#NeverStopSelling - even when Working From Home (WFH)

I wrote recently about how to pivot to a work-from-home strategy overnight. You are probably in the same boat. My team used to all work together in our office, but now we are scattered around - all at home and trying our best to reduce viral transmission by socially distancing from as many people as possible.

In my earlier article I was really focused on some of the practical aspects of working from home, especially in the points raised by McKinsey. How do you plan for the right technology? How do you maintain security when everyone is accessing the office systems remotely?

All these points are important, however now that our team is 6 weeks into this WFH experiment, it’s certainly changed how we work, so I have made a few observations about other factors that are equally important, but not quite as obvious when you start out. Here are the three main additional points:

• Isolation: I am trustee and durhamlane is a partner of Mind, the mental health charity, so we have long accepted that it’s important to take care of both mental and physical health if you want to perform at the top of your game…I have a saying…’healthy body, healthy mind, healthy business’. However, when you are in the middle of a lockdown like this it is easy to see just how quickly people can start to feel affected, particularly those who live alone and are now advised to not visit friends and family for the foreseeable future. It’s tough for many on the team right now, those that are still working and unfortunately without choice, a few that we have had to furlough, arguably even tougher. Accept and acknowledge this and try building support channels, incentives and social activities, that can help to keep your team engaged.
• Communication: at the office you can engage in jokes, banter, and chat over a coffee. There is a constant communication between team members that is not strictly about business. You need to encourage the team to continue communicating as friends and colleagues in addition to the work they are performing. Virtual discussions about sport or Netflix can help to keep the team close and help to prevent the isolation mentioned earlier. In addition, managers need to double down on their work-related communication because distance will often lead to confusion - keep communicating far more than you usually would. Microsoft Teams is really working for us.
• Culture: it is clear that companies need to adopt a different, more networked, culture to successfully work from home. Team members need to be trusted to deliver, you can’t hover over their desk or check on progress every 30 minutes. Remote working is not just about the process change or technology being used, there is a distinctly different and more collegiate culture when a team is organised this way.

At durhamlane we are only 6 weeks into this experiment, but I have already noticed that the team can remain productive and even excel KPI’s, we just need to adjust the way we work to suit the different communication styles needed for remote working, whilst adopting the right support technologies and incentives.

I’m looking forward to the day that this lockdown is over. It’s essential to reduce the exposure of people to a virus we have no vaccine for, but I look forward to the day when I can visit my favourite cafe on the way into the office and then to see the entire team all working together again, not to mention the nights out and gatherings we are used to having. When this is all over, I’m sure we will be much more flexible about requests to work from home than we were before this crisis - an office and WFH hybrid model is likely to be business as usual from 2021.