5 Levels of Remote Working and Where You Need To Be

COVID 19 has forced companies all over the world to enact or create remote working protocols. Like most things worth doing, there are different levels of proficiency and sophistication scale. Many newly remote workers seem to conflate simply by downloading zoom, slack and having access to email. But, having a ball and a ring does not make an NBA basketballer. Basically, there are 5 levels of Distributed Team. There may be more, but from the researches I made, I was able to put together these five basic levels. This would let us know where we stand as a company, so we could work to achieve greater heights.

Level 1: Non-Deliberate Action

Truth be told, nothing deliberate has been done by most companies to support remote working, but employees can still keep the ball rolling somewhat if they are at home for a day. They have access to their smartphones and email, perhaps they dial into a few meetings, but they will put off most things while they are back in the office and will be a shadow of the office bond selves. Level 1 is where the overwhelming majority of organization was prior to the Covid-19 outbreak.

Level 2: Recreating the office online

This is where most organizations now reside especially traditional ones. It is where your employees have access to video conferencing software (e.g. zoom), instant messaging software (e.g. Slack), and email, but instead of redesigning work to take advantage of the new medium, the team ultimately ends up recreating online, how they work in the office. This extends into many of the bad habits that permeate the modern office and suppress the ability of knowledge workers to actually think, leaving them wired to desktop dings like Pavlov dogs. At level 2, people are still expected to be online from 9 am through to 5 pm, and in some cases to be subject to what essentially amounts to spyware with employers installing screen logging software on their employee’s machine so that they can play the role of Big Brother.

Level 3: Adapting to the Medium

At level 3, organizations start to adapt to and take advantage of the medium. E.g. some organizations use Google docs that is visible to all and updated in real-time during a discussion, so that there is a shared understanding of what is discussed and decided, eliminating the risk of lost in translation errors and time wasted thereafter. The companies, also, start to invest in better equipment for their employees as well, such as lighting for video calls and background noise-canceling microphones.

Level 4: Asynchronous Communication

The reality is that most things do not require an immediate response. For most things, a one-way email/instant message should do the job, with the recipient responding when it suits them. If something really is urgent, then the mode of communication should reflect that. NOTE: Pick up the phone (to call) only if urgent. Apart from the massive benefit of giving knowledge workers time to think, create and get into the flow state, asynchronous communication predisposes people to make better decisions. Companies that truly practice asynchronous communication have stepped out of the industrial revolution. Presence no longer translates to productivity or hours with output as on the factory floor. Globally distributed teams who work asynchronously and master passing the baton can triple productivity. Compare this to a local team relying on everybody to be in an office between 9 am to 5 pm.

Level 5: Nirvana (Liberation)

This is where your distributed teams work better than any in-person team ever could. This phase has more emphasis on environmental design insofar as the organization culture and physical environment people work in is concerned.

Cons to these levels of remote working:

Team bonding and building:

Instead of telling employees to be at office 11 months a year and 4 weeks off, employees have 11 months of remote work a year and have to make time to travel for up to 4 weeks a year for team building and bonding events.

Osmotic and Office Communication:

With everybody working online, employees miss out on water cooler conversations, overhearing other people say something that they can help with, or just have a general awareness of your team activity by virtue of being within earshot discussions.
Working from home is for the moment a privilege and not a right for so many. So let us be more intentional about how we work, show that we can be more productive away from the office, and earn the right to work form wherever we please more often.