Work Life Rebalanced
Read this report by Bond that unveiled some interesting remote work trends. The issues faced by companies could be solved by Agile practices.
The case for remote work
We’ve been trending towards remote work but with the Coronavirus, we’ve been pushed into it and found it works well.
- We have often been in large open spaces at technology companies filled with people using laptops at standing desks while wearing headphones to tune out background noise. Despite the advantage of being in the same space, the workers often collaborate mostly using digital tools. We have questioned what percentage of workers need to be in the same place at the same time – is there a better win-win arrangement?
- Beginning on March 2, Bay-Area technology companies began to shift to work-from-home owing to Covid-19…in effect, a big experiment started that will likely change the way lots of office work is done
Bond's learnings
Through their informal survey, Bond learned some surprising things:
- Remote working works.
- Productivity is same or even higher
- Video calling works. Messenger apps like slack work well.
- People have saved hours a day in commute time.
- Families are able to share more meals together
*There are a few challenges that need to be worked out like the challenges to focus and productivity with kids homeschooling. Remote working requires people to improve their written communication skills to enable effective synchronous and asynchronous communication.*
The case for Agile practices in remote work
The trend to remote work will continue and agile team practices may provide a proven template for team cohesion, creativity and productivity.
Top-of-mind issues with large-scale remote work include questions of how to:
- Ensure creativity is captured and productivity is maintained
- Determine which teams are optimized by working together in-person all the time / some of the time / rarely
- Maintain engagement and culture(s), recruit / train / develop / retain people, and manage human resources
- Manage technology / security with rising numbers of remote workers
- Think about recruiting if physical proximity to headquarters / office is less relevant
- Organize / utilize office space(s)
- Evolve business travel and entertainment