Work from Home #WFH - Developing Remote Work Culture

The "Work from Home" #WFH i.e. Remote Work concept is not very new in the IT industry, rather many mature & successful IT service delivery companies in the market have been practicing this culture from many years. This model helps these companies to build better customer relationship, generate more business opportunities etc. thru consistent service deliveries & support, so these companies enable their employees to work with same quality even from outside office too with their convenience, flexibility & ownership so that customer deliverable shouldn't have any impact.

In this way, the #WFH model appears to be a win-win situation as it saves a lot of traveling time & fuel too, with no impact on work. However, now developing #WFH muscles in the employees & to buy this concept looks to be an absolute need of almost every software development company to keep rolling the business progress due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cultural Values - Mindset Shift

Couple of points below would help making better "Work from Home" i.e. Remote Work environment in software development companies from different perspective for effective and significant output / throughput from the teams. This would help the #WFH Remote Work model still keep functioning even after the COVID-19 pandemic or in other scenarios, whenever required.

• The company itself should have strong believe in employees being productive even thru #WFH as same as within the office premises, and should sell this concept to employees by "enabling" the mindset shift thru the company's overall values.
• The employees must also be trained to develop the "serious attitude" for ownership driven #WFH model exactly like within the office premises by making themselves fully available on agreed office time slots (or whenever required) based upon specific project situations / needs.
• The company's operational culture should also support the #WFH in seamless & methodical way that employees shouldn't feel any blocker in assigning & performing their own tasks, so that everyone should be accountable & share status to contribute in continuous deliveries as per plans to make progress in all verticals.
• Teams should have planned the milestones / customer deliverable in way that collaboration methodologies should be totally aligned with executions and need of physical presence / meeting must not be really required.
• Having a separate room / space in home (or wherever comfortable) for office work with no background noise for meetings / better focus along with comfortable seating would be a best practice. However, #WFH culture would still be fine if somebody is smart enough to manage it in shared space too.

Collaboration - Technology Support

The teams should have close collaboration on agreed office time slot thru the rich & modern communication tools to get support on #WFH.

• The employees should have been equipped with necessary devices e.g. laptop machine, high speed internet (with backup in some cases), smart phones with cellular network connections, webcam, headphones & mic etc. and with necessary access permissions to the resources, may be thru secure VPN connection e.g. Cisco AnyConnect optionally with RSA Token Secure ID etc. can work if possible or with some other possible means.
• Emails must be on active-sync with push notifications enabled to never miss / delayed a single one. The use of Microsoft Outlook (or other email clients) on laptop machine & smartphone devices has big market share on this and it helps a lot on staying updated.
• Meetings must be scheduled thru calendar invites, and participants must be present sharp on time followed by starting immediately on the subject, for optimal use of time. The meeting tools like Cisco Webex (or others tools e.g. GoToMeeting etc.) can add value in conference calls and screen sharing, meeting recordings etc.
• IM Tool in the organization must have everyone with Available status for quick & prompt communications across the company including cross-teams. The Microsoft Teams (or other tools e.g. Google Hangouts etc. even) can serve the purpose of both remote meetings & IM communication.
• Collaboration across the teams must be done as required to run IT operations, service management, help desk etc. & should be frequent enough to avoid any surprises at the end of the day, and this can be done better thru the use of Office 365 products e.g. SharePoint or the Atlassian Jira etc.
• Source Version Control should also have methodology driven formatted commits to avoid conflicts and teams must be with latest version of source code. The use of online SVN or Git e.g. BitBucket etc. can perform the job in better way.
• DevOps steps must also be executed over the course of executions as per plans (possibly on cloud) to perform consistent deliveries and deployments to stay synced on both sides. Microsoft Azure would be the great tool to get support from that for possibly all operations & resources.

Having said all above, the importance of corporate workplace environment with office premises decorum is extremely high & can't be compared with #WFH Remote work, and it would still have a great contribution towards successful executions.