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4 Mistakes that cost businesses thousands when working from home

Winchester

If you’ve transitioned your team to working remotely in the past few months, chances are you’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to perfectly replicate the office experience at home—and that’s a big mistake. The real reason remote workers are more productive than their in-office counterparts is because their companies have let go of old ways of thinking about communication, collaboration and completion of tasks. Instead they employ what Molood Ceccarelli calls a “Remote-First Approach” to setting their employees up outside of the office. Ceccarelli is a remote work expert and agile coach. She is the founder of Remote Forever, a company dedicated to helping businesses maximize their remote working capabilities by creating business agility. Avoid these remote missteps and you’ll see the benefits in your bottom line.

Mistake #1: Using Too Many Online Tools

“My company has surveyed and analyzed the structures of hundreds of organizations and I’ve noticed a common theme: many will allow their various teams to buy different tools for addressing the same or similar problems,” said Ceccarelli. “One team might buy Basecamp to track tasks, for example, while another purchases Trello. Paying for overlapping products is not only a waste of company resources but also your employees’ valuable time in the event that different teams need to work with each other on a project.”

Instead, keep things simple by minimizing the number of tools and processes that all your teams will use. Choose just one tool across the organization for each group of challenges: task management, document storage, video calls, etc.

Mistake #2:  Instituting Mandatory Meetings

When you work in an office, your body gets a chance to be in motion. You go from conference room to conference room or get up to talk to co-workers. When you work from home, however, your body stays hunkered down in your chair for hours on end. What’s more, your eyes only stare at a square screen in front of you. This limited visual span, makes your eyes and your mind tired—especially when you’re in a long, unstructured video meeting that could’ve just as easily been an email.

“The financial cost is a big one for your company,” notes Ceccarelli. “A one-hour all-staff meeting with 400 people costs your company the sum of the hourly wages of all those people. When you factor in the mental fatigue that will carry over into each of those workers’ days after the meeting, the cost is actually more.”

To avoid this mistake, I challenge you to establish a new rule in your organization that says ‘No Meeting is Mandatory.’ Before you panic about calling meetings that no one shows up to, consider this. A ‘No Meeting is Mandatory’ rule would make boring meetings extinct and well-designed, exciting online workshops the new norm. The number of meetings people actually set up would likely be dramatically reduced. People would begin communicating information in less costly and more effective ways like emails, pre-recorded videos and blog posts.”

Mistake #3:  Not Being Explicit About Expectations 

If you are not used to working remotely, you might assume that when you read a message, that is enough. Meanwhile the sender of the message is waiting, confused as to whether or not anyone has seen his/her message. He/she may think an email has to be responded to within 24 hours while the recipient of that email may believe that as long as emails are responded within the same week, everything is fine. As a result, employees could spend more time resolving conflicts and misunderstandings than being productive—and that costs your company money.

“The solution is to turn implicit assumptions into explicit agreements,” advises Ceccarelli. “Make team agreements about how each tool is expected to be used and be sure everyone’s on the same page about what the accepted response time in each tool is. For example, you might decide that Voxer should be used for urgent communication and that messages should be responded to within 2 hours. Make repetitive processes explicit so that anyone on the team can follow them. Furthermore, create agreements about how decisions are made and what it means for a task to be done.” 

Mistake #4: Depending On Real-Time Conversations

When people talk about communication and collaboration in an office, they’re usually referring to real-time or synchronous exchanges of information, like meetings and workshops. But valuable exchanges of information can happen on your own time or through asynchronous interaction as well.

“I’m a tremendous advocate for asynchronous communications because they empower your employees to use their time as they see fit,” says Ceccarelli. “If they’re in the middle of a project, they can stay in that state of flow and get more done instead of heading to a video meeting or replying to an email. The more you treat employees as responsible adults, the more motivated and productive they’ll be and the more money your company will make.”

To make this work, use your task management tool not only for organization of work but also for communicating with your coworkers about each work item. Use long format texts to convey well thought out ideas. Chatting and meeting in real time should be reserved for times of emergency and inherently difficult topics, such as resolving personal conflicts. Let longer texts convey solidified ideas and allow the recipients to consume information at a time they are most ready to do so. This will empower all parties to contribute to the work with deliberation instead of offering unfinished thoughts and ideas that are usually exchanged in real time conversations.”

If remote work is new to your team, remember this: it doesn’t have to be a copy cat of your office set up. Open yourself up to new possibilities of getting things done, working together and creating culture.