How to Cultivate Effective 'Remote Work' Programs

Key Challenges

• Mutual lack of trust undermines remote work good intentions.

• Stereotypes about what kind of work can or cannot be done remotely lead to unrealistic expectations and underperforming programs.

• Employees unaccustomed to the demands of remote work lose enthusiasm and suffer from loneliness.

• Creating a responsive technology infrastructure to enable effective remote work is complex.

Recommendations

Application leaders responsible for digital workplace programs that include remote work initiatives:

• Establish a foundation of trust by empowering both employees and managers to be effective in remote work scenarios.

• Determine what work lends itself to a remote model by analyzing responsibilities, tasks and the roles that can fulfill them.

• Prepare employees for remote work demands by setting accurate expectations and enabling supportive interactions.

• Stress-test your technology infrastructure to determine its capability to support remote work.

Establish a Trust Foundation by Empowering Both Employees and Managers to Be Effective in Remote Work Scenarios

Mutual trust is at the heart of successful remote work initiatives in the digital workplace. Application leaders must trust that their employees will act responsibly when working remotely. Employees must trust that their employer will act in their best interest and enable them to be successful.

Creating a culture of trust is a top-down responsibility. Application leaders — working with colleagues in HR and business units — have a vital role in communicating to employees that the organization:

• Trusts them to do their work remotely

• Accepts responsibility to enable them to do so effectively

• Will fairly and transparently measure remote work productivity and performance

• Values their contribution and supports their career development

How can application leaders create, enable and sustain this culture of trust? They can take actions in three areas: authority, affiliation and accountability.

Determine What Work Lends Itself to a Remote Model by Analyzing Responsibilities and Tasks

There are different criteria to weigh when judging what work can be done effectively by remote workers (either individually or in teams).

One way to approach this evaluation is to examine the existing operational models. Organizations may have one or more operating models that structure how employees do some or all of their work. Three well-known models that require remote work coordination are centers of excellence, self-organizing teams and "follow-the-sun" models. (In follow-the-sun models, operations shift between global locations as the workday moves westward with the sun's movement.) In such cases, remote work processes, policies and enabling technologies become a deliberate strategy of optimizing these operational models.

Another useful approach is to conduct real-life tests of working in virtual offices. Toptal asked 100 developers to spend a few hours each day working remotely with the rest of their team. It then compared the experience with the way they worked before. The results helped to identify several weaknesses in Toptal's approach to remote working.

"Work" consists of the assignments and tasks that are needed to achieve a specific organizational goal. As such, there is no inherent understanding of "place" in this concept of "work." Place or proximity becomes relevant only when it's needed to achieve a goal. Specific tasks may or may not be "place-dependent." Manufacturing, healthcare delivery, and brick-and-mortar retail selling are tasks that relate to a place or a location. However, 3D printing technology and virtual goods, including ideas, digital documents or digital products, make work much less place-dependent.

In some cases, place is turned inside out: What's most important is the customer's location, not the worker's location. For example, are huge centralized call centers needed for efficiency when local call center representatives can be distributed and supported globally? LiveOps takes advantage of the "gig economy," employing the world's largest work-at-home call agent workforce with more than 20,000 agents. Its tagline is, "The modern call center isn't a call center. It's a network of virtual, on-demand agents."

Enabling effective remote work involves five interrelated actions:

• Determine how much remote work your firm can handle. Work is essential to the organization's functioning. Figuring out which specific assignments and tasks can be done remotely, perhaps supported by redesigned business processes, is critical to making remote work programs a success.

• Base eligibility on the work, not the person. Eligibility should not be personality-based because of the potential for discrimination.

• Establish outcome-based performance measures. Monitor progress steps and milestones. Outcome-based metrics often require a major shift in expectations, employee accountability and managerial responsibility.

• Determine whether a remote work trial period is necessary. This option allows people to try out a remote work opportunity before making it a permanent decision.

• Seek feedback on employee performance from peers. While obtaining peer review is a good idea regardless of whether an employee is a remote worker or not, it becomes especially important when the manager lacks visual clues about employee-to-employee interaction.

Prepare Employees for Remote Work Demands by Setting Accurate Expectations and Enabling Supportive Interactions

Remote work can be equally novel — and unsettling — for employees, managers and the organization at large. Depending on where workers and facilities are located, organizations may want, or need, a combination of remote, traditional and mobile work. In the 2017 Gartner Digital Workplace Survey, we asked respondents what proportion of their time they would like to spend working:

• In the corporate office

• In a public place

• From home

• While traveling or commuting

Figure 2 shows the average allocation of time for each location. These preferences indicate that workers want the flexibility to work from their choice of locations and to feel productive regardless of where they are (see ).

Creating remote work programs benefits both employers and employees. By implementing a systematic approach to effective remote work, employers can win significant advantages, including:

• Reduction in real estate expense

• Lower employee absenteeism

• Increased employee retention

• Improved employer brand

• Access to a larger talent pool

• Potential to create a more diverse organization

Effective remote work programs enable increased employee productivity and reduce employee stress, according to an array of studies. Nearly two-thirds of organizations supporting remote work have documented higher productivity. Best Buy, BT and Dow reported that remote workers are 35% to 40% more productive than people who work in corporate offices. AT&T found that remote workers worked an average of five hours more per week than their office-based counterparts. Eighty-two percent of remote workers self-report that remote work lowered their stress levels.

However, remote work is not free of human costs: Loneliness is a major factor in employee burnout. Fifty percent of people say they are often or always exhausted due to work — a 32% increase from two decades ago.

Enabling new hires to quickly build workplace networks is key to counteracting loneliness and optimizing employee effectiveness in remote work programs. Application leaders should lead by example by becoming experts in tools that make communication and collaboration effective (see ). To build and sustain healthy trust, application leaders must also create opportunities for ongoing interactions with and among remote workers, their teammates and their managers. Frequent check-ins with remote employees help them feel less isolated.

Stress-Test Your Technology Infrastructure to Determine Its Capability to Support Remote Work

Remote work technology infrastructure enables effective performance by remote workers. The specific elements of this infrastructure will depend on the type of work for a given role. Infrastructure decisions must account for training, support and levels of service, so that employees are enabled to work well from multiple disparate locations.

Most organizations have at least some existing remote workers, whether sanctioned officially or allowed by informal arrangements. Application leaders should stress-test the existing technology infrastructure to ensure it has the scale to support remote work. They also need to determine whether the infrastructure has the necessary capabilities for accelerating digital business and for increasing employees' engagement.

Technology decisions can also change the nature of responsibilities and tasks — enabling them to be done remotely. Application leaders should assess the different ingredients in the technology mix to optimize the experience of remote workers. These are some of the questions that they need to address:

• Employer-supplied technology: What equipment will we provide to employees? How will we manage those assets during their useful life? What process will we use to dispose of those assets?

• Home office expectations: Are there minimum requirements we expect employees to meet, such as having a room or space dedicated for work?

• Network access: Is there a minimum internet speed employees need to procure? Who will pay for internet access?

• Videoconferencing: Will we provide videoconferencing capabilities for all employees? How will we compensate for areas with low bandwidth? (See )

• Collaboration tools: What additional applications and tools should we add to our infrastructure to enable more effective interaction for remote employees? (See )

• Technical support: Does our current technical support strategy need to change in order to effectively support remote employees? (See )

• Office resource scheduling: How will we make it easy for remote workers to find available space to work when they have the need to come into the office? (See )

Table 1 provides some examples of how different organizations outfit remote workers and what they expect employees to provide for their home offices.