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Fair Use Source: B09Z5F678G (EfctRmWrk 2022)

“ (EfctRmWrk 2022)

“With the Joel Test in mind, let’s create our own version. It will consist of twelve questions that can be answered quickly with a yes or no and will form a scorecard for the quality of the remote-working experience at a given company. And although we’ll win no prizes for originality, let’s call it the Remote Working Test.” (EfctRmWrk 2022)

There are many ways that we can use this Remote Working Test:

We can score our own companies against it to see which areas we do well in and which we need to improve upon and why.

We can attach our results from the test to our job advertisements to publicly show our commitment to providing a great remote-working experience, thus increasing transparency at our companies.

We can ask pointed questions when we are interviewing for new remote jobs to find out what the culture is really like.

Taking into account everything that we’ve learned in the book so far, we can put together the twelve questions that form the test:

Do you treat everyone as remote? Do you provide a remote work-space setup? Do you spend money equally on in-office and remote staff? Do you optimize for asynchronous communication? Do you create artifacts from synchronous interactions? Do you measure staff by their impact? Do you allow staff to choose flexible hours? Are the members of the executive team remote workers? Do you use the best collaborative tools that money can buy? Do you hire staff anywhere in the world? Do you support families as well as employees? Do you give back to an employee’s local community? So, without further ado, let’s explore each of these questions in more detail.

Do You Treat Everyone as Remote? The first question is something we covered in detail in Chapter 3, ​Treat Everyone as Remote​. Does the company treat everybody as a remote worker regardless of whether they’re working in an office, in a meeting room, in a shared work space, or at home? Does this pervade through the culture? Given that this is a mindset that will form a consistent thread through countless habits in the organization, it’s important that this question is the first one.

The worst situation for a new remote worker is that they feel like a second-class citizen from the day that they join the company. Without this mindset, remote workers can feel like they’re out of sight and out of mind, with discussions and decisions within their team taking place without them being present and with limited access to others in the company. Even synchronous communication can be a pain. Remote workers can have poor experiences in meetings where others are all physically present in a meeting room, with remote participants struggling to properly see or hear their colleagues on a webcam that’s positioned faraway across the meeting room.

As we previously learned, treating everyone as remote can’t just be an intention. It needs to be backed up with action. One would hope that if a company answered this question with a yes, the interview process would quickly begin to reveal that this is the case. Each interviewer would have a separate connection, webcam, and microphone in the video call. Screen-sharing and collaborative software would be the norm for communication rather than pointing webcams at a whiteboard. People could ask questions about how meetings and socials are organized in a way that everyone is welcome regardless of their location.

Whether everyone is treated as remote is a simple but powerful question. It sets the scene for the remote culture of the company from the start.

Do You Provide a Remote Work-Space Setup? When employees start a new job in a physical office, they aren’t expected to purchase their desk, chair, and computer equipment. That expectation should be the same for those who are working remotely.

We understand that ergonomics are important to ensure that we’re looking after our bodies while we’re spending a significant portion of our days sitting at desks and using computers. This means using the right equipment. However, the downside is that good-quality office equipment is expensive if you’re the one who needs to purchase it rather than your employer. Good chairs can be hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

Companies that are invested in their remote workers should offer to purchase home-office equipment for them. It should get shipped to their door. Typically, this will include a computer, a desk, a chair, a monitor, and any peripherals that are required for them to get their work done. This also includes any equipment for individuals with disabilities or special requirements.

Not only does this question highlight whether a company understands the importance of ergonomics and their intent to give remote workers the same treatment as those who are located in offices, it shows that they trust them. For a reasonably sized company, the sum of money invested in buying this equipment for an employee is just a rounding error on the company budget. Being generous with a home setup—perhaps by going in at the higher end when it comes to equipment choice—makes employees feel great when all of the packages get delivered and they get a setup that’s way beyond anything that they would likely buy for themselves. Why not even make it a policy that the staff can keep all of the equipment other than the computer if they leave the company? It’s generous and a great perk, and it saves the logistics of returning and redistributing large items.

Do You Spend Money Equally on In-Office and Remote Staff? Employees who work in offices may not think that much money is being spent on them, but often when it all gets added up, it’s a reasonable amount. Free tea and coffee, snacks, occasional team lunches, drinks, and so on can sometimes total many hundreds of dollars per year per employee. That’s not to mention that employees won’t be paying the rent, electricity, or Internet bills for the office for the time that they’re working in it.

Remote workers often have to foot these costs for themselves. They might notice that their grocery bills are higher than usual because they’re now buying all of the items that they used to get provided to them for free. They may also be missing out on team lunches and drinks that are expensed by the department. Their electricity bills may be higher, and they may need to upgrade their broadband to the fastest package.

So the question is, Does a company realize this and then spend equally on staff who are remote? Perhaps when a team goes out for lunch at the end of the quarter, the remote staff gets the opportunity to expense takeout for themselves. Perhaps workers could be offered a monthly stipend for the same kinds of supplies that the office would provide for free, such as tea, coffee, and snacks. Maybe there could even be an Internet allowance to help staff get the best possible broadband connection. There’s a lot of scope here for companies to tangibly help out their remote workers in small but impactful ways that don’t put a huge dent in the budget. It’s both symbolic and genuinely useful, especially for younger or less-experienced staff who are earning less money than their senior colleagues.

Do You Optimize for Asynchronous Communication? We covered the topic of asynchronous communication in detail in Chapter 4, ​The Spectrum of Synchronousness​, and we noted how important it is for companies to use it to support remote workers. This question gives companies the chance to reflect on how they communicate in general.

Is it the case that information only exists in the heads of staff and then is transferred between them in synchronous communication, or is it well written and documented and easy to find? If a team member has a tricky time zone difference and only overlaps with their colleagues for a few hours each day, is the presence of good documentation able to keep them unblocked and productive? Or are they stuck as soon as everyone else goes offline?

Are companywide broadcasts recorded or written so that everyone has equal access to the content? Is all critical information recorded somewhere centrally, such as in a searchable, well-organized digital employee handbook? We’ll look into producing one of these in more detail in Chapter 12, ​Creating a Handbook​.

As we learned previously, optimizing for asynchronous communication not only requires a change of mindset and habits, it requires real action to continually create the required artifacts that allow people to discover information, find answers to their questions, and to understand how to do their work. Candidates who are interviewing should ask about whether important communication is written and archived, whether the codebases and contribution guidelines are well documented, and what proportion of time their prospective team spends in synchronous meetings every week.

Do You Create Artifacts from Synchronous Interactions? There’s always going to be some amount of communication that needs to happen synchronously. Urgent, complex, confusing, or nuanced matters are sometimes better resolved by just getting together and talking about them. Additionally, there’s always some number of team meetings, whether it be scrum ceremonies, planning, design sprints, and so on.

The important aspect is that teams create sufficient artifacts from their synchronous interactions so that anyone can catch up at their own speed at a later date. Artifacts can range from video recordings of the meetings themselves to written summaries or design documents that outline the approaches that were discussed.

A continual flow of artifacts from synchronous interactions build up the archive of information and documentation that also serves as the answer to the previous question. It’s a virtuous cycle. Isn’t that neat?

Do You Measure Staff by Their Impact? As we learned in Chapter 10, ​Managing Teams​, it’s important that the performance of staff is measured by their impact in their roles rather than the number of hours that they spend working. This paves the way for flexible working hours. We saw how in the physical office, the worst of this behavior can manifest in staff waiting for their bosses to leave, and they in turn are waiting for their own bosses to leave. In the remote world, this can manifest in staff who feel unable to step away from their computers because they’re afraid if they’re not able to immediately answer messages, they’ll be seen as slacking off. FOMO is real.

Companies that measure their staff by their impact have better ways of understanding performance than with time-tracking software that’s installed in their computers. Instead, they have a culture that consists of clear goals for their teams to work on, allowing them to achieve autonomy, mastery, and purpose. They also value staff who are good team players and mentors—those who not only produce work themselves but also amplify the work of others around them.

The key point is that none of this has anything to do with clocking exactly eight hours of work every day. It has to do with clear progress, efficient use of time, good prioritization, and a focus on the quality of the hours rather than the quantity. Measuring staff by impact lets them choose exactly how to spend time, which means that fitting in a busy home life is more possible, working across different time zones is easier, and having a work-life balance that’s beneficial to their mental health is attainable.

Do You Allow Staff to Choose Flexible Hours? Working remotely, often from home, means that there are plenty of other interruptions during the day. School runs, childcare, and looking after dependents can mean that juggling both work and life requires flexibility in the hours of the day in which staff choose to be sitting at the computer.

This can also come down to personal preference. Some workers know that they’re extremely productive in the morning and given the choice would start early and finish early. Some are night owls who get into their stride in the afternoon and evening. If a company is able to let workers choose the hours of the day that suit them best for doing their work, it gives them more flexibility in their home lives and allow them to capitalize on when they feel productive. It also is a clear demonstration of the amount of trust that they have in their staff to know how and when to work best.

Supporting flexible work for staff in the same time zone is a localized version of the same issues that are faced when workers are globally distributed in different geographies. It requires good documentation, asynchronous communication, and the ability for teams to organize core hours in which they know people are contactable in order to get synchronous collaborative work done.

Flexible hours, including part-time hours, when implemented correctly can be a boon to new parents. This concept can be extended to include compressed hours, which is where they work the agreed hours over fewer but longer days. Or job sharing is where a job designed for one person is shared by more than one part-time worker. Assuming that a company is measuring its workers by their impact, all of these arrangements should be possible.

Are the Members of the Executive Team Remote Workers? Culture is set from the top down. If the members of the executive team at the company—that is, the CEO and their direct reports such as the CTO—are remote workers, or at least spend a meaningful portion of their time remote, it’s likely that they’ll experience first-hand the challenges that all remote workers will face in the company.

They, too, will feel the challenge of having to coordinate significant initiatives and projects over different time zones and geographies. They’ll have to address the company via video or by writing. They won’t be able to just get everyone in a room when there’s something urgent to discuss. They’ll have to use the same tools as everyone else and face the pain if they don’t. This creates cultural change.

As the company leaders and budget holders, if they’re the ones who see the pressing need for software that allows remote collaboration, they’ll purchase it for everyone, because they can. If they see that their recorded video messages have poor audio and video quality because of the built-in hardware in their laptops, they’ll likely make it easy for everyone in the company to expense a good-quality webcam and microphone. If it’s hard to find the information that they need, it’s likely they’ll spearhead initiatives to centralize documentation and make it easily discoverable.

The best way to gain sympathy and understanding for others is to see the world from their point of view. In the technology industry, we have been taking this approach in UX design and research for many years by improving the technology that we deliver to our users based on what we learn while observing them using it. If the leaders of a company are able to understand first-hand what it’s like to be a remote worker, it’s likely that the experience will improve for every member of the staff as well.

Do You Use the Best Collaborative Tools That Money Can Buy? This point is almost identical to the one in the Joel Test. There’s a whole host of fantastic collaborative software out there, but often it isn’t free. This is especially true when those software licenses are for businesses rather than individuals.

At the time of writing, the best-in-class software for IDEs, collaborative drawing, document editing, spreadsheets, and videoconferencing all cost money. Many use subscription-based models that charge per number of users. This can get expensive quickly. However, if a company holds to this principle and realizes that this is one of those areas that you don’t skimp on, it can ensure that all staff have access to the best collaborative tools that money can buy. This makes certain that it has a workforce that has the best chance of being happy, efficient, and productive. It’s a competitive advantage.

Any underspending in this area, unless the company is in a financial crisis, shows a lack of understanding of how countless, tiny frictions can build slowly but surely, until staff become so frustrated that they’d rather just give up and work elsewhere. When being forced to use a second-rate tool, a member of the staff may wonder why their daily pain is worth the company saving $10 a month on its license. Imagine how that feels if the company is also announcing that it’s opening a new flagship office where each of the designer chairs in the lobby costs several thousand dollars. It’s all about relative priorities.

Do You Hire Staff Anywhere in the World? This is a bit of a trick because the answer will often have more embedded nuance than a simple yes or no. However, it gives companies the ability to highlight a few key things:

Whether they hold any biases for hiring in any particular location

Whether they’re willing to consider hiring a member of staff who isn’t in one of their current locations

Whether they’re able to further expand on how they’ll achieve hiring in other locations and what policies or processes decide this

Why is this so nuanced? First, this question can highlight the extent of a company’s appetite for supporting remote work. Does remote work to a company mean a hybrid setup where staff can work from home but are expected to be within a reasonable distance of the office in case they need to come in? Or does it mean that they can be anywhere, in any time zone, working mostly asynchronously? There’s a big difference in setup and culture between the two scenarios, from how IT support works to how communication takes place.

Second, if an exceptionally talented member of the staff wanted to work for the company from a country that they’re currently not located in, what would they do? Typically, companies employ staff by having them work for a given legal entity in the country that they’re in. For example, staff based in the United States would be employed via the company’s U.S. legal entity, and Spanish staff would be employed via the legal entity that’s set up in Spain. This means that staff can be easily added to payroll in existing locations, but staff in new locations may need to be hired initially as contractors while the company goes through the process of setting up a legal entity in their country. Depending on the country, setting up legal entities can be arduous, requiring plenty of form filling, legal advice, and wet-ink signatures.

As you can see, all of this requires significant investment from human resources, and the desire to do this will form a core part of the remote culture of the company. The alternative answer to this question is no, and that’s also fine. But it gets expectations straight about what remote work really means if an applicant is applying and also provides a North Star for companies to move toward if they so wish.

Do You Support Families as Well as Employees? When people work in an office, they’re among a tribe of other workers who share that space with them. An office manager may keep the space running efficiently and the tea and coffee flowing, and the maintenance staff keep the hallways, bathrooms, and lobby clean, safe, and tidy.

And few remote workers are entirely unsupported. They’re often at home with a partner, children or other dependents, and pets. This is the primary support network that surrounds our remote colleagues. Therefore, a company that’s mindful of the hidden support network should elevate it by offering additional support for those in the network as well. This can be in the form of more traditional benefits, such as offering a generous life-insurance policy or whole-family healthcare, vision, and dental plans.

However, it can also extend to other benefits such as widening the scope of work-from-home stipends for household expenses or childcare. Perhaps companies could allow employees to expense health and well-being activities that their families can also use to their advantage. This could include gym memberships, yoga classes, or a set of dumbbells or running shoes.

The key factor here is that the company realizes that few people truly work alone. There is often an invisible supporting cast that could also do with some additional reinforcement from time to time.

Do You Give Back to an Employee’s Local Community? Companies may give to charity, perhaps by donating a portion of their profits every year. Also, they may donate their time, such as staff volunteering at a local nonprofit like a food bank or soup kitchen. In the nonremote world, these activities would typically happen near the office location.

Remote working isn’t a reason to stop doing these things. In fact, there’s a great opportunity for a company to really give back to the communities in which their remote workers live. For example, all employees could identify charities in their local area that they know make a real difference in their community. The company’s charitable donations could then be divided among the charities that have been chosen. Companies could also give regular, paid volunteer leave for their staff to donate their time as well as their money.

Allowing staff to choose local charities is important because every local community is different and facing different challenges. Employees who live by the coast in the United Kingdom may want to donate their money or time to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution because it’s sustained by donations and unpaid volunteers. Conversely, another employee who lives in a city may choose a local children’s hospital based on their own experience of visiting it with their sick child. Just imagine how many small communities worldwide could benefit.

Your Turn: Score Yourself Now that we’ve outlined the twelve questions that form the Remote Working Test, it’s time to score your own company against each of them:

Go through and answer yes or no to each of the questions in regard to what you observe at your own company.

Ask a colleague to do the same. Do their answers line up with yours?

“For each answer no, think about what would need to change within the company for it to be a yes. We’ll consider how you can begin to lobby for change in the next section.” (EfctRmWrk 2022)

Fair Use Sources:

• Effective Remote Work on DuckDuckGo
• B09Z5F678G (EfctRmWrk 2022)