 Hello, I'm David Artis and it's very good to be here today. Now, about five years ago, when I used to work for another company, they had a bit of a problem. They wanted to take an assortment of officers that they wanted, combine them all into one. But the problem was, the one officer they wanted to move everyone into, didn't have enough space for the number of people. So they decided to start a hot desk. In other words, no one had their own desk, they'd send up and found any desk that was available to them. The problem with this was that even taking into account the number of people that was off each day, either on holiday or off hill, there still wasn't enough desks. So they decided to promote working from home. The problem with this is that the junior management didn't like it, because they had no idea what their staff were up to when they were working from home. In the end, it was resolved by senior management making some sweeping redundancies. So actually, the issue went away and we decided not to do hot desk any anymore. As soon as that happened, junior management cancelled working from home for everyone, except for the end people they trusted, fellow managers. And I've gone on to the next one, by mistake. Oh, excuse me. I've got a second technical pop in here. She's not dissolved in itself. And yeah, just to say I didn't think of the next input. Sorry. Just to sort this out a minute and a second. Apologies. I wasn't doing what it's supposed to. So in a pop, here's my site now. That's good. Thank you. Sorry. He just stopped strolling on my notes. Can't read. Okay. So there are quite a few talks at Workhouse about remote working. They'll tell you how great it is and you should all definitely do it. However, if you work in a traditional office-based environment, moving to it, whether just for some staff or for everyone is not that simple. Now, we're going to explore the changes that any business will need to make for this to work. From hiring people to managing them day to day. We're going to learn how effective remote working can be compared to working in an office. And I'm going to show some simple techniques that you can use to improve both environments. Now I can move on to this. Remote working requires changes to how you manage people. And it can benefit everyone. By the end, I would hope that you understand what I mean by this. But don't take my word for this. Remote working requires a specific mindset and a completely different management structure and workflow. First of all, you need some background about myself. Now, I work for Automatic, which is a fully remote company. We have no offices. And I've been working for them for three years. Before that, I spent 30 years at the most traditional office-based company that you can imagine. It was all wooden cubicles and rules that nobody could ever remember why they were there in the first place. Here's a picture of what it was like in the 1990s. And not much has changed since. And during that time, I spent four years working for a well-known IT company. Now, when it comes to old-fashioned traditional IT companies, what name comes to everybody's mind? That's right. That was taken last week. So going from that to Automatic was an extreme change. But I do love it. Remote working, though, really isn't for everyone. Other talks will tell you about some of the upsides and downsides. The low limits of not being in an office environment versus the lack of having to commute every day. Now, illness, that's one thing that they often don't talk about. I have never been so well since I'm no longer crammed in a rule-mare conditioned office with thousands of other people. But lots of large companies have tried it. IBM and Yahoo both did and abandoned it. In the case of IBM, they once had 40% of their workforce working away from the office. So why did they give up? First of all, we need to look at how... Oh, that's going to do it again, isn't it? First of all, we need to look at how, in a traditional office, managers track what their staff are doing. On a day-by-day basis, then, how do most know that their staff are present in working? By seeing that they're at their desk in front of their computers, doing something that looks vaguely like work. In other words, not watching YouTube videos. So, can you remember there used to be, I don't know if this still is, software and websites where if your manager was looking press-to-key and a spreadsheet would appear, so it looked like you're still doing something. They existed for a reason. I'm going to keep doing that for at least an entire thing, moving on to the lot. So, when remote working is introduced, and someone is working from home, how do they know what they're doing? Well, they can't, and two things then tend to happen. People take advantage of this. Managers become paranoid. Maybe for good reason, maybe not. Now, both of these things would be eliminated if the manager actually knew what their staff were doing. So, let's look at what happened at Bloomberg. Employees took advantage of the perk. One was unavailable for hours at a time. Another wouldn't communicate with co-workers all day. Ten months in, we scrapped the benefit and now require all employees to work in sight to come into the office every day. Now, I think it's interesting that you refer to it as a perk and a benefit, as if it's something just beneficial to the employees. And I think that mindset there tells you quite a bit. And yet, how productive are office workers? Does anyone know what the statistic is? But how much time the average office worker in the US spends actually working during a typical eight-hour day? Any other suggestions? It's just under three hours. Now, it could be worse. In the UK, it's half an hour less. And you can't actually read it there, can you? On that, it's two hours, 23 minutes is what it's saying. And although I can't find the source now for the part of the UK that I'm from, I'm sure I read it's about one and a half hours. Now, the rest of the time is spent having breaks, going to the toilet, getting coffee, chatting to colleagues about what was on television the previous night, etc. And yet, there's a perception that remote workers are the ones not doing anything. Now, whether you believe those figures or not, here is another statistic. Remote workers in a study with 13% more productive took fewer days off and were more likely to work their full shift every day. So, why can't these big organisations get it to work? They say that people were less productive, but I put it to them, it's because they don't know what they were doing. They may be genuinely less productive as a result, or they just don't know. They're trying to manage them as if they're still working in an office. There's also the fact that the immediate communication you can get in an office, walking up to somebody and asking them a question doesn't now apply. They may have gone to the toilet or gone to get a coffee and ring or message them and they don't apply. It's suspicious. So there has to be a change in mindset too. So, what's the solution here? Simply put, it's better tracking of what people are doing at a meaningful level. Does it matter if somebody seems to be watching someone on Netflix or chatting about the beer field they think they've just had if they actually deliver what they need to do? Measure output. I work in support and that's an easy one to measure, kind of. The obvious one is how many customer tickets I get through. In fact, we also measure documentation changes, internal posts I make and all sorts of communication. That's then measured monthly against any vacation time that I had. That also needs comparison against everyone else. So a natural rolling custom queries will be seen across everyone in the same time zone. There's also a recognition that we're not robots and it's going to fluctuate. We'll have bad weeks and good weeks. Now this next bit, my manager writes I've got to read it out correctly. So during the day, I can move away from my desk, maybe have a plumber in to fix a leaky tap or I could go and mow the lawn or do my washing. I know there's a clear expectation for me to get work done. This translates into reviews twice a year where my progress is correlated with expectations. The reviews are not unidimensional and there's no number that tells the whole story. Instead, we look at the outcome of the background projects that I'm contributing to as well as a wealth of data around my primary work, customer interactions. I work together with my lead on creating this review which gives me an incentive to keep track of my own performance and achievements throughout the year. As a result of all this, if I was sitting at home not doing any work, it would be clear to my manager without needing to go over the top with their monitoring that work wasn't happening. As the author, Scott Birkin says, shouldn't the quality of work be the primary measure of work performance? But this is a two-way process as Scott again says, if you don't make your work visible, it's invisible. So there equally has to be some oversharing sometimes of your work and also of your conversations. Automation can help you to vocalise, audit and track things you may be doing. And this isn't something that only works for somebody who's working from home. It can bring immediate benefits to anyone else. So even if you don't want to do remote working moving to a similar solution will give you a better view of what those who report to you are doing. And in a split working environment you can use the same methodology for everyone. But something else you have to consider is to make remote working flexible. When you're at home and there are things around that need to be doing, the temptation is to do them. So why not build that in? Meet the working days flexible as possible rather than putting up the artificial barriers that are so often prevalent in working situations. Now I used to work with a developer who was incredibly talented and a real asset to the company. However, he wasn't a morning person at all and he used to when you were into the office at 11am at the earliest and he started getting into trouble with management because of rules. He was told he had to be in the office by 10am. Now, there are some people where strict rules on hours work are important. But this wasn't the case here. It was a regimented single rule that applied to everyone not taking into account individuality. He soon left. Again, to quote Scott Birken we faithfully follow practices and we can't explain rationally why is it that work has to start at 9am and end at 5pm. We have little evidence these habits produce better work. They become so familiar we've forgotten their merely inventions. By introducing autonomy along the aforementioned tracking of work people can be free to benefit from the freedom that remote working gives whilst allowing them to work at times when they will be most productive. As a result, you gain the best from people. And another thing often forgotten about is to make sure that everybody is properly equipped. At IBM, you'd be expected to work from home with a small screen laptop and nothing else. Now, working from a laptop on your coffee table for short bursts of time is fine but it's not a healthy and longer term working environment. So consideration has to be given for a home office setup. An external monitor, keyboard and mouse maybe even a desk and chair. And just how old is the equipment that you're using? Where I used to work they replaced laptops every 5 years although it was usually 7 by the time they got around to it even knew they were pretty underpowered so after 5 years they were awful to use. And this company I worked for was a retailer and I was on call and at certain times of the year I could be one person that could be essentially keeping retail stores opening when they had technical problems. But it was not unusual after opening my laptop up for it to take about 20 minutes to be usable. That was just the result of how slow it was. Good quality equipment is important. At automatic your laptop is replaced every 18 months and the most you generally have to wait for any other kind of equipment replacement even a desk is 5 years to select your laptop specifications so you can choose something suitable for your own requirements. And this remains relevant to people in an office or at home. Not that you should be expected to be working from home. Remote working doesn't mean home working and you'll get a bigger variety of people interested in it if you provide flexibility to go wherever they want. Sitting alone at home isn't for everyone. More extroverted people for example will often shun this kind of working as they need the company of others. So what about provisions for people to use co-working spaces? Now you're probably thinking that a co-working space is only applicable if you don't already have an office. You won't want to pay for them to be in an office when you already have one. But in fact all of the benefits of remote working are not being in your company office. An ad hoc co-working space for those working from home isn't going to work out all of the time. It's ideal. They still benefit from a much reduced commute, less distraction and you don't need to have such a big office. So yes providing a working environment for everyone is critical but not a one size fits all solution. Except that people want to work in different ways. And remote working brings discipline in a number of ways many of which can be beneficial to the company at large. Documentation is a prime example. For effective communication you can't just lean over and ask somebody to sat next to you. And if you're working flexibly the person you may want may not be around. So timely and accurate documentation is critical yet it should actually be in an office anyway. But it's often forgotten. How many times have you spent trying to solve a problem only to learn that somebody else had already done it some time before? How easy is it for new joins to your company to learn the requirements of their job? The requirement of remote working ensures that documentation then becomes a priority. And for much the same reason it becomes a lot harder to do this thing now mentality as the chances are that people and resources you need won't be available. It's easy in an office just to form up to someone and distract them from what they're doing for something which you could have waited to have done. And if it's not apparent already communication is critical. Or as we say in the automatic creed I will communicate as much as possible because it's the oxygen of a distributed company. Put the tools and resources in place to allow good communication to occur. Don't rely on email and an old instant messaging client that came free with your office software. And you need different tools for different jobs too. When instant communication isn't always possible you need ways to reach out to groups of people easily. In fact it can drastically improve how you communicate by writing things down in long form and publishing them and giving people a chance to get back to you on your own schedule you'll end up with much deeper fairer and generate better discussions. Poor communication is at the root of most disagreements, conflicts and poorly managed projects. When people understand each other difficulties melt away. Now, the reference to oxygen in the automatic creed is not accidental. Too much oxygen can be fatal as well. It's important to invest time making sure the right information isn't just published but it's heard and understood by those who need to. This again comes back to having the right tools for the right job. Anyway, enough for this talk about communicating remotely all the time. If a remote working is going to work you need to sometimes be social. In-person meetups are still important. In the VIP team we have a yearly company retreat and there's about 100 of us. And we also have one or two team meetings every year as well. As well as discussing work topics we also do things like playing board games, karaoke or going on a city tour together. These help us to learn more about each other and our families. It's knowledge we wouldn't have gained in a normal week. We eat together, work together and have fun together too. So consideration has to be given to this aspect as well. Even in a mixed working environment you need to get your staff all together throughout the year and not in a way that's all meetings and business. Because that social interaction is something that you need to put back. Obviously cost is a big consideration for doing something like this. Keep in mind though that a typical remote team saves money by not having to pay for an office or paying for a much smaller one if you're a partially remote team. Invest the money you save on office related expenses into these meetups because in the invaluable team building these experiences provide. It's not cheap but what's more expensive is having a remote team that doesn't work well together. And finally you need to consider specific hiring for remote workers. Now, here's a question for everyone who's been hired where they had probation period. Yeah. Now, these are actually really interesting because in most countries they exist and there is nothing in law. The companies say that there's something special about it in your contract except contracts can't override country laws and usually labour laws prevent you from saying getting rid of somebody after a couple of weeks because you don't like the look of them. Yet companies will often make out what they can do. But why do probationary periods exist in the first place? The probation period allows you to assess where an employee is right for you. You can take the time to evaluate if you're new employee showing the same potential that you identified in them during the application process and interview. Put simply, the hiring process was not sufficient to tell you if somebody was a good fit or not. In fact, in this quote they make mention of an application and an interview which is often all that hiring consists of. How do you assess somebody's technical capabilities let alone whether they're a fit for the working environment with an interview? So, automatic we don't have probationary periods instead we have trials where we take a prospective hire on as a paid contractor for a number of weeks. And projects to do during this time and carefully monitor their progress including how they fit in with the team. We also ask specific questions during the initial interviews around remote working and we carefully watch this during the trial. People can do the trial at the same time as maintaining a current job as you fit it into your own time. Before someone even gets to the trial stage they will often have one or two technical exercises to do often quite complex and demanding. Even if this is an office hire you can do this with them performing this work at home and sending it in. But some people who do hiring don't like this they can get help they can look at answers but isn't this what we all do in real life anyway? I went for an interview many years ago as a PHP developer and after the great traditional face-to-face interview I was led away to a room. Now this was before smartphones I think and all that was in the room was a Windows desktop PC and a test that I had to complete on it, 20 questions and it was questions such as this. Now who memorises all the parameters of PHP? What everyone does is you look them up when you need to. I answered about two out of 20 questions and so I spent my time complaining at the end via a long complaint what was wrong with the test and how unrealistic it was. I didn't get the job but I was right that was an unrealistic test it isn't how people work in reality even if this is an office hire why not do the same trial method yourself? And less doing the job requires you to be physically in an office you can test the capabilities of a potential hire if you're then allowing some staff to work from home then you can add in checking to see if they're a good fit for this. The important thing is not to give them the answers to the actual question so make them open-ended. For example, you could ask what would your work your week look like or have you worked remotely before? What were the biggest benefits and challenges? These are questions that we ask at VIP. As well as being very targeted on the questions and general expectations we are thorough. For the VIP team what percentage of support engineer applications do you think make it through to the trial stage? This is another one where you can all have a guess the percentage of applications that this isn't even hire this is through to the trial 3% it is 2.3% very close and less than 54% then make it through to being hired. Now that doesn't mean we have a large number of resources to do this I lost my time me. Instead it's done remotely and it's all prepared and documented we use scripts for interviews and tools to manage applicants so if you're working try all people if you can and don't have probation periods have a process that hires the right people the thing is nothing I've said today is revolutionary many of the practices and techniques shouldn't cost the business very much and are likely to lead to very happy steps. So let's revisit that statement I made at the beginning I hope what you've learned today is that working isn't something that many companies can just do and yes it does for many requires some adjustment yet many of these changes sorry, yet many of these are changes that any business can do whether they consider remote working or not and lead to benefits whether that's a better awareness of what work is happening or simply a more content workforce. For the notes from this side along with source resources please visit this link thank you very much thank you does that mean you have time to do your laundry motion up absolutely yes I like how you think I've got a question the problem that I faced as a remote slash flexible worker at home I don't know about you but everyone assumes that because you work from home you are free 24-7 which means you have time to pick up the laundry to walk the dog to do the shopping to take the car to the mechanic or anything what's your technique to have that boundary have that barrier when you say everyone do you mean your family family, friend that is quite difficult and even I still struggle with that one when the children are off to school it's like I am working I am still working it's so much easier when the house is empty during the day because no one's there but once it's to school holidays that can be quite difficult and it is just a case of reminders and iteration I think a lot of it that is a difficult one distraction and again distractions is one of those things that during our trial process we do specifically ask about and we do monitor as well even for me I haven't perfected it at all if the phone rings I don't answer it sometimes because they need to know that it doesn't mean that I am available at night to drop off a hat if the phone rings again by the same person then ok to the military but you are right I am lucky empty house my wife might work so I got it free anybody have questions around the topic there are additional organisations and I don't understand what it's like to be working it's what it's like to be thinking but they obtain a point set for the lunch because your organisation use that point set what are the things that are completely managing by what's the outcome result no there are some requirements for it depends I can't speak for outside of the IP because I have a lot less involvement with the wider automatic now but yes I am flexible to do but there is still a requirement for me there will probably be some conversation if I suddenly decide to start working US time for example if I decide to start working the evenings I think there is a general expectation I am going to be working a UKish time zone where that flexibility comes in is the fact that it's not a 9 to 5 in fact generally I start at 7 I get up at breakfast and I am straight on it but and then I usually finish about 5 which is like 10 long hours but that's taken into account that I am probably spending 2 of those hours moving the lawn and whatever else but they know I can't be around but certainly in the IP there is no set hours but certainly when people are and this comes back to hiring as well because if it was truly flexible or whatever you would hire somebody no matter where they are but when we do hiring we do look for specific time zones because there is an expectation that we generally work around the times of that time zone can I have a question I have a question do you work as a remote worker or select worker thank you I don't know quite a few because one thing that I picked up you were saying is about how there is an assumption that remote worker is a dot 9 and you finish at 5 on the dot and then you're out and that's it in my experience the rest of you is that I work for a time where my wife she pulls my chair out of the office and put me in front of a play station literally I'm quite lucky so there is always an assumption that people they work an hour because they work from home but in my experience it's not so I admit I did a lot as well I'm working in a government organisation in Glasgow so I at a gym share you can take a week off sorry a day off a week all those things are so I'm looking at both the links I want to know from you how much of I understand people are more productive and they are working as you suggested but how much of it is driven with the management of the company saving money because in government organisation I think they have reduced 40 hours of working 35 and they are now promoting remote working and the reason for that is that they are reducing cutting corners or infrastructure so how much of truth is there because we tend to promote things the way it suits us so now they are saying that people are more productive in our office also they are saying you can work from anywhere but practically the job is not getting done because somebody is not reachable there is no communication so when you are promoting remote working I am in agreement with your philosophy and the how because this is a private organisation people are dedicated and your selection process is strictly weighted and you are able to locate those you know spot that talent who is fitting when how realistic it is that is a question but I would certainly say doing it for cost cutting reasons then you are probably definitely doing it wrong then because I would say that if you are doing it correctly you won't be saving costs because the money that you will save from people remote working you should be plowing back into things like as I mentioned meters, office equipment and all the rest of it this is not about saving money this is to provide a lot more flexibility for your workforce and in a lot of cases people are a lot happier as well just a very personal very specific example like I may not be in the UK because I am an international person who finished my studies and I need to have a certain visa and my employer who is a government organisation they are not willing to spend 1000 pounds to get a license to sponsor me so it is really about cutting corners even if you have some good employees they don't want to retain you don't even have coffee in the office so you know you are buying it every time from here at some point there is a sentiment that let's reduce our fixed cost they have given us laptops and that's all you don't have PDF on it you don't have a proprietary Microsoft office on it so they have a Citrix which is a pooled office and then you log on so yes there is there is an element of cost one more question anybody have a question what you were saying before about working over hours I do that all the time I don't really have any advice I just don't know when to stop I just keep working and working it's midnight and I'm feeling in front of my laptop I haven't had dinner I haven't had a shower I'm just coding all day I'm just thinking what would happen if I did that and I would probably have a very sharp slack message from my lead because this goes back to the very first bit about your managers needing to have a better idea of what you are doing and it should be obvious I know the team was struggling our US team was struggling and so I was on one evening UK time trying to help them out and I think she spotted me saying it's 10pm your time get off so managers that have an awareness of what you are doing is really helpful there because it is really difficult for you personally because that is one of the other things about remote working you have all your equipment at home and it's just really tempting to finish something off and just go back to it it doesn't happen when you walk away from the office you've got it there I know I feel well but this comes down to the flexibility of it I can have really poor days we go back to those 3 hours of work I still have those working from home and I feel really guilty about it and so I will get my laptop out early evening and do a bit more work because I've got the ability to do that but it's a really difficult one really and I think a management of awareness that you are doing that and getting them involved is really helpful it's definitely an element of self-awareness about this one thing I've learnt the hard way that giving an assumption that if you do 12 hours of work if you're more productive then you do 6 hours of work for a month now, few times a week I take extended lunch break I take 2 hours for lunch and then I work less hours on those days I found out I was more productive I got more done in less time because you've got energy, you're fresh you're feeling better, all these things it took me time, not easy you have to be aware of it but gradually you get there so try to do that work in 12 hours or you really work in 12 hours you might be doing a few things that are not needed you can get out and cut it down and then you can ask my wife how you take out a bit of it so maybe you need someone to do that for you as well to kick it out that might help go on then I wonder if the lady at the back highlighted an underlying problem that if the manager is doing a different task than you say, of 1 hour and if you're trying to explain there's no way you can position 4 hours but the manager is quantifying that as 1 hour and probably that is sometimes the reason why they are overworked you carry on doing your work you're quantifying that as a 1 hour work but you know that it still takes longer sometimes it's hard to put it across and also sometimes I don't know how you can even quantify a work which is very very creative something that flash of idea it can be done in 5 minutes and sometimes it's 5 days that's one of the reasons why I didn't go into the specifics because different jobs different roles are going to require different ways of looking at them to see how that you can track what people are doing how you measure their output it's going to be different I can only speak it's just port role that I do and most of it is just some very open and honest discussion with your management and and that has to be treated as having you know and the one thing I've noticed and this has got nothing to do whether you're working in an office or whatever but one of the key things I've seen since I've been working for automatic is the fact I'm treated so much more as an adult having adult conversations with people about how to do stuff than I ever had my previous employees and so I think that's important to it it's got to be very fine open honest conversations and getting down to that something I did have in my talk and I actually took out just for time whatever was that not long after I joined the VIP team my lead at the time sat down with me not literally just using the side of the world but I had a conversation with me and we worked out a kind of like minimum work level for me if you were having a really terrible week how would we identify this and we worked on it together and this is a new concept for me kind of like what you're not looking to you're a manager you're not just going to dictate to me what this is we worked it all out and now there is this measure in place now if I drop below that my manager would get into contact with me and say hey is everything okay your work output seems to be very good this that's good I'm assuming that would still happen I've never actually kicked that thankfully that's the whole idea it would definitely be a kind of like there's something wrong here if this ever happens putting that in place was less important what was more important was that conversation and how it happened I know thank you very much