In 2020, several firms undertook a “lift and shift” of their local activities to a remote environment because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which expedited a structural change in the way we work.

Because remote work is here to stay, we have a chance to rethink about how to utilize the situation and create advantages.

Organizations will profit from a team of domain experts who can deliver synergy between technology, process, and culture through improved work redesign to avoid silos and constrained changes.

A major experiment

The big “work from home” experiment of 2020 put an end to the argument on the efficacy of synchronous and physical co-location work paradigms. We now understand that a more adaptable, diffused approach to knowledge work is not just feasible but also advantageous. The pandemic provided a chance to test out distributed work in practical settings, and like any experiments, it had its share of accomplishments and setbacks. Avoiding compartmentalized, single-threaded transformation initiatives is the difficulty for firms that want to take advantage of this work style and genuinely become top remote/hybrid operators. Successful businesses should turn this into a strategic goal and allocate funds for a complete overhaul of the way their teams interact and communicate.

Lessons Learned

The companies that continue to take an incremental approach to dispersed organization transformation will fail. High levels of complexity, demotivation, and ambiguity creep into some of the modest savings that are realized from office space reduction.

Think about the following scenarios:

  • An inept COO implements automated procedures that alienate and confuses the employees while attempting to optimize processes for remote collaboration, restricting creativity and productivity.
  • To prepare the workforce, a CHRO focuses on developing remote policy and training, but unintentionally introduces “Zoom-fatigue” that depletes the team’s mental energy.
  • Working remotely is a team sport.

Why a Team is Necessary for Success

Each of these domains can only make minimal changes to enable distributed work if left to run independently. The delivery of technology, process, and cultural synergy is a team sport that requires cross-functional domain specialists. We know that effective domain partnerships create a work system in which the ability to work from anywhere is the side product of more important outcomes like agility, scalability, productivity, quality, and empowered teams. We have learned this from organizations that have successfully operated remotely for more than ten years.

With a cross-functional team in existence, the following factors should be taken into account while developing a distributed work organization’s core competencies:

  • Enhancing market responsiveness by establishing dynamic strategic and financial planning capabilities
  • Fostering a culture of asynchronous communication to boost global “follow the sun” workflows for innovation and delivery
  • Improving internal and external virtual-first client experiences to increase the market outside of the metro
  • Automating recruitment and global sourcing to cut 90 percent of the time spent on interviews
  • Cross-functional collaboration, acceptance of uncertainty, lean process redesign, and automation are just a few of the requirements of the evolving distributed work blueprint. Due to a lack of dispersed work knowledge, the key to make this work paradigm superior is to fundamentally rethink the organization’s work.

To flourish as a dispersed organization, it’s imperative to:

  • Focusing on the most crucial company-level goals and ignoring the noise of everyday labor are essential for a distributed organization to succeed.
  • Create workflows with people in mind, keeping the tasks that call for creativity and passion from people, and making each employee an “expert in their sector.”
  • Build the information structure and remote organization around the task, not the roles.
  • Integrate each organizational element using a single, user-friendly management system that prioritizes quality over throughput.

The Future of Remote Work is Bright

Automation and flexible work schedules are only a small part of the tale of the dispersed work transition. It is about using technology to improve human performance, freeing teams from tedious duties and enabling them to reach their full potential.

Work will increasingly depend on human intelligence, passion, innovation, and cooperation. Making a worldwide workforce is more thrilling than ever right now!

Organizations should invest in tools that allow employees to work collaboratively from anywhere, including video conferencing, messaging platforms, and collaborative software platforms. Processes must also be put in place to ensure that everyone is working together effectively. Procedures for communication, task management, file sharing, and other key tasks should be streamlined and made as efficient as possible. A successful remote transformation is not something that happens overnight. It takes time, patience, and dedication from everyone involved. But with careful planning and execution, it can be done!

What issues with remote and/or hybrid work have you noticed in your company?