Committing to Hybrid & Virtual Work Environments

Remote: Office Not Required

As the world continues to navigate what returning to the office looks like for them, we were inspired to take a deeper dive into committing to a virtual or hybrid work environment. 

Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, published in 2013 explores what a virtual work environment looked like before Zoom, Teams, and 5G. In short, much of what is discussed in the book is what we’ve all been living since March of 2020, and while some teams have successfully adapted to asynchronous project work, and communicating expectations and deliverables via virtual platforms, there are those who may be chomping at the bit to get back to “the old way”. 

Whether your team is intending on remaining virtual (like eGuide), returning to office, or falling somewhere in between. We wanted to highlight a few of our favorite concepts from the book that are applicable to the road ahead for us all. 

Meeting Should Be Sacred, Not Routine. 

“Meetings should be great—they’re opportunities for a group of people sitting together around a table to directly communicate. That should be a good thing. And it is, but only if treated as a rare delicacy.” 

We have all been in meetings that could have been an email or slack message. A quick 15 minute 1:1 on Zoom, or having a 10 minute Slack exchange is different from calling a weekly all-staff meeting. As they say in Remote, a 1 hour meeting with 5 people is not a 1 hour meeting, it’s a 5 hour meeting. 

As project managers, leaders, and owners of our organizations, respecting the time of your employees can mean the difference between a productive day, or a day spent tuning out and feigning interest. We agree there is a time and a place to bring everyone together, but as Jason & David illustrate, it should be the exception, not the rule. 

The Right Space for the Right Work

"The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely. When you work on your own, far away from the buzzing swarm at headquarters, you can settle into your own productive zone. You can actually get work done—the same work that you couldn’t get done at work!"

Remote doesn't have to be an "all or nothing" approach. Identifying the days or times that are best suited to working alone, without interruptions, and when to plan for collaboration, can create a work environment that is relevant to the goals of the day and increase productivity for the entire team.  Now that we have comfortably identified how we are most productive when working from home, it’s a wonder how any work was accomplished in the trendy open office concepts of pre-pandemic. 

If you are considering a shift back to the office, it may be worth planning for desk space, productivity space, and collaboration space. If you are committing to a hybrid model, is it really necessary to have dedicated desks or would it be better to have work stations that fit the type of work your team is needing to accomplish? 

Managing Projects, Not Chairs. 

“If you run your ship with the conviction that everyone’s a slacker, your employees will put all their ingenuity into proving you right.” 

Having the right people for the right job is an important part of managing any team, but especially if the majority of your team is working remotely, creating an environment that is autonomous, transparent, and fluid will ensure that questions and meetings are mitigated, and deadlines are being met. 

Ask yourself this: does your team have all of the tools they need to perform their job independently of management? If you are a manager, ask yourself: am I focused on developing efficiency and skills more than I am focused on micromanaging time-logs and out-of-office responses? 

If deliverables are consistently not being met, and deadlines are being missed, it is most likely not the fault of the employees (although some employees may not be the right fit), but rather the manager whose role has become to track the teams every movement in doing their job. 

Trusting Your Team To Do The Right Thing

“As Sir Richard Branson commented in his ode to working remotely: 'To successfully work with other people, you have to trust each other. A big part of this is trusting people to get their work done wherever they are, without supervision.'” 

If deliverables are consistently not being met, and deadlines are being missed, it is most likely not the fault of the employees (although some employees may not be the right fit), but rather the manager whose role has become to track the teams every movement in doing their job. 

Having trust that your team is comprised of adults who have managed to show enough skills to land them in the positions they hold, and may know how to execute and manage their day to accomplish what they need to get done, allows for an environment where everyone will continue to raise each other’s performance to do the best work they can produce.

Making the Shift and Committing Long Term

Finding the right balance for your team may also take some time. Keeping an open line of communication will be crucial in navigating post-pandemic work environments, and as the items above allure to, an office is more than just walls, chairs, and chairs. Creating a working environment that is built on the fundamentals of trust, respect, and as Jason Fried puts it, “great people coming together to do great work”, it won’t matter where that work is being done from.