Remote work
Is it here to stay?

"Silent revolution ongoing....."

John D'Arcy - January 2021

I love roles, not the ones you eat (rolls), but the ones you can Assume (AssumeRole). A role I have been assuming for almost a year now is the RemoteWorker role, also known as the WorkingFromHome role or the TelecommuterRole. And it's going great. I would go so far as to say, there is a silent revolution ongoing. More and more people are working from home and both employees, consultants and yes, even businesses are finding it very effective.

This dramatic shift to working from home is a true success story from this global pandemic. The transition has certainly had its share of ups and downs (ask the team behind MS Teams), but the rapidly growing acceptance indicates this is a trend that is almost certainly going to shape the future of work. Like everything else, there are good ways to do it and there are not so good ways to do it. The cultural and social side of remote work also needs to be in focus in order to make working from home work well for all parties.

Technology, that enabled remote work, certainly played a major role in this paradigm shift, but so did attitudes toward the workplace in general. Working from home doesn’t mean that employees won’t be able to communicate or collaborate. Business-communication tools like MS Teams, Slack, AWS Chime and Zoom have enabled employees to continue working together on projects, as well as engage in the normal social interactions one would find in a traditional office setting. While the future will be different, it won’t necessarily involve total isolation.

The new norm for many organisations has made transparent the reality of working from home for an extended time. It is proving to be effective for many businesses.

"Go from work-moments to true work-hours"

Once businesses realise the high returns remote work can bring to the organisation, it might be tempting to immediately shift to this way of working. But, slow down, there are some very specific characteristics in people who are more successful working from home. Typically, successful remote workers are self-motivated, disciplined, strong in communication skills, have some experience working from home, highly responsive and tech-savvy. Especially, the highly responsive characteristic is essential when working from home. You need to be able to contact your remote workers within minutes, by chat, mail or phone. Again, collaboration tools like Slack, AWS Chime and MS Teams help here.

Like everything else, working from home can be done successfully and it can fail. Both the "ways of working" and the cultural and social side of work needs to be addressed. The benefits of working from home are huge both for businesses and for the individual. Here are a few:

• Increased productivity

  • • For many employees, there are fewer distractions, less noise, and additional hours to complete deliverables

• More work-life balance

  • • There’s no commute, less preparedness to get ready in the morning and more personal time. Employees can manage their time and achieve a better work-life balance. Work is a part of life and not life itself.

• Location flexibility

  • • One can live anywhere in the world and continue working. Global teams can be more effective than teams traveling to a central location to work together.

• Less office-space overhead

  • • A large expenditure is reduced significantly when there isn’t the need to house employees, provide on-site amenities and maintain a building. This money can be spent on offering employees home office facilities, instead.

• Less distractions

  • • It is easier to get a chunk of time to get stuff done at home than it is at work. Involuntary interruptions at work take you out of "the zone". People coming by, unorganised meetings, open office disruptions all can reduce effectivity substantially.

• Less employee turnover

  • • The State of Remote Work 2017 report by OWL Labs and TINYpulse found that companies that support remote work have a 25 percent lower employee turnover rate compared to companies that don’t. People are generally happier and more willing to help out with extra hours when needed.

• A distributed workforce helps the environment

  • • Having a distributed workforce not only saves time for employees, but also cuts down a company’s carbon footprint. Very important in our fight against carbon emissions.

"Remote first strategy"
"When did you last book a conference room"

For many startups and consultants, remote working is already part of the normal course of business. However, many enterprise companies who had a more office-based workforce previously, are realising that remote working has been more successful and less complicated to transition than they expected. The pandemic has proven this. Organisations and employees have become increasingly more comfortable about working from home or out of the office and are now looking at keeping some or all of their workforce remote indefinitely.

Several high profile organisations have recently announced a shift in strategy, giving their employees the option of working from home permanently and we will no doubt see others follow in adopting a blended approach and offering greater flexibility.

So, what is a remote-first strategy? Is it really a viable option for your organisation?

Adopting a remote-first strategy means offering the option to work in an office or remotely for the majority of roles in your organisation. Processes are built from the ground up with the assumption that not everyone is face-to-face. It means there is no disadvantage to working at home versus being in the office as all employees have the same experience. Do you remember booking meeting rooms? It seems so "old" for us working from home now.

It’s all about flexibility – offering remote work to employees & consultants who want it and if their jobs allow, while maintaining the ability to work from an office for those who don’t, or who need to be office based. This differs from remote-friendly where companies allow some employees and consultants to work remotely at least some of the time and don’t make significant changes to internal processes to make sure that those employees are successful.

You can build global strength with a remote-first strategy. This will give you the opportunity to recruit on a global basis with a greater range of competences to choose from. Startups that build distributed teams set themselves up to operate effectively across geographies. This forces organisations to build and manage strong communications, to trust employees with more autonomy, and to foster a shared culture across the organisation.

For further reading on the topic I can recommend looking at this blog: https://blog.doist.com/remote-first/

A comparison between remote-friendly and remote-first below:

If you hire globally, time zones are the single biggest issue to overcome when it comes to operating as a remote team. However, there’s a simple strategy that eliminates this hurdle and keeps team members collaborating effectively while they’re distributed across the world: asynchronous communication.

Asynchronous communication, where participants communicate as they are available and discussion is punctuated by intermittent gaps, serves remote teams well. Team members don’t need to be online at the same time or in the same physical location to respond to emails, create conversation threads, or collaborate in cloud-based software apps. Instead, they can choose their own productive working hours, default to deep work, and answer messages when they’re open to being interrupted. Synchronous-first versus asynchronous-first:

In conclusion, the future of remote work is looking good. The pandemic has forced us to broaden our horizons and see the "silver lining" in this difficult period. At CloudRemote.io, we believe that we can serve our clients better by offering to solve their AWS infrastructure challenges by utilising a global network of consultants who will work to solve a specific problem and still communicate and work as part of our clients way of working.

Don't hesitate to contact us if you need to get further details: john@CloudRemote.io

Further reading:

• Take a pay cut to work from home - 75% would jump at the chance

• The top 20 Fortune 500 remote-friendly companies

• Businesses will spend more than $330bn on remote-working tech this year

• Go back to the office? Some employees would rather quit