Remote working doesn’t have to feel remote.

New working patterns are one of the major trends of the  of the last 5 years. We see a lot in the media about remote working, with grave warnings for employers about the challenges of managing teams and the loss of collaboration and creativity – and for employees who miss out on social connections and can feel isolated at home. Then there are the counterarguments of greater productivity (good for the employer), the joys of less commuting (for the employee) and particular benefits for people juggling families or managing health conditions.

The ability to work from home is largely the preserve of professional, office-based roles: medics, teachers, transport or retail workers among others find all this introspection very annoying. However, we have now notched up almost 4 years of managing a fully remote business. We have put a great deal of thought and effort into this since we left our lovely farmyard offices in the extraordinary circumstances of March 2020 - and feel the time is right to lend our perspective to the debate.

On balance, remote working has been very positive for Blue Marble – not least for attracting talented researchers from anywhere in the UK. But the well-documented downsides of isolation and loss of teamworking are real, and we take these seriously. This is what we have learned:

·        It is vital for us to have regular team days to maintain familiarity and shared experiences as a company: we have settled for 8-weekly meet-ups which are a mix of social time, training, agency updates, celebrations, creativity sessions and reflection.

·        Remote working doesn’t have to be home working. We offer everyone a subscription to shared workspace for 5 days a month and use a national provider to enable the team to work in different places. We have clusters of staff in London, Edinburgh and Bristol, where colleagues use these spaces to meet and work together.

·        Returning to face-to-face fieldwork – and visiting clients’ offices – have additional benefits in a remote working context providing the chance to work alongside colleagues.

·        Online tools really can replace the watercooler moments: we use different channels for the incidental chat that makes office life entertaining, interesting, even mind expanding. For instance, the team WhatsApp is the office backchat and often very funny;  an innocent ‘can anybody help me…?’ on the ‘Question’ thread can set half the team off on a mission to cross new frontiers.

·        Remote businesses have to provide space for cross-fertilisation of ideas: we instigated a new type of weekly meeting to replace the sharing of problems or news that happens more naturally within an office. (But also worth saying that achieving this has been iterative: we have tried various ways to create social and creative time but always take soundings and ditch initiatives that don’t hit the spot.)

·        Strong line management systems are an effective early warning system to trigger broader pastoral care where needed e.g. via our access to coaches.

At some point our remote working experiment became permanent and we’ve not looked back. We think there is equity in the fact that we are all remote. And we don’t have to manage the hybrid option which has many of the same drawbacks but without the sort of mitigations that we have put in place.

We have experienced a more fundamental benefit, however, that explains why we plan to carry on this way. While ‘remote’ conjures thoughts of back bedrooms, isolation and stifling personal development, it can also engender a new office culture that sits squarely around trust. The remote model does not allow for micro management, siloed working or rigid hierarchies. Instead, effective remote working is contingent on trust between the company and its staff. This trust improves communication, creates strong teams, and builds personal confidence and autonomy. It also improves morale, supports collaboration, fosters openness and encourages good problem solving.

We know that our way of working isn't right for everyone, or possible for every business, but our ‘close-knit-remote’ model is proving successful for us.