Turning the remote location dilemma into a business opportunity: Four Key Lessons.

One of the things I always ask the team when we are trying to come up with creative ideas or solve complex problems is “who else has this challenge and can we speak to them and find out the good and the bad of how they solved it”.

It’s not laziness on my part, but I genuinely believe that collaboration and sharing is one of the best problem-solving techniques out there. It’s also a great opportunity to talk to peers and get a sense of how things work for others. And who knows, there may also be a flourishing relationship that can be developed – personal and business. Everyone wins.

So, for this piece, I wanted to pro-actively give back. I like to think I am very open and often share our ideas, thoughts and practices with others anyway, but I noticed more and more things on LinkedIn asking about remote working and how organisations are changing etc. And this piece is actually inspired by a post I replied to at 5:30am this morning. I am off work today, but my brain woke early, so with brew in hand, I wanted to write a quick article!

For ROQ, remote working was not totally alien pre-pandemic. We have our Test Lab and working away from clients was pretty normal – in fact it was one of our core offerings as it was becoming clearer that 100% co-location of teams is really not needed. However, remote now really means “home working”. And that is different. And it’s also a challenge that many companies face.

So, the challenge we faced and will continue to work on, is how do we strike a balance between ensuring we keep our clients happy and maintain our culture (which is something we are immensely proud of), with employee happiness and welfare at the heart of it. Complex? Very.

However, our approach was simple in many ways, the complexity was in the analysis and detail. The execution, I believe, is also quite simple, so hopefully the rest of the article is helpful.

Our Approach

To solve this, we engaged an expert in people/culture who facilitated several workshops.

On the face of it, the problem we were looking to solve seemed simple, but actually, what transpired was actually, as a management team, we had legacy mindsets, we had different views on what it might look like and we were actually trying to solve multiple issues really – hence why it appeared very hard to figure out.

Workshop One was really about establishing the problem statement. An agreed problem that we all clearly bought into and understood. It involved a deep analysis of the business, a SWOT on ROQ and the market and some really challenging questions on what we wanted the future to look like. 

Now this may sound like a dysfunctional management team. Hand on heart, its absolutely not. It’s actually human beings, trying to solve really complex issues without necessarily stepping back from the day-to-day grind.

Lesson One. To solve really complex problems like this, take the time to step back and agree what the common problem statement is. It is so much easier to solve. Personal recommendation is an external facilitator works really well in these situations.

Workshop Two was about addressing the real problem. Without going into all the minutia, this considered things as diverse as branding, employee contracts, recruitment strategy, sales messaging, culture, communication, retention, offices, company events etc, etc.

All of the above (and there were many others) would/could be impacted by any changes to “working location”. So, they rightly had to be considered thoroughly and agreed actions taken from the sessions. An execution plan was formed, including a real focus on communication etc.

Lesson Two. The wider team were asking questions about the future working environment for months. Some were more impatient than others, but the key lesson here is not to be rushed on such big decisions. We communicated our approach (and the complexity of it) to solving the problem, made no promises of what the outcome may be, and that we would tell them on an agreed date. And we delivered.

 The Outcome

The outcome is that we have now moved to a “remote first” approach.

For our consultants, everyone is home based, unless they need to work on a client site (as needed) or the Test Lab (as needed). This two-way flexibility is much appreciated by the team and enables our client delivery not to be impacted. The realisation that total co-location isn’t needed supports this immensely.

For operational roles (sales, recruitment, finance etc.) these are home based with team days in the offices (as needed) and for collaboration sessions - which definitely work better in a room with a white board and some biscuits.

There are also no restrictions on when people can come into the Test Lab / Office, so if you want to be in, you can. We are also running “office” days, where we will rent an office across the country so that people can come in and be with colleagues if they want to – a chance to meet other team members and avoid being lonely.

Genuinely quite simple.

Watching Brief

But with all changes of this size and nature you need to be mindful of the warning signals and the flags that may get raised. We have highlighted several key areas to keep a close eye on – client delivery, cultural impact, policy/processes that now don’t work (in a home working model) and communication, communication, communication.

Lesson Three. Now, you may be thinking all this isn’t rocket science. And you’d be right. The key lesson here is that the most complex problems don’t always need the most complex answers. In fact, the simplicity of solution execution is ideally what you should strive for.

Summary

I would say that its early days in our change of policy, but the reception of the team and the clients is positive. It is becoming really clear that 100% co-location is not needed to deliver the vast majority of programmes.

We have seen our client satisfaction really benefit from the increased productivity gains of not being co-located as everyone is more connected – not physically, but mentally.

It has helped hugely with our recruitment this last 12 months and we now have a much wider geographic reach. It will also culminate in a load of other strategic changes in the coming 12 months, that are hugely exciting. I’ll leave that there for now but keep your eye on us.

Lesson Four. Look on this moment as a huge opportunity rather than just the pacification of external pressure. It may not make you change anything, but at least you know you gave deep thought to it.

Good luck with your decision making in this area. I empathise entirely with your dilemma, and always happy to share ideas/thoughts, although I may not show you the war wounds!