Has remote work impacted your team’s productivity?

Our team was always globally dispersed from AP to Europe to America’s

We all had to work in the office but worked virtually since teams crossed many time zones. Only change for us was perhaps upgrading home Internet connectivity for more speed

We had tactical challenges around deployment of strategic/large technology. Traditionally we would have a 2-3 week sprint: a week for the design, a week for development, and a week for testing or some variation of that. But it really didn't work well because everybody was at home and then they were jumping on and off Zoom.

Then there are challenges with User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and the expectations we're setting with business users and the capacity that they have, given the way that they've now set up their days. Before, you could keep them accountable by putting them in a conference room. That's no longer the case, now they're constantly multitasking throughout the day. That's affected the quality and longevity of our testing. Across the board, I've seen an increase in post-deployment impacts because of that. So we have to look at the dynamics of the team and shift the way that we're managing and directing as we’re trying to solve for those gaps and do things differently. It's been challenging.

While the overall productivity and metrics have improved, the impact of working remotely lacks human touch. The real challenge is how do we as leaders continue to coach and mentor our star performers whom we rely on to get things done? With the monotonous lifestyle and the team constantly needing motivation to avoid burnout, we need to continually coach and mentor. 

Also with large-scale transformations - communicating and at times over-communicating changes has been difficult. The lack of a war room where we get everybody into “that” conference room to brainstorm and enable one another has been a challenge too. Technology is only 10% of digital transformation and the other 90% is human.

One of the bigger challenges for me has been performance management. For some of my staff who've been largely remote, it's been relatively easy. But for the people who were supposed to be on site every day, who now have this newfound freedom to be hidden from the overlord, they took advantage of it a bit. I found out that one of my employees has been moving about the country, didn't tell anybody, and didn't have any plans to come back to the office when it reopened, even though their job is an onsite role.

Burnout is a common challenge that I've seen with developers. Because it is so easy to set up a meeting, you're continuously hopping from one to the other and before you know it, it's 5:00 PM. I conducted a survey of the developers in December of 2020, and because they're in meetings throughout the day, over 67% of them said they were working more than 10 hours a day, just to attend all the Zoom meetings. After 5:00PM, they were able to go in and code. So productivity took a big hit for us.