During the COVID-19 outbreak, we saw remote working become a huge, global movement, as every company practices social distancing and discourages potential spreading. Global brands that you never thought would have remote work policies like Dentsu and Shiseido sent employees home. Governments are also pumping out business continuity advisories.
Remote working is one thing. To work remotely and have the entire team remain productive—with a forgivable dip in the beginning—is another.
One of the biggest questions come in managing operating hours. In this case, online hours, since everyone is digitally connected.
“Core hours” are what managers will often fix as it gives them a sense of structure. For instance, every employee has to be online between 8 am to 10 am. This creates an opportunity for the manager to send messages, make announcements, understand projects, and etc.
Yet, these core hours aren’t actually core hours at all. Instead, they are pseudo-meetings that happen daily, which eats into an employee’s working hours and productivity. Rather than fix core hours to create a semblance of the physical office, teams have to adapt to the way remote collaboration is meant to be.
1—Integrate Technology and Use Tools
For instance, tasks and progress are typically tracked by software such as Asana, Trello, or Monday. Need to do a video conference? Use Zoom or the digital communication tool’s inbuilt video call function.
Setting up a single source of information using Google Drive or a Wiki would be good, especially for companies that rely on an intranet. After all, you can’t simply look over the cubicle and ask a question.
If you really want a semblance of the physical office, try digital presence tools.
2—Do You Really Need Everyone to be Online?
Leaders need to ponder: does having everyone online benefit the team? For remote workers, this is the best time for the employees to experiment with their own productivity cycle—they can find out when they are most productive and make full use of it. If having everyone online is meant to do nothing but resemble everyone sitting at their chairs at work, scrap the plan.
3—Try Synchronizations
Syncing up is better than having aimless hours. Every hour is precious, and you want work to be done faster rather than have employees remain online for hours—all while they’re scrolling somewhere else. Don’t waste their time and they won’t waste yours. By giving them a heads up with a synchronization, they’ll know what to do after. This can be a daily occurrence with smaller teams, and weekly occurrences for larger teams with a multi-tiered leadership structure.
A good way to start with transitioning to remote working smoothly would be to make it a partial thing—employees will only work remotely once or twice a week. For the coronavirus outbreak, companies can also implement shift work, where a certain team comes to the office on odd days and another team comes on even days. Meanwhile, everyone else will be working remotely if they are not in the office.
With an increasing number of tech-run generations occupying the workforce, companies will inevitably embrace or crash into remote working, leaving only the critical ones at the physical office (or maybe some swanky WeWork space, if they haven’t crashed and burned yet).
Rather than have an unprecedented health crisis sweep across the world to accelerate this movement, it’s better if companies spur this change amongst themselves during the most peaceful of times.
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