How to transition from a Remote to an Agile workforce?

Demystifying agility

Let's set one thing straight, working remotely is not the same as having an agile workforce. It is soo much more than just to increase the pace of Zoom calls, Microsoft team meetings or Google hangout meetings. The last couple of months has really brought this to light!

As many companies have been forced to work remotely most have taken an ad-hoc and often unstructured approach to remote work. Replicating activities that they were doing in the office to the home environment, including the constant follow-ups and check-ups on progress, is not the way to go.

The reality is that the move online has mostly lead to overloaded employees, not necessarily as productive as before. Being constantly connected, if you don't have the right discipline and mindset, can easily lead to spending more hours than before. Spending more time in meetings and increased level of reporting, can quickly be seen as the first negative side-affects, and I am not even talking about the pressure you might put on family members when working trying to work from home.

Remote work will not "free" employees and the traditional command and control leadership will certainly not make them more productive. To transform a remote workforce into an agile workforce requires something else!

It usually always starts with Leadership

Trust, Emotional Intelligence and Empathy are the new foundations

The first change that is needed to develop an agile workforce is a mindset change, and that mindset change needs to start with leaders and managers. Leaders and managers will have to develop more trust and faith in their employees. This is the first change, and that requires emotional intelligence and empathy, as leaders will now need to compete for the employees attention. To win that battle, you need to start by spending more time understanding your employees' context, show empathy, while still being clear on your expectations. Secondly you will need to empower these employees, allow them to organize themselves, stay focused on outcomes, not output or availability. Alignment and engagement is not that easy if you are not in synch on priorities.

Trust, Emotional Intelligence and empathy are therefore new foundations for today's Leaders. Once these foundations are in place, you will need to start empowering and inspiring employees, so that you can work with an engaged workforce.

Empower and Inspire

The risk for disengagement is high and this is why empowerment is essential. Remote work is often synonymous to everybody working at their own pace, while also blurring the lines between work and home. You can't separate these two worlds anymore, so you need to deal with it, in the best possible way, competing for the employees focus and attention.

But be reasonable, don't expect employees to be reachable at all times during regular working hours, that is a mindset of the past! Let them organize themselves, so that they can increase their own productivity, both toward their company, but also toward family chores. You can't separate these two worlds anymore, so you need to deal with it, in the best possible way. Make sure it is clear when they need to be online, for meetings, collaborative work, but make sure you give them enough freedom to organize themselves. Everybody's context is different, show empathy, focus on timely quality outcomes rather than outputs.

Your role as a leader will change, as suddenly have to win the hearts and minds of your employees. Outside the office, there are plenty of distractions, so unless you feel a strong connection to your company, unless there is a bigger purpose that stimulates you, it is easy to drift away from the company's expectations. Your role as a leader will be to keep employees engaged and that means empowering and inspiring them.

From managing to Coaching and Facilitating

Another expected shift on leaders, will be to do less micro-management, but be clearer on the objectives and expected outcomes. The workforce of tomorrow has to be a workforce that is autonomous, that requires pro-active and empowered employees. Clarifying objectives and defining the right KPIs will be key to your success, but that will also require you to listen more carefully to challenges employees are facing and potential roadblocks they might encounter. Your focus will have to shift from managing to coaching and facilitating work.

Always on, Always Connected is not the right way to go!

Blurred Lines

Having a connected workforce usually raises expectations from management, to have employees available at all hours of the day. If employees for instance don't respond to an email or Whatsapp message in the late evening, even though they read the message, their managers might perceive this negatively. This type of pressure to always respond right away, can seriously threaten work/life balance, and when working from home or remotely, that balance is further threatened. Always connected, yes! But should always be on?

Synchronous vs Asynchronous Communication

The issue is that today many companies and managers treat synchronous and asynchronous communication the right way, and that is a problem!

The issue with relying mainly on synchronous communication, like voice calls, or videos calls with zoom or similar communication requires that the other party is available and present at the same time. While this might be needed in some occasions, much of the work we do today could be done a synchronously, and we need to ask ourselves whether we have today the right communication tools and communication culture.

E-mail and messaging tools are great for asynchronous communication, you can read them at your pace and act on messages when relevant. For larger groups and for managing multiple communications within the same group, you might want to explore other tools like Slack or Discord, that will allow you to create multiple communication channels. The implicit urgency on this channels, is usually a bit lower than what people would expect on whatsapp, so they are great for this asynchronous communication that helps us collaborate more efficiency and less disruptively to each other. The issue with platforms like Whatsapp is that we also use them in our private interactions, and here again the lines between private and work get blurred as well as the expectations to respond right away.

Exploring new Engagement and Collaboration tools

A more asynchronous communication is essential to get more balance, but you also need to think about the tools you are using today and how they scale to larger audience.

• Do you they allow for engagement?
• Can you easily share thoughts and ideas?
• Can you design new worksheets and canvases?
• Can you break out teams into workspaces and rooms?
• How easy is it to track progress ?
• Can you visually design workflows?

Flexible Workflows

There are a couple of things you might want to think about to see how you can improve collaboration and co-creation. Maybe it is worthwhile to start thinking about the process to start with... As processes need most likely to be adjusted and tuned, it is important to use tools where you can redefine these processes in the simplest way. Modern tools like Trello or Asana (activity tracking and planning), Pipedrive (for Sales) or Hubspot (for Sales and Marketing) are all using list-based workflows that you redefine, rearrange add customer fields and share between teams. No coding required.

Also most modern don't work in isolation, they are best in class as-a-service offerings that have multiple plug-in to easily integrate with complementary tools

Planning & Tracking

In order to facilitate asynchronous communication, there is a lot we can learn from startups and the way they have been implementing agile methodologies. Teams are typically empowered, pretty much self-going and there is a clear activity roadmap a product backlog that is managed. Product owners prioritize, scrums master and agile coaches orchestrate the whole thing. Tools have usually dashboards that allow you to quickly see progress and handle potential issues. You can quickly analyze to-do lists, what's done or what's delayed.

Startups use best of breed products to manage the whole process, and reporting is kept to a minimum. The 15-min stand-up meetings that agile teams practice is probably a good practice to replicate in any type of job line. This is what agility is about, autonomous teams and short meetings!

Trello, Asana, Basecamp and Monday.com are all part of the tools you might want to look to improve your planning and tracking

Break-out rooms, White-Boarding and Collaborative Group Work

Another essential capability that you need in your toolbox is for employees, clients or partners to collaborate in a seamless and efficient way. It starts already in communications as mentioned earlier, with the capability to create separate channels. When we use zoom or similar we sometimes talk about rooms or break-out rooms. Dynamically creating, deleting or modifying communication channels and work/ break-out rooms is an essential capability to quickly adjust the communication to the needs of a team.

Similarly notes exchanges need sometimes be in real-time, and that is where you need to start adopting, white-boarding solutions, where employees can in real-time add or share notes and ideas. Mural or Miro are such tools, they are great because they come up with plenty of tools and templates to run various type of workshops, but the most important capability is probably the ability to design your own Templates and Canvases to adjust to the needs of your teams.

Engaging Audiences

Maybe less of a collaboration tool, but when you engage audiences remotely, especially for Keynote speakers or executives leaders talking to large groups, it might be a good idea to explore tools that can do like polls. That way the employees will more engaged in the presentation. Zoom provides such capabilities, but you can also try tools like Mentimeter, as they will allow to ask feedback to your audience.

Talent Management and on-boarding

A more dynamic workforce

Remote work and distributed teams is also very very likely to shake up the way companies think about their workforce. Once the right mindsets, tools and processes are in place, it should become simpler and simpler to quickly add members to the workforce.

I strongly believe the notion of add-on and on-demand workforce will soon become the new norm. I will become less difficult to right size the organization of a company, with more resources joining on per project basis rather than offering permanent employment.

The transformation we have been talking about here, is a certainly a new form of agility where resources can be added from all over the world based on the their skills and experience. Working remote consultants and freelancers will become less and less of a problem.

What will become equally important as some of the technical skills we require today, is the ability to work autonomously and be familiar with the latest productivity and collaboration tools.

Talent Databases vs Grooming talent

All of this might also lead to a shift in the way we look at talent. Finding the right talent, will most likely not only be about recruiting top talent, but also building up networks and databases that can allow you to efficiently onboard talent when needed. This is more than just sourcing talent, because here we need a mindset shift as well since we will need to shift from a cost only approach, to an approach that leverages referrals and experience.

A speedy on-boarding

If the shift towards remote and distributed teams accelerates, this could also lead to top talent churning faster. Top talent will search for interesting projects rather than permanent employment. Purpose is really one of the factors that will determine whether they are in it for the long term.

Overall, new generations are more and more expecting to work on different terms and risk of rapidly churning will force companies to rethink their recruitment and retainment strategies as well.

A speedier on-boarding is essential, but we also need to question how much talent development will happen with the company and how much will happen outside. The long term incentive is not necessarily there anymore and even the age advantage could disappear, putting younger and older talent more on par.

Having a learning mindset and taking ownership of your own skills development is certainly a characteristic we can expect from the workforce of the future. Companies might hence reduce certain types of induction trainings to really focus on what is specific to the company, and expect everything else learned by the on-demand or on-boarded workforce.

Final Works and thoughts

A remote workforce is just that, a set of people working remotely without necessarily adjusting in the way they work. This add workload, stress and doesn't necessarily improve productivity.

Moving to an agile workforce starts by developing new mindsets, a new leadership style with more empathy and emotional intelligence to understand the context of your employees. It requires leaders that trust, empower and inspire, but also leaders that can coach and mentor.

The agility will really come by readjusting processes and adopting the right type of communication and collaboration tools. In particular leaders will need to become better at managing through asynchronous communication.

An agile workforce is a workforce that is able to quickly scale up or down. That also means rapidly on-boarding new talent, better dealing with the on-demand nature of the business in almost real-time. An agile workforce is a workforce that has a learning mindset and is constantly trying to improve its own ways of working.

Do you want to learn more about workforce agility? Contact us at [email protected]