The remote work revolution appears to have run its course. Lately, there has been a push from business leaders for a return to the office, forcing many workers to start commuting back to their workplaces. The Trump administration is wiping out remote work by federal employees. States from California to Texas have issued return to office orders, as have many private employers such as JPMorgan and Dell have mandated five-day-a-week workweeks in offices.
Management control aside, there’s some logic in these moves, in which onsite work encourages a greater esprit de corps and a feeling of family – sometimes even closer than actually family members. Add to that the close-in communications, collaboration and the sharing of ideas.
Still, remote work offers access to global talent, productivity, and innovation which should not be discounted. In his recently published book, titled The World is Your Office, Harvard professor Prithwiraj Choudhury urges employers to consider the profound advantages of what he terms as work-from-anywhere arrangements. “Not only can a company position itself to better compete for distant talent, but by removing geographic limits, businesses can expand their hiring pools to capture a more diverse set of talent worldwide.”
To bring about a successful remote work culture, Choudhury offers the following guidance:
Encourage active and continuous asynchronous communication. Choudhury points to the remote-work processes within GitLab, which eats its own dogfood with its asynchronous collaboration tool that it brings to market. “Each worker is assigned a set of issues or basic tasks, which they complete and pass on to, or get input from, colleagues using what they call a merge request.
Once a task is finalized, it is committed into the GitLab master file. This system runs entirely asynchronously. with one worker completing a task and then sending it for feedback from pers, supervisors, and even the public before that task is finalized.”
Encourage active knowledge-sharing. There are two levels to the knowledge-sharing key to supporting remote workers: organizational knowledge such as who handles what, and specific skills pertinent to jobs. “Critics worry that a distributed team workforce will struggle to learn, and remain up to date on, the information needed to complete their tasks,” Choudhury relates. He urges adoption of “knowledge codification,” or the process of turning tacit but codifiable information into an organized – and importantly, searchable – resource.”
Knowledge codification starts with “writing down exactly how a company performs its key activities and creating a how-to document that remains online and accessible to all company employees.” He even suggests a crowdsourcing approach to codification, in which each individual contributes to the core knowledge repository, in which “the company as a whole is able to create a better overall documentation product than if one contributor or team were to try to and replicate this process on their own.” This approach is beneficial to remote workers, and is a low price to pay for the flexibility they enjoy.
Help remote workers deal with isolation. Remote workers risk being both professionally and socially isolated, Choudhury says. His research shows a hybrid work approach works best to address this. “Those with intermediate levels of in-office work (one to two days per week on average) on average reported greater work-life balance, more job satisfaction, and lower isolation than colleagues who were in the office for either more time or less.”
Additional approaches – especially for workers too far away to work hybrid – include “virtual watercoolers,” which encourage greater social interactions online between employees. Don’t confuse this with “Zoom happy hours” where the same people show up each week, however. Virtual watercoolers can be structured to mix different employees at each encounter, Choudhury says. Occasional offsite meetings can also help build relationships between remote workers and onsite teams. At the same time, be sure to arrange for workers with differing specializations or functions with the company to be brought together, he urges.
Choudhury also makes this interesting observation: “the biggest critics of remote work tend to be CEOs leading companies with an ethos of overwork and burnout. Constant presence, being seen by the manager or client, and overwork has been mistakenly considered to be a solution to the social and professional isolation problem – when, in fact, they are merely replacing one challenge with another.”
The bottom line is remote work can work, and work spectacularly, if managed as the great opportunity it is. While some companies have drifted back to five-day-a-week in-office mandates, there are countless companies coming on board with mostly remote talent.
