When you travel through Europe, you can very well notice the waves of traffic. In the morning the whole city wakes up and begins to move smoothly through the offices, in the evening there is a reverse wave. But when you travel east, you realize that the city lives a different life, unaccustomed to the European. It’s more like a big anthill: everyone’s going somewhere, honking at each other, there are cars, donkey-drawn carts, and an endless stream of scooters and small bikes.
In Africa, one can imagine how people lived before the Industrial Revolution, even before the centralization of the means of production forced people to gather at the same time in the same place to work together. But it was the development of industry that shaped the way we are used to today. Only now many of us gather in the morning by 9 a.m., not to assemble cars together on the assembly line, but rather in the office, where we will spend the whole day e-mailing each other, messaging each other, discussing something in meeting rooms and on the phone. However, today there are more and more types of work, where even without the physical presence of a group of people in one place and at one time, it is possible to get the desired result of the work. In many business spheres this has already become the norm: international corporations successfully work in distributed teams, and some of them are thinking about using the remote work option. IBM, for example, recently announced that up to 40% of its employees work partially or fully remotely.
The main business of our company
ICL Services is to provide a wide range of IT services to various customers around the world. Quite a few of our specialists provide remote IT infrastructure support to European and Asian companies. In recent years we have been growing very well, adding new customers to our portfolio and expanding our range of services in different languages and time zones. To this end, we are regularly opening new offices and now have specialists working in Belgrade, Voronezh, Moscow, Kazan and Vladivostok. Last year, we realized that for further effective development we, like many other IT companies, need to learn how to work effectively not only from distributed offices, but also by employing remote employees working from home or in small co-working spaces.
In order to minimize the risks of introducing remote work, we decided to take two parallel paths simultaneously. On the one hand, to try to study the accumulated experience of other companies and published scientific articles on the topic, and on the other hand, by our own trial and error, launching a pilot project for a small group of employees and collecting feedback from both employees and their managers. For the pilot project, we evenly distributed candidates in both forms of remote work :
- permanent
- scheduled-periodic
- situational
as well as at the place of work :
- home
- from a co-working
- from the client’s location.
Looking ahead, I can say that the pilot project is not over yet, but as soon as the feedback is collected, we will carefully analyze the experience and share it in a separate article.
Difficulties of distributed work
The first thing we had to think about when starting a project was the problems we would encounter. The most popular in the literature were the following difficulties of moving to remote work :
- asynchrony of communication and task execution;
- rather «dry,» formal communications;
- less social, interpersonal, communication;
- more difficult to organize communications in the project;
- harder to get a clear picture of what’s going on;
- harder to determine the actual workload of employees;
- less opportunity to influence employees (motivate, persuade, control deadlines);
- Difficulty in knowledge transfer.
Most of these difficulties can be attributed to any form of work in distributed teams, which is far from new to us, and there is already some advising experience to address them. Line managers who have employees in other offices know that they need to pay more attention to communication, schedule more frequent individual online meetings or just phone calls, spend more time on it, and discuss sometimes not only «dry» work items, but also topics that might come up during lunch or over a cup of coffee. Project managers, on the other hand, have long used virtual workspaces such as SharePoint or Teams to organize team interaction. All meeting rooms are equipped with tools for online meetings, and teams can easily connect remote employees if needed. Yes, all of these challenges can be exacerbated in the case of isolated home-based work, but they are problems inherent in any distributed work environment.
Research on home-based work
In a study published by the MIT Sloan Management Review (Mulki, Bardhi, Lassk, & Navaty-Dahl, 2009), researchers identified the following factors that managers should pay special attention to when organizing home-based work :
- Striking a balance between work and personal life.
- Overcoming feelings of isolation at work.
- Compensating for lack of personal communication.
- Compensating for the lack of opportunity to showcase your work accomplishments.
Balance between personal life and work
Keeping a balance is important for all workers, but, those who work from home face additional challenges. On the one hand, they can work more, and this study and many others have noted that workers often work longer hours and more than they do in the office. Often this is because there are fewer distractions at home, it’s easier to concentrate, there’s no need to drive to work, you can start work earlier, and you don’t have to drive home from work. As a result, it’s harder for the employee to establish a normal work rhythm. The work schedule begins to change constantly, then very much time is devoted to work, then for a long time the employee can not cope with procrastination. Another serious factor is household irritants and family members. Pets, friends, neighbors, and housemates see that you are home and may demand attention. An employee who works from home has difficulty separating work time from personal time and easily becomes distracted by household tasks during work hours.
Feeling of isolation
It’s good if your employee has an active social life and doesn’t feel isolated in his or her personal life. But the telecommuter doesn’t have the opportunity to get up, go get coffee, and talk to colleagues who also decide to take a break. It is very difficult for a remote worker to establish normal social contacts with colleagues. Even if you set up very good work communications, it’s usually not enough to make those communications a little more personal, personal, social. This study recommends that managers pay special attention to informal communication, develop social communications at work, and celebrate certain dates and events together.
Lack of personal communication
Personal communication is lacking because communication is based on work issues. In the office, people somehow begin to share personal information, talk about how they spent their weekend or where they plan to go on vacation. In the case of remote work, however, it is harder for employees to overcome this barrier, and managers themselves must set a good example in this case and initiate more personal communication.
Demonstration of work results
In the office, employees communicate not only with those with whom they must interact directly on work matters, but also with many other colleagues. You can share your successes not only within your team, but also with employees from other departments or heads of other departments. In the case of a virtual team for a remote employee, however, the manager often replaces almost the entire organization. He or she should be aware of this problem and make other employees aware of the remote employee’s successes. Talk about his unique skills, knowledge so that other employees can call on him for help or information if needed, in areas where he is strong.
Another interesting study conducted by Canadian scientists (Neufeld & Fang, 2005) focused on identifying factors that affect the efficiency and effectiveness of home-based employees. In this study, the researchers concluded that individual factors such as marital status and gender did not affect job performance. And social factors (communication with co-workers, supervisors, and family) and situational factors (availability of resources and lack of distractions) were most influential.
Another study by Canadian researchers (Turetken, Jain, Quesenberry, & Ngwenyama, 2011) focused on identifying the influence of individual, organizational, work and technological factors on the performance of home-based employees. They ultimately found that seniority in the organization had no significant effect on either employee job satisfaction or productivity, while, conversely, experience in the position had a strong effect on job productivity and satisfaction. Measurable job performance, communication skills, and the availability of a variety of communication channels largely determine the success of the home-based work organization.
Conclusions
If we try to summarize all these materials, it turns out that remote work can be used by professionally experienced employees who already know their job well, are socially mature and have well-developed communication skills. For ourselves we have formulated a list of positions for which remote work is allowed, formulated the policy of remote work in the company, guidelines for line and functional managers, requirements to the workplace of a remote employee, and updated the relevant processes in the company. We developed trainings for employees and managers, where we introduce them both to the process of transferring to remote work, and to the social and organizational aspects that were covered above.
Perhaps the offices of the future will be more like corporate universities with mainly two categories of employees: trainees just learning the profession and their mentors. The majority of employees will be able to work from distributed and comfortable for them locations, united by small regional offices on the principle of hub and spoke.
