Situation
Every single day since March we have been listening news on COVID-19. This pandemic that has spread all over the world is what in everyone’s mind even now, about 5-months later. Countries all across issued nation-wide state of emergency, many forces businesses to shut their offices for an uncertain period of time. Businesses are experiencing lost of businesses, revenues, and productivities from their workers. This is truly a crisis that threat the existence of the business itself. There is no option for businesses than to accept the COVID-19 situation and adapt to make it work in this new world if they want to survive.
Crisis and Organization level experimentation
Working for IT department of a large insurance company, I am fortunate to be exposed to various kind of technologies to enable remote working even before the COVID-19 situation. Virtual meetings and conference calls and VPN technologies are not something new to us. I am sure that the rest of the company is pretty familiar with these technologies as they are mostly standard issue. When the situation turned for the worse, my team in particular has been very prepared. We have done virtual stand-ups for at least a week even before the order to stay home was in place. Then the day came when employees are ordered to stay at home except for workers of critical functions that can only be done at the office.
I remember the rally after that. Volunteers from across IT was called under the banner of BCP, and enabling Remote Work. Unfortunately, I did not see first hand as a lot of these work are on infrastructure side. But I do get to experience the initial problems and rapid improvements, such as difficulties on connecting to VPNs and virtual conferences and slow connections. Nowadays, such issues are a thing of the past. Yes, I do experience slow downs or disconnection, but those are very rare.
Lately, there was a.. ‘survey’ that the company can do to gather ideas around how we can improve efficiency. Surprisingly, one of the most top rated idea is widening implementation of Remote Work policy. Somehow to people that voted on this idea, working remotely is actually more efficient for them. Isn’t this a sign of successful experimentation?
I can not say that this is true for the majority of population, that this is true for all kind of work, or that this is based on factual careful measurement, but that the perception is there was very interesting. What I believe is that there are people that experimented on various ways of Remote Working and find that it works for them better, and our team is one of the team that find it to be true.
Teams
The team that I am coaching currently is a small team. Composed of mostly engineers and analysts, with a strong business person as the product owner. However, the team has again and again impresses stakeholders and senior management on their deliveries.. all why doing their work remotely. And this is the truly where I witness how incredible human ability to adapt to changes to their environment, and improve and optimize the new norms.
Internally, we leveraged a lot of tools to help our work, integrated chat tools, video calls, screen sharing, file sharing and repository. Email is not our main way of communication anymore, instead it is mainly to interact to external group that require wide distribution or teams that prefer us to do that. We develop internal culture where we have virtual daily standups, open communications even over chat, we joke and complain in chat, we strive to find the most efficient way to communicate with other teams, even dragging them over group conversation or group calls immediately at times. We found new ways of working over remote, such as new tools to facilitate our retrospectives, or even making sure people can see meeting notes as it is being written in real-time to sync up people understanding on the spot.
Self
But these improvements does not stop at the Teams level. I personally found how much time can be saved by just working from home most of the time. These are precious time that I can invest on my son, in particular. I am able to structure a schedule where I have the time to take care of my son day by day while staying productive. I got to work on his homework and education personally. I have more time to play with him as well. Thanks to that I am now closer to my son than ever.
These are also time that I can use to develop myself more. If previously I had to do midnight trainings, now I can find some time here or there to continue with my study, or spend the time to do my cycling hobbies for instance. How to make my time more efficient is probably been in my mind more times than ever.
Closing
Even though the title of this post is about remote work, what I wanted to share here is that we as person has a tremendous potential to adaption. Organizations are made of people and inherit the same ability. However, a lot of times we did not tap into this ability enough. Tough situations forces creates difficult situations for us to adapt, and in the process it is very possible that we may have discover something that is much better. Experimentation is also another way that we can use to tap into this potential (hopefully without making ourselves go into tough situations).
As an Agile Coach, I believe and does a lot of experimentation, in professional and in private life. Organizations, society, or what dubbed common sense sometimes forces us to a specific truth or way of thinking. I often get bothered with it. Not only because of the doubts, but as it somehow dismiss our ability to adapt. The only way to the truth is to challenge it. Of course, knowing which one to challenge and accept requires wisdom and is a different topic by itself.
Agile & Cycling 