The Problem with Replicating the Office in a Remote Work Environment

If you’re managing a remote or hybrid team and you still think you and all your employees will be returning to the office ‘once this pandemic is over’, you should probably think again.

A whopping 78% of knowledge workers now want location flexibility, according to Future Forum’s 2021 survey of 10,737 workers in the U.S., Australia, France, Germany, Japan and the U.K.

This period of forced remote work shone a light on the tangible benefits of work-from-home flexibility and called bologna on any claim that a central work location is at all a necessity.

The result? Employees’ expectations have changed.

Many people no longer want the hassle of the commute nor the imposed distractions and awkwardness of office life. They want the flexibility, comfort and work-life balance control of the remote work environment. And if you’re not willing or able to give it to them, there are loads of other employers who certainly will.

In fact, 73% of employees say employers will lose out on talent if they don’t offer flexible or remote working positions.

But it’s not just about offering flexible hours. It’s about the quality of the remote work experience you’re able to provide, and it’s about reshaping the future of work in a way that benefits both employees and companies alike.

While your business’s processes and culture may have worked great in an office-first setting, trying to force them into the digital world is a whole other story.

Creating the structure for remote work success

The first concern for most businesses at the onset of the pandemic was, of course, supplying their teams with the technology infrastructures to support effective remote work.

Companies quickly got comfy with instant chat, video communication tools and task management platforms—after all, many were already using them. And of course, some new systems and processes around digital security became necessary.

However, a huge challenge for employees who are new to remote working environments, as well as those who’ve been at it for a while, was—and still is—the lack of structure around work processes, expectations and successful outcomes.

The onboarding, training and learning management systems that may have worked in an office setting often don’t transition very well into the remote digital world. So even though not every employee loves working at an office, it can have its benefits.

“While we believe that the spontaneous water-cooler interactions of the office are often romanticized, we also recognize the ways in which gossip, after-work drinks and even body language come together to teach new employees the standards of behavior in the office,” said Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel authors of Out of Office, in a recent New York Times article .

“Small talk, passing conversations, even just observing your manager’s pathways through the office may seem trivial, but in the aggregate they’re far more valuable than any form of company handbook. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be translated into a remote or flexible work environment.”

While Petersen and Warzel’s article touched more specifically on the challenges of training and mentoring young employees in remote work environments, their observations easily apply across the board.

So what’s the major difference between the office and the remote environment, aside from physical location?

It’s that tangible openness. That clear view into what our managers and co-workers are doing and saying and how they’re structuring their time.

Synchronous vs. asynchronous communication

Working at an office traditionally involves a lot of synchronous communication—everything from boardroom meetings to walk-by desk chats and that water cooler gossip. When someone is standing right in front of you and you have a question for them, you just go ahead and ask it.

But this style of working and communicating doesn’t work as well in a digital environment—and arguably, not in a digital-first office setting either. It can lead to a very disruptive, inefficient and even stressful work environment.

“The average person sends and receives about 121 business emails a day, spends about 23% of their time on unnecessary emails, and sends about 200 instant messages per week via platforms such as Slack,” wrote entrepreneur and author Steve Glaveski in an article for Harvard Business Review.

Recent research by Microsoft that measured brain wave patterns of remote employees showed significantly higher markers of stress and overwork in video meetings than in non-meeting work. Fatigue begins to set in around 30 minutes into video calls, due to the high levels of sustained concentration.

This really highlights the importance of:

• scheduling video meetings only when truly necessary
• keeping meeting within the 30-minute mark, and
• ensuring when meetings need to be longer than 30 minutes, breaks are prioritized.

Managers of remote teams need to be thinking about how their employees are communicating—and also how they’re communicating with their employees. Because what used to work at the office won’t necessarily work in the digital world.

• Is everyone really working in the most efficient and effective ways, and
• do they really have what they need to be successful?

Remote work requires the right leadership

"It was difficult for many to learn how to shift from what was their effective in-person leadership style to a virtual setting," said Chantelle Turton, Senior Director, People & Culture for investment firm Top Down Ventures. "It takes a whole new unique skill set."

A common misstep of managers in the remote and digital-first world is assuming their people have what they need to be happy and successful in their work. But there’s a necessary rewiring on that mentality that needs to take place, said Turton.

Managers of remote and hybrid teams need to be more aware of seeing signs of disengagement and they need to be open to asking questions. It’s a marked shift in the qualities employers value in their leadership teams. What was valued and sought after for in-office leadership isn’t the same as what’s valued and sought after for the dispersed and digital workforce.

"What we are looking for now are true empathetic leaders–ones who understand you can create the ultimate experience for both the employee and employer by being people-focused first,” she said. "When your people feel seen individually and as a team by a leader who can challenge them and champion their career path, there is no better type of culture. And the shift to remote first work has elevated this."

Why remote work still feels distracting and disjointed

You might have adopted the right tech infrastructure for successful digital-first or remote teamwork . You might even have the right leadership—empathetic managers who are well-aware of the challenges and nuances of effectively managing dispersed teams.

But what about that openness and transparency we touched on earlier that adds clarity to work processes, expectations and success? This is still a barrier impacting the digital work environments of many. Why? Because there are processes that have been dragged forward from the office environment that just don’t work for us anymore.

Current solutions to digital work visibility involve:

1. notification torrents from apps, or subscribing slack channels to them
2. digging into each app for task status updates
3. death by direct messages, and
4. endless status meetings.

In other words, digital workers are just doing what they were doing before in the office, but now remotely. They’re buried in notifications and over-communication, and they're stressed by the pressure to respond. The quality of that remote work experience is…not what it should be.

We think remote, hybrid and digital-first teams need real visibility into the work getting done across their entire digital environments—but in a less disjointed way and without all that distraction.

How to build a better remote work experience

We started Produce8 because we, too, were working in remote, hybrid and digital-first environments—and we were feeling the pains.

Produce8 won’t help you hire the right leaders to build a better remote work culture, nor will it ensure your team members are using all the right apps to do their best work. But what it will do is:

• help your team create a more open and transparent digital work environment
• reduce the distractions involved in updating and being updated, and
• create a whole lot more time for focused work and meaningful team collaboration.

With Produce8, your team can:

• know exactly what work is getting done, where it’s getting done, and who’s doing it—automatically and in real-time
• have deep insight into your teammates’ work patterns so you can identify opportunities for greater efficiency and process optimization, and
• track the work output and contributions being made by each team member.

By just replicating the office remotely, you perpetuate the problems that existed before.

And to support these new work models, we need to reimagine our work environments, our work processes and our overall team dynamics.

We believe more trust and more transparency in our co-workers is going to be the key to collective excellence.