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Remote work has become the standard for a large number of knowledge employees. It makes sense from a work/life balance perspective – why come into the office and deal with the commute when you can work just as well from home. It is also proven to have benefits in terms of productivity and worker morale. For organisations that are struggling to find and retain great staff through the “great resignation,” if allowing people to work from home is the difference, then it’s a self-evidently good idea to embrace it.
However, remote work also throws up challenges. Most critically, when employees are working remotely, transparency in what they are doing can drop, and this can result in critical errors being made.
Take the role of clerks, for example. The role of a clerk is focused on the accuracy of information that they have coming in, as well as their own outputs. Without transparency, mistakes can be made in the passing of information to the clerk, and those errors might not be identified for a long time (if ever), because the default assumption is that the information that a clerk is handling is accurate.
Without having a dedicated transparency strategy in place to govern remote work, organisations run four critical operational risks:
1. Poor communication across teams
A lack of transparency also means that teammates are not talking to once another as well as they should be. Tasks that would have been casually mentioned in an office environment go undone, and there’s a risk that two employees might accidentally end up working on the same things, crippling productivity. Most of all, however, morale across the team takes a hit, as no one is really sure that what they’re doing is contributing to the whole.
2. People end up working on the wrong things
Misguidance is a real risk when teams are not communicating transparently. Someone on the team might be led to undertake a task that is the very opposite of what is needed. At other times, someone might take on a task thinking that it was working towards a specific outcome, when the rest of the team needed a different outcome.
3. A culture of silence might develop
Remote working employees can become paranoid that what they’re doing is going to be claimed by one of their team, their manager, or people in the office. Without an ongoing commitment to transparency and information sharing, these people can start “holding their cards close to their chests,” which can cause greater confusion across the organisation.
4. Document control becomes a nightmare
In the modern workplace, most documents have multiple authors and layers of revision. If two people are working on two different versions of a document, thinking that they’re on the most current version, the integrity of the document itself is compromised. The only way to protect against this is through a transparent work environment, so that everyone can know, at a glance, what the most recent version of the document is.
How to encourage greater transparency among remote teams
There are several tactics that can help to deliver a more transparent working environment among remote teams.
1. Find the right tool to consolidate all work communication
There are many tools available on the market at the moment that enable open communication, document sharing, and collaboration. Slack, Basecamp, Asana, Monday, Discord and more all have their own unique advantages and disadvantages, but adopting one of these platforms is essential for driving a transparent work environment.
Encourage teams to communicate over the open channels rather than private DMs (aside from specifically sensitive information), and make sure this is a top-down initiative, so that managers are using it to communicate with their own teams. It will then become habit-forming and a standard form of communication across the team.
2. Encourage asynchronous communication
When teams work remotely, the temptation is to encourage the heavy use of real-time, synchronous communication, such as video conferencing, to try and mimic the dynamics of the office.
However, this doesn’t work as well with remote working, and indeed can result in frustration as teams feel like their days are constantly being interrupted for frivolous meetings. Asynchronous communication – where an employee will leave a message on the Slack channel to be responded to when the next person gets the chance to look at it – more naturally suits the dynamics of remote work. The added benefit of taking this approach is that workflows will be smoother and your teams will adopt an “in time” approach to their work – rather than waiting on work coming to them, employees will keep an eye on the workflow system for the next task that they can take on.
3. Create formal accountability systems
Accountability is critical within any transparent system. With remote working, it’s important that the accountability is kept in the open. This means generating reports for weekly distribution across the team, and making the statistics, successes, and challenges open and available for all to see.
It is not about creating a culture of blame and finger-pointing. For example, with collaborative documents, it’s important that the edit history is made available for all to see. However, this is not to criticise or shame the changes that are made. Rather, it should be used as a way of highlighting and celebrating improvements to the work.
When you’ve got an open, collaborative, and “no-fail” environment like this, employees will not feel hesitant about putting their ideas out to the group and being open in their feedback and communication with their peers.
Most importantly, though, the commitment to transparency needs to be noted down, with formal policies governing the way that remote employees will communicate with their teams and be managed. It’s important to communicate these policies, too, and make it clear that this isn’t about micromanagement or restricting the employee’s ability to work on terms that suit them best. Rather, it should be positioned as a positive – a more transparent and open working environment helps everyone get their jobs done better, and allows teams to work in the best way that remote working allows.