Don't Ignore the Benefits of Remote Work When Bringing People Back to Work

There’s no substitute for in-person meetings, but we’ve all determined that video meets do work. The tools for video conferencing are mature, bandwidth is plentiful, and people are accustomed to it now. What’s the key takeaway going forward? If someone needs to call into a meeting via a video conference tool – let them. Is someone going to visit a sick family member and work remotely for two weeks? Let them. Is one of your best team members moving to another city, and you’d rather them not go to work for a competitor? Let them work remotely. You should use video meetings to keep your business flexible to changes in the future.

Evolving our mindset on what work is is the key takeaway going forward. We know we can work remotely for periods. We can now all agree that work is what we do instead of where we are. If you have an employee who likes to do part of their job from a coffee shop, why can’t they? For knowledge workers, letting them do that should be encouraged.

One thing that rings true for both remote and in-office workers is they both need more time to focus away from distractions. In-office distractions might be the “pop-ins” to their cubicle, but they might be constant pings in team chat tools for remote employees. Both types of work models need more time to “un-plug” from the conversations and get deep work done.

If you’ve got employees who previously commuted 30+ minutes to the office, this is time employees probably spent working when remotely. If people enjoy their jobs and are making a difference in their customers’ lives, they were happy to spend the time they’d normally spend commuting getting more work done. You’ll lose that with fully in-office

If you are a worldwide company, you’ve already navigated the time zone world when trying to schedule meetings. It wasn’t as big of an ask to ask someone to jump on an early meeting or a later meeting when they were working remotely. If you’re forcing an employee to be at a certain place during the day, they’ll likely be less flexible when it comes to taking after-hours calls and meetings.

The tools you had before remote work likely didn’t work as well for fully remote. If you’ve yet to audit your tools for collaboration, it might be time to survey your employees to find out what works well, what’s not working, and what they’d like to see. Finding the tools that encourage deep focus, streamline collaboration, and fit in naturally with a work environment is paramount to succeeding in the years to come. For example, are you overusing video meetings? Consider tools like voice messages in an email to enable asynchronous work. Encourage people to turn the camera off if they’ve been in meetings back to back to have a mental break.