Hybrid-Remote Work-Arounds—Infrastructure

Yesterday, I asked for your help in crafting a taxonomy of challenges in remote and hybrid work. While there was less feedback than I hoped, I did receive two excellent additions to the categories. If you recall, the main categories of challenge were:

• Working Day Logistics
• Information Retrieval
• Strategy and Strategic Alignment
• Performance Management
• Onboarding
• Culture

There were some sub-categories as well, like ongoing job development. A reader (who asked that I not name him) identified two additional areas. They are

• Technology and Infrastructure
• Employee Well-being (including work-life balance)

I think it’s useful to separate these from other categories because they point to ways that leaders can overlook employee stress by failing to appreciate how little we may know about any other person’s circumstances. For example, during the pandemic, we saw how many people don’t have strong Internet connectivity in their homes, and therefore could not participate in certain virtual versions of civic life. The same can easily be true if employees live in rural areas, or don’t have high-speed Internet service in their particular building or town.

Accounting for the range of infrastructures that individuals have is a huge change from in-office work; because in-office, all infrastructure is shared. The office is a technological equalizer.

The Solutions

There may be additional categories missing from our taxonomy. And if anyone spots them, please let me know and I will add them. But, having identified a whole range of areas of challenge, let’s start gathering together some of the best practices to address them.

In proposing these tactics, I am not claiming either authorship or superiority. In fact, these are opening salvos. None are perfect and as every organization is unique, so will the solutions that best suit them be unique.

Let’s start with the basics.

Technology and Infrastructure

I selected this as the first category because it is a cross-category issue. Several of the sub-categories of challenge found their root cause in technological gaps.

Many challenges arise from either technological gaps, or logistical gaps that technology can solve if configured to do so. But what are the basic needs for a successful remote organization? As it happens, from a technology perspective, hybrid organizations have to have everything that a remote organizations have.

The Essentials

• Connectivity: Everyone, whether hybrid or remote, must have access to high-speed Internet connectivity wherever they choose to work. No employee should have to travel to a third location to have access. That demands of employers that they assure some provision for anyone whose home is not equipped with high-speed access. I haven’t done any data collection on this, but I suspect that in most knowledge work environments, HR and other leadership assume that employees are connected. Maybe they shouldn’t. Assuming connectivity may be reducing the possibility of a truly diverse workforce by excluding those who rely on office-based connectivity.
• The Minimum of Collaboration Tools: One of the repercussions of efforts to facilitate remote work is an unwieldy proliferation of tools. One study found that the average organization currently uses 16.4 different HR management tools. That’s just HR. Along with that, organizations need and use project management, budgeting, analysis, strategy planning, engineering platforms, marketing and sales tools and many more. As of 2021, the average organization was utilizing 110 different SaaS (software-as-a-service) platforms. That’s too many.

Organizations need to carefully design the system of tools they use by going back to basics. Craft a taxonomy of needs. Many platforms can do double duty across functions. For example, a product like Airtable which on its face appears to be a database tool. Can also function as a spreadsheet, reporting tool, surveying, analysis and more. But reducing the overall number of tools and selectively procuring the right ones is, in itself, a significant undertaking. However, doing so saves countless hours of productivity by reducing the amount of context shifting —not to mention the licensing costs for unused tools.

• Cloud-based Knowledge Management System: I would love to suggest that this is table stakes. EVERY organization that operates remotely to any extent needs some organized form of shared knowledge. But, experience has shown me that this is not common. Most remote first organizations evolved without any foresight about how big they would get or that they would remain remote. So, even if they utilize a shared cloud service like Google Cloud, they don’t have a strong knowledge management function. Information retrieval is haphazard and difficult, because there aren’t abiding standards for naming, filing and tagging all saved content. This is a HUGE problem.

Just to put this in perspective, on average, sales reps spend 440 hours a year just trying to find the right information to share with their clients and prospects. 440 HOURS!

One might say that’s a “sales enablement” problem. But, as a consultant to multiple high-growth remote organizations, I have logins for many of my client’s clouds. To find basic information like updated KPIs, or the most current version of marketing brand templates, or the weekly leadership report can cost hours of time. Every minute spent searching for a document or report that is instrumental to value-adding work is costly.

Not only does it cost in productivity, it costs in morale and alignment. It underscores the atomization of the team into individuals who are tenuously connected.

Knowledge Management Best Practices

Like so much of organizational life, having a straightforward and transparent method of knowledge management and retrieval sounds simple—but it isn’t easy. It takes the creation of thoughtful standards, and training of each and every employee. There must be clearly documented ways of naming, saving, storing and tagging all content, and those standards need to be ubiquitously available. They should include:

• Clear and consistent naming conventions for files and documents.
• Tagging and metadata systems to enhance searchability.
• Centralized repositories or knowledge bases for easy access.
• Version control to track document revisions.
• Documented processes for capturing and sharing knowledge.
• Regular knowledge audits and updates to ensure relevancy.

Distributed teams are almost, by definition, knowledge organizations. So having a knowledge-sharing culture is essential. That includes utilizing collaborative technologies and platforms (the fewest possible, select platforms), providing training and support for knowledge sharing, and aligning knowledge management practices with organizational goals.

This is the tip of the iceberg for the infrastructure essentials to have optimal performance. But when organizations explicitly address these first issues of connectivity, the best and only the best collaboration platforms, and clear and easy knowledge management the table is set.

These seem like background issues —and the should be. But, for most organizations, the lack of deliberate and thoughtful planning of infrastructure means a proliferation of ad hoc solutions. Too many platforms, too little collaboration and a lot of wasted time looking for wi-fi signals, information, and the right tool to do your job. Let’s get the foundation right. That makes everything else easier!

Thinking about how to optimize performance is what Beyond Better does. Schedule a call to chat about offering your team the immense benefits of high-performance coaching.