The Future of Remote Work Is Social: Here’s Why

Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Effective Communication with Virtual Teams (23-slide PowerPoint presentation). The number of people working remotely has been increasing progressively across the globe. An employee benefits report narrates that around 60% companies in the US offer telecommuting opportunities. According to Upwork, freelancers and contractors have increased by 81% from 2014 to 2017. [read more]

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Remote work has already evolved considerably since it began to emerge as a trend more than a decade ago, but it still has a long way to go to be truly effective. These days, teams transitioning from a traditional office-based work environment to a remote, home-based one tend to think in antiquated terms, attempting to translate whatever they did in the office to a new environment—rather than creating an environment specifically for remote work. 

But as remote work evolves, we’re going to discover and popularize new modes of interaction and collaboration that empower employees to do their best. Today, the future of remote works looks like it’s going to prioritize social interactions—much like how blogs, forums, and social media platforms connect us in our personal lives. 

The Problem With Taking the Office Home

Many corporate decision makers suffer from status quo bias, believing that the best way to keep the company moving when transitioning to remote work is to keep as many things the same as possible—in other words, they want to translate the office to a new environment. 

On the surface, this seems logical, but it comes with a couple of major problems. First, not every office activity can be easily translated to a remote model. Second, many office activities weren’t very productive in the first place. 

A key example here is in-person meetings; hosting a meeting in a small conference room in person is much different than trying to host the same meeting via video chat or a conference call, where technical difficulties and interruptions make everything harder to manage. On top of that, many meetings are practically unnecessary to begin with. 

The Advantages of a Collaborative Social Environment

Instead, it’s much better for organizations to rely on tools that allow them to create dynamic, social team environments online. With the help of individual webpages, segmented channels for different departments and topics, and profiles for individuals, companies can benefit from several distinct advantages: 

• Transparency. One of the key advantages of the online social model is that it provides adequate transparency. Employees can easily interact with each other in public threads related to their projects, and team leaders can view their work and discussions at any time. This provides more visibility than email, which is a functionally private communication platform, or in-person conversations, which need to be recorded or eavesdropped on to be witnessed. And ultimately, transparency in business is a good thing. 

• Time independence. Social dynamics are also much less time sensitive than, say, hosting an in-person meeting or sending an email. Employees can respond to developing threads and edit pages as they have time, resulting in more employee freedom. People can choose to work the hours that are most productive for them, and can afford to be less distracted by constant notifications of new communications. 

• Autonomy. In line with this, employees are able to exercise more autonomy. They can choose to navigate the online social world however they want, rather than being physically required to be in a certain place at a certain time. They also aren’t obliged to follow the whims of a micromanaging boss. Multiple studies have found that autonomy is the key to employee happiness and morale, so incorporating this model could greatly reduce turnover while boosting productivity. 

• Effective collaboration. Collaboration is tricky even in the real world, but the right online social tools can make it easier to navigate. The key here is flexibility; having the option to text chat, voice call, video call, or work on a document together is imperative to finding the right solution for the right application. Employees with more flexible options can get more done in less time.

• Accountability. Most online social platforms for businesses also have profiles that allow you to track the efforts of individuals within your team. This forces people to be more accountable for what they do each day; you can easily see how active each person is, how many tasks they’ve closed, and what kind of discussions they’ve participated it. 

• Analytics. High-level, you can also use analytics capabilities to track the performance of the entire organization. For example, you can see whether productivity is trending up or trending down after the initial transition to working from home—and delve into the root causes for those changes. 

If your business wants to succeed with a remote work model, you need to optimize for remote work—and not simply try to make your office work from home. Tools for social, remote collaboration are still undergoing evolution and development, so there’s no single “correct” picture for effective remote teamwork. But you’ll need to come up with something both effective and tailored to your remote needs if you want to be successful.

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