Unlocking the Potential of Remote Work: Navigating the Pitfalls and Promoting a Connected Workforce

Remote work is expanding more and more but surprisingly in many companies remote work is organized badly and many employees are suffering instead of enjoying remote work.

With the current situation, many people have started working remotely. Of course, many companies worked remotely or in hybrid mode before, and some even for a long time. There are many benefits of remote work for employees and for companies. Companies can reduce costs for building renting, furniture, electricity, etc. Reducing commute time has a good influence on employees and on the company itself. Employees have more energy and a better attitude towards work because they are not tired after a long commute. They don’t need a long break for coffee before they start, at least not in working time. Employees who have flexible work time with no commute are more satisfied with their jobs. As a result the company has less staff turnover, which is also good for the company.

I am not going to discuss technical issues regarding how to organize remote work because I think it is the easiest subject for companies in the high-tech sector.

Of course, remote work has many shapes. There are companies where employees work at the office but for special cases, like sickness or family problems they are allowed to work from home for several hours or days. This case is the easiest. I will not discuss it because remote work is an exception in this situation, and it has almost no issues.

The next case is completely opposite: all employees of the company work remotely. If the work is not organized in the right way people feel lonely and separated. I came through a real case you will not believe can happen.

I was hired as a product manager for a small fintech startup. The startup was founded by an owner of another company. The developer who at the beginning developed the product became a CTO of the startup. He hired three more developers and then in six months I was hired. When I started to work, I realized that developers didn’t know each other. The CTO communicated with each of them separately. The only thing they knew was that there were other developers. I found that one of them was intensely depressed. He suspected that he would be fired for some unknown reason because he never communicated with anybody else than the CTO. Nobody knew much about the product they were developing. I had never expected that this situation could happen somewhere. I made a lot of effort to change the situation. I started to reorganize development according to Kanban methodology. We started to use Jira as a Kanban board and had everyday meetings. The developers actually met each other! I asked them to communicate among themselves and to help each other. Every week I spent an hour talking with each of them. I even tried to organize happy hour meetings, but it didn’t work out for us, and I had no administrative power to force it.

I found that everyday meetings are strongly necessary when teams are working remotely. As a manager you should promote regular communication: everyday team meetings and one-to-one meetings. I have an opinion that in addition to work meetings, you should organize some social activity for your team like happy hour meetings where people can meet and discuss things like hobbies, ask questions, and get advice about their private life, etc. It would be nice if you could celebrate some achievements of the team like the deployment of an important feature or great feedback from your customer. For the professional growth of your team, it is possible to organize free professional courses for your employees or knowledge exchange meetings where everyone can share some expertise and knowledge in the field. The last activity is nice to have also in regular situations working in the office but in remote environments it has the additional value of socializing.

I am going to discuss hybrid mode in another article.

When your company works remotely you as a manager have issues with assessing your employees’ productivity. This will be the subject of another article.

Remote work is a valuable resource, but it's essential to understand how to properly structure and manage it.

(Photo by Kristin Wilson)