How can your organization adapt better to virtual work?

A framework for understanding distributed work and how to improve it.

The Great Digital Migration sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic left many companies and workers in a foreign land. Accustomed to working in an office surrounded by coworkers and resources, many businesses had learned to be quite efficient in their own environment. When they were suddenly driven from these spaces, most of them sensibly attempted to recreate a virtual version of “what was working.” 

However, what worked in the office might not work so well anywhere else. 

If you count yourself among those millions of workers that were suddenly distanced from an office environment and never quite fully returned, you are probably not taking full advantage of the possibilities offered by remote work. We can learn from companies that intentionally made that transition, pre- or post-pandemic, in an effort to improve their work. 

Today, we are going to look at a helpful framework for understanding where your business is right now, as well as some ways that you might be able to improve your personal or collective remote work. 

The Five Levels of Distributed Work

The founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, has developed a useful scale for understanding the extent of distribution of a business’s work. He prefers the term “distributed work” instead of remote work since “remote” implies the presence of a central office, which is simply not the case for many virtual businesses. 

See if you can identify your organization's current position in the hierarchy. 

Level 0: Onsite Only

No ability to perform work remotely. Workers must be physically at their site to carry out their jobs. 

Level 1: Unintentional Remote Work 

You do the exact same thing that you did in the office, but from home. When you are at home, your work is communicated and organized through phone calls and emails. 

Level 2: Recreating the Office Online

You work the same hours with the same basic work practices—large meetings, back and forth conversations, swapping documents around—only online. Zoom rooms take the place of conference rooms. Instant messages replace taps on the shoulder. In this zone, workers are hyperresponsive to notifications and have a hard time engaging in truly productive work. Mullenweg estimates that most companies are here. 

Level 3: Adapting to the Medium

Workers start to recognize the potential advantages of distributed work and adopt some of the tools. Dedicated sharing software facilitates much of the advancement in this stage. Shared screens through Zoom or a similar collaboration platform. Shared tasks through programs like Asana. Shared documents in Google Docs or Microsoft 365. Realtime edits and work on these shared projects begin to limit the inefficiencies of misunderstandings and replication of tasks. In this stage, written communication becomes much more important, and the hiring process may begin to emphasize the written word over other forms of communication. 

Level 4: Asynchronous Communication 

In many office tasks, most things do not require more than one person to be working on something at the same time. Nonstop notifications and alerts soliciting constant communication creates a state of unproductive hyperresponsiveness that prevents people from getting into a good flow to get great work done. 

Without a flow of constant meetings and messages, people can actually think and design days that best suit them. As long as there is some intentional overlap in times worked by different employees, there will always be an opportunity to communicate in real time, but most of it should take place asynchronously. Asynchronous communication also extends response times, alleviating the amount of emotion in a particular response. 

Level 5: Nirvana

In this hypothetical state, your remote team is operating better than an in-person team ever could. 

How to move up the scale.

Mullenweg believes that most organizations are sitting at Level 2 right now. The pandemic-driven, rapid shift mom centralized to distributed models did not allow many organizations to execute a thoughtful transition. As a result, their new work style does not pair well with their new work environments. 

If you find yourself stuck in Levels 1 or 2, here are a few concrete steps that you can take to start moving your organization towards a more efficient, effective distributed work model. 

1. Hold fewer and better meetings.

The quality and quantity of meetings can dramatically affect the efficiency of your organization. Consider the following tips to make sure that your organization is not dragging an unnecessary weight in your journey towards productive virtual work. 

1. Only hold a meeting when it is absolutely necessary. If you are holding a meeting to simply communicate one-way information, it is not necessary. Exceptions are for big announcements or company-wide updates. 
2. Set 15-minute defaults for meeting. You will work to fill your time allotment; push yourself to respect your coworkers’ time. 
3. Make sure you have a firm agenda set agenda prior to the meeting. If possible, send it to your colleagues in advance of the meeting to give them time to prepare. 
4. Invite only necessary participants. In most cases, two to four people should suffice. You should question yourself if your meeting has five, six, or more people in it.   
5. Ensure that your meetings always capture action items, responsible parties, and due dates. Avoid “boomerang meetings” to discuss the same thing one week later. 

2. Adopt asynchronous communication.

To knock hyperresponsiveness from its domineering throne, leadership must endorse asynchronous communication as an acceptable and desirable workplace practice. As you move away from constant meetings, instant messages, and phone calls, a few simple practices can improve your asynchronous communication. 

1. Provide sufficient information in your initial communication for the recipient to be able to complete the task without returning to you for additional intel. 
2. Provide a clear, reasonable due date. 
3. Provide a path of recourse for them to clarify in case the request is not clear to the recipient. This can be a good opportunity to invite verbal communication via a phone call to hash out the nuance of any confusion—“Just call me if you have any questions.” 

3. Optimize your use of technology.

Many organizations continue to trudge along with traditional office tools in the virtual environment. Others make the switch to cloud-based software, but never learn to truly take advantage of the opportunity that they offer. Here are a few simple first steps that take advantage of tools that you probably already have. Learn to rely on these tools instead of using them as an occasional novelty. 

1. Stop emailing document drafts. Dedicated cloud document sharing software like Microsoft Word 365 and Google Docs allow for real-time review and markup—eliminating the concern of multiple drafts or repeated edits. 
2. Share screens to increase meeting productivity. Zoom, Google Meet, and Slack all allow you to share your screen with a remote colleague. Make your virtual time together more productive by sharing a screen. Even if you are not working on a specific document, you can still list action items out or capture notes of the meeting to keep you on task. 
3. Utilize virtual project collaboration platforms to keep colleagues up to date. Most collaboration platforms include the ability to share your progress with your colleagues through Kanban boards, flow charts, matrices, Gannt charts, or any other type of project visualization chart that you prefer. Well-known examples of this type of software include Asana, Monday, ClickUp, and Trello. 

4. Revisit your hiring priorities.

If your organization is making a durable transition to a distributed work model, you may want to consider what type of employee, or even what positions, make sense in your new framework. 

Geography becomes far less of a factor in the hiring process, but access to reliable internet becomes very important. Face-to-face first impressions and verbal communication skills will take a back seat to clear, concise, personable written communication. Effective solo work may trump smooth teamwork. 

Make sure your hiring matches your new reality. 

5. Decouple the relationship between “hours-worked” and “productivity.” 

To fully take advantage of a distributed work model, employers and employees alike should permit maximum flexibility for their employees. More flexibility equals better work-life balance, more work done during optimum conditions, and an emphasis on quality and productivity instead of hours-worked. For this to work well, employers must establish clear expectations for outputs, deliverables, and timeframes and allow their employees to manage their time accordingly. 

 
Learn more: 

Much of the information in this post was adapted from an excellent article written by Steve Glaveski at Medium. If you prefer video content, he has also posted a video summarizing the content. The majority of his article was based on an episode of the popular Making Sense podcast entitled The New Future of Work.