Remote work and the future of collaboration

My perspective on remote?work

Glorified by some as the panacea, kind of a stairway to work heaven, work from home and other forms of remote work may also have some major downside effects, as I previously depicted in “Start packing your home office…WFH just shot your job! ”.

But whatever your point of view, your feelings or your opinion:

Remote work is here to stay, and we’ll never go?back.

Our role as managers and leaders, is to make the best of it and to make sure that our organizations leverages the new opportunities that comes along.

Many organizations got through this transition to remote work as a brute fact. Not for us.

Here at nBold , the transition was quite painless, as we didn’t had to transition at all ??, and we’re 100% remote from day one. More importantly, we’re also almost 100% asynchronous, as we have team members working across distant timezone from USA, France, Russia…

Winning tactics for synchronous collaboration

Yes, synchronous collaboration is still a thing, and sometimes its just the most effective way to convey ideas, energy and positive social interactions.

Here’s my take on this topic from my personal experience.

#1 Set well-defined meetings?slots

Especially true for global organizations, allocate strict time slots for meetings that will work for everybody, and stick with it.

From 8am to 10am PST is our sweet spot as is fits with most regions timezone

Tip: If you’re using Outlook, you can show time from multiple timezone in your calendar. I love it!

Of course, local managers may accommodate this rule for specific regional or personal constraints.

#2 Record every?meeting

In a remote work world, issues may happen, personal constraints, connectivity issues, etc…

Record every meeting!

It’s not only important to show that you care about everybody, but it also makes everybody more accountable (formal agenda, timekeeper…).

Tip: If you’re using Microsoft Teams, you can enable meeting recording from the meeting options, and yes, it also works for recurring meetings:

#3 Hire 100%?remotely

If you really want to know what it is to work 100% remotely with somebody, start from the hiring process.

Why would you ask candidates to come to your office for an interview? What’s the message you’re sending?

Anyway, you’ll still have many opportunities to meet in real life.

#4 Make the best use of your collaboration platform

Modern collaboration platform may also help by providing new capabilities.

Meetings live captions in Microsoft Teams is one of my favorites, as it’s sometimes easier to catch-up watching a meeting asynchronously:

It also help you find a particular moment in a video as a specific topic is mentioned.

Live editing tools such as Microsoft loops components are also a game changer:

It definitely makes virtual meetings more interactive and engaging.

Develop asynchronous collaboration as a strategic asset

Writing culture is a cornerstone

Remote work intrinsically implies and requires more asynchronous collaboration.

Think of our civilization's best achievements and the greatest science breakthrough, most of them were actually made possible almost exclusively through written communication.

Despite some interesting approach for asynchronous distribution of video content, especially in the E-Learning space, writing is still the best medium for most asynchronous-based collaboration.

How to develop a culture of?writing?

First of all of course, by being an example. Write everything in plain English, don’t stick with “the shortest the better” motto to give nuance, and practice, then practice again.

A great leadership example is from Amazon, with it’s “leadership meetings memo”. Have a look at this Forbes article , I promise you’ll not regret it.

Excerpt:

Don’t expect to become a writing expert overnight. Bezos compared writing a memo to learning how to do a free-standing handstand. Most people think they could learn to do it in a few hours or days. In reality, it could take months of practice.

According to Bezos, leaders tasked with writing memos “mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more!”

Second, praise the “first follower”. If you want to spread this culture of writing, you not only have to give the right example, you need to support the first follower, somebody that’s gonna actually show others how to follow.

Remember:

1. The first follower is the one that transforms a lonely nut into a leader.
2. New followers emulates the first follower, not the leader.

Perspective: The future of collaboration in a remote?world

Digital transformation didn’t happen?(yet)

Let’s cut the marketing crap:

From one day to another, switching from physical to virtual meetings (even in a “personal and fun metaverse-ish style” like Mesh for MS teams ), is a just a literal translation of your current collaboration processes, and doesn’t leverages in any way the real innovations driven by digital collaboration platforms.

Look at the proportion of companies that are just using Microsoft Teams for 1:1 chats and meetings… I think I’ve made my case…

What to?expect?

I can see three different areas where digital collaboration platform will in one way or another make remote work better.

#1 Intelligent meetings

Meeting preparation could be fueled by AI to gather all the useful contextual information from multiple sources, and automated knowledge capture would make meetings more valuable in the long run.

#2 Collaboration process

Collaboration is an activity, not a process per se, but collaboration platforms at some point will have to encapsulate business process and their underlying apps (CRM, ERP, Marketing stack…), to form a “collaboration process”.

#3 Collaboration science

As collaboration and process will merge, new data and insights will emerge that managers and leaders will be able to leverage to better understand their organizations and take better decisions.

What’s your perspective on this major?shift?