How You Make Remote Work “Work”

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Last week was the time for my annual pilgrimage to Voss, to the largest extreme sports festival in the world.

One week per year, this calm village on Norway’s west coast turns into a paradise for all the sports you wish your kids will never get into. (Sorry Mom!)

As I stood there with a few thousand other outdoor enthusiasts, it hit me.

A few thousand people. In a tent. Shoulder to shoulder.

Four years ago, this was normal. Two years ago, it was unfathomable.

And now it’s normal again.

Crazy.

Apart from not having a festival for a few years, the pandemic also accelerated the move to remote work.

A friend and partner at McKinsey joked that a virus did what they’d tried to do for 20 years: stop traveling and normalize working remotely.

I run a boutique consulting firm myself, fully remote. That would have been impossible just a few years ago.

I get loads of questions about how I do that, and how I help clients to make remote teams “work” for them.

It starts with a plot twist…

You don’t hate remote work. You hate the way your company does remote work.

Let’s get this out of the way first.

Remote work can work. And it can also fail miserably. It’s not for everyone (more on that later) but even those that could thrive in a remote environment, sometimes end up hating it.

Don’t write it off too soon though. It may have nothing to do with remote work as a concept, and everything to do with how your company does remote.

Forget remote vs in-person.

I first thought I’d get tactical here. Show you the tools, tips, and tricks I’ve learned for running remote teams successfully.

But once I started writing, it became clear to me that the tactical conversation is pointless without the right strategy & perspective.

So, this week we’ll cover the why & what, and how comes next week - just like a project.

To start that conversation, I’d encourage you to stop thinking about remote versus in-person. Instead, think about synchronous vs asynchronous communication.

Let’s talk sync vs async.

To succeed remotely, there are a few ground principles that need to be set within the organization or team. The first one is the mindset shift to async communication.

But “going async” is not about tools. It’s about culture & team habits.

Hear me out…

This newsletter is asynchronous. I send it on Tuesdays, but you read it whenever works best for you. I’m not forcing you to attend a live session when it suits me.

Synchronous communication requires constant switching of tasks & context. It prioritizes being connected over being productive.

And a lot of work requires the opposite. Think coding, writing, problem-solving, and creative work.

Please, do not disturb.

Async communication, on the other hand, incentivizes higher-quality communication over knee-jerk responses. It pushes people to think before they talk, and pushes for better planning, transparency, and documentation.

And at the same time, it allows people to get “in the zone” and get things done in uninterrupted blocks of work.

Go all in or out.

I’ll take some heat for this, but it has to be said: hybrid is often a nightmare.

The only way to make remote (or async) work, is to go all-in.

We’ve all been in that call, where 3 people are remote and the other 4 are in the same room. What happens? Side conversations.

Or worse: the actual decision is made by the coffee machine after the call.

The same goes for async: if 3 people call each other for everything while the rest works in a single tool or document, it’ll never work.

I used to work for a company that allowed hybrid, and it can work. But it only works well if you split activities. I went to the office for leadership team meetings and creative stuff, where everyone was present.

The other days, I did my deep work from home or worked on projects where everyone was remote.

Async & remote is not for everyone

For some companies, it’s the recruitment opportunity of a lifetime.

Coinbase announced in May 2020 that it would stay fully remote whenever restrictions would end. The result? Within 60 days it had resolved most of its nagging recruiting issues, because it now had access to a global talent pool.

But the opposite is also true. You need to screen for remote “fit” when you hire for your team. And I bet that 90% of people who don’t like it today were hired for an in-person job.

Three fundamental issues

If you take all this into account and you decide to run your team remotely, there are three fundamental issues to solve:

1. Social bonding

2. Mental health

3. Collaboration

And here’s the good news: you’re not alone. Others have cracked this puzzle for you. And next week, we’ll look at how you do that with tools & tactics.

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Three big questions

For now, I’ll leave you with 3 questions. If you’ve tried remote before, did it tick the boxes we discussed above?

1. Were the culture and habits adjusted to async communication? Or were you working remotely like you’d do in the office, wondering why it didn’t work?

2. Was your team all in or out? Or was part of the friction caused by the fact that some were better adjusted than others?

3. Were the people on the team hired for a remote job, or did it just happen overnight?

If the answer is no to one or more of those, that’s a great place to start if you want to make remote work.

And with that out of the way, we’ll look at tools & tactics next week. Have you had any spectacular fails or big wins? Let me know, and maybe I’ll include it!

That’ll do for this week!

Cheers,
Jasper