Lessons learned when we moved our staffing companies to a remote work model 8 months ago.
If you clicked on this article because you were hoping to find the 10 tips of being successful in a remote work model. You can move along. There are plenty of other articles on the web that will address this topic in depth. In fact, I provided one here for reference from Inc.
However, if you want some visceral truth about what it is like to transition from an office model to a remote model then I think you will enjoy this.
To give you some context on me, I’ve worked in the recruiting and staffing industry for 15 years. 7 of them as an employee of a company and now 8 years as an owner / manager. In 2018 I decided to start several companies at the same time. Not an easy feat to accomplish regardless of the circumstances, but I wanted to take a new approach with a long term vision. My mindset was the same as it had been for the previous 13 years which was duplicate what I’ve done in the past because I knew it worked.
The problem was that I saw too many companies making paradigm shifts to the way they were operating and I couldn’t get it out of my head. There are too many operational deficiencies to how staffing companies operate today, and many owners I am networked with weren’t showing any signs of evolving their company to keep up with market or industry changes. If there was a time for me to make a change, then now was the time.
But old habits die hard!
I leased and furnished an office of 4,000 square feet and staffed up as I had in the past. Almost immediately I regretted my decision. Although I appreciated having an office for everyone to go to, and it was incredibly helpful during a time when we were still developing our processes, I knew it was the wrong decision for the longevity of our companies.
In addition, I had several friends in the industry who had transitioned their company to a remote work model in the previous year, and had done it successfully. These growing staffing companies were having success with it and I knew this was going to be a trend I needed to take action on sooner than later.
Some of you reading this are thinking in your head, “why didn't he just get a co-working space to get off the ground?” It’s a valid question to ask, but we had 17 employees to house within the first 6 months of starting and co-working spaces in Orlando couldn’t support a staff that size at the time. I even took time to tour Industrious in Orlando (https://www.industriousoffice.com/orlando) but it wasn't going to be an option.
Regardless of all the information I was gathering, we moved forward with the traditional model for 18 months.
As a business owner, I can tell you all the reasons why a remote work model makes logical sense financially. But this wasn’t my issue, I have never worked remotely myself and didn’t feel we had the processes in place to be successful.
Even with all of the tech tools available, the staffing business is a people business and traditionally tends to attract employees who have sales and consulting backgrounds. Anyone who works with me has heard me describe agency recruiting as “People selling people to people.” Our entire business and assets are people. Traditionally in my industry, majority of the people who work in the staffing industry are extroverts who crave the interaction with others, but I have noticed in recent years there is a shift in separating the sourcing recruiters who are tech savvy and the consulting recruiters who are great with interfacing with people. My ultimate concern was that it would be the recruiters and sales staff who would have the hardest time with the transition.
All of this background information leads me to August 2018 when I decided to convert our 3 companies to a remote work model.
As an owner and manager I worked with my team to establish a new schedule, video conferencing tools, and researched articles about how to be successful in working from a home model.
We were about to make the big leap, and like any positive minded person I expected the best but there were certain things we weren’t prepared to handle, and I thought it would be best to give you my perspective on the lessons I learned during the transition.
- The first lesson I learned is that some people just don’t like working from home.
Even the people that complain about coming into work every day and how bad traffic is still want to have it both ways. They wanted to have the option of going into an office when they want and an option of working from home when they want. For most businesses, that just isn’t feasible, but I learned that people in general want options. Within the first month we had a few people leave the company, citing that they really wanted to work in an office environment, or we had people who had a severe productivity decrease which I determined was an issue of having distractions at home.
Here is an article to help you if you need to set up a work space conducive for a work from home model: https://www.the1thing.com/blog/the-one-thing/setting-up-a-space-where-you-can-work-from-home/
2. Our weaknesses in communication and daily planning became exposed.
Within the first two months I would hear a common phrase from certain employees that they missed the ability to just walk over to someone’s desk and ask them a quick question. Or the ability to communicate At a moment's notice. When I heard this, I knew that some of our processes were not clear, and our business was going through a habit changing process. I knew both of these transitions would lead to lower productivity for a period of time. Our solution was to invest more time in creating an online training website for onboarding and continuing education in addition to investing in some automation tools that simplified our processes.
3. I learned that having very clear expectations of each person was now more critical than ever.
Because of our remote work model we had lost the ability to capitalize on the nonverbal cues of communication when you were with someone live. We adapted to video conferencing immediately which helped, but still didn't have the same effect as face to face interaction. The solution for us was to transition our workload to be more of a “project based” work style. Our expectations were now based on what someone would accomplish in a day or a week depending on the project. We had daily progress check-ins and our automation tools allowed us to see it all real-time but it provided more creative autonomy to the staff, and creative autonomy now provided its own set of opportunities to improve in the areas of culture and the type of employee who would thrive in our environment.
4. Creating the proper culture is challenging.
If you want to start your business as a remote work model from the beginning I think it will not be as difficult in comparison to moving your company to a remote work model afterward. We noticed that the culture amongst our company was changing and would require time to take effect. 6 months after the transition we had to re-establish “who we are” as a company.
5. The care for our employees well being needed to extend further than it ever had before.
If you manage any staff now, you know when someone is going through a rough day or time in their life. It shows in how they look, dress, talk, and you can address that, but how do you know how someone is really doing when they put on a nice face for your daily video chats?
if you were to ask me initially, I would tell you that we certainly care about the well-being of our employees in their life inside and outside of work, however I noticed it became increasingly important to create a culture where the employees felt OK with the schedule flexibility. In addition, we noticed that the employees who created a life outside of work whether it be socializing, going to the gym, having some type of hobby they love, traveling, etc Was more important now than ever before. Lastly, we adjusted our video 1 on 1 meetings with people to include topics related to what they are accomplishing personally in their life, and how they are progressing on those goals.
6. Our interview process to hire new employees needed to change.
Overall, we slowed our interview process down, to allow for more phone and video interactions. We had to add questions into our interviews pertaining to people's home life and the dynamics of that in addition to what they do outside of work. We also had to assess how an individual communicates best. If we interviewed a person who was not confident in speaking up about their thoughts, opinions, suggestions or issues we knew they wouldn’t work well in a remote model.
7. We created a group chat thread for fun topics, and non work chatter
I'm sure you can relate with me here. Because we now live in a digital, texting world, you feel more connected with people when you are part of a group chat thread. We did the same for our staff and created a separate chat thread using Microsoft Teams where we have non-work chatter, quotes, videos, articles and of course Memes! Oddly, this has created a sense of belonging and is one part of the culture formula. I never thought a day would come where I would say this, but its the truth.
8. The urgent fires you deal with in an office aren’t always urgent or fires at all.
From a managerial perspective the biggest lesson I learned was that we were wasting time every day with conversations about issues that weren’t really issues. I found that when someone can’t walk to your office or desk and interrupt your day it they were left to decide if the issue was really an issue to be addressed or not. Having scheduled times to talk with each other gave everyone the ability to focus on their work and project for a period of time without interruption.
So where do we stand today, 8 months after our transition?
We are in a completely different place than I ever expected. Our team is producing results 2.8x greater than they ever did in the office and we are on track for our yearly goals despite reducing our staff drastically. We have a clear understanding of who works well in a remote environment. The team we have loves the schedule flexibility but also has the discipline to understand the core work hours. We were able to transition away from a micromanaging, fear-based culture that so many staffing companies have to a results driven, creative, thought-provoking, flexible time, project-based culture.
To be clear, Yes, we did adapt all the tips and suggestions mentioned in the Inc article in my first paragraph. I want you to know that all of the tips listed are essential and non-negotiable in a remote work environment, but ultimately we learned some lessons that I hope can save you time and money.