Category: Remote Work

How to start? The answer to that question depends highly on your actual company. How old is it? How many employees in how many locations does your company have? Which industry is yours? What kind of work are you conducting?

But there are a lot of advices, which fits them all. There are 2 possible ways, I like to show you:

Possibility 1: You will start a new business right now

Start completly remote. Other words for that are ‘100% remote company’ or being a ‘remote-first company’. You will save a lot of money for office space, furniture, hardware, electricity and cleaning service. Even if you have just planned to rent some desks in a bigger office building – save this. Hire the best talented people for you endevour and participate in all the benefits explained in ‘Why your company has to go remote‘.

Posibility 2: You have a running company and should transform

Start small. Send your staff to the home office for some days a month, i.e. every Friday or two days a week, whatever fits to your projects. To be clear, you should not ‘send’ them home, you should ‘let’ them work from home. There will be some characters or some home situations (i.e. loudly kids or housemates), where the home office is the second best solution.

After that trail for some time, adjust you processes, tools and regulations if needed (read ‘How to prepare your company for remote workers‘) and increase the remote portion of the remote time. Please don’t forget to consider the feedback of your employees about that topic.

Only after all that improving start to hire fully remote workers. And further on track the mood inside your teams. Try to avoid any unequal treatment of onsite and remote workers.

If you want to jump into the cold water with your existing company instead, try it only with a separated project. The topic and the depending work should be as discrete as possible and should not overlap with the work of the onsite employees much. After getting through that project do the lessons learned accordingly and transform the rest of the company. Don’t allow a separated firm inside your company for too long.

What is always helpful on the way of the transition of your business is to be accompanied by an expert who has the knowledge about all the common stumbling blocks which will pop up.

Do you have other experiences or additional advice? Please let us know in the comments!

After knowing why your company has to go remote, it’s important to prepare your business for remote workers. I will make that an easy one for you and just ask you some questions:

Are the documents, someone will need to work with your company (i.e. requirements), in English or another language?

If you have your documents in a foreign language and would not translate them, you narrow the number of possible remote workers by a order of magnitude minimum. That is still right, if you have the documents in Spanish, French, German or Mandarin – English is simply the most common language in the business world.

Is the company language English or your native language?

Similar to the question above, you are limited, if your native language is not English. Even if its English, you should adjust the writing and talking to an English which everyone on earth has the possibility to understand. If only the documents are in English, it can work, but meetings are hard for people, which are not used to the conversations in English.

Are your employees measured by ‘hours in the office’ or by the value of their work?

Remote workers are measured by their working results, not their time spend on the work (even if they are paid per hour). Though it’s easier for managers and collegues, if the onsite staff is also measured by results. That is also an efficiency boost!

Is ‘trust in employees’ a phrase at your company or is something behind it?

Nearly all managers claim that they are trusting their employees, unfortunately many of them don’t. That’s a really important point to fix. Because if managers are not convinced, that workers will work at home or anywhere else than the cubicle, the whole system will fail. A good way to help with that is measure the people by their work, not office time – normally the trust should rise with that.

Do you have a reliable internet connection or breaks or slows it down sometimes?

Sounds like the norm? Yes, but it isn’t. That is especially important if the remote workers will work with tools on your servers. For sure the same counts for the availability of your servers. Get this fixed before you create inefficiencies or bad vibes around the collegues.

Are all documents, someone will need the work with, available from a remote site?

Again it sounds like standard. But lots of security policies are reducing the availability in many coorporations – avoid that from the beginning, be it on your servers or in the cloud.

What are possible experiences with partly remote teams already?

The common situation is a customer, which sits somewhere, most of your collegues sit around you and some suppliers are sitting somewhere as well. That is already an remote environment! What works already in your company (i.e. easy video conferencing and screen sharing) and where should you improve?

You have to go remote to sustain in the future, so prepare your company now. Avoid frustrations about remote work just because you were not prepared.

Which point is missing? Please write about it in the comments!