Hi!
We hope you are reading this post during work hours, having already been transferred to remote work by your employer.
We managed to transfer employees to remote work quite quickly for one simple reason - since 2016, the company has BeeFREE, our strategic remote work project, which allows an employee to work from home.
Under the cut - about how everything works for us, why programs for monitoring the desktop of employees are a shot in the leg, why we implemented all this at all 4 years ago, as well as some advice for those for whom temporary remote work turned out to be a rather sudden event , including three remote traps.
Also a little poll.
BeeFREE
BeeFREE was conceived as a project that beneficially affects both the corporate culture in general and the state (and mood) of an individual person. No matter how big a company is, it always consists of people, each of whom has their own ideas about the beautiful and the environment, including the working environment, schedule, comfortable temperature for work, (in)acceptability of reheating fish in the common kitchen, and other things.
Some people like to work in an office, interact with colleagues in person, and (yes, yes) take part in meetings. Someone agrees with those for whom open space is one of the circles of hell, in which it is just a little noisier than in the rest. Still others are firmly convinced that one normally composed letter with a clearly posed question can achieve much more than convening three meetings at different times for this. And often even faster.
In general, in 2016 it was decided to launch it as a pilot, and then see if it takes root at all, or if it is not worth scaling it up. As the attentive reader has already understood, it has taken root quite successfully and continues to work.
So, how does it work and what is needed for an employee to switch to BeeFREE.
- Discuss everything with your immediate supervisor, who, depending on the situation, will give the go-ahead or say why not. Let's say if a person has already more or less shown that he is able to work independently and solve problems, then OK, let him try to do it at home. And if a person, on the contrary, becomes the clearest example of an employee who needs to be constantly monitored, corrected, fixed something or reminded that it is possible (and necessary) to hang out on social networks for three hours in their free time, then this is another story. .
And, of course, a number of positions simply do not involve remote work. It will be a little difficult to send a FOCL installer to work from home. Of course, he will be able to morally support his colleagues via video link, but this is a bit different. Or employees of communication salons. In general, this is quite obvious - a specialist who works well on a laptop and performs all his duties from a computer can also work well outside the office.
- Inform colleagues that you are not in the office on specific days. BeeFREE is a flexible thing, and, for example, if during a conversation with the manager it was decided that you work from home for 3 days, and in the office, say, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays (or Mondays and Fridays), then it would be nice if your direct colleagues knew about this and immediately wrote to you in the mail or chats instead of looking for you all over the office.
- Once a week, coordinate with the manager your current tasks and prioritize. It sounds like a rather banal thing, but it really helps to set the accents and removes this strange managerial tension a la “So, what exactly does this guy do, at what stage?”. For this, there is a special todo list in the personal account of the employee and manager, but, as practice shows, the main thing is just to agree. And who, where and how keeps a record of tasks and progress is another matter. The main thing is that it should be simple. And not just verbally.
The main principles - with such a distance, we evaluate result, not a process. Roughly speaking, the worst thing that can be done in such a situation is to try to constantly control the employee, clarifying what he is doing right now, whether he is busy with work or something else. In the wildest cases, employers are sometimes asked to install special monitoring software (read - surveillance) at the employee's desktop. There is a strange opinion that this motivates the employee to always do business, and not something abstract.
In fact, it should be very motivating to go update your resume and find a job without those excesses in terms of control.
Actually, everything. Further we work as worked, using the following.
Our Toolkit
A number of corporate resources are only accessible from the internal network, so the problem of access to them is solved using VDI. To start enjoying the benefits of remote work, this is what is required.
- We make the necessary applications. Probably the only stage, one way or another connected with bureaucracy and formalities. But when you are a big company, it is difficult in a different way.
- After the execution of all these requests for an employee's laptop (personal or work), VDI is installed, we use .
- To authenticate the user, the data of his account + entering a unique token are used (this is the responsibility of , the application can be installed on a smartphone with Android / iOS).
- Corporate mail and calendar - Microsoft Outlook.
By the way, this is the entire list of mandatory software, in terms of communications and setting tasks, we have given everything at the mercy of the heads of departments and the employees themselves. It is more convenient for someone to communicate in Slack - please. There are not enough stickers to express emotions - there is always Telegram. Nobody canceled Whatsapp with Skype.
Once a week, many units pass the status. In a normal epidemiological situation, it was a big negotiation with the VKS, because we have employees of the headquarters in Moscow, and remote workers, and guys from the region, and people from the regions, so it was in the format “Personal presence or Bluejeans”. Now all meetings and negotiations are held only remotely, Bluejeans or Zoom.
And more useful software for convenient remote work
It happens that the work of your company is tied to one vendor, or you just already use its products. Or, on the contrary, the security policies in the company for a number of reasons prohibit the use of the software of a particular company, which means that alternatives are needed.
Videoconferencing
(free for up to 100 participants and 40 minutes per conference, then from $15 per month)
(up to 50 participants from $12 per month, then more)
(within GSuite, from $5,5 per month per user, up to 100 participants, 14 days free trial)
(within Office 365)
Chats and knowledge bases
- the product is about 7 years old, and during this time it has acquired a bunch of useful integrations (Dropbox, Asana, Google Drive, etc.). From a simple working chat, Slack has become a combine in which you can create a channel for each department in the company, share files, quickly connect the necessary bots, monitor events, alerts for testers, in general, there are enough functions.
- helps to create convenient knowledge bases (howto, young fighter course for onboarding new employees, convenient schedules, tasks with statuses, and, of course, notes).
- perhaps, a classic of the genre in terms of setting tasks, deadlines, responsible, priorities and other things. Lots of useful integrations.
- for fans of boards and Atlassian.
About people
It would seem that everything is simple, you switched to remote work and work from home. Of course, the pluses of the sea - you do not waste time on the road to work (and nerves too), saving on travel tickets and gasoline, and other amenities. But there are also a number of dangers that lie in wait for a person who decides to set foot on this path. The most famous is related to the wrong self-organization. In fact, everything else follows from it.
Trap #1. Homemade
If you live not alone, but with your spouse, children or parents, or, even more dangerously, with a cat, then at first your remote location will be perceived by them very clearly - cool, you are at home, which means you can ask for anything. Go to the store, make tea, change diapers, reprimand the cat for an unequal fight with ficus, clean the house, change diapers again.
In general, even if you decide for yourself that you work from home just as responsibly and selflessly, then you will need to clearly convey to your family that you are not just at home at the computer, you are working.
It helps to isolate yourself from such stipulation of a clear time when you cannot be distracted. So that your family understands that from 10 to 18 (for example) you should not be pestered with questions, distracted, asked to do something, since you are “at home anyway”.
Of course, there is no need for extremes, and if suddenly you still have 20 minutes left until the end of the work, and peripheral vision reports that the child did get out of the arena and went to explore another room alone, then it’s better to get up and take action. Or if you want to go and walk for half an hour in the park nearby - you have to go and take a walk.
Trap #2. deceptive time
It may start to seem that since you are sitting at home, the computer is at hand, the software is adjusted and you are literally always now one click away from work, now you will definitely have time for everything and you can relax and do everything three times slower.
Generally never. And that's why.
Most likely, there will be more tasks. With a high degree of probability, the overall and usual for your department, the speed of work will drop a little. Because working as part of a remote team for a year in a row and working remotely for two weeks are two very different things. Life has been preparing someone for this for the last 20 or 30 years. And for someone, such a sudden relaxation will not have a very good effect on productivity.
Even if you, here you are, yes, switch very quickly, responsibly and will always be in touch, completing your tasks twice as fast, there will always be someone who will slow down the work. Either someone repaired it, then the light was turned off, then a neighbor with a puncher realized that the time had come. And now any video conference is a collective session of philanthropy.
In general, we do not urge you to drive yourself into a very rigid framework and instantly respond to any incoming message, but keep in mind that the first stage of moving a team that is new to this to a remote location will be associated with a slight slowdown.
Trap #3. Lack of control
As we wrote above, the worst thing an employer can do is turn on the watchman and try to be aware of your every step: at what stage is the task, why not everyone was put in a copy of the letter, how long did you sit at the computer today, what brand of drill did you neighbor, why do you have such strange wallpapers on your desktop and stuff.
The main thing here is not to start thinking that since you are out of the office, then it suddenly became all the same to everyone where you are and what you are doing. That all your tasks fit for management in some kind of daddy without deadlines, and indeed that it is not necessary to do them.
The most important control for a remote worker is self-control. No one knows better than you what time you work best. Maybe in your case it’s cooler and more useful to stop working and watch TV shows until 15.00, and from 16.00 to midnight your productivity is beyond praise, and you will do as much in a day as an office fan does in three. The office system with open spaces and ignoring the rhythms of people is not able to understand this.
Remote work is both an opportunity for the employer to conclude how well you work when you are sitting at home, and an opportunity for you to prove by deed that people can actually do cool things not only from 10 to 18, and if you did nothing before noon, it only says that you did nothing before noon.
And one more thing
Over the years, we at Beeline have perfectly tested BeeFREE, collected a lot of feedback from both employees and their managers, drew conclusions, made a couple of fixes and continue to actively use the approach now.
Now we are actively helping other companies to enable BeeFREE at home. Both in terms of hardware and software, and advice. For example, we will help you quickly deploy VDI for tasks of any profile, whether your guys work with everyday tasks or it will be 3D modeling remotely. We have solutions for audio and video conferencing, you can read more about BeeFREE: WorkPlace-as-a-Service . In addition, companies may benefit from our , register for which in advance .
And here is a detailed webinar on organizing remote work from Olga Filatova (executive vice president for personnel management, organizational development and support) and Alina Dragun, (organizational development manager for Beeline, curator of the BeeFREE project).
Only registered users can participate in the survey. , you are welcome.
And a small survey for companies about remote work (you can select more than one answer)
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Present in several = 11,3%Transferred employees to remote work, the flight is normal, after the normalization of the situation I will leave those who want to work remotely6
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Present in several = 7,6%Transferred employees to remote work, the impressions are ambiguous4
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Present in several = 1,9%Transferred employees to remote work, did not like it, then I will return everyone back to open space1
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Present in several = 69,8%I believe that remote work is the future, people are able to work normally at home, and not in open spaces37
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Present in several = 20,8%I do not believe in telecommuting as a full-time form of employment, without control in the office, everyone works worse11
53 users voted. 29 users abstained.
Source: habr.com