One concern for companies who have at least some of their employees running remotely is the loss of structure and control.
It’s a valid concern, but reflects an older brick and mortar way of thinking. Their concern is that, if you don’t see your employees, at their desks every day, how can you catch them sloughing off? When everyone’s working in their jammies, chatting here and there with their team about what needs to happen in their day, it can seem chaotic to a management team used to the more rigid structure of bricks and boards and rooms and cubicles.
On the flip side, working remotely also opens communicating and coordination across circumstances that used to divide us. Allowing employees to work from home can help retain talent that would have left because they wanted to spend more time with family, or for that employee whose spouse has to move for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, or for someone who simply needs to stay home to raise their kids.
In other words, there are major challenges, but also opportunities if we can bridge the old way of thinking with modern realities.
One hard part of making that transformation is actually technological, but that’s already been done: moving our communication patterns from wires, to less wires, to wireless. But the harder part is confronting the customs and conventions of a culture that has a fixed notion of what it means to have a job in the first place.
So to run remotely and make it work, new structures need to be put in place. And it doesn’t have to be complicated.
In our company we “hello” each other in the mornings and “good bye” each other each afternoon at the same time through our chat function. These company-wide meetings serve as our office cooler and catchup location to check in on how it’s going with both personal and professional things.
Through this medium we actually get to know about each other, and I encouraged chat about whatever: pets, kids, pics with the fam!
Mornings set the tone for our day with group and individual tasks. Evenings wrap up the day so we can tell each other how we all did! Finding out where the day ranked from fulfilling to frustrating ties us all to a common purpose. More importantly, it grounds us to the same feelings. This layers in the emotional elements that bind us together, beyond work and job and into what matters more.
For working remotely, this the simplest of expectations to be met. Hello together in the morning, and goodbye together in the evening. Create a daily routine of routine of daily doings, starting with the entrance and exit of the working day. In our case anyway, this fosters friendships, anchors our relationships together, and increases productivity in the process.
It has become the connective tissue of our tight-knit workplace culture.
