Looks like remote working is here to stay

COVID-19 has given millions of workers around the world a taste of working from home. Many will want to hold on to this newfound flexibility, and organisations should embrace this enthusiasm to transform operations for the good of all.

As countries around the world begin to ease physical distancing rules and office workers contemplate a return to the office, many will be hoping to retain some of the flexibility of working from home in their post-Covid-19 lives.

A recent survey in Singapore found that eight in 10 employees wish to continue working from home at least half the time or more after the enhanced distancing measures - or 'circuit breaker' - have been lifted.

The enthusiasm that organisations have for extending the practice will depend in large part on how well they coped with being thrust almost overnight into the world's largest ever remote working experience. Few would have been ready to transition their employees to working from home at the speed and scale required, and almost all will have suffered productivity losses.

There would have been an immediate productivity hit as organisations scrambled to equip workers with the tools needed to work from home and reconfigured their IT systems to support them, and losses would have continued as people struggled to work with tools and processes that were not designed for a distributed, remote workforce.

Full remote working not feasible for all but how about a hybrid model?

Imperfect as the experiment was, it would have given leaders an opportunity to begin thinking about whether there are better ways to structure and locate the work their organisation does to maximise productivity and efficiency while meeting employee needs.

Whether work can be performed remotely depends on the nature of the role, and clearly not all roles can be completely separated from their physical dimensions. But where work can be done remotely, there could be significant advantages for organisations that embrace a hybrid distributed model in which the work can be performed either remotely or onsite, depending on the immediate needs of the employee, the wider organisation, and its customers.

Many challenges need to be overcome but organisations that find the right balance between remote and on-site work and adopt their operating model accordingly will be able to increase resilience, reduce costs, and accelerate operational efficiency, all while boosting employee morale.

The good news is that the changes needed to get the most out of remote working are already tried and tested because the organisational structure and processes needed are almost identical to those at the heart of the Agile way of working.

It's therefore no coincidence that Agile organisations were among the best prepared to adapt to remote working in response to Covid-19. One large bank that adopted an Agile operating model one year ago was able to transition its 500-strong delivery organisation to remote working mode within one week in response to the crisis.

So, how can leaders meet their immediate remote working challenges while simultaneously looking at going Agile?

First, they need to stop thinking of work as a place people go to and start looking at it as a process made up of four interconnected streams: structure, people, process and technology. When these four streams interact in the right way, technology allows workflows to be organised around people and processes instead of around places, fundamentally transforming the way teams work as well how they interact with customers.

Starting with structure, it is easy to see how scale becomes a handicap in a distributed remote environment. Current organisational structures should be dismantled and replaced with an army of small cross-functional teams, each with a clear, measurable business objective. These should be empowered to make decisions and possess all the competencies they need to meet their objectives without needing to depend on other teams.

Smaller teams communicate better, but communication becomes more challenging across a dispersed organisation. Leaders need to step into the breach, setting clear directions for each team, tracking process and joining the dots to ensure that all teams are working towards common goals.

Paradoxically, leaders need to be more engaged and visible in remote and Agile environments than in a traditional structure. They should check in daily with teams, especially as the Covid-19 crisis continues to throw up new challenges, although this can be scaled back to weekly as teams find their pace.

Decision-making needs to be decentralised and delegated to teams. This can be a hard adjustment for some leaders, but they should not see it as a dereliction of duty or a loss of control. Instead, they need to switch to problem-solving mode and adapt to a new role where they proactively help teams navigate roadblocks, bringing them into the decision-making process earlier, and at a point where their skills and experience can add the most value. Organisations have seen up to 10 times faster time-to-market as a result of this model. For example, an Australian institution was able to bring a chatbox to market in six weeks when traditional product development methods would have taken it more than a year.

Smaller teams in a flattened structure can have a dramatic positive effect on morale as employees begin to see their influence on strategy and direction for the first time, giving them more of a stake in outcomes. One major telecoms company that introduced Agile methodologies doubled employee engagement scores as a result, lowering staff turnover and boosting attractiveness to the best recruits.

Working in isolation can also erode morale so team leaders need to double down on activities to build a 'one-team' culture and feeling, although in a post-Covid-19 world where workers switch easily between working from home or a hot desk in the office, this should be less of a problem.

Reengineering processes

Reengineering processes for remote and agile working has a big role to play in building this culture. Team leaders should establish a daily schedule with regular check-in and check-out meetings to establish the cadence of a typical working day. Time should also be blocked out for virtual collaboration workgroups and dedicated feedback sessions, and the week should be top-and-tailed with planning and review meetings to keep the team together and focused.

Frequent checkpoints need to be established along with clear decision-making and escalation paths. Integrated workflows and roles and responsibilities help move work through the pipeline, and a team-wide accessible 'single source of truth' is critical for creating transparency and ensuring that the team stays focused on goals and priorities. KPIs should be replaced by OKRs (objectives and key results) that target bold step-changes in performance.

There is a reason technology comes last. The right technology is critical, but it should be viewed as an enabler rather than a driver of remote work. After all, if it was simply a matter of technology, remote working would already play a much larger role in people's working lives.

Companies that use the crisis to take purposeful steps towards remote working in agile teams will find themselves better prepared to pull through Covid-19 in relatively good health, and the gap they open over competitors will grow, the longer the virus requires a full or partial lockdown of society.

These organisations will not only be the first to rebound as the lockdown ends and economies recover, they'll be fundamentally transformed to better meet their employee and customer needs, giving them a solid yet agile platform from which to capture long-term growth.