The Power of Remote Working

Years ago I took a job with a company that did not have an office. A company that refused to have an office. Having lived abroad and having travelled to over 30 countries in the prior decade the notion of an entirely remote working environment was intriguing, but I had my doubts. I’d spent the last several years working in the food service industry and studying international politics. I’d thought of joining the foreign service to be able to live and work in different countries. The thought that I could work anywhere with just a laptop had never crossed my mind. It was beyond my realm of thinking. Then again, the company’s founders were convinced this was not just possible, but the only way to work, so I set to work doing my part.

We considered legal requirements, taxes, fees, risks. We got our physical address, we filed for business licenses and tax IDs. We set up our bookkeeping software to properly handle sales tax, income tax, and all the other taxes and fees for each employee’s location as applicable. Before I knew it, we were working from our homes and sometimes our backpacks.

In the years to follow I got to go to the Roman Coliseum before starting my “morning” meetings. I got to eat Gouda cheese made in Gouda while providing tech support for a client in the Netherlands. I enjoyed fresh baked bread in a Spanish cafe while reformatting a customer’s data. Sometimes I pulled weeds in the garden while listening in on company meetings or trainings.

We were hardly more than a handful of people with minimal overhead and earning over a million dollars in revenue. Revenue that was growing with costs growing less than revenues.

I share this not to reminisce or brag. Rather, I’m dumbfounded by the calls back to the office that keep making headlines. We live in a beautiful world where technological developments have enabled us to be wildly more productive than we would be if left to our own cognitive and physical limits. Calculators have long allowed engineers and statisticians to swiftly and accurately complete complicated calculations. Computers now auto-correct spelling and grammatical errors as you go. ChatGPT and the like rapidly develop content and arguments in an organized fashion. Writing basic essays and marketing campaigns can be minutes vs. hours. Services like the one hosting this site minimize the effort of producing a simple user-friendly UI and allow publishers to create websites without knowing how to code. Again, potential days of coding replaced by minutes to hours of work.

While human efficiency and effectiveness has been supported by the use of tools and technology throughout human history, the speed of advancement and the amount of time saved is on an exponential growth trajectory, and business leaders are suffering serious FOMO. We are seeing calls by employers for their staff to 10x their productivity, but employers are failing to keep pace with the productivity of their teams. They don’t know what their teams are doing. They don’t know how to harness the capabilities of their teams. They are under water as leaders and rather than reflecting on their own leadership styles and abilities, they are presuming their own lack of awareness is a result of a lack of visibility into what their teams are doing, and therefore they fear that their team members are not actually working as hard and getting done the things they are paid to do. Their answer: bring them back to the office where leadership can keep an eye on them. WRONG ANSWER.

Despite access to powerful tools and the ability to automate huge workflows (something I definitely love doing!), employees are being asked to live in a world that is constantly running; to maintain focus despite being barraged by communications, tasks and problems to solve. If you want employees to up their productivity by 10x, know what you want them to achieve, know how to measure that productivity, and let them do it in the comfort of the space they’ve made for themselves, not between unnecessary commutes and while trying to politely ignore their colleagues milling around them and avoiding the temptations of an espresso machine, a pool table and the “water cooler”. And if you think that “water cooler” is necessary for colleagues to build report, well, then you need to look to your people team and managers to do a better job focusing on people and creating a safe feedback loop. In my remote work days I came to love the RBF worn by the 6 year-old daughter of one colleague’s in Maryland. I had some personal experience with another colleague’s 2 year-old’s potty training in North Carolina. I gave my two cents on the office decor for a colleague in the boonies of Canada. I watched a colleague in the Bay Area hand nurse a baby bird abandoned by its parents. I felt the support and love of my colleagues across three countries when a fire burned through our property.

It has always been clear to me when working remotely who is getting $*@& done and who isn’t. The only thing I know of a colleague by default when working remotely is the impact they have on our company goals and KPIs; if, when I go to them, they can answer my questions; if they jump to solve problems and provide support; if they follow-up on requests. I can see when they create new processes or automate things to the delight of their teammates, making everyone else’s lives easier. And when they are not visibility, the void is loud. While I love building relationships with my remote colleagues, knowing what people are doing and if they are doing it well is the default state of remote work. If you as leader are present, self-aware, and trust your team, you will find success with a remote team.

So please, leaders, if you are calling your teams back to the office, take a long look in the mirror and ask yourself again, why?

Need help with your remote work policies and securing your remote workforce? Email Rachel at rcgrc-consulting@protonmail.com