© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021
S. BellingRemotely Possiblehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7008-0_7

7. Remotely Successful

Success Is Self-Perpetuating
Shawn Belling1  
(1)
Fitchburg, WI, USA
 

Technology and the global economy have been two primary drivers of the expanding prevalence of remote work and distributed organizations. As these types of organizational and work models continue to demonstrate success, technology has enabled and also been driven by these models and successes.

Another driver of remote distributed work models is the changing demographics of the global workforce. Younger workers have grown up with enabling technology and remote work options and now take them for granted. They expect to find remote options and the supporting technology in the workplace and arrive already knowing how to be effective without specialized technology training or concerns that things may not work as expected based on decades of on-site work habits – these “old” habits and expectations are simply not there for the younger members of the workforce.

Often, these legions of younger workers push the boundaries of organizations who must balance the desire to provide remote work options and support them with the latest tools for collaboration and productivity against the prevailing organizational culture as well as critical needs for security and supportability. These same younger workers also expect a greater balance between their professional and personal lives, and remote distributed work and teams and tools help to provide this balance.

All of these factors combine to raise the expectations and demands for the increased use of remote work and virtual teams. Think of it as a self-perpetuating circle: The easier it is to collaborate as a remote member of a virtual/distributed organization, the more successful these models are. The easier it is, and the more successful these types of teams and organizations are, the more is expected of them, thus demanding more innovation in the tools and techniques which in turn yield more and better results (see Figure 7-1).
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Figure 7-1

The self-perpetuating circle of collaboration and success

Lessons from the Global Experiment

This book opened with a short history lesson and a discussion of the lessons learned from the 2020 global Covid-19 pandemic, which forced (or depending on your viewpoint, provided an opportunity for) many organizations to experiment with remote and distributed work scenarios. It would be naïve to say or assume that all were successful – however, plenty of organizations did experience success. Some found they were able to operate in remote modes far more efficiently than they would have expected and found that many roles in their organizations could be performed remotely and quite effectively in this model.

The sudden removal of the daily commute provided flexibility and more productivity for many. Various studies and anecdotal data indicate that for some organizations and types of work, productivity increased with remote work arrangements. Many people expressed that the elimination of a commute enables them to devote more morning and evening time to exercise, meditation, family, and other personal pursuits, which in turn finds them at their home/remote workstation more refreshed, less stressed and therefore more productive, creative and collaborative – all elements that contribute to successful outcomes.

Success Perpetuates Freedom and Opportunity

People and organizations who deliver a successful experiment gain the freedom and opportunity to push further. A scientist who runs a successful experiment will push on to the next; a leader who tries a new approach to a business problem and is successful will gain the credibility and confidence to scale this model. The same is true with remote and distributed work and organizations.

Organizations who opt to continue remote distributed models for working after the Covid-19 period will experience varying levels of success due to a myriad of factors. Those who do experience success will extend and expand these models to more people and parts of their organization. They will also expand their specific definition of “remote,” perhaps moving to a broader geographic area for recruitment and hiring or enabling people to work in a total remote mode versus a hybrid or flex option. Organizations may move up Mullenweg’s model of distributed work autonomy and find that as they do so, they experience more success than they did when operating in full on-site mode or at level one or two.

Success – Recruiting and Hiring

Earlier in the book and in this chapter, we discussed how remote distributed organizations greatly expand their options for recruiting and hiring, truly fulfilling the interest to hire the best people no matter where they live. As this vision manifests, HR departments and hiring managers will experience success and provide organizational value in recruiting and hiring these remote workers, not only because they are no longer geographically limiting the candidate pool but also because the recruitment costs less – both in time and money – for the organization as well as the candidate, with no or minimal travel involved and less lost time for the candidate in their current job or other life commitments.

Fewer or no geographic restrictions also means that organizations will face fewer obstacles to becoming more diverse. With geography and the assumption that workers would need to be local no longer a factor, organizations pursuing diversity in their workforces for the various benefits that a diverse workforce brings will find success – not only in fulfilling the core objective of increased diversity, but also through the increasing success and performance that a diverse workforce is proven to bring to organizations.

Example – Automattic’s Global Employee Base

As Matt Mullenweg puts it, the “hire the best people no matter where they live” approach enables the organization to leverage the vast majority of global talent that is located somewhere other than near one of your current physical locations. The money saved on recruiting and through employee retention can be reinvested in better training, benefits, and other value-creating elements (Mullenweg, 2020).

Mullenweg’s Automattic is one of the best illustrations of this approach. In addition to WordPress, Automattic delivers ten other web-based products including WooCommerece and Tumbler. As of this writing, Automattic claims over 1300 people in 77 countries. Fully remote and distributed since inception in 2005, Automattic’s ongoing growth, product development, and acquisitions certainly speak to the success of the totally remote and distributed organizational model inclusive of recruiting from a global talent pool (Automattic.com/about, 2020).

Example – CloudCraze’s Instant Remote QA Team in California

2014 was an interesting year for CloudCraze. We had successfully implemented our cloud-based ecommerce system for several well-known customers and had others in process and in the sales pipeline. One of those was Pono, classic rock star Neil Young’s short-lived high-quality digital music device and company. We’d landed Pono largely because Neil Young and Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff had neighboring estates somewhere in Hawaii. When Neil Young asked his neighbor about ecommerce for his Pono product, one thing led to another, and we landed the deal.

By mid-2014 we were implementing the ecommerce site for the Pono music device while also building the equivalent of iTunes in three months, and we started to have software quality issues. Pono’s VP of technology hit us pretty hard on our increasing bug rates, so we had to act quickly. CloudCraze founder and CEO Bill Loumpouridis used his connections to find us a great team of software quality assurance (QA) people, all based in California. Given our remote distributed model, we were able to rapidly add them to our team and our development processes to quickly reduce bugs in our core product. Note – I did not actually meet any of the new QA team in person until November 2015!

Success – Living There, Working Here

If you have never worked in an organization where your coworkers are distributed across a country or even globally, it is hard to wrap your mind around the idea that the person or people you work with most frequently live in other time zones and climates. I adjusted to this during my time at Promega from 2005 to 2012, when project team members were often from offices in Germany, Benelux, Australia, and elsewhere, and then gained further experience and comfort with this model during my CloudCraze days with the company and my coworkers spread across the United States and our customers located around the world.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, plenty of people took the opportunity to live and work someplace other than where they had been living and working. Earlier, I wrote about the exodus from places like San Francisco, New York, Silicon Valley, and other crowded and expensive regions. This manifested as the workers, realizing that as long as they would be working remote, they had no work-based ties to these areas, decided to try a different lifestyle for a while.

In my own organization and within my circle of contacts, people moved to bucolic northern Wisconsin and Door County, while others moved to Texas or Miami to be closer to family, to San Diego for the winter, or took their families on a temporary hiatus to the Rocky Mountains. I personally decamped to Arizona for a block of time. Stories like this played out all over the world.

When an organization tries this and finds that things don’t fall apart just because people are not in the same physical space, and in fact people are happier with more of their personal as well as professional needs met (remember Maslow and Herzberg?), this success creates more willingness and opportunity to make this a permanent part of the organizational model – success perpetuates success.

Ongoing success with the remote model helps this to become a perfectly normal and seamless experience and expectation. In one case, I was interacting with an executive who had moved to the mountains and had been there for several months before sharing with me that they were actually living and working outside of Wisconsin – nothing in our interactions had made this evident. This same leader encouraged me to take advantage of the opportunity to live and work in a warmer place for the Wisconsin winter – this was indication of the confidence through success that the remote model had created for us both.

Success – Collaboration

Remote distributed models enable successful collaborations between organizations and people in different places, different companies, and different countries. Examples include research and development within companies, between multiple companies, global research alliances, product development, and software implementations.

Example – Collaboration with a Russian Crime Lab

In 2011, I was a project manager at Promega Corporation in Madison, WI. I was leading a project to develop software for an automated genetic identity workflow – the software would amplify and normalize the signal from human DNA to improve the function of laboratory automation tools. The project team included people on our Madison campus as well as from a crime lab based somewhere in Russia. Input from the Russian team, which would be the first pilot installation site, was critical to ensuring the software met the needs of professional crime lab managers and technicians.

At various points in the development process, input from the lab team in Russia included run-through of live installation and testing of the installed software working with the laboratory automation systems. By using conferencing software to share computer desktops, participants could see everything that was happening on the pilot installation and the Madison team could guide and assist the team on the ground in Russia. We also recorded the collaborative conferences for future use. This remote distributed partnership was critical and a key to the successful development of this software, as input from the Russian pilot lab enabled further development of the final commercial release of the software and DNA testing workflow, which included reagents and other Promega products that had to work with systems from various lab automation manufacturers.

Example – CloudCraze: Collaborating with Integration Partners

Growing CloudCraze from a few US customers to a global B2B ecommerce product meant partnering with global system integrators (SIs) like Accenture as well as regional system integrators like YourSL (now part of Salesforce) in Germany. YourSL brought us into the conversations with Coca-Cola Germany in late 2013, and by February 2014 we were in three-way negotiations with YourSL and Coca-Cola Germany to develop their first B2B ecommerce system.

On-site kick-offs and subsequent visits to Berlin helped to build relationships and collaboration. In one of the best examples of relationship-building I have experienced, YourSL’s engagement leader gave a small group of us a tour of Berlin’s most famous places in a couple of hours prior to a dinner meeting the night before the project kick-off meeting. That attempt at relationship-building did not mean things always went perfectly.

Prior to ultimately building and implementing a successful ecommerce system, the three remote teams needed to work through various issues and obstacles. My attempts to speak some German probably helped a bit – these attempts at least amused my German colleagues. More critically, the total commitment of CloudCraze to keeping the project alive when YourSL lost confidence in the project was due to the good relationship we had forged with Coca-Cola Germany’s CIO.

Once past the rough spots in the partnership and with responsibilities for data, functional development and front-end/user experience development sorted out, the three remote companies and their teams collaborated to deliver an ecommerce experience that was one of the highlights of Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in October 2014.

Success – Results

When remote and distributed teams start shipping product, finishing projects, and maintain and accelerate productivity, and further, find that they are happier working this way, the results speak for themselves. Sometimes external or internal customers need to see results to be convinced that the remote distributed model will work for them. Whether through quantitative or qualitative results and examples, there is plenty of evidence that remote models are successful. The successes experienced in specific circumstances and as a whole provide plenty of support for those organizations who are considering remote distributed scenarios as their Day One model and for those who are moving to this model as a permanent scenario.

Example – Telemedicine

Routine medical visits involve a lot of time and inefficiencies. In the United States, where most aspects of the visit have little to do with the actual reason for the visit and everything to do with ensuring an insurance company will pay for it and updating data in an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system, the wasted time and built-in inefficiencies are stunning as well as frustrating. The Covid-19 pandemic forced many routine visits and many aspects of medical care to go fully online. Health systems and clinics enabled patients to update their own EMR prior to their visits and conducted many types of telehealth visits remotely. I personally participated in or witnessed several of these; most were quite efficient.

Qualitative and quantitative data support rapid acceleration of telemedicine adoption and capabilities in many regions, and one estimate posited that Britain’s National Health Service had seen ten years’ worth of change in less than a month as the pandemic forced providers to realize they could provide much of the healthcare experience remotely (Standage, 2020). There is every indication that the positive experiences and efficiencies in healthcare and telemedicine will sustain further success well beyond the end of the Covid-19 pandemic and become the norm.

There is nowhere in the world where success breeds more success than in the global capital markets, and remote distributed healthcare is a prime example. The success of telemedicine and the increase in healthcare provided through remote delivery during the Covid-19 pandemic is leading some to predict increasing investments in companies developing software, tools, and infrastructure to expand capabilities and options for remote and distributed healthcare. This could ideally lead to more readily available healthcare options for all, including in underserved areas and for underserved populations (Hall, 2020).

Example – Online Call Centers

Lots of jobs have long been doable by remote workers who need nothing but a telephone, a computer, and reliable Internet service. Call center operations are one example. Physical call center locations are very expensive; I learned this first-hand while implementing ecommerce for a one of Coca-Cola’s US bottling groups. The remote distributed project that digitized this experience helped that particular Coca-Cola bottler lower its costs and increase its average order size, and this success prompted the bottler to invest in further projects. Not only was the project a financial success, but several of the project’s leaders earned promotions as a result.

Any project and success that can improve the productivity of call center employees and lower the overall cost is a bottom-line benefit to the employer. Doctoral students at Harvard studied the performance of call center workers from early 2018 through August 2020 and found that on-site workers who switched to a remote work option increased their productivity by 7%, increasing by an additional 7.6% during the 2020 lockdown. These results and similar results from other studies and companies prompt the question as to whether remote work in these types of roles should be the norm, given the quantifiable productivity gains (The Economist, 2020).

Example – CloudCraze

In 2012 and 2013, CloudCraze continued to acquire more big-name customers for its ecommerce system. As with many other types of IT projects, ecommerce system implementations often involved sending a team of consultants to work with the clients at a specific client site. In these instances, many organizations and their clients expect the delivering organization and its partners (when necessary) to place consultants at the client site for weeks if not months – putting “butts in seats” and billing hours on-site until the ecommerce system goes live. This is not only expensive for the customer, since they are responsible for the travel costs and out-of-pocket living expenses for these consultants, but it is also taxing on the delivering organization as their people spend weeks and months away from their homes and families. Over time, this (in my experience) can lead to lower productivity and worker satisfaction.

CloudCraze realized early on that this approach was not efficient and would be expensive for clients as well as taxing on the morale of the staff who had to be away from home and travel every weekend. We also realized that it would also limit CloudCraze’s ability to scale, as the implementation team was relatively small at that time and needed to be able to work on multiple implementations simultaneously in order to achieve growth – not something you can do with your team’s butts in clients’ seats at their physical locations.

Some clients were initially reluctant to allow CloudCraze to implement our hybrid delivery model, which involved remote preparations, a kickoff week of on-site work followed by several weeks or months of remote work with periodic on-site visits if and when necessary. The delivery team would come back on-site in the preparation for and performance of the critical system go-live. After a few successful implementations using this model, CloudCraze could point to it during the sales process as our standard implementation practice. With multiple successes and client references, we got much less pushback from prospective clients.

Since the CloudCraze implementation consultants were not constantly on the road and could have better work/life balance, CloudCraze was able to retain its core software delivery team while scaling and growing the organization, which in turn led to us acquiring more customers and improving delivery efficiency. Once again, success with remote models led to more success.

Not every customer was onboard with this hybrid remote/on-site model, and their projects sometimes suffered as a result. In one case, the customer’s ingrained organizational culture kept them from seeing that the project and our team could be successful working remotely, and so they insisted on more physical presence from our teams. The result was a drop in day-to-day productivity – with the lead architect and developers from our team physically on-site, the client’s lead felt free to interrupt their work constantly to ask questions, harangue them about progress, share unfounded worries, and generally create an unproductive and toxic situation. With this particular customer, we were able to work out a combination of periodic on-site work by the lead architect with the remainder of the team remaining in remote status except for user acceptance testing (UAT) and go-live.

Success and Expectations

Success, as noted at the start of the chapter, breeds success. People and teams that find success working in remote distributed scenarios will expect more of the same and will continuously innovate to enable this success. Organizations who experience ongoing successes with remote work models will clear any remaining barriers and doubts and begin to further enable these models and the people who both support and benefit from them.

As momentum increases and final reservations around remote distributed models of work fade, and the process and tools are continuously optimized to facilitate these models, expectations for success and accomplishments will go up. The demand for continued innovation from within the organization and from the providers of processes and tools will increase.

The overall expectations of remote distributed work on the part of the people doing it and the organizations engaged in it will increase. The expectations of technology capability, accommodation from employers, and expectations of productivity and achievement will continue to rise as these same people and supporting structures and technology improve their performance. Without a lot of empirical data as of yet, I’ll still make a comparison to Moore’s Law – the famous hypothesis from Intel founder and semiconductor icon Gordon Moore. Much like Dr. Moore correctly hypothesized that the rate at which transistors could be placed on a single unit of silicon would increase at a sustained rate for decades, I believe that the successes of remote workers and the technology that supports remote work will sustain gains in both the acceptance of and productivity of remote work.

Summary

In this chapter we reviewed how success in various aspects of remote and distributed working models will build upon themselves and provide momentum to organizations, the people using these working models, and the companies supplying the platforms and tools to enable this work. We discussed how ongoing success will foster and encourage further adoption and experimentation, increase the capability and diversity of the workforces in distributed organizations, and enable people to live wherever it suits their needs while working for their employers of choice.

In the book’s final chapter, we will review pros and cons and contemporary arguments for and against remote and distributed work models in the 2020s and beyond. With an acknowledged bias toward the pros versus the cons, I will outline how most arguments support the potential for remote work to be an option that will persist and expand throughout the 2020s and beyond.

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