Gemma Dale - How to Work Remotely: Work Effectively, No Matter Where You Are

• Dealing with Difficult People Roy Lilley

• Decision Making and Problem Solving John Adair

• Develop Your Leadership Skills John Adair

• Develop Your Presentation Skills Theo Theobald

• How to Manage People Michael Armstrong

• How to Manage Projects Paul J Fielding

• How to Organize Yourself John Caunt

• How to Work Remotely Gemma Dale

• How to Write a Business Plan Brian Finch

• How to Write a Marketing Plan John Westwood

• How to Write Reports and Proposals Patrick Forsyth

• Improve Your Communication Skills Alan Barker

• Successful Time Management Patrick Forsyth

The above titles are available from all good bookshops.

For further information on these and other Kogan Page titles, or to order online, visit the Kogan Page website at: www.koganpage.com .

Work effectively, no matter where you are

Gemma Dale

Remote work (also sometimes known as teleworking, virtual work, telecommuting or distributed work) refers to work that takes place outside of a traditional office environment. Many remote employees work from home, but remote working includes any form of work taking place away from a physical workplace and, typically, where colleagues are not co-located. It may include working in local hubs or co-working spaces too, or even working abroad or from a holiday home. Some remote teams meet occasionally, whereas others span countries and time zones and only ever connect virtually. Remote work takes place on a spectrum from fully remote work to a part-remote/part-office split, through to occasional or ad hoc home working while still being based predominantly in an office.

Remote working and home working are just two forms of flexible working; remote work can also be undertaken at the same time as other forms of flexibility such as time and schedule flexibility.

Remote work has only become truly possible as a result of technology in particular the internet and affordable wifi. Technology has enabled us to truly work anywhere and any when. As early as the mid-1980s leading management thinkers were predicting that remote working would be the future of work. However, it took a global pandemic before many organizations took remote work seriously and introduced it at scale largely as a necessity rather than through choice. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, those companies that were entirely remote were still few and far between.

Neither remote working nor home working are new ideas, but they escalated significantly as a result of Covid-19. It has been estimated that across Europe up to 100 million employees went to work from home in mid-2020, many of them doing so for the first time. In some countries up to half the working population spent an extensive period working from home, required to do so by their respective governments.

During this time, a strong, consistent and very global voice emerged employees wanted to work from home more often in the future. Most of them, however, did not want to work remotely all of the time, but instead wanted to spend some of the time in offices with colleagues and some of the time working remotely. Both industry surveys and academic research (details of which you can find in the References and Further Reading section of this book) typically found that around 60 to 80 per cent of employees wanted to work in this way. Organizations quickly responded, many of them confirming that employees would not be required to return to their offices at least not all of the time. The idea of hybrid or blended working was born.

Although the pandemic drove this rapid shift to remote work, it has always been desired by employees, while not necessarily available to them. In 2019 the UK Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development described the progress of flexible working adoption as glacial, with many employees reporting that they could not access the type of flexible working they wanted or needed. Early research, however, now suggests that home working will stick after the Covid-19 pandemic. Organizations and individuals have both invested in home working; organizations in new technologies and training, and individuals in their own homes. Similarly, both organizations and their employees have found home working to be better than they might previously have believed possible. Jobs that were once considered unsuitable for remote working were proved to be so, and many managers realized that their fears that employees would misuse flexible or remote working were unfounded. In fact the majority of employees reported that they considered themselves to be at least as, if not more productive when working from home when compared to the office.

From an organizational point of view there are many potential benefits to introducing remote working. Research indicates that remote working, and indeed other forms of flexible working, can increase job satisfaction, reduce absenteeism, attract and retain talent and reduce estates costs (Dale, 2020). When people do work remotely, they usually tend to want to continue to do so, becoming strong advocates of it to others.

Together these factors point to a future that will be more flexible, and involve much more home or remote working than in the past. These new ways of working may take many forms. At one end of the spectrum remote work (or hybrid work) might simply mean working the occasional day from home; at the other end, 100 per cent remote work with no formal office base. For many though, the emerging expectation of hybrid and blended working (also sometimes referred to as part-remote) is that most people will spend a little time in each place each week depending on the type of work that they do. Organizations are likely to take a variety of different approaches depending on their own particular context, customers and stakeholders.

Of course, not every type of work can be undertaken remotely. It is largely the preserve of the knowledge worker people whose work involves thinking, problem solving, writing or processing information. Whether a role is suitable for remote or home working will depend on several factors:

• the duties and responsibilities of the job itself

• operational requirements

• the needs of the team or organization

• the type of collaboration required with other people

• availability of enabling technology

• or the need for work to be completed at a specific place or time

Identifying the suitability of a role for remote working, and indeed whether an individual is able to undertake it effectively, are first steps in identifying potential for creating success.

Increased home and remote working has profound implications that stretch far beyond the workplace. It also means that those who will work remotely, and those who will lead remote teams, need to create the conditions for success in this new future. We are very familiar with how to operate and create career success in an office we have after all been doing so since the Industrial Revolution. For many people, remote work before the pandemic was an occasional experience. As many learnt during the global pandemic, regular remote work is very different from working in the office as default, and hybrid working is different again.