How businesses can not only survive but thrive with a remote workforce

One year into the big move to remote work practices, 52 percent of employees said they felt more productive while working from home, according to a 2021 survey from PwC.

But how have employers continued to cultivate a fruitful remote workforce in the interim, and how should they maintain it?

Minimal disruption is a good start.

Vanessa Stock is a co-founder and VP of people at Pitch, a startup offering collaborative work tools for creating presentations and slide decks. She said that being more intentional about day-to-day communication flows, alongside the intentional use of tools to enable this, allowed her company to pivot seamlessly to fully remote during the pandemic.

But trusting your employees is also essential – trusting them to deliver on their work in a home environment, and trusting them to manage their own time.

Leadership’s response to remote dictates its success

“I think when you ask yourself how well remote work is working for you as a team, it boils down to how well the leadership is [understanding the reality of] remote work. How well do you have set values around remote work? What does transparency mean? What do I expect from my people?” Vanessa asked.

“The clearer the leadership team is about remote work and what success looks like, the better the team can execute on it,” added Vanessa.

PwC CTO Joe Atkinson spoke about his experience of putting these practices in place for a large global workforce of 55,000 people in the US and almost 300,000 around the world.

The connected environment we’re all living in … it means the way that we built trust, around water coolers or coffee machines, is different [now]. – Joe Atkinson, CTO, PwC

“Like most organisations, we woke up one Monday morning and the offices and the facilities and the technologies that we’d relied on were no longer the ones we were going to use,” Joe said. “We needed to shift everybody so that we could enable their work wherever they were. So that was huge.”

“We had the coaching, the relationship management, the models in place – the benefits of a people-oriented business. But now we were trying to flex all of those muscles in very, very different ways,” Joe explained.

Trusting your employees to be productive outside the office

Echoing Vanessa’s sentiment about the necessity for trust, Joe pointed out that things are still not the same as they were before: “The connected environment we’re all living in – the virtual environment we’re all living in – it means the way that we built trust, around water coolers or coffee machines, is different [now].”

This new concept of trust extends to accepting the fact that employees can be productive without having to prove it in the number of hours they clock in a day.

“[Time is] actually a terrible measure of human output. It may be one of the worst, because you encourage people to spend time – the most precious resource we have – but then you measure the time as if the amount of time is an outcome measurement and it really isn’t,” said Joe.

Vanessa and Joe both spoke about the power of ownership and empowerment; of giving remote teams the agency to make decisions and be impactful.

“The practical matter is, when you take 300,000 employees and you send them home to work, you have to empower them,” Joe explained. “If you think you’re going to manage and drive each one’s individual objectives for the day…you’ve got to give them the empowerment to identify the work that needs to be done and the way that needs to be done.”

Is the traditional 9 to 5 work day dead?

I don’t think [the traditional office model] is necessary to be productive. I think [remote] is the future. – Vanessa Stock, co-founder and VP of people, Pitch

With such a sea change, Vanessa doubts things will return to the way they were pre-pandemic. The traditional nine-to-five, Vanessa argued, is already dying out.

“I don’t think [the traditional office model] is necessary to be productive. I think [remote] is the future. If you want to hire the best talent – if you want to hire the best engineers globally – I think, as a company, you have to be remote-optimised and you need to go with the wave.”

“I know it’s not easy, especially for bigger companies, but this is the future. And I think all of us as managers and founders need to think about how we can create an environment where remote work is possible; it is nourished,” Vanessa explained.

This doesn’t mean fully remote is the way to ensure a well-oiled organisation, and neither employer nor employee seems to want to tear down the office walls for good.

A hybrid approach to office presence

For instance, PwC’s 2021 survey found that most executives (68 percent) believe workers should be in the office at least three days a week to maintain company culture.

But according to the survey, employers and employees differ in their reasons for wanting to get back to a physical office space. While employers think it will increase the productivity of the workforce, employees value it for face-to-face collaboration.

And, of course, there are some organisations that simply cannot consider remote work. From the healthcare sector to government departments, those working with confidential information don’t always have the option of leaving the secure environment of their workplace.

“I think a lot of companies are going to struggle with [remote]. There are always times that people need to be physically present,” he added.

It’s clear that a one-size-fits-all approach simply won’t work. So what’s the alternative?

“For us, the mentorship, the connectivity, the collaboration is important,” Joe said. “We want to bring people together, but in the current environment, and with the war for talent we’re all seeing in this Great Resignation, giving people choice and empowerment is the headline of the day.”

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