Internal cuisine: a recipe for effective work with a remote employee. Part 2
Why does it start from point 6? Because in the publication “ Internal cuisine: a recipe for effective work with a remote employee. Part 1 was five “ingredients,” and they did not exhaust their thoughts on this topic.
Technology-technology, but remote work in any case is associated with certain difficulties in communication. And these difficulties are becoming more annoying as the remote worker’s responsibilities expand.
Example? It is necessary to solve an urgent issue with illustrating the material before the magazine is laid out, and a colleague, whose competence is this problem, despite the "green" status in Skype for some reason does not respond either to the letter or to the messages! Perhaps it is at this moment that he examines the letters of the customers or checks the reports, but this fact somehow does not reassure me as a person responsible specifically for this small part of the project. In the office, you can stand above the soul, try to tear a colleague from the case, ask a question “between times”, indiscriminately rub the poor guy under the toilet door.
In a situation with remote work there are only three most likely scenarios:
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• Postpone this topic and take on another, but invariably time is spent on switching to one question and switching from one task to another. Minute, second, third ... Little by little, one by one, during the day, week and month of patient waiting time, add up into hours,
• In the presence of a complex of hyper-responsibility, asking a question or waiting for approval, you have to “dance” at the monitor, mentally adjusting the time and being afraid to step back so as not to miss the answer. By the way, the minutes spent on waiting and in this case gradually turn into hours, only the costs of nervous energy are many times more,
• And if you call? A phone call with the same ease can be ignored, just like a Skype signal. In addition, not always the cost of telephone long-distance or even international calls justify the importance of the issue.
If a remote worker regularly works on the tasks of the “must be yesterday” category or participates in the development of strategic projects of the company, something needs to be done with communications. Simplify the project approval scheme, allocate 100% of the personal manager available to resolve any issues, during which all tasks will be “tied up”, determine the priority type of communication, according to which the person responsible for the work can always be found, create several alternative channels for free or inexpensive communication, etc. As an example - for urgent tasks we have Skype calls in our Internet client. Official information is received and sent only by mail. For global issues, management periodically organizes Skype conferences.
Everything is much simpler if a remote employee works on current projects that are not strategic or “burning” as there is no need to urgently clarify details or request additional information. So from my own experience I can say that with measured and planned work, when everything goes according to schedule and in accordance with the deadline that is known in advance, the specifics of remote work communications are practically not felt.
Let your designer, programmer or copywriter be ten thousand kilometers away from the office and colleagues, there will be conflicts and misunderstandings anyway. Definitely. Because even a team consisting of even one remote workers is still a team. And people with different characters, different levels of culture, different moral values and different qualifications work in this team at different times. And everything would be fine, but in the mentality of many of our compatriots from childhood, the rule “to sneak badly” was tightly hammered into the head. Therefore, being dissatisfied with poorly adjusted interaction with the manager, constant jambs on the part of SEO, low qualifications of a colleague - copywriter, the worker will most likely be angry, waste time cleaning the jambs, mumble, freak out, but ... remain silent. Because the informer is a stigma, and it is not good to sneak off!
The idea that due to this situation the productivity of the team as a whole decreases, from time to time it will come to the mind of a morally persistent worker, but until the situation reaches a critical point, the management will remain completely in the dark. Back when I was working in an office, I witnessed a situation when a department of 8 designers had failed to meet deadlines and the incompetence of one of his colleagues for a year. Not a great love for him, and not by friendship. Just because no one wanted to be the first to complain about a colleague to a boss. And this is despite the fact that the degree of relations in the office, where everything is in sight, is not at all difficult to determine!
Want to know what is happening behind the monitors of your company and how it affects the overall performance? Make a mandatory feedback! And so what, anonymous or personalized - you decide.
For many remote workers, there is a low level of communication with colleagues, and as a result, the dominance of the principle of individual responsibility.
Normally, when constructing a presentation and noticing errors in the text, the designer tells the copywriter about this. Normally, when the content manager informs the manager that it will be very inconvenient to work with the site in such a font. Normally, when finding broken links on the site, the programmer will set the task for the controller to fix the situation. And it’s not normal when anyone, a remote or office worker, is guided by the principle “I’m on my side, I don’t know anything.”
In order for the principle of command responsibility to work, and employees take the initiative, encourage people to try to turn on their brains, look around, pay attention to related tasks, go beyond their job responsibilities. Initiative is punishable? Indisputable! But when a project, to the creation of which I am somehow involved in “coming out in people,” I will not be ashamed.
6. Think over the question of communication
Technology-technology, but remote work in any case is associated with certain difficulties in communication. And these difficulties are becoming more annoying as the remote worker’s responsibilities expand.
Example? It is necessary to solve an urgent issue with illustrating the material before the magazine is laid out, and a colleague, whose competence is this problem, despite the "green" status in Skype for some reason does not respond either to the letter or to the messages! Perhaps it is at this moment that he examines the letters of the customers or checks the reports, but this fact somehow does not reassure me as a person responsible specifically for this small part of the project. In the office, you can stand above the soul, try to tear a colleague from the case, ask a question “between times”, indiscriminately rub the poor guy under the toilet door.
In a situation with remote work there are only three most likely scenarios:
')
• Postpone this topic and take on another, but invariably time is spent on switching to one question and switching from one task to another. Minute, second, third ... Little by little, one by one, during the day, week and month of patient waiting time, add up into hours,
• In the presence of a complex of hyper-responsibility, asking a question or waiting for approval, you have to “dance” at the monitor, mentally adjusting the time and being afraid to step back so as not to miss the answer. By the way, the minutes spent on waiting and in this case gradually turn into hours, only the costs of nervous energy are many times more,
• And if you call? A phone call with the same ease can be ignored, just like a Skype signal. In addition, not always the cost of telephone long-distance or even international calls justify the importance of the issue.
If a remote worker regularly works on the tasks of the “must be yesterday” category or participates in the development of strategic projects of the company, something needs to be done with communications. Simplify the project approval scheme, allocate 100% of the personal manager available to resolve any issues, during which all tasks will be “tied up”, determine the priority type of communication, according to which the person responsible for the work can always be found, create several alternative channels for free or inexpensive communication, etc. As an example - for urgent tasks we have Skype calls in our Internet client. Official information is received and sent only by mail. For global issues, management periodically organizes Skype conferences.
Everything is much simpler if a remote employee works on current projects that are not strategic or “burning” as there is no need to urgently clarify details or request additional information. So from my own experience I can say that with measured and planned work, when everything goes according to schedule and in accordance with the deadline that is known in advance, the specifics of remote work communications are practically not felt.
7. Organize feedback
Let your designer, programmer or copywriter be ten thousand kilometers away from the office and colleagues, there will be conflicts and misunderstandings anyway. Definitely. Because even a team consisting of even one remote workers is still a team. And people with different characters, different levels of culture, different moral values and different qualifications work in this team at different times. And everything would be fine, but in the mentality of many of our compatriots from childhood, the rule “to sneak badly” was tightly hammered into the head. Therefore, being dissatisfied with poorly adjusted interaction with the manager, constant jambs on the part of SEO, low qualifications of a colleague - copywriter, the worker will most likely be angry, waste time cleaning the jambs, mumble, freak out, but ... remain silent. Because the informer is a stigma, and it is not good to sneak off!
The idea that due to this situation the productivity of the team as a whole decreases, from time to time it will come to the mind of a morally persistent worker, but until the situation reaches a critical point, the management will remain completely in the dark. Back when I was working in an office, I witnessed a situation when a department of 8 designers had failed to meet deadlines and the incompetence of one of his colleagues for a year. Not a great love for him, and not by friendship. Just because no one wanted to be the first to complain about a colleague to a boss. And this is despite the fact that the degree of relations in the office, where everything is in sight, is not at all difficult to determine!
Want to know what is happening behind the monitors of your company and how it affects the overall performance? Make a mandatory feedback! And so what, anonymous or personalized - you decide.
8. Stimulate team responsibility, encourage initiative.
For many remote workers, there is a low level of communication with colleagues, and as a result, the dominance of the principle of individual responsibility.
“I have been tasked with checking the page URLs, and it doesn’t concern me that the photos of the announcements are stretched. It looks, of course, miserable, but if the manager does not know, why should I leave? ”
“Subtract texts from the site? No problem! But the broken links found on the pages are not for me. See content-let him do. "
Normally, when constructing a presentation and noticing errors in the text, the designer tells the copywriter about this. Normally, when the content manager informs the manager that it will be very inconvenient to work with the site in such a font. Normally, when finding broken links on the site, the programmer will set the task for the controller to fix the situation. And it’s not normal when anyone, a remote or office worker, is guided by the principle “I’m on my side, I don’t know anything.”
In order for the principle of command responsibility to work, and employees take the initiative, encourage people to try to turn on their brains, look around, pay attention to related tasks, go beyond their job responsibilities. Initiative is punishable? Indisputable! But when a project, to the creation of which I am somehow involved in “coming out in people,” I will not be ashamed.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/185598/
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