Helping people to survive and thrive in a remote-first world of work

While few mourn the commute, after seven months home working many of us are starting to miss the many ways offices are optimised for efficiency.

From elevators assigned by destination floor to the ergonomically-adjusted chairs, the office environment is custom-designed for productivity.

Behind all of this is an often-invisible support infrastructure of 5am cleaning shifts, janitors to fix things, and people to call when we face problems.

And that’s important. According to Forrester, the number one factor in employee satisfaction is the ability to make progress every day on the work we feel is important. 

We feel frustrated when we can’t deliver our best work, so it’s critical for both engagement and productivity that we can quickly remove any barriers we encounter. Whether that’s broken aircon or trouble collaborating with colleagues online.

Employees are supported to navigate the complex landscape of digital platforms and tools we rely on through guidance, training and helpdesk support, troubleshooting issues as they arise.

Support mechanisms are often set up alongside an employee service or tool, sub-divided into a series of helpdesks for HR, IT and so on. 

In larger organisations, someone with an IT problem will be expected to log a support ticket and wait for a reply. These can be augmented in theory by chatbots or self-service tools. 

But, in practice, they’re augmented by informal support. People will turn to a longer serving or otherwise helpful colleague to help them resolve problems. 

Whether that’s the PA who knows how to make things happen, or that guy who knows everything about Excel, this peer support bridges the gaps in a support landscape that’s often as fractured and siloed as the organisation itself.

Left fending for ourselves

The sudden shift to home work as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic has left employees more reliant than ever on digital channels to get work done. According to the results of Cisco’s 2020 Global Workforce Survey, more than 98% of meetings now have at least one employee attending remotely from home. 

This switch to remote has increased dependence on collaboration technology, yet nearly every participant surveyed cited frustrations with video meetings and the tools available. 

But just as people have been faced with this change, they’ve lost much of the support they’d ordinarily have access to - that immediate peer support. 

Organisations, too, face new demands on their helpdesk teams. Instead of supporting 40,000 people across 10 sites, they’re getting 40,000 different home offices up and running.

So what’s next?

Seven months into the pandemic, it’s clear that remote working is here to stay.

Organisations are looking for ways to make remote not just as good as the office, but an altogether better and more productive employee experience.

Many organisations have already signalled their intent to have a smaller office footprint in future. 

But this move away from the office means shifting resources away from supporting physical spaces and towards supporting, coaching and training people to work in more distributed ways. 

Managers need to understand that, in a remote-first world, employees are reliant on a complex and fragmented set of tools to get work done.

When those tools don’t work, people are left frustrated and productive time is lost. 

So making work better means we much rethink the entire approach to employee help and support to keep people engaged and effective in a remote-first world.

To my mind, there are four strands to this:

1. Reduce complexity

The first - and perhaps most obvious - is to prevent your people experiencing problems in the first place by giving them stuff that works and is easy to use. 

(You’d think this was obvious, but sadly it is not. Employees are frequently faced with a hot mess of tools that don’t work well together. A whopping 64% of participants in Cisco’s 2020 Global Workforce Study shared frustration at the complexity of integrating collaboration technologies from multiple vendors).

Consider the overall digital employee experience you offer. Where possible, streamline and simplify this so it’s designed around the needs of your staff and not the structure of the organisation. 

Think about how your complete suite of tools and processes works, ensuring it meets modern consumer expectations for usability and design and, crucially, it all plays nicely together. 

For example, most office based employees live in Office 365 (specifically, Outlook). Use integrations so an employee can easily initiate a Webex meeting, share their screen and work collaboratively on a document without needing to switch applications, making collaborating remotely as easy - or perhaps easier - than collaborating in the office.

2. Re-establish that peer support network

Modern communication and collaboration tools offer a wealth of functionality, but most people only use a fraction of it. 

As a result, firms rarely realise the full value of their investment.

Helping your people to discover what tools they have available, and how they can use them to make work better, is a win-win for employees and organisations.

In the last few months people have had to re-learn how to collaborate, manage and get work done. 

That means learning not just practically how to use things like virtual whiteboards or to manage remote meetings, but the best practices for weaving these into your ways of working.

Here’s where the peer support network that people relied on in the office can come into its own. 

Empower your people to share the skills and best practices they’ve developed in this time with one another, so that these can be adopted more widely.

You can do this through:

• Running lunch and learn sessions over Webex, where people can share the tools, practices and workflow they use to get work done
• Building informal support networks to help resolve issues and unblock problems, within their teams or across the wider organisation. Remember, it’s only partly about having the right tools, such as easy screen-sharing or whiteboarding on Webex Teams, but also also ensuring you have a culture in which people have the time, knowledge and motivation to help each other
• Taking a leaf out of consumer tech’s book and building customer communities for key applications where people can help to resolve issues and unblock problems for one another. Sharing tidbits of learning is something we often do implicitly within an office space, but we need to put more effort into doing it explicitly when we’re WFH. Be sure to reward and recognise the most helpful contributors for their work to encourage greater participation.

3. Build digital confidence

Where people are navigating an increasingly complex landscape of tools, there is a need to offer support through formal and informal channels.

But, to survive and thrive in the long term, we need to help employees build their own digital skills and confidence, and use the tools they have and fix their own problems.

Peer-to-peer knowledge transfer is a key part of this. But employees also need the ability to find answers for themselves and access learning on demand, for example in short videos. 

To help people thrive in the new world of work we need to help people to continuously upskill and reskill. Not through intensive, in-person training, but by accessing short, relevant materials or support at the moment of need.

4. Take a concierge approach

Siloed provision of help and support makes the employee do the hard work. 

They need to know whether a problem is an IT, HR or facilities issue, and use different approaches and tools depending on the department providing the service. 

This is frustrating and a poor experience that impacts effectiveness.

Instead, we should replace fractured single-system help with a simple concierge approach, focused on unblocking problems for the user quickly so they can get on with the things they’d rather be doing. 

For example: Fast and reliable connectivity is critical. Business continuity now depends not on having offsite offices teams can decant to, but providing reliable backup options for those struggling to work at home. A concierge approach to support could quickly investigate and offer solutions such as 4G hotspots, or fully kitted out alternative local working locations where people can simply plug and play.

Make work better

This switch to hybrid work gives us all an opportunity to rethink how work gets done, to make it better for people, organisations and the planet. 

The current crisis has seen companies pledge to invest in collaboration technology, but to truly embrace this opportunity - and make work better for everyone - we must rethink our approach to help and support, so we empower people to use these technologies to make an impact every day.

In paid partnership with Cisco