A Productive Remote Work Culture

How can you enable your teams to be successful through a global pandemic?

The coronavirus pandemic has kicked off the most significant work from home experiment of our time. As these conditions become the new norm, companies are finding that existing business problems are being amplified - and remote working is bringing with it an array of new challenges.

Through this guide, we’ll share practical ways you can get the most from your remote team by:

Assessing changes to your team’s performance
Developing team social contracts and working cadence
Helping you get out of email and into visualising work
Setting up, and getting the most out of, the right tools
Creating more time for real work

The future is unknown and unpredictable, so it would be a mistake to focus solely on building a remote team. Instead, focus on building a resilient team.

Resilient teams can deal with anything, not just COVID, but whatever comes next. COVID is maybe the most extreme modern example of why we need resilient teams, but we saw bushfires before that and digital disruption even before that.

Inevitably we’ll continue to see radical change, so let’s make sure we’re ready for whatever comes next.

The Opportunity of Remote Work

Remote work doesn’t need to be all doom and gloom; in fact, many companies have been working this way for years.

Atlassian a large 3500 employee technology company (based in Australia) has been trialling remote work since as early as 2015 and doubled down on its efforts for their whole Australian workforce in early 2019.

Remote work enables a more flexible and dynamic workforce, giving organisations access to a pool of talent previously out of reach.

There are also many other advantages to remote work arrangements for both employers and employees.

For example:

Employee Engagement
Employee Retention
Lower Overhead
Access to better & cheaper talent pools (e.g. regional Australia)

That said, we first need to approach remote work with the right mindset.

Setting Up a Remote Team

Quick Start Guide

Setting up a remote team is not dissimilar from setting up a co-located team. As long as a team has trust, a common motivating purpose and the tools and autonomy to solve problems as they arise, they will succeed.

Think of the move to remote work as a leveling up. You are still playing the same game, but there are new challenges. You’ve been playing cricket informally with your mates in your back yard, and now you’ve been sent out to play on tour.

Some teams will make this transition more seamlessly than others. No team’s experience will be the same.

In the following section, we will walk you through step by step how to set up a successful remote team by creating a dynamic social contract.