Have you considered ditching a brick-and-mortar business set up to enable your teams to work remotely?
Your bank account would certainly welcome the significantly lower overhead and fixed costs. And your conscience would likely rest at ease knowing that you’re decreasing a broader carbon footprint, thanks to lower utility consumption and eliminated commutes. Plus, there’s that massive talent pool you are now able to tap into… hiring, retaining, and training all-star professionals without location-based or cost-of-living salary constraints. More research-backed reasons companies can benefit from going remote.
According to Werk’s recent research report, “96% of employees in the U.S. workforce need some form of flexibility at work, yet only 42% have access to the type of flexibility they need, and only 19% have access to a range of flexible options.” To be able to offer flexible options puts your organization at a serious advantage in the supply and demand of the flexible workforce.
Now that the sky’s the limit–and you’re dreaming about the new ventures you can undertake with the money saved from going remote–one question remains.
“How do I get there?”
Before you head in a new direction, know where you’re coming from!
Sorry to slow your roll, but this step needs to happen first. While you may be anxious to move forward you need to figure out your business’s baseline. Because frankly, without determining where you are, who you are, and why you do things the way you do them, it is practically impossible to come up with a coherent plan to get to where you want to go.
So let’s talk baseline.
First of all, you’ll need to assess your existing corporate culture. This includes, for example, how your current office is set up, how your day-to-day business gets done, and how your employees interact with each other. Identifying how you conduct your daily business is crucial in order to be able to filter and streamline roles, responsibilities, and tasks that can be done offsite. (You may find that while you wish to say goodbye to your corporate headquarters completely, doing so may not be feasible just yet.)
Still a bit unsure as to how to determine a good baseline? You’re in luck! We’ve developed Goplaceless, to help you define your remote vision.
- Learn more about the many advantages of going remote for businesses and for individuals, along with how to maximize them for your team and capitalize on them with regard to your hiring efforts.
- Determine your business’s current suitability in shifting to and benefitting from a remote workforce.
- Build your Distributed Vision using our template to articulate your unique leadership vision for transitioning to a fully remote or hybridized onsite/remote environment.
Now that you know your baseline, how do you make remote work happen?
- Focus on productivity. With your Distributed Vision in place, you can begin to determine the most relevant metrics by which you’ll measure both your team’s collective productivity and performance, and that of your individual remote employees as well. Finding your remote operational ‘sweet spot’ will be critical to the longevity of your business.
- Prepare organizational assets. Once you’ve decided to have any portion (or all!) of your team work offsite, it’s time to compile the requisite materials, tools, and resources that you’ll need to keep operations humming. These could be placed into a central digital hub or Cloud-based repository, or within a browser-based project management tool like Asana or Trello. (Ensuring access and discover-ability are the keys to success here.)
- Select a remote model. There are a number of remote models you could choose to implement for your business, ranging from multiple hybrid onsite/offsite teams, to an HQ with ‘satellite’ teams, to going fully remote. What you ultimately decide can be adjusted over time, of course–but with your baseline in mind, you’ll already have a solid idea of how to head off any potential issues with regard to miscommunication or misaligned expectations before they arise.
If you are ready to define your remote workforce plan, we invite you to check out Goplaceless. The Workplaceless team designed this rapid-paced program specifically to provide executives, change management, and remote enablement teams with the knowledge and decisions they need to effectively shift toward a remote structure—whether they’re looking to become fully distributed or to transition a few key roles.
Another resource for some additional insights on Building and Scaling Remote and Distributed Teams.
Simone Beltz contributed to this post.
If you need support in developing your “goplaceless” plan, we’re happy to chat.
