Bhavik Modi | Associate Director at BTS Innovation & Digital Transformation

Bryan Campbell | Agile Transformation Coach & President of 7 C’s Consulting

Leaders have been surprised at how productive employees have been working from home, many are considering how to accelerate a transition already occurring to a remote-first work environment.

What lessons can we learn from businesses that were intentionally built to be remote-first or are planning a shift to an office culture focused on virtual work?

Reimagining the Office

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

 – Henry Ford

As human beings, it is difficult for us to think about the future without viewing it as an incremental improvement over the present. As Henry Ford pointed out, busting our biases is hard and we’re seeing this as companies have been forced to transition into virtual work environments.  Employees have resorted to simply recreating everything that was happening in an office and doing it online.  This isn’t an uncommon problem and we’ve seen it many times before, in fact there have been many such step changes in history, take films for example:

1. When movies were first created, they were essentially plays on a screen with the video camera remaining static similar to an audience member watching a play– moviemaking only came about as mental models shifted and filmmakers explored new ideas such as moving the camera[1]
2. In 1928, Joseph Schenck, the President of United Artists told the New York Times, “talking doesn’t belong in pictures…I don’t think people will want talking pictures long”. The common wisdom at the time (since they had never experienced films with dialogue) was that talkies (as talking-films were called) were simply a gimmick. Only after audiences adjusted and audio-recording technology improved, was dialogue in movies embraced as we see today.[2]

If you are a leader considering a shift to a remote-first workplace, you have to embrace two types of disruption. The first is reactionary, reacting to a disruption like COVID-19 that happens to you and your business. The second type of disruption is proactive,  often referred to as creative destruction[3] – deliberately breaking down existing ways of working to make space for innovation. Most leaders are often good at managing reactionary disruptions or “fire drills” (with COVID-19 fire being a five-alarm type).  They are adept at processing data and bring decades of experience in making the hard decisions that are required in these periods.  However, proactive disruption is typically more challenging.  Leaders have to look past their own well-formed experiences and consider unconventional approaches that are going to feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

Our present environment offers an opportunity for you as a leader to lead disruption. Fortunately, the principles are simple and stem from the world of design thinking.

1. Define the problem to be solved, build empathy of users (in this case employees),
2. Ideate on potential solutions,
3. Refine these ideas into those you wish to pursue and then
4. Take an agile approach to experimenting with the implementation of these ideas (testing the ideas fast and cheap).

However, this isn’t an article on design thinking so for now let’s focus on common questions that arise when shifting to remote-first work and build on ideas from other companies who were built to be or are transitioning to be remote-first.

What should we do with the Latte Machine in our Corporate HQ?

Employers have invested significant sums of money in corporate campuses that create spontaneous collisions between employees who do not work in the same department. Steve Jobs famously designed Pixar’s campus and later Apple’s campus with the intent to create these interactions. Open offices have also come into vogue made famous by tech startups out of Silicon Valley, where CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg ditched their office to sit with team members and other traditional firms have opted for “hoteling”  to create more informal, flexible work environment. As companies have invested more in keeping people engaged at the office via gyms, cafeterias, expresso machines and endless snacks – leaders are left wondering how to walk away from these major investments and what takes their place?

There are two approaches we have seen with remote-first companies, and you’ll notice we say remote-first not remote-only. The first approach is for companies to repurpose their office environment as a co-working space for employees to collaborate with each other when an in-person meeting is required. This requires some thoughtful consideration on what types of interaction make more sense to occur in person and which interactions can happen asynchronously, over the phone or over a video chat. A great example to look at is Automattic – a distributed company with over 1200 Automatticians spread across 77 countries (and 93 different languages. They are behind popular publishing and internet platforms like Tumblr and WordPress and are incredibly productive.

“People are surprised when I say this, but I think in-person is really key. And so we just flip it, so instead of saying you have to be around your colleagues 48 weeks of the year and do whatever you want for a month, we say be wherever you want for 48 weeks out of the year and for three or four weeks a year we’re going to bring you together.” -Matt Mullenweg (Automattic CEO)

The leadership lesson here for remote-first companies is simply to set clear expectations and guidelines for when teams should come together (in a corporate co-working space, coffee shop or elsewhere) and limit those interactions to those that are absolutely necessary – flipping the old co-location ratio like Automattic has done. COVID-19 has challenged our biases of where work can be done most productively and you’ll find that teams (equipped with the right tools and resources at home) can be surprisingly productive without being co-located. And who says you can’t have office perks while at home? It could be as simple as repurposing the money invested in your latte machine and providing a stipend for a green screen, dual monitors, microphone and a high-quality web camera (and an UberEats subscription for some snacks when desired).

How will I know who is working and get facetime with leaders?

“In most companies, it is a significant career advantage to work from the headquarters rather than to work remotely. People in positions of power have a tendency to bias toward giving out opportunities to those whom they are familiar with. Employees in headquarters often don’t keep remote workers front of mind.” – Adam D’Angelo (CEO of Quora)

Face time with senior leaders is often considered an important right of passage for corporate cultures, the more time a leader spends communicating with you the better chance you have of being noticed for a promotion or a high-impact project. In a remote-first organization you have the opportunity to create a level playing field for a distributed workforce that rewards outcomes and not being the first one in, last one out or sending emails at all times of the day.

The first leadership step in a remote-first organization is to change your work pattern to be remote-first. You can’t be in the office while the rest of your company is remote – otherwise high achievers will follow suit to get facetime with you. Quora’s CEO, Adam D’Angelo has clearly stated in their remote-first announcement that he and his leadership teams will not be located in the office. By being remote yourself, it allows you to shift your talent evaluation and work process to balance towards evaluating the outcomes of a remote workforce.

The second leadership step is to build a new asynchronous rhythm of doing business. Instead of emails and calls (which in a distributed workforce are tough to schedule across time zones) – consider a blogging system like what Automattic uses called P2s to document progress on projects. P2s are posts written every day by employees to summarize what they have been working on, the problems that they might have encountered and the discussions that they had that day. If you think about the purpose of our in-person meetings, whether in person or on Zoom, this is typically what we are doing – unearthing hidden information from our organization to see what folks are working on, reach group decisions and find ways to collaborate. By documenting what is happening on P2s, it has become a cultural norm at Automattic for all employees to read P2s and uncover what is happening around the company. This communication method creates a transparent organization where you don’t have FOMO (fear of missing out) for not being included in a meeting or not being copied on an email chain. Using their internal search index you can look up P2s and follow certain topics (like Google Reader) to stay informed on progress.

The two leadership lessons to take away from this are that if you are going remote-first, your leadership team must model the way and be remote yourselves and that you need to build new communication habits in your organization to allow for asynchronous collaboration and updates.

What about the corporate culture our employees know and love?

If we were to do a thought experiment and ask you as a leader, what makes your culture great, we would likely get a range of responses from company to company. Some companies value a strong safety and compliance culture that enables them to de-risk their work environment, others value an entrepreneurial environment where they are afforded creativity to take on challenges – it varies but when you check Glassdoor for what makes a company great the office perks are rarely at the top of the list. It’s about the people, work environment and opportunities provided.

Those same interactions can be reimagined (not recreated) in a remote-first environment. It could be as simple as creating space on employees calendars for “making time”[4] – consider the first half of each day (up to 12:30 PM) as a time where meetings are not allowed and employees have time to do deep project work. If you reduce the need for emails and check-in calls, it creates more dedicated work time for employees to creatively solve challenges. You can also support small team or 1:1 interactions amongst employees by providing gift cards for lunch or coffee so employees located near each other can meet and network. Another option is for leaders to participate in targeted, fun interactions across the company – for example at BTS we just did a virtual trivia night, a virtual scavenger hunt and invited kids onto a company-wide Zoom call. Anything to create a familial environment – which luckily being stuck in our new “home offices” surrounded by new barking co-workers has already allowed us to do. Remote-first work allows you to memorialize and celebrate what made your office culture great, and re-invest time and resources to progress that culture forward in a distributed work environment.

Keep in mind that many employees will be shifting to working in a home office for the first time and might not have a separate space available dedicated exclusively for work. As a leader, it is important to promote a separation of “church and state”, allowing employees to turn off notifications and step away from their desks. For example in Slack, the default setting is for notifications to be turned on at 8:00 AM and turned off at 6:00 PM based on the time zone – this should be encouraged across all communication channels during core working hours. This is something that organizations and teams must discuss to create formalized working agreements and establish new norms.

Practical Next Steps

As you plan your work environment of the future, consider a few of the practical steps we shared above.

1. Reimagine don’t recreate: List out the assumptions you have about in-person work and provoke each one of them, reimagine what those tasks and activities might look like in a virtual work environment.
2. Lead the change: If leaders are still in the office, the rest of the company will aim to come into the office – if you want to be remote-first, leaders must commit to being remote themselves
3. Flip the ratio of in-person to virtual interactions: In-person interactions don’t go away in a remote-first world, they are more targeted and thoughtful. Provide stipends to employees for team meetings, 1:1s and other interactions and set guidelines on when in-person interactions should happen and when they are not needed.
4. Create a new rhythm of communication – asynchronous communication involves a new communication rhythm, repurpose emails/check-ins and other meetings and create new norms for how information is communicated and how others can contribute to building on ideas from other parts of the company
5. Memorialize and progress your culture: Continue to honor what makes your culture great, remote-first doesn’t mean you have to lose it – it offers new opportunities to build your culture and invite more talent into your organization that you previously may not have had access to.

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[1] Source: Stratechery, Ben Thompson Interview with Matt Mullenweg

[2] Source: Vox, https://www.vox.com/2015/2/9/8004661/fads-inventions-changed-world

[3] Source: The Library of Economics and Liberty, https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/CreativeDestruction.html

[4] http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

One of the principles of the Agile Manifesto emphasizes the importance of co-located teams collaborating actively.  Collaboration is still as valuable as ever but 2020 is forcing us to revisit how to achieve the benefits of co-location without the co-location.  The good news is that much has changed since the Manifesto was written which has created some answers to how to enable the benefits of being Agile.  Here’s what you can do to allow Agile to Thrive in a Virtual Environment.

by Bryan Campbell and Bhavik Modi

Flashback to our digital lives in 2001 – Netflix was still mailing DvDs, Google was just getting started and Twitter, YouTube and Facebook didn’t exist.   At the same time, only 50%[1] of people in the United States had cell phones and the iPhone was 6 years away. It was during these times that 17 software developers came together in Snowbird, Utah and created what they called the Agile Manifesto, a set of values and principles that would drive a revolution in how organizations and teams worked together to deliver business solutions. 

Since the advent of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, practitioners have emphasized the importance of teams working together, side-by-side delivering valuable products for their customers.  This is typically referred to as co-location and the benefits of teams working in the same location are numerous, from developing trust as they learn more about each other, to learning from “osmosis” as they hear colleagues collaborating to seeing shared goals and progress metrics through highly visible information radiators.

Collaboration is still as valuable as ever but 2020 is forcing us to revisit how to achieve the benefits of co-location without the co-location.  The good news is that much has changed since the Manifesto was written which has created some answers to how to enable the benefits of being Agile.  Here’s what you can do to allow Agile to Thrive in a Virtual Environment.

How to Enable Virtual Co-Located Teams

The first value of the Agile Manifesto states “Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools”, however, remote Agile teams are going to need effective technology or tools to emulate a co-located experience.  Fortunately, technology and accessibility have improved significantly since the Agile Manifesto was developed and a number of options available today are free or low cost.  As a leader, it is important to check to ensure that your team has access to core enabling tools to facilitate work management, brainstorming and ideation. 

It’s likely your team interactions in a virtual environment are going to need some enhancements particularly during this extended time of remote work.  Here are some areas that you should focus on and some starting technologies to consider:

Clickable Links at end of article

Create Your Agile Working Agreements

As teams shift to remote work, team members and companies will need to reconsider many of their working agreements.  Team members will need to discuss how they want to engage using Zoom and other tools including what their expectations are in regards to responding to messages and video conferences.  This might mean considering whether to invest in high speed internet, efficient and ergonomically appropriate work spaces and considering how to minimize distractions (including your chatty Macaw) from affecting your productivity.  It might also be necessary to create some working agreements in your household on how to manage noise levels and interruptions and possibly some personal working agreements on stretching and the frequency of your visits to the pantry.  Companies should reconsider how to  their onsite gyms and offer memberships to Peloton or Steezy, instead of onsite cafeterias look to DoorDash or UberEats and start tracking the benefits to the environment of not having your employees driving to work.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

Agile also emphasizes creating a work environment that included having fun as a way to keep teams engaged.  Ice cream retrospectives, jigsaw puzzle areas and plushy talking sticks are signals that this is an Agile team, so how do you insert fun into a virtual team setting?  Once again there are some interesting options that have emerged that teams can consider.  Try using one of the Jackbox.tv games that are easy to learn, team-oriented games accessible from phones, tablets and computers.  Consider a virtual happy hour with the team and encourage everyone to share what they brought to the party.  Another idea is a multi-player jigsaw game or maybe even create a Guild in an online game like World of Warcraft.  You can even invite a llama to a team meeting through Goat-to-Meeting and support a community farm.  Encourage the team to offer their own ideas too.

Three Moves You Can Make Tomorrow

It’s time to accept that Agile can and will work in a virtually distributed environment, so now you need to decide how to get the most out of it. 

1. Create Your Agile Technology Stack: Start with engaging your team and check to see if they have all the tools necessary to work effectively remotely.
2. Enable Your Team’s Working Agreements: Create Working agreements with the team on how to engage with these tools and expectations on when and how frequently they should be used.  Also teams need to check how they are setup in their home both from a technology and an ergonomics perspective.  Small investments in keyboards, chairs and lighting can have big returns in productivity for companies and ergonomics for people. 
3. Lastly and most importantly Don’t Forget the Fun!

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Sources:

[1] https://www.infoplease.com/science-health/cellphone-use/cell-phone-subscribers-us-1985-2010 

Thriving in a Time of Continual Crisis

By Bryan Campbell and Bhavik Modi

The screen unfolds to images of the world reeling from a global airborne virus, Russia and the Middle East are locked in a no-blink oil price war and the most stable countries in the world are roiled by social unrest and riots.  This isn’t the start of a Hollywood blockbuster, it’s the beginning of 2020.  To describe this as “living in interesting times” would be an understatement and none of these events were anticipated by any of the leading forecasters.  In fact, Deutsche Bank recently released a report that estimates a 33% chance of a global disaster larger than Covid-19 occurring in the next decade[1]. It illustrates that these crises not only can’t be forecast but that we are moving into an age of continual crisis (the Australian and Brazil fires, Brexit and the Hong Kong protests already feel like distant memories).

However, the progressive advancement of technology, has created a new way for organizations to create the resilience they need to adapt to this business reality. Much has been said about individual resilience but organizations need to build their own muscles for resilience as they go through change. Instead of reacting to disruptions by shifting people and functions into a remote delivery model, it’s time for organizations to take a Remote First approach and re-create themselves to operate as an efficient, disruption-proof organization. Remote first not only creates a responsive, adaptive means to respond to crisis it also drives down costs, increases talent reach and helps improve the environment.

The Time is Now

One of the most significant changes for millions of people in 2020 has been the shift to working remotely.  Countless articles, blogs, and videos have emerged chronicling the change from driving to the office to joining Zoom meetings in your living room.  Remote working has helped organizations reduce costs, improve the environment and increase employee morale and yet none of this is particularly new.  Technology and infrastructure shifted seamlessly into this new model and validated the push to cloud-based products and investments in network security (Zoom was able to respond to the rapid increase in demand through their use of Amazon and Oracle Cloud services).  The good news is that the time is ripe for this, 96% of all Americans have a cell phone[2] and 79% have home broadband services[3] and almost every major software solution has a cloud based, subscription offering.  Worker attitudes towards remote work have shifted significantly with 99% expressing an interest in working remotely at least some of the time for the rest of their career[4].  With these forces all converging, first mover organizations have an opportunity to leverage these trends to their competitive advantage.

The Benefits Are Real

Creating a Remote First organization unlocks powerful competitive advantages for companies that rapidly adopt this approach.  Corporate offices served an important function when communication was primarily limited to face-to-face interactions but it also limited the ability of companies to hire talent outside the commuting distance of their office.  With a Remote First strategy organizations can now attract talent anywhere in the world and there is little doubt that these are an organization’s most valuable asset.  Having the ability to access talent outside of a 50 mile radius of your corporate office increases and deepens your talent pool.  It also has a residual effect of reducing pollution and demands on public infrastructure.  It is estimated that CO2 emissions dropped by 17% during the pandemic[5] a significant portion of which was due to reduced vehicle traffic.  This might be an important answer to the problem of climate change which will also resonate with new employees entering the job market.

However, there are also powerful bottom line cost saving benefits too.  Commercial real estate costs had been increasing for 9 years at the end of 2019[6].  These prices have undoubtedly changed in 2020 but the fact is that providing corporate real-estate is a significant line item on the balance sheet of every company.  Organizations can now re-think their investments in sprawling campuses and the high end furniture and consider where to direct that spending.

Start with the Culture

Moving to a Remote First approach needs to support your organization’s people as they adjust to this working environment.  Remote working isn’t about the technology, it’s all about the culture. It takes real organizational commitment to unlock the potential of people working remotely. This is an important piece of the fabric of a resilient and adaptive organization and the cornerstone of a Remote First strategy.  Remote First means thinking of how to deliver the value of your organization without a centralized office.  To do this you need every person in the organization to understand the commitment to working remote and ensuring they are enabled to work this way.   This means promoting and rewarding individuals that are working remotely and creating career paths they can pursue to increase their skills.  It also means finding ways to keep remote workers invested in the organization even as they have fewer of the reminders that they had when they were working in a corporate office.   This could mean providing corporate Zoom backgrounds, green screens, branded mousepads and other reminders of the company.  The organization will need to protect the mental health of its works such as affirming its commitment to the benefits of vacation for example.  Since remote workers can work anywhere it’s easy for them to bring their laptops on vacation and adjust their schedules to stay connected.  It’s important to support the need for constructive breaks from work to re-charge and re-energize. Remote First organizations will need to re-assess their corporate values and ensure these align to this new way of working.

Support Your People

People are the first consideration in moving to a Remote First experience.  What does human connectivity and community building look like when people are working remotely?  While technology and accessibility have improved significantly over the last decade it hasn’t completely replicated the experience of working together.   Organizations need to consider how to recreate these experiences in a remote environment.  The introduction of more accessible video conferencing has increased human connection when working remotely and the ability to connect anytime/anywhere has extended the work environment into a wide range of spaces.  Now organizations need to consider how to create boundaries for their employees between work and their personal lives and support their mental health in this space.  One way is to encourage employees to “unplug” periodically and to create their ideal work environment in a way they couldn’t in a more traditional work setting.  This might mean working on their patio or even moving to a different location now that people are unencumbered by travelling to an office.

Remote work also introduces both a potential benefit and challenge; asynchronous communication[7].  Ensuring your teams have a means to communicate even if they are not able to meet at the same time is critical.  Persistent “chats” are increasingly becoming a necessary part of the technology required for remote workers including some, like Automattic, abandoning email with a micro-blogging platform that gives access to ideas and threads that would have been locked away in inboxes.  Asynchronous communication enables team members in different time zones to participate in conversations and research has shown it tends to be accompanied with greater thought and rationale.  However, this doesn’t remove the need for more traditional synchronous communication through Zoom meetings which build relationships, align multiple parties and are a better way to discuss sensitive topics.

There are other challenges that companies will need to prepare for as they move to this model.  One concern is managing the health of your employees particularly as they begin their shift to permanent remote working.  Ensuring safe and ergonomic work environments will be a shared responsibility of companies and their people.

Rethink Your Company

With Twitter recently announcing that its employees will be working remotely permanently[8] it must lead Microsoft and Amazon to question their billion dollar investments in creating Spherical Greenhouses and Tree Houses for their staff.  However, Twitter is not alone, Fortune recently surveyed CEOs and learned that more than 25% of their workforce will never return to the office opting to work remotely[9].  Prior to the pandemic there was increasing interest in Zoomers and Millennials to have more flexibility in their work location.  Now most large companies are starting to re-evaluate their investments in sprawling campuses with exercise facilities and cafeteria dining.  In the past these investments were important to establish work environment that created ‘collisions’ that spurred creativity and ideas.  Now organizations need to consider creating these in a virtual world. Some ideas include investing in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that looks at people and their work and connects them to foster creativity.[10] 

So what should organizations offer remote workers if they can’t provide tree houses and fitness facilities? These perks can still be extended to staff but in different ways, virtual exercise classes like Pelloton or Steezy are low costs ways to encourage healthy behaviors and providing Door Dash coupons, Amazon gift cards and high-speed internet expense allowances can offer the same benefits of onsite cafeteria but with more options. 

Reimagine Your Future

As Satya Nadella recently stated[11] organizations will progress through three phases as they deal with the pandemic:  respond, recover and reimagine.  Most are rapidly progressing through the respond and recover stages but now is the time to start re-imagining the future.  Remote First is one of the first compelling visions of what that re-imagined future might look like.  It’s time for every organization to start investing in how to enable and support their move to a Remote First structure.

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[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/theres-a-one-in-three-chance-of-a-massive-disaster-that-could-be-worse-than-covid-19-says-deutsche-bank-2020-06-17

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/

[4] https://buffer.com/state-of-remote-work-2019

[5] https://www.wired.com/story/the-pandemic-has-led-to-a-huge-global-drop-in-air-pollution/

[6] https://www.jpmorgan.com/commercial-banking/insights/2019-commercial-real-estate-outlook

[7] https://www.hrexchangenetwork.com/employee-engagement/articles/the-value-of-asynchronous-communication-and-how-to-embrace-it

[8] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/twitter-will-allow-employees-to-work-at-home-forever

[9] https://fortune.com/2020/05/14/fortune-500-ceo-survey-coronavirus-pandemic-predictions/

[10] https://www.gensler.com/research-insight/blog/fostering-casual-collisions-and-creativity-in-a-virtual

[11] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/business/dealbook/satya-nadella-microsoft.html