COVID-19: Why and how to implement work from home strategies

Why Work From Home?

As the COVID-19 virus spreads, we all have a personal and professional responsibility to slow it down. While we may not be able to stop the virus quickly, we still have a chance to slow its rate of spread and do what we can to help minimize the strain on our healthcare system. If we can do that, there is a better chance for people who really need the care to receive it. It’s clear that countries like Italy were unable to do that and we need to learn from them. To that end, I personally believe that organizations which are able to, have a duty to implement work from home programs.

As businesses and other organizations start to consider remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s only understandable that while leaders are determined to protect their employees and contractors, they are also nervous about what remote work can do to their organization.

Luckily, remote work is not a new phenomenon and there have been many great examples on how to implement it properly. I have personal experience with it. About 10 years ago I was privileged to cofound a software company called Ceremity with a group of great business partners. We grew the business for over a decade and ultimately sold it to a private equity backed software company. What was unique about Ceremity was our remote workforce. We were more than that. We were a distributed company with employees and contractors on several continents. We have learned a lot about what to do and what not to do in order to maintain a company culture and productivity. We were by no means perfect, but it worked for us.

The good news is, whether companies deliberately decide to create a distributed business or are essentially forced to do so given the circumstances beyond their control, many can survive and even thrive when much of their workforce is distributed. Obviously, there are still many organizations in many industries where working remotely is either impossible or at least impractical without changing a business model. Also, many organizations can send only a portion of their workforce home, but not everyone.

In this article, I’d like to offer some short term strategies for those companies that are brave enough to change how they operate. Lastly, this merely addresses cases where the existing workforce starts working remotely. There are additional considerations for long term remote workforce.

Strategies

Define a Work From Home Program

In order to let people work remotely, there needs to be clarity. This may be new and strange for many people and not everyone handles a change well. Some things to consider are:

• Is the policy mandatory, strongly encouraged, or voluntary?
• What essential personnel remains working from the office?
• What personnel is sent home?
• What are the expectations of all employees day-to-day?
• How do they effectively get their work done remotely?

Maintain Good Processes

Just because your workforce is remote, it does not mean that you throw away your existing processes or not have any at all. Sure, they may need to be tweaked, but they still need to exist. For instance, most software companies follow some kind of Agile process such as Scrum. Many of these companies leverage daily standups, where everyone on the team (who is able to) literally stands up and presents updates. However, daily standups can just as easily be implemented remotely using collaboration tools (more on that later). Same can apply to other meetings as well. Notice, I didn’t say skip the necessary meetings. Instead, meetings are just conducted digitally and everyone is still expected to participate and be productive.

Maintain Accountability

Similar to processes, remote workforce should still be expected to maintain productivity while working. People need to be accountable for their results even if working remotely. Likewise, companies still need to retain their existing planning cycles whether that’s focusing on quarterly Rocks or OKRs. As with other processes, the accountability process simply leverages digital tools. Frankly, even without a remote workforce, it would behoove most companies to leverage digital tools to track goals and results of those goals.

Leverage Digital Tools

Communication

Communicating and meeting digitally is not as rich as meeting in person, but with video conferencing you can get as close to it as currently possible. While there is seemingly endless number of wonderful tools, at Ceremity we used below solutions. They worked for us and will likely work for you too, but this is by no means a comprehensive list.

Voice and Video Meetings

• GoToMeeting - great for online meetings. Participants can leverage video and audio as well as share a screen.
• Ring Central - Also great for online meetings. In addition, it can be leveraged as a cloud based phone system where each user has a dedicated phone number people can call. Lastly, they also have a messaging service called Glip where team members can chat. The messaging is not as feature rich as Slack or Microsoft Teams (part of Office 365), but it works well.

Team Messaging

Whether you are a distributed company or not, chances are that not all of your communication is done in person. Most companies still leverage email even if everyone is in the office. Email is appropriate for some things, but sometimes you just need to have a quick discussion with one or more person and it does not need to be a meeting. For those cases, you may want to leverage some kind of team messaging product.

• In the past we leveraged Slack and we loved it. This tool is used by many distributed and traditional companies alike. There is a free version that comes with some limitations such as 10,000 message history and only 1:1 video and audio calls. There are several paid versions that remove this limitation.
• Microsoft Teams (part of Office 365) is a good alternative to Slack. We found Teams be basically as useful as Slack with probably a slight preference for Slack’s user interface.

Collaboration

You should not be collaborating via email. Many companies still exchange files and content using email attachments. The problem with this approach is that when one person edits a document he / she needs to email it back to everyone involved. They then change something and the vicious cycle continues. Eventually, no-one knows what the latest version is, or worse, there are several “latest versions”. That’s a nightmare that can easily be avoided by using collaboration tools.

• At Ceremity we used to leverage Google’s G-Suite that allows users to share documents, presentations, or spreadsheets. Not only that, it enables teams to work on the same “file” at the same time and in real-time. We found that these collaboration tools work well. The one challenge we experienced was the fact that G-Suite documents are in Google’s own format and need to be converted to Microsoft Office formats if you want to use office products to edit them.
• We eventually switched to Office 365 and in general most people liked the experience and really did not miss much from the G-Suite (other than their amazing search). Like the G-Suite, Office 365 also includes email and calendars. However, it includes so many additional useful tools from SharePoint, to Planner, Power BI, Teams, and many others to make it a very compelling suite.
• I’m writing this in Confluence, which is an amazing tool for knowledge sharing and collaboration. While it’s useful for software development companies, I have seen it being used by every type of business from tech to fuel wholesalers.

Project and Task Tracking

• Jira and Azure DevOps are great software development life-cycle tools used by many software companies. Jira has been around for a while and the company behind this tool - Atlassian- has many other great solutions to help software companies with the development process, code repository, code reviews, documentation, etc.
• We were leveraging Trello and now leverage Microsoft Planner (part of Office 365) to plan and prioritize work. Trello pioneered this kind of way of collaborating and Microsoft created a very similar solution that’s just about as capable.

Quarterly Rocks (Goals) or OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)

One of the most important things any business can and should do is to plan and hold people accountable. Companies use many different concepts and frameworks to perform yearly and quarterly plans. Google pioneered OKRs (Objectives and Key Results - here is a good primer). At Ceremity we started to leverage OKRs, but ultimately adopted a system that’s much more comprehensive called EOS. For OKRs we briefly leveraged GTMHUB. Once we switched to EOS we simply implemented shared documents in G-Suite (and later Office 365), which was perfectly adequate. As long as Rocks, OKRs, or whatever you use are created in a collaborative manner, transparently, and people are held accountable to them, the tool itself really does not matter as much.

Working Environment

I believe one of the most overlooked a crucial considerations for remote work is the person’s working environment. Some questions to ask are:

• If they work remotely, will they have an environment in which they can get their work done?
• If they need a quiet space to concentrate in, will they have nothing but constant interruptions? This is especially a consideration as schools are closing and kids stay home.
• Likewise, do they have all the right equipment and tools to get their work done as if they were in the office? (laptops, monitors, cables, etc.)
• Do they have access to company systems that are not accessible from the Internet.
• Do they have good Internet access?

Final Thoughts

I wish everyone remained safe and healthy, but the reality of a pandemic is that many people will get sick or worse. However, we have an obligation to help slow the spread of the virus. I personally believe that organizations, which are able to implement a work from home program have an obligation to do so. At the same time, that should not mean they cannot continue to provide great service to their customers as well as survive and thrive. In many cases working from home can be implemented well and I hope this article provides at least some guidance for doing so.