The 2020 pandemic has caused a dramatic increase in the number of companies supporting a work from home shift for employees. VMblog had the chance to speak with Sahin Boydas, founder and CEO of RemoteTeam, an expert in the industry for remote work. So we spoke with Boydas to learn more and understand some of the most common challenges facing organizations.
VMblog: Many
companies tasted remote work for the first time during the pandemic. What
advice do you have for those companies that want to remain working remotely
even after the pandemic?
Sahin Boydas: For
many companies, what they are experiencing when it comes to working during the
pandemic can't accurately be called "remote work" or "full work from home" --
but rather an "emergency remote work" condition. As companies wanting to remain
working remotely even after the pandemic, there are few important things to
consider:
- Eliminate the "emergency"
part of remote work. If you're a company planning to work from home
forever, management has to take deliberate steps to implement company
culture, employee benefits, and more to suit the remote work environment.
You have to eliminate office politics and practices that will hinder
productivity but weren't considered when we were all rushing to go remote
and keep the ones that will help.
- I will also advise and
encourage companies to reassess their tools, do away with unnecessary
ones, keep the important tools, and put in place plans to help their team
use the right tools to make work easy and exciting. Doing these imperative
exercises will eliminate the "emergency" decisions that were made during
the pandemic and set your organization up for permanent remote work.
VMblog: Why
do you think working remotely is hard to adapt for many companies into their
everyday working schedules and lives?
Boydas: Adapting to work environments, in general, isn't an easy journey and usually
requires a gradual process. This means adapting to remote work conditions is
hard for companies with in-office employees and harder for a remote workforce.
At RemoteTeam.com, we've been working remotely from the beginning, but we still
face and deal with certain challenges when it comes to adapting. While
there are numerous challenges, the biggest one is the difficulty companies face
trying to disconnect remote vs. in-office conditions.
I have talked to many company executives about remote work from the perspective
of an in-office environment and this is probably the biggest pressing challenge
to transitioning. Many companies want to migrate their office working
conditions directly into the remote work environment. For these organizations,
going remote means the close supervision, the bureaucratic processes, and many
of the practices that they deem "company policies" must continue when employees
are working remotely. Migrating these policies into the remote working field
means less trust for employees and an overall loss of trust in the organization.
It also means cumbersome processes and boredom, which are despised by people
working remotely.
The
way out is for companies to ditch many of their "company policies" that were
developed in the brick-and-mortar office work environments. Beyond this,
companies also need to create new remote work policies based on their company
situation. And new policies should create open working environments remotely,
the existence of trust among workers and between employees and managers.
VMblog: As
a result of COVID-19, workforces have been forced to go remote. How do you
predict this will shift in the years ahead?
Boydas: There's
no doubt that COVID19 has sparked the largest remote work experiment ever.
While this emergency trend has popularized the remote work revolution, I think
there are going to be different branches of work conditions after the pandemic.
The biggest branch, of course, is going to be remote work. This will be the
default work condition for many startups, software companies, media firms, and
many of the companies that can work remotely without any issues. However, I
also see flexible work conditions being a bigger part of this future of work
years ahead. This will inculcate both remote and office work together, where
companies have some days or months for employees to work from home and other
days or months to work in the office. The future of work will also see
companies making remote and flexible work conditions based on what they want to
pursue - a lean startup, ditch a costly office rent, get access to a wide array
of talent worldwide, deal with employee loneliness, or tackle diversity and
inclusion.
VMblog: What
are a few of the most common challenges companies face in taking a business
remotely?
Boydas:
There are many challenges companies face when trying to move their workforce to
remote teams. While these challenges may depend heavily on the size and type of
organization, there are many that cut across:
- Keeping employee engagement
vibrant is one of the common challenges that companies face when trying to
make their teams remote. In the brick-and-mortar office environment,
employee engagement largely happens unconsciously during breakfast, random
walks to the washroom or chit-chats in cubicles. And in the startup
environment, the presence of ping-pong tables makes employee engagement
seamless. Taking a business remote means that a company has to keep
employees engaged while they work away from one another, and it's a huge
challenge even for companies that have been working remotely for a
while.
- Besides employee engagement,
companies also face other challenges, including communication, maintaining
company culture, measuring productivity, and dealing with the loneliness
that comes with a remote work environment. At RemoteTeam.com, we are
working on solving the operational challenges that remote teams face and
we see a future where managing remote employees are more seamless.
VMblog: What
technologies are most important to prioritize investing in for a remote team?
Boydas: The future of work, which is, and will largely be characterized by remote
working conditions, will be impacted by many technological inventions. But I
think if we want a vibrant and robust remote work future, these are the
technologies we should focus on:
- 5G and high-speed internet
connectivity. This is a must for the remote work revolution. The
meetings, the conferences, and all the online presentations that we need
to go through as remote workers will need high-speed internet, and 5G is a
great invention that will get us there.
- Always-connected and
remote work-oriented notebooks. In the remote work revolution, laptops
and tablets will be our primary working tools. We need to build these
devices with always-connected capabilities to enable people to work
wherever they are. These devices also need to come with better cameras and
audio as we would be doing more video calls and conferences.
- Investing in AI and
virtual reality. This will help propel a seamless digital world that
makes remote work environments seem more like in-office ones. We also need
to build the technologies that will make our homes, our primary working
environment in remote work, a vibrant place to get work done without
facing loneliness.
VMblog: What
are some tips for maintaining a cohesive company culture, when employees are
working in different locations?
Boydas: Company culture is hard to build and maintain, even for teams under the same
roof - after all, it's about people and people are complicated. However, it's
not impossible if you set out to build a cohesive company culture in your
remote team. Here's what I think matters most for companies:
- Create an environment for
employee engagement to thrive. Building culture requires companies to
create an atmosphere that allows employees to communicate with one another
and with management without hurdles. Companies shouldn't assume that
employees will build connections "automatically". Employee
engagement helps build culture and is a deliberate step for companies to
take when their employees are working remotely.
- Build personal connections
beyond work. One sure bet to maintaining company culture is to build
personal relationships in the remote work environment. This could come in
different forms, including organizing virtual after-work parties, virtual
games, and slack channels for employees to network and get to know one
another.
- Spice up your company culture
through physical connections. Companies should organize retreats and bring
employees together once in a while to help employees connect on a personal
level. Retreats aren't just about bringing the entire team together.
Companies can organize small retreats for employees living in the same
state or country as well. This builds lasting relationships and helps keep
the company culture going.
VMblog: What
is the most important piece of advice you'll give to a brick and mortar company
transitioning to a remote workforce?
Boydas: The remote work revolution is huge and a lot of companies see it to be ideal
not just for the cost-effectiveness of it to the company, but also the freedom
and flexibility it gives employees.
As
brick and mortar businesses transition to a remote workforce, they should
differentiate between what their tools can do and what they can't. I have seen
a lot of companies that transitioned to remote work with the assumption that there
are "many tools" to make their work easier. While this is largely true, these
tools are not replacements for the human resources that an organization has,
and who are even more important in a remote work environment.
VMblog: What
are the critical sectors do you think remote work will disrupt the most and how
should the workforce in such industries prepare for the future?
Boydas: Cities
as we know them will change forever. Remote work is one revolution that
will disrupt cities dramatically. Not only is remote work democratizing the
"centers of innovation" and "workplace" roles that cities have played for
centuries, but it is also helping humanity create a new kind of city. The
workforce in this industry made up of builders, developers, and investors, need
to look at a remote work-oriented city. One that's less busy, provides more
open spaces and champions clean energy both for transportation and powering
city resources.
Residential
living and the housing industry. Our homes and neighborhoods will also be
impacted highly by the remote work revolution. Homes will have to serve an
additional purpose of being a "workplace" or an "office" in addition to their
existing roles. This means that property developers and investors need to
rethink how they build the homes of the future. These homes should not just
come with high-speed internet facilities, but also have offices and
office-related environments such as ping pong tables to keep families engaged
and entertained even during working hours. Our neighborhoods also need to evolve
to include more open spaces that allow people to work outdoors.
Digital security industry. As we move to a remote work environment, one
area that will be hard hit is the securities industry. Programmers, companies,
and investors in this area need to build new security protocols and tools that
will keep company resources safe and secure while employees work from home.
Other areas where remote work would impact include the cloud computing
industry, the human resources industry.
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