My Remote work Journey of 25 years
Or why remote work could be done then and even more so now.
Or why remote work could be done then and even more so now.
I remember when I started my remote journey with ITX Corp, back in 1997, almost 25 years ago. Music had peaked a couple of years earlier for my generation, but we had not realized it yet. Page and Brin had had just founded Google, although I had not yet heard of it. Construction began on the ISS.
And I had just landed a remote freelance job working for a US startup, from Argentina.
Work remotely? That was almost unheard of. It was uncertain. How would I get paid? How would I communicate with the rest of the team? How would my employer know that I was working? How would I even know whether I was doing a good job?
To make things worse, remote work environments and tools these days were…primitive to say the least. There was email, yes. But social collaboration tools were extremely limited.
No Slack or Microsoft Teams to keep in touch with the team (if I can think hard, I can still hear the infamous “Uh oh” of iCQ — it scarred me). And what a pleasure it was when some tools allowed us to combine several IM clients, so we didn’t have to keep track of several ones separately!
Having a teleconference with several people? Good luck getting everybody on at the same time! And when you did, someone would freeze in the middle of the sentence. “Could you repeat, please? You broke up a little (a lot).”
There was no “SaaS everything” to allow employees to have consistent distributed experiences without having to worry about the physical installation of software on their device.
There was no cloud, therefore there were no cloud collaboration tools. There were no code repositories, just log in to the server through your FTP client and replace files. Feel free to mess things up. No Continuous Integration or Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tools, no automated deployment pipelines. There were no Agile PM tools. Heck, there were not even Agile methodologies widely available!
There are so many tools and benefits we have today that did not exist back then. And yet, we created value and we persevered. For 20+ years we improvised, we adapted, we overcame.
How we did it: We built language around the value of Integrity
We were able to accomplish that because there was a common foundation of values that guided our work. We articulated the expectations that existed from (and for) everyone in our team, through a Commitment Conversation conducted regularly by the respective managers. We built and deployed solid language about integrity so people could be more in command of their promises, not as a moral mandate but rather as a workability requirement. We coached our team on how to set up healthy remote working environments. This was the “software we installed on people” before the actual collaboration software was even available.
How we did it: We crafted experiences that allowed people to build relationships remotely
We created instances for people to connect at a human level, and we took the opportunities to meet in person from time to time to cement those relationships (e.g., global internal summits, learning events, team retreats, etc). But knowing that we have a truly globally distributed team -and that we are unlikely to ever be able to get everyone in the same room at the same time- we implemented some virtual experiences as well (monthly town hall meetings, internal cross-training programs, cross-team recognition initiatives, remote agile ceremonies, and even a yearbook shipped to everyone across the world).
We also acknowledged that when one person in a meeting/team is remote, then everybody is remote to an extent, and the experiences should be adjusted accordingly (a “remote first” approach that ensures that the core experiences are designed with remote users in mind and do not degrade significantly for whoever is not physically present in the room).
And of course, we leveraged tools that enabled collaboration once they became available, we integrated existing tools through APIs to make information transfer more seamless and we even created our own tools, when needed. We are software geeks, after all, and this is an area where innovation is constant. But one does need to apply some discipline to it: while having cool new shiny tools is exciting, the careless proliferation of tools and feature bloating can hinder rather than assist with collaboration.
WfH vs RtO? WfHF-WfA! (*)
Most recently, we all -companies and employees- got a taste of what remote feels like during the global pandemic. And while -yes- there were some hiccups, and some processes are not (yet) optimized for remote participation, the world kept spinning and (most) companies kept making money. And many employees learned to enjoy the better life-work balance that usually comes with working from home.
Sure, there is still a lot to improve, particularly around keeping career development opportunities remote-friendly, managing mental health and feelings of isolation, and making hybrid workplaces more inclusive. And there are still jobs that require a degree of physical presence. But more and more jobs are being done from home, there’s really no turning back.
A few years ago, in the bizarre old pre-pandemic world, I wrote an article about how autonomous cars could mean that the boundaries between home, means of transportation, and workspace could be blurred, resulting in disruptions in society, the markets, and the environment. I was exceedingly cautious, my friends. The best commute is no commute.
That is why when I read about companies -with mostly knowledge workers- debating whether to allow their employees to work from home more permanently, and questioning whether value can be created remotely, I tend to ponder the thought and effort those companies have put into making their culture remote-friendly. Is it because they have not yet figured out how to measure their productivity? Then THAT is the real problem they need to fix.
And if it’s because they don’t know what to do with their cool -empty- office space, there are some ideas already being implemented. Collaborative spaces are, above all, mind spaces. Employees CAN be productive remotely. You just need to create the proper conditions for it.
In the meantime, every time a company announces inflexible back-to-the-office policies and mandates, somewhere a recruiter hiring for remote positions smiles greedily ;).
(*) Work from Home, Return to Office, Work from Home Forever — Work from Anywhere.