Month: July 2020

There’s no silver bullet to creating a remote office culture, rather it depends on your employees – both office-based and remote – embracing tools and behaviours that will cultivate an environment in which ideas and work ethic thrive.

For groups that make it work, business will be revitalised, with morale, efficiency and productivity all receiving a shot in the arm. Some firms achieve this with entirely remote operations, balancing several time zones and communication barriers.

Thankfully there are real steps leaders can take to ensure the machine runs smoothly. The following steps show you how to get started.

Thorough onboarding

The best way to have an employee embrace a remote office culture is to have the right environment in place for their first day. Ensure that new staff are remote-enabled from the get-go through fluid and easy online access: login details need to be ready, and permissions need to be opened as much as is necessary.

Formal introductions to fellow team members are essential to getting work processes and relationships off on a firm footing. Encourage a climate in which workers seek to support one another.

Choose tools to suit the style

Electing to use an app that doesn’t lend itself to the workplace atmosphere – whether real or virtual – can severely inhibit your workers from coming together and collaborating. Reach for tools that staff will want to use – MailChip or Slack have a great energy to them.

A remote workforce can develop its own personality through inside jokes, working together and building shared experiences, and this can all be enabled through the tool everyone uses daily.

East-of-use and accessibility are close behind in terms of boxes to check when thinking about remote access tools. Chat apps such as P2, and video conferencing such as Highfive can bring working environments to life.

Leverage team building on a day-to-day basis

Remote working environments can quickly slip into a deadline-only dynamic that prevents colleagues from working together and undermines the team ethic. Pairing co-workers together can help to offset this, by building communication and promoting trust.

Aim to simulate a social side to the office – maybe you could use social media channels such as Pinterest to enable colleagues to find shared passions?

A friendly element of competition can also inspire collaboration and bring a little smile through gamification. You could start a film club, encouraging employees to watch a certain film each week and to submit a small online review. Or perhaps online games would be more of a catch? Online leader-boards enabled through Hearthstone are a great way to build staff morale.

Involve everyone

A half-baked attempt to create a good remote working culture is not enough; if some exceptions are made for remote workers while those in the central location adhere to other rules, the culture breaks down and a corrosive ‘them-and-us’ mindset can creep in that invariably leaves some parties out of the loop, making them less engaged and less productive.

The office manager’s role is to create an even playing field upon which all employees stand as equals.

Enable ownership

The physical distance involved in remote working can make a motivated employee feel liberated and empowered to work. It is important that bosses do not hinder this potential by micromanaging, but foster a climate that trusts the remote worker to work on their own initiative.

To facilitate this mentality, assign team members as mentors to newer staff on team boards, or ask them to organise a team-building exercise. Such methods can relieve pressure on you, and enable staff members to develop their own management skills.

While full remote working isn’t always an option for many companies, those that can work around distance can often make a shrewd business move of the arrangement. Firms that succeed often have lower turnover, better stock market returns and healthier profit margins.

From the outside, meanwhile, the younger generation care far more about working environment and flexibility, so a robust remote working culture will always give firms a rosier complexion in the job market.

Dell

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Remote working – the Cloud and mobile computing made it popular, but this may be changing.

Merissa Mayer may not have initiated the backlash, but she certainly gave the idea of remote working a big kick towards the grass.  Ms Mayer is the chief executive of Yahoo, and one of her very earliest acts when she took the reins of the company, was to ban staff from working from home.

She did not so much encourage remote workers back to the office, but inform them that is what they would do if they wanted to remain working for the company.

She had a good reason. In the UK, workplace consultant Peldon Rose’s survey of over 600 office workers, revealed a conclusion that may have dealt a heavy a blow to the idea of remote work.

Its survey revealed that two-thirds of British workers say that they work most productively in the office, whilst just 26 per cent said that they also work more productively at home.

Half of respondents said that remote working can make them feel stressed, while 43 per cent said it makes them feel lonely, and 53 per cent said that working out of the office makes them feel disconnected from colleagues.

Peldon Rose said: “Employers keen to see the productivity and wellbeing benefits of bringing a disparate and disconnected workforce back together should consider some key aspects of what the office of the future will look like.”

It recommends hybrid workspaces – which is another way of saying workspaces with a more modern approach, designed to offer a kind of ‘best of both worlds’ environment, with flexible spaces, collaborative working zones, quiet spaces and more personalised areas to work.

A small majority of workers – 55 per cent – who responded to the survey said that ‘they wished they were more trusted to manage how and when they work.’ Peldon Rose said: “This flexibility should be a critical concern for businesses.”

It suggested that the future office will see more ‘hybrid workspaces’, with moveable furniture, couches and private booths to add variety and individuality to previously featureless open-plan offices.

It said that “These spaces not only serve as an oasis for concentration and quiet work, but as peaceful retreats in the busy, always-on working world – an important safeguard for employees’ mental health and wellbeing.”

Peldon Rose also recommends what it calls the ‘at-home office’, which provides ‘home comforts at work’. It said that this is “vital to boosting productivity and the ideal for the future is that workers will hardly be able to distinguish their office from their home. Fully-fitted kitchens, coffee and juice bars will increasingly be the norm, as will shower rooms, while taking a ‘power nap’ in a sleeping pod or nap room will be part of the new office culture. And if workers still need to relax then rooms decked out like a garden to boost oxygen levels and improve mood will be on hand.”

Or to put it another way, one way to encourage remote workers back to the office, to is to make the office look like home. There is no place like home, ergo: there is no place like the office.

Peldon Rose also talked about “ensuring the future office is completely connected and wired for all devices, equipment, facilities, power, heat and light will be a hygiene factor.” It said that “while technology will keep making us faster and more efficient, the technology of the future will increasingly be about building back communities in the workplace and breaking down the silos that it was partially responsible for building. To build and maintain a dynamic, connected workplace there will be widespread use of personal tele-/video-conferencing on lighter, smarter, faster mobile devices, with apps such as Ovoo.”

Continuing with the theme of using technology to entice remote workers back to the office, Peldon Rose discussed beacon technology. This can be used for sharing information with nearby devices in the workplace. It is expected that this technology will become commonplace.

Peldon Rose said that the “playground office: with workplace friendships, critical for office wellbeing and productivity, will need to provide the time and place to encourage team bonding and ensure there is fun to be had at work. Two-thirds of workers think social events help them to bond with their colleagues and facilities encouraging a bit of down time, such as slides, aquariums, table tennis, games and music rooms will increasingly be seen as the norm rather than the exception.”

Dell

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Remote working can be a great way to give your staff flexibility in a way that saves the business money while increasing productivity across the board.

However, there are a few tenets to take on board if this arrangement is to succeed. If incorrectly implemented, remote working can undermine discipline and erode chances of success.

Trust

Allowing your colleagues to work from home hinges on trust. Few individuals want to be constantly monitored by their boss, just as those in charge should be able to rely on workers to complete jobs on their own steam.

If you do not feel your staff have the discipline to remain effective when out of your sight, then a very gradual implementation of remote working might be best for your organisation.

Agreed planning

Putting together an effective schedule will greatly support a successful remote working policy. This should be buttressed by face-to-face meetings which establish working time-scales and responsibilities.

Within this framework, key measurable objectives and accompanying deadlines should be made explicit. Ideally, the schedule will be available to view by all parties at all times, alongside a further illustration of how it fits into business in the office.

Resources

A member of staff should be able to access the same work-critical tools, resources and systems when working remotely as they do when operating in the office.

As such, bosses need to go to extra lengths by making a thorough audit of who needs what. More than hardware devices, collaboration with IT departments will be necessary to ensure individuals can access and operate the software upon which their roles rely.

Furthermore, IT staff may need to shore up company networks to accommodate an increase in remote users. All platforms and applications need to be working at office-speed levels when being accessed from other regions.

The IT approach to remote working should be wrapped in a solid security solution which can guarantee that workers beyond office walls have the same online protection and awareness as those operating within them. This can be achieved using a small and discrete software client and VPN.

Maintain contact

By definition, to remote work involves losing contact. But it does not mean the disappearance of all contact – bosses need to consciously address this aspect for arrangements to remain effective.

A simple way to ensure your remote workers are at least at their work stations, is to let them know that you may ring them on occasions just to check their understanding is clear on one issue or another.

To maintain robust working relationships, organise weekly or even daily video call updates to maximise communication, where a long email thread of conference phone call might create information gaps.

Free tools online, such as Trello, Taiga and ProBoards allow colleagues to work across a common virtual desk in a way that maximises visibility. Each of these platforms is available in app form for Android and iOS.

Reach out

Out of sight needn’t be out of mind. Often remote workers discover that what began as freedom might turn into isolation, as they fall out of touch with events talked about around the office coffee machine.

To address this, managers need to be proactive through providing workers with regular office updates, expectations and goals. Again, occasional phone calls are effective because they demonstrate a level of personal care that voiceless emails do not. Be sure to offer support and assistance, as opposed to straying into micro-management.

Remote working is often seen through rose-tinted glasses as the ideal way to have the best of both worlds.

The reality can be far different if some major boxes go unchecked. Remote working depends on two parties: the individual and the manager, both of whom need to nurture the arrangement with conscious effort and patience.

Dell

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Do you trust your remote workforce? The answer, surely is, that it depends.

Back in 2015, an article on Deseret News ran with the headline: Office workers don’t trust colleagues who work remotely.

It turns out that according to a survey among 2,000 workers carried out by Utah-based VitalSmarts in partnership with Training Magazine, office workers think remote workers are three times more likely to miss deadlines.

The survey also found that office workers felt remote workers were four times more likely to make a half-hearted effort.

Deseret News quoted David Maxfield, Vice President of Research at VitalSmarts who said: “When we are physically collocated, we get to know each other, we grow to like each other, we observe each other’s challenges and we cut each other more slack . . . When we don’t know a colleague, we often assume the worst. Social psychologists call this, The Fundamental Attribution Error — we attribute blame to people’s motives, rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt.”

Mr Maxell recommended quarterly visits to remote workers.

It is odd that in its survey it was suggested that remote workers could not be trusted to meet deadlines, because it is deadlines that provide the litmus test to remote workers. If they consistently fail to meet deadlines that office workers meet, then you know something is wrong.

Can you fully trust remote workers – it takes a rare person indeed who can find the self-discipline to work diligently from home, unless that person has clearly defined tasks – but then frankly in an office environment, clearly defined tasks are pretty important too.

There is nothing like deadlines to focus the mind, remote or non-remote worker.

Communication tools including Appear.In, in which, via a URL, workers and their supervisor can view each other via their computer camera, may promote trust of remote workers.

Or, there are project management tools that can work at a distance such as Trello, an electronic card based system for assigning tasks and checking on progress. BinFire, is a tool for managing remote teams, as is Basecamp: a tool for organising projects, internal communications, and client work in one place. Other good project management tools that work when members of a team are in different locations include Proofhub, Slack, Twproject and Wimi.

The key to building trust in remote working may lie in clearly laying down responsibilities and what people are expected to do.

But this may all boil down to the particular-individual, some can be trusted, some can’t.

A more pertinent question may relate to whether remote working is effective regardless of whether you can trust remote workers.  This relates to the issue of whether people miss out by being at a distance from a core team, for example missing out on brainstorming, and drawing inspiration from the working environment and colleagues.

Dell

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Technological advancements have paved the way for workforces to become less centralised and many businesses now offer employees the ability to work from home, either full time, on occasion, or as the needs arise.

Flexible working has many advantages for a business including:

• Talent acquisition
• Increased employee morale & engagement
• Reduced absenteeism
• Reduced turnover of valued staff

As a result of the benefits to business, organizations of all sizes are embracing flexible working and are allowing more and more employees to work from home. Some organizations are even ditching office HQ’s (and expensive leases) altogether and are developing an online ecosystem of employees all working from their own geographically spread homes.

Home workers lack regular face-to-face interaction with colleagues and clients. As a result, their dependence on technology to keep the channels of communication clear is at an all-time high. This dependence carries certain risks, conversations and information is shared over broadband lines instead of meeting tables. In this article we’ll touch upon three potential risks employees should address and introduce steps in mitigating them.

A dedicated line:

Employees that work from home need to be readily reachable by email, phone and other platforms. To ensure that work and life communications don’t overlap and potentially disrupt one another, remote workers should either have a dedicated work phone installed at their home, or have a company mobile phone.

Not only does this make billing and expense reimbursement more transparent, but it means that there is a continuity plan in place should one line or number ever be out of service.

Security concerns:

There are important security issues to consider when managing employees who are working from home. For example, data security could be compromised if employees working from home use their work computer for personal use.

Businesses with employees working from home should provide staff with a computer, preferably a laptop, to allow for continuity of work if the need arises for the employee to ever work away from their home.

It is important to set an expectation from the start that this device is for business use only and anti-virus and firewall software should be installed (and passwords used) to control entry to company networks. Employers should also ensure that home workers have read and understood IT policies and know their information security obligations.

Technology & Trust: 

With some or all team members working from home, project management and progress need to be managed carefully.

Working in a decentralized way means that employees need to keep even closer tabs on the development of projects because they’ve lost the ability to simply look over their shoulder and ask their team mate.

Trust is a critical component when allowing employees to work from home.  Team members should set up regular and mutually suitable times for reviews and client discussions.

Luckily, the tools to track time and progress are plentiful. Applications and software solutions like Trello, Slack and Basecamp allow for visibility on projects across locations. Which one a business chooses to adopt will depend on project specifications, current working practices and how they might integrate into an online project management domain.

Working from home or elsewhere remotely seems to be the wave of the future, so now is the time to get prepared if you’re not already. A recent survey at the Global Leadership Summit in London found that 34% of decision makers said more than half their company’s full-time workforce would be working remotely by 2020.

Dell

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The modern working world has expanded way beyond the four walls of the office, thanks to remote working.

With few claiming that the practice negatively impacts upon productivity, it’s clear that today’s professional landscape is being re-designed thanks to the flexibility afforded by technology.

In the UK alone 54 per cent of the nation’s office workers are now able to work remotely, 30 per cent of whom feel it enhances productivity.

However, working remotely is not a silver bullet to business efficiency, as demonstrated by Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO who clamped down on working from home because it undermined the collaboration and innovation that are created in the office environment.

Many benefits come through individuals and teams being able to work remotely; the office makes savings and can enjoy a far broader talent pool because work is not restricted to a one location. However, unless implemented with care, this potentially highly effective and fashionable work method can backfire.

Read on to find out the most common mistakes leaders make when managing remote teams:

The wrong individuals are chosen

Offering the ability to remote-work can attract many workers, but if that’s the reason a person seeks out employment with your business, then they’re probably not for you.

Some industry leaders advise to keep a lid on the possibility of remote working until new hires have been taken on. If prospective staff keep bringing up flexible working in an interview, then it should be taken as a deal-breaker, as it implies that the individual’s needs will take priority over those of the working team.

Don’t jump on the bandwagon

Remote working has taken some high-profile hits through the decisions of some big companies, but managers shouldn’t take that as a reason to shun the practice all together.

Flexibility in working regimes can secure some fantastic talent, so managers should always put their company and teams at the front of the picture when deciding what benefits remote working could bring.

Not knowing your workers

Often, managers can lose sight of how employees work, and even more so of how teams work. Usually, heads of staff just need to see employees in the office and sitting at their desks to believe that they are doing their job, but this affords no insight into processes and productivity.

Managers need to consider how work is accomplished on an individual and team basis and how collaboration is effected before coming to a conclusion about the efficacy of remote working for the parties involved.

Similarly, if managers do not make an effort to actually get to know their staff as individuals, then they are unlikely to be able to gauge how much suitability a person has for remote working.

Workers and teams that are pro-active and self-disciplined are far more likely to thrive if given more flexibility.

Don’t over-analyse

Some managers make the mistake of using metrics to follow progress. Research by Gallup has found that remote working less than one fifth of the time is good for engagement, whereas only remote working can lead to “active disengagement”, and a negative attitude that can creep into the workforce at large.

Arrangements need to be put in place so that remote working is monitored and calibrated with deadlines and targets, as such the emphasis remains on productivity.

Out of sight out of mind

If you become accustomed to not seeing a worker in work, they become easily forgotten beyond the occasional email contact.

To combat this, managers should get in touch with remote workers to preserve the conversational social interaction that would get shown in the office. Enquire about how work is going, bring up issues of concern, or simply let employees and teams know that their work is being appreciated.

Not forgetting about your remote working teams is also essential when it comes to office social occasions, such as birthdays or awards ceremonies.

Conclusion

Ultimately, there will be many warning signs indicating that remote working is not going as planned. At every stage, communication is key, and all channels should be kept open and functioning so that detached parties feel as close as is possible to the operational hub.

Dell

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The remote worker has been through vast development in the last fifteen years, and today they represent a key persona in the evolving workforce. The next few years will be key in the progression of the remote working model, so how do businesses equip their remote teams for today, and an unpredictable tomorrow.

Mark Samuels

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Whether you chose to call it business transformation, positive disruption or some slightly more technical kind of architectural reengineering, the drive to replace outdated systems (both hardware and software) is at an acute inflexion point right now.

The new impetus for what has been called ‘digital transformation’ in firms across all verticals is of course largely fuelled by the rise of cloud computing, ubiquitous web connectivity and the proliferation of mobile devices.

At the infrastructural level, this is challenging the status-quo on all business components. To be clear – previous notions of basic technology functions are being quickly eroded as a new ‘composable’ and software-defined era now rapidly comes into being. Silo-based IT from the client-server is being strategically updated and replaced to facilitate the opportunity to create a services-centric IT lifecycle.

As we build this new lifecycle of IT deployments, we can take a passage around the new IT stack, inside which we find:

• Infrastructure (servers, storage & networking)
• Services (such as cloud, management & security) and
• Endpoints or devices (PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones and also the use of so-called zero/thin clients).

The ‘lifecycle’ is a staged cyclical route that centres around these building blocks that takes the following shape:

• Initial consulting and architectural requirements planning
• Testing, training, deployment, monitoring and change management
• Managed service layers placed into the lifecycle to be consumed
• Asset audits, assessments and ultimate retirement, resale or recycling

 Optimisation matters

 But establishing and building the lifecycle is just the start. The truly efficient IT lifecycle is essentially optimized through services designed to meet customer requirements on an ongoing basis.

Executive director of EMEA services sales at Dell is Stéphane Reboud. He explains that it’s now a question of building, finessing and evolving the IT lifecycle infrastructure and services to enable applications.

“The big revolution factor here is that we are going to customers and talking about how they are switching to a new digital world. This is a big task, but Dell has everything customers need in terms of hardware and software – and, crucially, Dell is no longer just the manufacturer. Customers can now think of us as the Systems Integrator too with end-to-end visibility all the way from analysis to deployment and retirement. Essentially, it’s all about breadth of competency… and Dell’s range is extremely wide.”

Reboud adds that to optimise IT lifecycles through services, the planning time spent with the customer is crucial as it enables Dell to understand what the drivers are for the business. “This way, we can create a customer journey based on the business drivers that each firm need to succeed.”

Elements of the services lifecycle

 In practical terms then, the lifecycle through services is enabled by everything from site planning, to project management, onward to asset reporting/labeling and then right though to areas like software/OS installation, replication, backup, and archiving – and down to application installation, data migration and testing.

What is especially important to realise is that the lifecycle of services itself is never static. Essentially dynamic in nature, we see different emphasis being put on different elements of operations from start to finish – and, crucially, as a strategic and holistic programme that runs from end-to-end.

Whether you call it a ‘cradle to the grave’ approach or one that spans from ‘data center to mobile endpoint’, the services-based IT system lifecycle is the lifeblood of the modern business.

Adrian Bridgwater

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The nature of work is changing rapidly. Despite major transformations and the rise of remote working, most firms have a core business in at least one physical premises.

Mark Samuels

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Tags: Future Ready Workforce