Common Work Challenges
As we read the return to office strategies communicated by various companies, it becomes evident that the challenges they’ve oft-cited – collaboration, team building, innovation, employee engagement, trust, accountability, and management preference – are not exclusive to remote work. They exist, to varying degrees, in all work environments, including office-first settings. Every single engineer who was working before COVID had heard these same drum beats before they were ever asked to work from home.
Consider collaboration and communication. In a remote setting, this challenge often manifests as miscommunication due to the lack of face-to-face interaction or the delay in responses. But hasn’t this always been a challenge? Even in traditional office settings, we’ve had to address misunderstandings due to unclear emails, missed meetings, or simply because a colleague was wearing noise-canceling headphones or didn’t make it to lunch that day to hear an important discussion.
Then there is team building and culture. In remote teams, the lack of physical interaction can make it harder to develop a shared sense of culture and camaraderie. However, office environments are not immune to cultural discordance. In fact, toxic cultures, office politics, and cliques have been cited as challenges, and even legal liabilities, as long as offices have existed. Sitting should-to-shoulder with your colleagues five days a week clearly does not guarantee a strong, healthy culture. Good culture, as we can see, requires a deliberate effort regardless of our proximity to one another.
The challenge of driving innovation is another example. In remote work, the lack of spontaneous, serendipitous interactions is often seen as a hindrance to innovative ideas. Yet, in office settings, we’ve all seen innovative ideas rot in stifling meeting rooms, get lost as colleagues give up on trying to be heard, or never even mentioned as individual contributors grow tired of being cast aside by management. There are, of course, ways to ensure good ideas are heard and they all work regardless of where people are sitting.
The issues of employee engagement and trust are similarly universal. The movie “Office Space” (1999) or the TV Show “The Office” (first season 2001) were cultural hits long before remote-work was a phrase most people had ever heard. And the strategies we know to be most effective in increasing engagement and trust, such as frequent one-on-ones, surveys, etc all work regardless of where people are sitting.
Employee productivity is perhaps one of the most controversial. Usually people’s preferences are about asynchronous versus synchronous communications not in person or remote. When managers are trying to measure productivity through face-time at the office, you know your organization is broken at a fundamental level. People getting to work early and staying late says nothing about their impact.
The Key to Overcoming Challenges: Thoughtful and Deliberate Strategies
When we see companies claiming that remote work hasn’t been effective for them, we need to question their understanding of remote work and its potential. All of these organizations rely on Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), such as GNU/Linux, that was developed by entirely remote contributors. If remote work were ineffective, why are they relying on tools and technologies crafted in a remote setting? If remote work were ineffective how are companies such as Docker and Gitlab creating transformational tools for other organizations? Imagine working at the company using Dockers running on Linux servers, pushing and pulling code from Gitlab and being told the only way you’ll achieve great things is if you return to the office!
As leaders we need to be thoughtful and deliberate about how we structure work and the tools we employ. If your return-to-office plan hinges on the hope that the next transformative idea will spark around the proverbial water cooler, it might be time to reassess. Building a business is about repeatable successes, not miraculous happenstance.
When transitioning to remote work, clear expectations and strategies are crucial. If you expect team members to respond to a Slack message within 15 minutes, that needs to be clearly communicated. This is a perfectly valid way to work remotely and it will work if people are aligned. However, if you’re looking to shift towards asynchronous communication, planning and training are necessary – you cannot send everyone home and expect they will figure it out without any friction. Employees accustomed to in-person, immediate responses should be given guidance and support as they adapt to whatever your ideal model of work may be.
Measuring productivity is another critical area that needs examination. If productivity is being measured by the amount of face-time with a manager or by the number of commits developers make, it’s a clear red flag. Instead, focus on measuring business impact at the team level and fostering a culture of accountability within teams. These assessments are valid for teams that are working from the office 100% of the time and those that are 100% remote.
From a business management perspective, the focus should be on maximizing capital efficiency. Balancing factors such as talent acquisition costs, office space overheads, and the travel expenses related to on-site meetings is crucial. For many tech companies, transitioning to remote work—with a few annual meet-ups and the benefit of a global talent pool—can offer significant cost savings. Every organization should conduct a thorough financial and operational analysis to understand whether a remote or office-first approach would be more capital efficient. In many instances, a well-executed remote work strategy will yield better results than a rushed return to office.
All of these points glance across but do not delve deep into solutions. Senior leadership down to front-line managers need to be deliberate about how they work. You can design a system that works for in-office, hybrid, and remote. The best approaches we know for collaboration, building trust, growing productive teams, and many other common concerns cited in return to office plans are best addressed via solutions that involve something other than letting fate take control of your teams. Instead, equip your leaders and managers with the tools and support they need to implement deliberate techniques that foster a healthy, productive work environment, regardless of location. It’s not about where we work, but how we work that truly makes a difference.
Remote Work Comes With Its Unique Set of Challenges - But Remember, It’s About How, Not Where, We Work
Admittedly, remote work isn’t without challenges. One of the most significant issues that I’ve personally encountered is the perceived inequity between those who can work fully remotely and those who cannot, often due to requirements to handle physical hardware or engage with customers directly in person. This friction point can create a divide within an organization if not carefully managed.
I’d also be mistaken not to note that the more you work with hardware, the trickier the financial math becomes. At my current start-up where we have a mixture of full-time in office employees and remote employees, the costs of shipping expensive hardware, or simply needing more prototypes so that we can ship them to engineers, can really add up. And the promise of a global talent pool can suffer when, for any number of reasons, you cannot or do not want to ship hardware internationally.
It’s important to acknowledge that there are valid reasons to operate in an office-first manner, just as there are compelling reasons to be remote-first. The key is to carefully consider what approach works best for your business. Once you’ve made that decision, clear and honest communication becomes crucial. If you’re not transparent about why a particular work arrangement is in the best interest of the business, employees will pick up on it, leading to a negative response, even if they can’t articulate exactly why. They all felt the challenges with communication, innovation, and your other excuses before they were ever working remotely.
Productivity, innovation, and a positive work culture won’t spontaneously arise. Instead, they are the outcome of conscious effort and deliberate action. If we want our teams to be productive, we need to equip them with well thought out constraints, the right tools, and provide the necessary support. If we want innovation to thrive, we need to foster an environment that encourages creativity and open communication. If we want to build a strong work culture, we need to invest time and resources into team-building and personal development. And the tools, techniques, and methods to achieve these results almost always work in-office and remote.
If you are on the fence about how your organization should work, you must do the work yourself and justify it with transparency. Anything short of that and you will bring severe harm to your teams.
It’s not so much about where we work as it is about how we work—a factor we can control, regardless of where we are physically located. Let’s take charge and make work better for everyone, everywhere by building systems for repeatable success.
Continuing the Conversation
The conversation shouldn’t stop here. Every situation is unique and I value your experiences. I invite you to reach out to me directly, for feedback on this article or to start a dialogue on how we can transform your challenges into opportunities.