20 Questions You Should Ask Your Team Now to Build a Better Remote Policy Later

While I sat on a ZOOM webinar for Boston HR Tech leaders on Friday, a few things kept coming up:

How do we do our jobs remotely? How do we onboard our people to remote working? How do we foster connections? Build our culture? Is culture important?

And then, The Great Remote Debate, and question: How much space will we actually need after this if 40% of our workforce is productive at home?

The difference between emergency preparedness and a remote work strategy 

I have said it before, and I will say it again: A remote work strategy should not be reactive. It should be a thoughtful plan that betters your employees and company. When offices start opening up again, companies will have to reevaluate their remote policy. So how can you use this forced remote-working period to build that thoughtful plan?

Emergency and disaster planning are a function of risk management and human resources.They involve planning for any emergency or disaster, developing staff plans, training, and policies to accommodate the changing needs and priorities of the company. It’s critical for every company to have a plan. It is not meant to be a plan for the future of your work. 

A remote work strategy, on the other hand, is a thoughtful plan that affects the design of the office, square footage requirements, furniture decisions, the benefits and perks you offer, and a killer way to attract top talent.  

In my high school drama class, when I was faced with heavy emotions or complicated situations, my teacher would often emphatically shout, “Use that!” So, while we are all in this emergency remote work experiment, let’s use this. 

Oftentimes, I tell clients to pause and collect the data, both qualitative and quantitative, before signing a lease, sourcing furniture, or, writing their remote working policy. Let’s build worker personas, space utilization studies, install sensors, do focus groups. 

While we don’t have the time or access to your offices to do all of that now, we can survey our employees and start to measure the data around remote working in this crucial trial period. By asking employees questions like, “On a scale of 1-100 how collaborative is the majority of your work?” we can use this data and the lessons we’ve learned when we come out the other side,  and begin developing a thoughtful remote work strategy. 

If you’re looking for help to build a custom survey, reach out to me or connect with the Leesman Index, who we partner with for enterprise-level surveys and benchmarking. 

But I feel strongly that everyone should be taking advantage of this time to learn, so I’ve put together some remote working survey starters for you and your team to build your own. 

Remote working will become a larger part of companies’ workplace strategies than it ever was before, so get out ahead and start building a plan.

Download the survey starter here.