The COVID-19 crisis is touching all aspects of society, including how we work. In response, many companies are considering asking some percentage of their workforce to work remotely until the crisis abates.
If your organization doesn’t have a great deal of experience with remote work, there are a number of key things to think about as you set up a program. You are going to be under time constraints when it comes to enacting an action plan, so think about ways to leverage the tools, procedures and technologies you already have in place. You won’t have the luxury of conducting a six-month study.
We spoke to a few people who have been looking at the remote working space for more than a decade and asked about the issues companies should bear in mind when a large number of employees suddenly need to work from home.
The lay of the land
Alan Lepofsky, currently VP of Salesforce Quip, has studied the remote work market for more than a decade. He says there are three main pieces to building a remote working strategy. First, managers need to evaluate which tools they’ll be using to allow employees to continue collaborating when they aren’t together.
Next, look at the cultural impact of the move to remote work: How will employees who aren’t used to working outside the structure of an office react to suddenly having to work at home or in another location like a co-working space or coffee shop? How will managers react to not having employees in front of them?
Finally, there are the infrastructure components that IT needs to consider, such as making sure workers have a secure way to access internal systems and setting rules and procedures to keep data secure. Even if you’re already using some tools and have systems in place for a small percentage of remote staff, can they scale to meet the demands of many more employees?
We are going to explore each of these remote working pillars and discuss how you can get up and running without a long process.
Finding tools (fast)
Lepofsky recommends starting by taking an inventory of the tools you have. “I think the first thing I would tell companies to do is look at what you have at your disposal today. What’s available that maybe you haven’t done a full implementation of? It’s important to take that inventory and see what you have to work with.”
He adds, “If you’re a Microsoft shop, you’re going to look at what Teams can do for you. If you’re a Google shop, look at what Hangouts can do for you, long before you start going down the road of evaluating a new collaboration tool like Asana, Slack or anything else [you might not have tried yet].”
As you choose your tools, it’s important to account for the fact that many employees will be working remotely for the first time, which leads us to the next consideration: cultural shifts.
Cultural imperatives
As you plan how to manage a remote workforce, your mindset — and many of your workflows — must change when people aren’t sharing the same physical space.
“Figure out which processes you can mirror from the real world in the virtual world, and which things can you actually change. Can you give people the freedom to maybe do things at a different time of day now that they’re at home,” said Lepofsky. “Maybe we don’t have to have that meeting just because when employees were in the same physical space, you took advantage of that.”
To some extent, that involves a change in mentality on everybody’s part, says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a principal analyst at advisory firm Deep Analysis. Pelz-Sharpe has been observing this space for over a decade (going back to Enterprise 2.0 days) and says managers and employees must change the way they approach work to break free of 9-5 thinking.
“Accept remote working is going to be flexible, some will be productive in the morning, some late at night. As long as they get the work done on time and to standard, it’s OK,” he said. “That can be a difficult pill for many organizations to swallow.”
Scaling systems
Employees will probably need to securely connect to internal systems via VPN, so you’ll need to know if whichever one you’re using can handle a surge in usage. Pelz-Sharpe says the technical part won’t necessarily be easy, which means you must be prepared to be flexible.
“This is the toughest challenge in that if you try to go a highly secure VPN route, for example, you will face many challenges with connectivity. Where possible, be flexible, enforce security through procedures and best practices and allow the use of tools like Trello for teams to loosely but effectively manage tasks, rather than over-engineering those activities,” he says.
Lepofsky adds that IT teams need to establish good information security habits for those who aren’t working in the office. Many companies may have procedures in place for some percentage of the company working remotely already, but you can’t take for granted that everyone will automatically understand infosec — and you won’t have much time to educate people.
One factor to consider is just the practical side: Do people have the appropriate equipment to work at home? Some office-bound employees may not even have a business laptop because they’re tethered to desktop computers every day. You need to be sure these workers have access to a computer with a camera, a microphone and a broadband connection so they can join remote meetings.
Keep it simple
This is by no means a comprehensive overview of everything you need to do or think about, but it is a place to start. Traditional ways of working may be faced with upheaval in coming months, so if you want your business to continue operating, start working on these issues now.
The biggest takeaway: Keep it as simple as you can and take advantage of the tools, policies and procedures you already have in place. Be prepared to be flexible, because it’s going to take some time to work through the kinks if this isn’t something your company is used to doing.