Coronavirus pushed the world to work remotely

As we’re all painfully aware, 2020 is the year of the Coronavirus outbreak. One of the first side-effects of the pandemic on the workplace culture was a sudden and, in some cases, unplanned switch to remote work wherever possible.

Tech companies were at the forefront of this movement, largely due to the unique characteristics of our industry that accomodates remote work pretty much “out of the box”. In fact, especially in the software development world, the shift to remote work has been going on for decades, starting with outsourcing and nearshoring and, in the more recent years, with an industry-wide shift towards more home office time, distributed teams cross-country or even organizations embracing remote-first completely.

However, while many organizations were on their way to adopting more remote work, the Coronavirus pandemic really pushed things into high gear, with a number of high profile companies announcing that they’ll move to remote work completely for at least one year, some permanently!

Consequences of the shift

Probably every organization that moved to remote work analyzed the results of the move with different degrees of formalism and accuracy. Harvard Business Review recently published a very interesting and enlightening article about Microsoft’s analysis of their own accelerated remote work shift. Please do read that article in full, it’s worth it.

The results of the research are interesting in Microsoft’s case, however, while reading the article I couldn’t help but draw parallels to how we operate in InfiniSwiss. Of course, the scale differs by orders of magnitude between the two organizations, but barring that the conclusions drawn by the research ring true to what we experienced in InfiniSwiss, as an organization that offered and encouraged unlimited remote work from the very start. Let’s take them one at a time…

When driven by employees, entrenched norms can change quickly

Microsoft noticed that individual meeting time shrank to 30 minutes or less from the previous mark of about 1 hour. The negative effect of longer meetings on productivity has been researched before, however, in this case the reduction in time came about organically, in other words people started wondering whether longer meetings really help. When they realized they didn’t, they just cut down the meeting time on their own, naturally.

In InfiniSwiss we embraced this organizational hacking culture from the start. Our employees are encouraged to try things out with a do it first, analyze it later mindset. For example, from a tools point of view, we started out using GSuite and moved to Office365, in Office365 we reorganized our storage from OneDrive to Teams Sharepoint, for chat we went from Slack to Teams (trying also Skype, Discord and some others in between), while for video calling we went from Skype to Rooms to Slack to Teams to Zoom.

Similar changes happened on an organizational level, starting with a completely flat, role-less structure and leading to the introduction of various roles while keeping the organizational flatness (we do that by having roles devoid of managerial power and instead defining responsibilities, such as having somebody driving change or as a business support person for a customer or as blog-master :wink:), streamlining processes, defining how meetings take place etc.

All of these changes were driven by people. Every single time, although there were existing and working tools or processes in place, the value-added stuff won out fast.

Managers work increased, but it helped the employees

For Microsoft, the number of meetings between managers and employees increased, as did the working hours of the managers. However, in doing this the managers actually succeeded in helping the employees work less or, in any case, be less affected by the remote work shift. They did this by providing an insulating layer between external factors and the employees as well as helping the employees manage their time better.

In InfiniSwiss the interesting thing is we have no managers. By having a completely flat structure from the start, we actually experienced what Microsoft’s research shows from the get-go, but naturally and to a larger extent. Because each of us is independent and self-driven, we’re all collaborating a lot (meeting, pair programming or just brainstorming) and during all this collaboration we try to help each other as much as possible. This leads to an extremely “safe” environment where each of us knows we can rely on several colleagues to help, take stuff over or just offer an opinion when needed.

We feel this brings multiple benefits:

  • there are no bottlenecks or single points of failure in the form of some person (manager)
  • people are more empowered to be helpful, independent and entrepreneurial
  • communication between customer and our teams is direct, without any additional layer, which leads to high bandwidth and fast feedback

In the end, what Microsoft discovered managers were able to help with in their case, happens organically in our case with every single one of our team members.

Workplace culture can shift on a dime

A fairly common view, especially in larger (enterprise?) organizations is that the norms and habits in the workplace are fairly entrenched and it’s not easy to change them. Microsoft’s research however found out the opposite: in their case, once disruption was forced on the company, flexibility shone through and people adapted fast. This was exemplified by:

  • less instant messaging during lunch hours
  • people catching up with work outside of regular working hours (e.g. in the evenings and/or nights)
  • more weekend work than before (not overtime, rather to compensate for time during the week)

These findings also resonate with our way of operating: we don’t have fixed office hours. Rather, people have to achieve 40 hours per week more or less whenever they can and prefer. The “more or less” part is there because while one could theoretically work at night and sleep during the day, there are some constraints mainly imposed by team meetings, e.g. daily call, planning or review meetings etc. Even so, none of our meetings are mandatory. Anyone can, at any time, forego attending a meeting, provided he lets the participants know in advance. This last guideline is strongly enforced when the missing person is essential to the meeting and less so otherwise.

We also don’t generally track time. We might track it if a customer requires it, but mostly we don’t, we operate on trust. People can work less one day and more another or split their working day into chunks as best fits them. Results matter, not “chair time”.

I can’t speak a lot to the other point the research makes about a sudden workplace cultural change because, in our case, the pandemic did not cause such changes. While there were some practical aspects which the pandemic did influence (e.g. zero in-office presence), by and large, we were already operating in a fully remote, fully self-organizing way before, which meant that, for us, business continued as usual.

Humans are social animals and will find a way to socialize

In Microsoft’s case virtual social meetings exploded. As people weren’t able to meet up face to face (at lunch, at the water cooler etc) they started meeting more online. Meetings such as “zoom beer” or “meet my pet” are also what we (and probably the rest of the world) started doing as well.

The research also mentions that it was expected for people’s social networks to shrink significantly, but the opposite happened, they grew. This is one of the few points in the article which I find dubious. To be clear, not the outcome, but the expectation. It feels only natural that in times of hardship, of any nature, people will reach out and nurture relationships while maybe creating new ones. As we’re living more and more in a globally interconnected, online world, the barriers to growing one’s network are at an all time low and I find it only normal that people take advantage of this.

So what comes next?…

While we don’t know where the Coronavirus pandemic is heading and what other surprises the future has in store, one thing is clear: organizations large and small have undergone a (forced) remote work experiment. And it seems that what the research has theorized for years and what practice has shown at a smaller scale is true on a global scale as well: remote work…works!

Despite some fears that people might take advantage of their new-found “freedom”, it seems that the opposite happened:

  • people manage their time better, while also being responsible (and even reachable outside of regular office hours)
  • people are more mindful about what they invest their time in to maximize their efficiency
  • people are happier because they can judge themselves which work-life balance works for them best and everyone is different so we should recognize and encourage this diversity

All in all, the trend that stands out is…

People appreciate it when they have purpose, independence and trust

In other words, moving from the world of (open-space?) offices, fixed working hours (block times?) and managers telling them what to do, to a world where they’re given a purpose, the independence to best organize their time to achieve it and the trust that they’ll succeed, leads to higher productivity and happier, more cohesive teams.

Of course, this is nothing new, studies and books pointed this out long ago. But while some companies adapted to these principles early or embraced them from the start (like we in InfiniSwis did) the Coronavirus pandemic forced the adoption on a global scale. We can only hope that other companies, like Microsoft, study the positive effects of the shift and recognize the value in the changes, thus leading the way into the future way of working.

Written by:
Adi.jpg
Adrian Hara

Managing partner and geek wannabe