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With coronavirus entering the picture in 2020, more and more organizations are making remote work an option, or even a requirement. This may be a short- or long-term solution. Regardless, you’ll need to consider how to help your employees transition to remote working and stay engaged with the company.

At Spidergap, we’ve been a 100% remote company from day 1. So in this article, we’ll share the key steps we’d recommend to any company adopting remote work. 

We’ll start with the basics (setting up a work environment), and then move onto the bigger challenges of keeping employees feeling connected and happy. As the results from Buffer’s State of Remote Work 2019 survey show below, the biggest struggles that remote workers face include “Unplugging after work” and “Loneliness” as well as “Collaborating and/or communicating”.

To work remotely, the first thing that an employee will need to do is work out where they’re going to work!

Ideally, they will find somewhere that:

If your employees are only working remotely in the short-term, then they may need to make some compromises. For example, working at the kitchen table. If they need to make compromises, then be aware that this can reduce their engagement and productivity.
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To work efficiently from home, an employee may need:

If the employee doesn’t have any of these items, then you’ll need a policy on what they can purchase and who will end up owning the device (the company or the individual).

At Spidergap, we have a “Bring Your Own Device” policy that covers:

If you’d like to review a copy of our policy as inspiration for your own, then get in touch — we’ll be happy to share!
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At some point, someone will spill tea on their laptop. Or drop it from the balcony. Or their desk will collapse. Or something less dramatic will happen, and the employee will no longer be able to work.

What should happen? You need to consider if the employee is responsible for fixing the issue, or whether the IT team will send a new device. 

At Spidergap, our policy is for employees to promptly repair or replace their own devices, and again we’ve covered this in our “Bring Your Own Device” policy which we’re happy to share.
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When working remotely, it’s important that your tools just work.

Some tools that we’ve found to be particularly useful as a remote team are:

Remember that new tools will require some form of guidance or training. Try to make it as easy and painless as possible for everyone to get up and running with each tool.
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At Spidergap, we have:

This may feel like a lot, but each of these meetings helps our teams to stay connected and in-sync, and we never have a meeting that feels unnecessary or slow.
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When working remotely, it’s not possible drop by someone’s desk or have a catch-up in the hallway to make decisions. It works far better for key decisions to be made in planned meetings instead.

For these to work well:

We recommend arranging meetings at the same time every week. Putting most of the weekly meetings on one day (e.g. Monday), helps to free up time for getting work done on other days.

For our daily all-company “huddle”, we start it at 13:36. This odd time helps with ensuring the meeting starts and finishes on time. Everyone knows it will start at 36 minutes past, and not a minute later.

Get in touch if you’d like to see our agendas!
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One practice we love at Spidergap is to start all of our routine meetings with “wins”. This is a short section — typically 5 minutes — where we reflect on the previous period and what’s been achieved.

This works brilliantly, as it helps us to stop thinking about any issues we’re facing, and get into a positive frame of mind to start the meeting. As a result, we see happier staff, less conflict, and more effective meetings.

We then get everyone onto the same page. This typically means sharing metrics and very brief status updates so everyone’s clear on where we’re at. It is not a time for discussion.

Finally, the bulk of all our meetings is spent on issues. We review all of the key issues that team members have, prioritize them, and then work from the top. As a result, decisions get made and issues are solved.

This structure isn’t specific to remote teams, but it becomes increasingly important to help avoid team members feeling disconnected.
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When working remotely, you’re not going to meet your colleagues at the water-cooler. You’ll also miss out on opportunities to catch-up over a coffee or beer. And you can’t call over your teammate to check out the cool side project you’ve been working on in the evening.

All of these casual interchanges are really important ways to help employees feel connected and engaged!

It’s important to find ways to replace these. Here’s a list of a few solutions that have worked well for us:

This may be a surprise, but — as raised in the excellent Remote book — when employees move to working remote full time, overworking can actually be a bigger challenge than underworking! 

This stems from not having a clear time that everyone leaves the office, and the feeling of not having achieved quite as much as hoped during the day. Over time, it becomes a bad habit and leaves employees feeling deflated.

So, encourage employees to create a routine. They should aim to be productive during working hours, and then finish on time!

Internally, we have a policy that team members should raise an issue if they find themselves working late more than once a week. This helps the team to remember to get their work done during normal hours and finish on time. If they really do need to work late, then the team can support and help to address this.
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Whenever we see a team member feeling down, one of the first questions we’ll ask is when they last got out for a walk or some exercise. 9 times out of 10, the answer is that it hasn’t happened, and — lo and behold — taking that walk, run or other form of exercise fixes the issue.

The exercise actually has two purposes. As well as feeling physically better, it gives the individual some mental space to take a step back, reflect, and move on. Other great tools for this are meditation and yoga.

This is really important when working remotely. Without a commute, it’s possible to spend the entire day without leaving the house, and our experience is that leaves the employee feeling both physically and mentally drained.

At the very least, we believe everyone should get out of the house once a day whether it’s at lunch or before or after work. I’ve personally found that 2 walks is better than 1! 

At Spidergap, we’re happy to let employees shift their working hours to support this and other activities such as meditation, tennis lessons, going to the gym, and getting out on the bike. We contribute towards any costs incurred as one of our benefits.
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Making sure that employees have an ergonomic work space is just as important at home as in the office. 

As it’s not easy to check on your employees at their home, they’ll need to take responsibility for their own long-term health.

You can use Google to find and share guidance on how to set up their work space. This will include:

Employees may need to purchase equipment to support this — for example, better chairs or laptop stands. This is highly recommended if people are working from home for more than a few weeks, and may be needed sooner for anyone who has back problems.
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When speaking to remote employees, you’ll often find that employees in a fully remote company are much happier than those in a company where some work remotely and some do not.

In companies that are fully remote, you’ll find:

When companies are part remote, and part on-site, then the remote employees often end up feeling like second class citizens. Meetings are optimized for those in the meeting room. Teams head to celebrate at the local spa, without an equal reward shared for those working remotely. The tools aren’t great, and the on-site IT team don’t see the need to improve them.

The answer is simple: Treat remote employees as true equals. This requires some investment of your time to think about the challenges they face, and finding solutions. But it’s worth it!
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However well you prepare, it’s likely that employees will still have questions and concerns. There needs to be a way for these to be shared, and to reach HR and your company execs where appropriate.

At Spidergap, we have an internal tool for raising and managing issues, where anyone can raise an issue with HR. We also use our weekly 1-2-1s, and a weekly employee happiness survey, to make sure we’re aware of any questions or pain points and can solve them quickly.

If you have questions about this, or anything else in this article, then we’d love to help! Get in touch :) 

We also have some specific guidance for how Learning & Development (L&D) teams can help the organization respond to coronavirus.