Remote Work: 3 Layers of Soft Skills

As we start the 2020s, remote work has gone mainstream. I’ve been doing it since 2012 at Fresco Capital, including investing in tech startups globally which also embrace remote work. My kids started it last week, as part of the world’s largest unplanned remote working and learning experiment across Asia, which includes their schools in Hong Kong. 

When reviewing the advice about remote work, a lot of the content presents some fake glamour world, with the most extreme versions showing a beach party surrounding the mythical remote worker. The reality: most remote work happens at home. According to this state of remote work survey, home is the primary location for 84% of remote workers.

For those looking for advice about remote work from the beach, I’m sorry to disappoint you. For everyone else, I hope the ideas below can help you to make the most of remote work. You can still have fun working from home, and that starts with soft skills.

While there are an infinite number of soft skill permutations relevant for remote work, I believe that there are 3 core soft skills which can be best understood as layers going from outside to inside: communication, time management, and wellness. 

Although these 3 layers are challenging, the good news is that these are all learnable skills. As individuals, we can take steps to help ourselves and others. As companies, we can create an environment to support remote work.

The Outer Layer: Communication

Communication is the most easily observed soft skill for remote work. The real challenge is to identify what specifically makes someone good at communicating in a remote team.

There is no single right answer because the key is to match the communication skills of the person with the team. There are, however, some clear tendencies.

As of today, the primary way that most remote teams communicate is by writing and reading. A leader in this is Automattic, the company behind WordPress, which is the technology that more than 35% of websites use according to surveys. Automattic has more than 800 employees across 67 countries and their communication is almost all written, through a combination of an internal WordPress site, blog, and Slack. Structure is embedded into the site, decisions are documented in the blog (including the comments), and the team Slack has more than 1,600 channels for everything else. It’s pretty clear that any person joining Automattic will need strong reading and writing skills. 

While Automattic may be at the extreme end, most companies will find that reading and writing skills are important for remote team success. But which skills specifically? Unfortunately, the ability to write long academic essays is unlikely to help. Spelling perfection is probably not required. And someone who is constantly using big words to seem smart may simple be ignored. Instead, there is huge value in being able to communicate complex ideas in simple ways that are easy to understand. Reading skills, similarly, should focus on the ability to both understand the essence of content and also spot things which need a deeper review. 

In addition, most remote teams will also want to use a mix of audio and video calls to communicate. And this trend will only increase in the future. This an area where I’ve been particularly impressed by my kids in the past week. They’ve naturally picked up the habit of both asking for help and supporting their friends using audio and video calls. While this can’t replicate the depth of in person communication, it’s a good reminder that everyone needs to have a person to ask for help without any hesitation or embarrassment.

Finally, when it comes to communication styles, there are many differences to consider. I would highly recommend reading The Culture Map, which covers these points in more detail. For example, low context compared to high context when communicating. Low context communication puts the responsibility on the speaker or writer — make everything very clear. High context communication puts the responsibility on the listener or reader — there are shared assumptions. Communication problems are most likely when two high context communicators have different assumptions. Low context communication is the simplest common denominator which can reduce confusion.

The Middle Layer: Time Management

Time management is the middle layer of soft skills, harder to observe directly. In fact, time management is really about the way a person manages themselves when nobody is watching.

I can see the clear impact of time management in our kids during 2020 compared to 2019. Both of their schools already had to deal with an unexpected week of remote school in 2019, except during that time their weekly schedules were left in flux. Their most common phrase back in 2019 was “I’m bored”, and as parents we struggled to fill the gap on short notice with meaningful activities. 

Fortunately, 2020 has been a completely different experience. The schools have come up with clear schedules, and the approach has been both successful and easy to implement: keep the same timetable as they would normally, with teachers being online in parallel during that same time. While the teachers can’t force kids to do the work, there is enough structure that the kids know what they need to be working on at different parts of the day.

All remote workers need some structure to their day, but there is an open question about who should provide this structure: the company or the individual? At school, it clearly works better when this is provided for students by the school. For our own work at Fresco Capital, we leave that freedom up to the individual. Different companies will need to find their own solutions, depending on the nature of their work.

Here’s the structure I’ve created for myself as an example of what it looks like from an individual level. My morning starts with a review of the previous day and setting up of priorities for that day. Without this map of the day, I would simply work on the wrong things. 

Each week, anywhere from 2 to 4 days I have early morning calls with people on different time zones. Besides these calls, I try to save the mornings for either thinking about key issues or other work that requires concentration. If it’s something especially important, I’ll make sure to check no messages before or during the work. This is only possible because I don’t use notifications, so I can choose when to do a message check. When reviewing messages, I follow the 2 minute rule and try to respond to things in the moment if it takes 2 minutes or less. Everything else gets written down if it needs more work. 

This leaves the afternoons for work that is “urgent” but more routine. If I’m working from home, I’ll also make sure to go outside for some sort of physical exercise in the afternoon. With my kids at home, this has actually become a highlight of the day when we go out together. 

My preference is to avoid working in the evenings, but sometimes there are calls after dinner. For important standalone work, I would much rather spend a few minutes thinking about the problem before sleeping, and then starting fresh in the next morning.

Rather than a single time management solution for all companies and employees, it’s important to figure out what parts of the schedule will be decided by the company compared to the employee, and then pick the simplest possible solution. 

The Hidden Layer: Wellness

Wellness is a hidden layer that has a significant impact on remote team success. It took me several years of working remotely, building a remote team, and investing in remote teams, to actually realize this simple fact. 

Healthy sleep is a necessity for all work, and this is especially difficult for remote teams working across multiple time zones. The science behind sleep and wellness is pretty clear. Sleep deprived workers make more mistakes, are less creative, and have a weaker immune system. Conversely, better sleep leads to better life and better work. 

Beyond sleep, there is an even bigger opportunity to embrace active rest. This includes encouraging team members to manage their daytime productivity rather than simply clocking in for hours. Similarly, vacation time is not only about re-charging, it’s an opportunity for people to expand their perspective from their core tasks. For an in-depth look at this topic, I would recommend reading Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less.

In addition, there are certain kinds of remote jobs where it’s easy to sit all day long without getting any exercise. In theory, everyone knows that they should exercise. In reality, we lose track of time. Physical exercise shouldn’t be the responsibility of an employer — ultimately, that’s a choice that has to be made by the individual. But I do believe there’s an opportunity for companies to proactively help remote workers stay active. So if a company is creating a schedule, then that schedule should include physical activity breaks. This isn’t just about being nice to people. Exercise literally makes people smarter and therefore more productive as workers.

For individuals, physical wellness includes everything in the whole day, and remote work provides the opportunity to have even more control. I really appreciate the ability to manage temperature at home compared to air conditioned offices, which I find too cold. Of course, some things can be applied regardless of working location. I’ve found that sleeping with a small towel underneath the arch in my back at night makes a positive difference for lower back pain, and I prefer using a desktop computer with the screen raised to reduce time spent with poor neck posture. Each one of these issues is tiny over a single day, but the cumulative impact is significant over the years.

One of the most important aspects of wellness for remote teams is social wellness. When asking my kids what they liked about remote school, they quickly said that talking to their friends was a key highlight. Yes, they were talking to their friends about specific work, but just as important was the fact that they had friends who they could trust and who they could help.

People get many benefits from working in an office, including the chance to build in person relationships with co-workers. My kids were lucky that they had the chance to build their friendships over time before their remote learning experiment started. Conversely, while a new team member can still build relationships in a remote team, the amount of in person communication simply cannot be replaced. People get lonely. 

Of course remote work should include social bonding time, especially in person, and other systems such as buddies for new hires. But even with all that, if a team member does not have an existing base of social relationships and support, I believe they will struggle with remote work. The good news is that these relationships could be from many sources — family, school mates, or even volunteering friends. 

This also relates to another aspect related to remote work: travel. Most people will find it easier to build these kinds of relationships by living in one location. Moving around constantly while being a remote worker is likely to be very challenging without an extremely strong base of existing social relationships. The good news is that you can enjoy beach time in your actual vacations if you’re following a practical approach to remote work wellness.

The Future of Remote Work

I believe that, in the future, there won’t be a separate category called “remote work” because it will simply be called work. 

My kids have had an unexpected early glimpse into this future, and it’s clear that they find it natural because kids are inherently curious. 

In fact, that’s the key for all of us — we should all be curious about the soft skills needed to succeed in remote work.