your team spends the rest of their time in design/code reviews, can this be achieved digitally with tools such as Invision, GitHub or Visual Studio online etc.

You’ll be surprised what tools are available to replicate day to day activities digitally. 

With some common-sense guidelines such as ensuring the tool use SAML for integrating with your authentication directory. You can be sure that you’re still in control of your companies data.

Access to tools

If there is no external access to the tools and systems the team needs to do their jobs, then remote working may not be possible without lots of workarounds.

Whilst it’s possible to email yourself all the files you need this is a sure-fire route to becoming unproductive, and can have significant security implications.

At the very least a VPN will be required to allow access to internal file servers and tools. However, given most people’s experience of using a corporate VPN you’ll want to give serious consideration to using a secure file syncing tools such as OneDrive, or DropBox. These tools make it much easier to access documents without annoying colleagues to send you the most recent versions.

Do you use a digital collaboration tool as your primary mechanism for coordinating work?

This is critical, if you’re already using a collaboration tools as the bedrock for coordinating your team’s work then you’re 95% there.

A remote worker needs confidence that when they’re not in the office they are still ‘involved’ in the project, and are not being left out of key conversations.

If you are not using these tools already then this is the first step. It seems strange at first to use a collaboration tool to talk to a colleague you’re sat next too, but it’s essential for creating transparency and clarity which is a fundamental principles of remote working.

At its simplest all you need is a chat client with persistent groups (group chats that don’t expire). Invite your project team and, use that for all future team and project discussions. 

When I first started remote working, I used Skype with a couple of named groups to run a team of 6 UX designers for 6 months.

When setting up your collaboration tool, it’s typical for most conversations to happen in private chat sessions. This should be avoided, all conversations should be in open channels unless privacy is absolutely critical, such as when discussing project financing, team performance etc.

To make this openness bearable everyone should change their notification setting to only notify when they are @mentioned or @channel mentioned. The onus is on the person posting the message to notify the right people when they want to draw their attention to a message.

Using open channels for communications has the secondary benefit of helping everyone become more aware of what’s happening across the whole team. It also ensures that the team is more likely to offer help and support each other which becomes even more import in a remote working environment.

Will email work?

Yes, but…..

One of the key drawbacks of using email is that conversations happen in private channels. Unless you included everyone which as everyone knows from bitter experience can get very frustrating.

It’s also very difficult to ensure you have the most up-to-date view of a project, as conversation tend to go off at tangents and sub-conversation are created without all participants knowing they exist.

Does your team have clarity about the work they need to complete on a daily/weekly basis?

When people work remotely they need absolute clarity on what you want them to achieve, and by when.

Make use of project management tools, such as Trello, to detail the ‘in progress’ work and ensure that the team keeps the board up to date. That way you’ll all have a clear idea about whats being worked on and what’s up next.

If you can answer yes to all points above then you should feel confident that you can run a successful remote working experiment.

If not then hopefully you’ve been able to take away some tips to help you create an environment for remote working to flourish.

So, here are a few thoughts on the Remote working.

Culture, attitudes etc.

The hardest part of remote working is adapting to the cultural attitudes of people not being in the office. 

The only way to change this is to build a culture of visibility, through digital tools, which benefits office based and remote workers.

People have to be trusted to get their tasks done, but a remote worker has to be able to show evidence of having done the work, as I tell my daughter about her maths homework, “you’ve got to show your working out”.

Tools like Microsoft Teams (trust me on this, Microsoft have done a good job with Teams. We’ve been using it since its beta launch, December 2016, and have seen nice adoption figures in non-technical users. Also, it’s free in Office 365 so it’s a good bet for large companies who already have a licence arraignment with Microsoft) or Slack, Invision, Basecamp etc. create a digital workspace where people can post status updates, ask for help and upload their work to a central location for review. This replicates most of the things a person does in a physical office, making it much easier for the team to get their work done.

The point is when someone is working remotely you lose the ability to observe what they’re doing on a day to day basis. Instead they have to be measured on their output. 

Team spirit and values

This was my biggest area of concern for the team, will remote working fracture a good team culture?

The answer is no, you combat this issue by having an open ‘water cooler’ channel for the whole team to chat and/or daily video chats, as if they are in the office together.

You must also arrange regular get togethers so the team can meet, discuss their work and to blow off steam.

Tools, connectivity etc.

Remote teams need reliable access to digital tools, that they can connect to from wherever they are, whenever they want.

This means that as an organisation you must decided what’s accessible from outside the corporate network via VPN, and what’s hosted externally.

In my experience things hosted behind a VPN are more unreliable. When the VPN goes down so does the remote workers ability to work, just as when the network goes down in the office.

There are now hundreds of cloud based tools that can be secured by an companies internal authentication system. Tools such as Office 365, Invision, Slack, Github, Visual Studio Online etc. can all be secured by Azure AD, and are available on the open internet, making it so much easier for a remote teams to get their work done.

Internet connectivity is a big problem when you’re out and about. Mobile broadband is essential, and home broadband must be fast and reliable, especially if you want to do daily video chats.

Roles and tasks

I firmly believe that anyone who spends most of their time communicating through their computer is a candidate for remote working, but the tools they’ll need to support their tasks will be different.

Developers will need something different from designers or BAs. It’s important to ensure you provide the right tools to your team to enable them to be effective. 

Typically you’ll need to shift from desktop to laptop machine, and for some people perhaps tablets are best.

A bit of background.

Before October 2013 I didn’t believe it possible to maintain a highly productive team and facilitate remote working, but given that at the time my team of 6 were going to be made homeless due to office consolidation I had to come up with a strategy to keep the team productive and functioning.

I spent two weeks analysing the team to see how they worked and discovered that 90% of the time they were working primarily through their computers. 

When they did work together on a problem, the team would gather round someones screen to discuss things. I was certain that there were screen sharing tools and collaboration tools which could replicate the same thing. So we tried a few out and found some that worked for us and our stakeholders.

We spent a month using the tools in a traditional office based environments, so that the correct behaviours could be embedded. After that was successful we experimented with a week of complete remote working to see what additional problems there were.

After that we moved to complete remote working and the team is as gelled as it was before. An additional bonus has been that when we do meet up there is greater camaraderie than there was before.

I use the following principles with the team, which I think should be at the front of every remote team.

Team Principles

• Trust, clarity and transparency
• Communicate early, communicate often
• If in doubt go voice… even better go video.

Our working environment

Our working environment is as flexible as you need it to be, I don’t care how we complete our work, only that we do, and we do it well. You don’t need to tell me:

• if you’ve got to pop out for an hour,
• if you want to go away.

Simply put the dates in the team calendar.

Before you go away, ask yourself question: Given what i’ve committed to delivering, is now is the right time to go? If it is, go ahead. You deserve it!

If you want to travel and work, i positively encourage it. Over the past year. I’ve worked from Amsterdam, Italy, Switzerland and Gran Canaria, other members of the team have worked from France and America.

To enable this flexible working arrangement, we need to trust each other, and be visible. Therefor we use the following tools to support that.

Basecamp

Is the place where we discuss the projects we’re working on and tasks we’re doing. It’s also the dumping ground for links to project assets etc.

• Friday pm or Monday am – we should update the ‘overviews’ to-do list with a project status.
• Task creation – All new task should be added to the backlog, when creating the task and overview of what’s being achieve should be added, and any other relevant details.
• Working on a task – The task will be moved from backlog, to in progress. All discussion about the task will happen in the task comments.
• Task completion complete task should be moved from in progress to done.
• adhoc meeting should be summarised in a discussion.
• general discussions should be created as a discussion.

Invision

If you need to collaborate on design Upload your sketches/screenshots/wireframes/designs here. Share your project with our stakeholders and collect feedback. **Make sure you password protect your share link. I regularly remove any unsecured share links.

Slack

Everyone should be logged in to Slack between 11am – 3pm, there is a client for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android and an app extension for the PC.

There’s several discussion groups which is where we can chew the fat, keep the fun going or ask general questions about our projects/tasks.

Use your status to let people know if you’re free or don’t want to be disturbed, people may not reply straight away, and we should be considerate about everyone else’s time.

If you need to video chat someone or a group of people then type /hangouts and it will create a google hangout that you can use for video chatting and collaboration.

Remote working allows people to be free of location and set work schedules but can cause isolation if the remote worker doesn’t create a framework for connectedness.

Find time to disconnect from your tools, and find people. Take a walk, join a club, go to your children’s school activities and be disconnect digitally.

Email, IM, smartphones, tablets and laptops are tool that can empower you to create freedom from the ‘industrial complex’ but only when we adjust our mindsets to be free of distractions and to soak up the wonders of the world and people around us.