Using A "Remote First" Approach To Grow Your Business

Working from home is the norm for employees of software consultancy Netguru.

By not being tied to a physical location, Wiktor Schmidt has grown his software consultancy Netguru to nearly 500 staff in ten years on the back of a "remote first" approach.

"Our clients are pretty much all over the world, and it's the same with the team, with offices in six cities but many people working remotely from their homes, or even traveling around the world," he told me. For Schmidt, flexible, remote working has been a means of growth, and this is a crucial point that established organizations should take on board.

For established organizations, flexible working initiatives can be exercises in compliance. For example, in the UK the 1996 Employment Rights Act gives workers the statutory right to request flexible working which might include working from home. Having processes and structures in place to respond to such requests can be seen as the end goal for some HR departments.

More commonly, corporations head into remote working programmes with vague aims of increasing collaboration or improving "staff engagement", while primarily wanting to reduce down their real estate costs by reducing physical space available. Motivating employees to fundamentally change their working practices in the name of a marginal increase in profitability is a tough challenge.

Schmidt is keen to dispell some common misconceptions about how remote working occurs. "Being remote doesn't mean we never meet. We meet, and it's always very valuable to do, say, a week-long workshop together. But then we take the physical things from those meetings and digitalize them, and then the majority of the work is being done remotely."

For a client service organization like Netguru, it's also important to understand that the approach to working extends outside of their employees. Clients have to buy into the ways of working and adapt themselves. The company, as much as possible, uses Cloud-based tools for working. That approach has become more natural in the last five years as corporations open up their firewalls to everyday applications.

"I'm quite surprised in quite a lot of large corporate environments we see things change very, very fast. When we look over the ten years of doing this kind of work, I think the first five years whenever we went to, say, a larger bank or larger corporate environment, we would have those moments when we knew it would be a problem. Now we see a lot of those kinds of organizations being much more agile." said Schmidt.

However, while the fidelity of tools for collaboration improves, and access is opened up on the client side, there remains an issue of how a team that rarely gathers together physically builds trust amongst its members.

"In my mind, this is something that comes down to the culture. This is something that we have been trying to build since we were a ten-person team, and we have wanted to keep a transparent, open, trusting culture of feedback. It's a constant struggle, a constant work, making sure that there are no internal politics and all the stuff that happens with larger teams and a lack of trust."

In this Schmidt identifies a key challenge for more traditional organizations where the culture of communication still retains strong elements of hierarchy, control, and secrecy. For remote working to be successful, there has to be a much higher level of transparency at all levels. That, in turn, can lead to understandable concerns about drowning in collaborative "noise," but Schmidt believes that is a more straightforward scenario to overcome

"I think there is a danger of noise, but there are so many tools now that can help to deal with it through tagging and filtering. It's much easier to cope with over-communicating than with the alternative."

There are successful organizations that are now maturing who have built flexible working practices into their DNA. More established businesses too often try to adopt the tools for remote working, often as a way to reduce cost, without understanding the broader cultural and behavioral changes that are necessary for those tools to flourish.

Maybe by regarding such approaches as tools for growth they might see higher returns on their efforts?

Let's block ads! (Why?)

Read again Using A "Remote First" Approach To Grow Your Business : https://ift.tt/2yKfpMu

Let's block ads! (Why?)