It has become a bit of an exercise in stating the obvious to mention that the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world, particularly the world of work. Yet, video conferencing, remote work, and hybrid models weren’t inventions of the pandemic and, in all cases, are technologies and approaches that a portion of the workforce has utilized for decades.
Sure enough, the pandemic made remote work the norm for most of the world’s knowledge workers. As companies contemplate returns to the office or some type of hybrid model, many workers are going on record with their preference to continue remote or hybrid work.
The Remote Working Challenge
Pre-pandemic, remote work wasn’t country email list done at scale in most organizations. Even people that weren’t tied to a specific office location were encouraged to “come into the office” periodically as high-profile organizations like IBM and Yahoo reversed their “remote first” policies and demanded a return to the physical office.
The difficult transition from “two weeks to flatten the curve” to long-running “social distancing” policies proved without a doubt that many knowledge workers, and entire teams and organizations, could work productively outside a traditional office. This forced global experiment was the final nail in the coffin of productivity-based objections to remote work. However, many executives and leaders still expressed a desire to return to in-office work when feasible.
You’re Already Innovating Remotely
One recurring misguided theme of 4 ways you can leverage data analytics to improve roi remote work is that innovation is impossible. Yet, many companies are already innovating with partners and vendors remotely. Companies like BairesDev offer innovation labs, and your teams have likely created their own unstructured versions of innovation labs already.
There is an emerging set of collaboration tools from the native whiteboard feature in Zoom, to apps like Miro that attempt to recreate the experience of placing sticky notes on a whiteboard. Of course, the tools alone don’t create innovation, but many savvy teams have found techniques that work well in a remote environment and that you can likely find and scale within your organization.
Innovating Remotely
It’s true that it’s difficult to replicate a hong kong phone number full-day in-person session, surrounded by whiteboards and people shoulder-to-shoulder in a remote environment, but it’s not impossible to innovate in such a setting with some forethought. One of the biggest challenges is dealing with “video fatigue,” the tendency to lose energy faster when working via video versus in-person. One of the best ways to combat this tendency is to use video for short, focused bursts of collaboration, followed by an hour or two of “cameras off” individual work.