What can and cannot be done remotely?Wat kan er wel en niet op afstand gedaan worden?Vad kan och vad kan inte göras på distans?Was kann und was kann nicht in der Ferne ausgeführt werden?
In the Netherlands, home-working has been growing rapidly in the past years. Existing companies are stimulating people to work (partly) from home, creating flexible desks in their offices. Many people become freelancers and work where and when they want. And more work is moved offshore or nearshore.
This trend is likely to continue and might even accelerate. The two main developments that will accelerate the speed:
1. People gain experience in how to manage people remotely (be it in their own country or somewhere else on the globe). Working together remotely requires different behavior, mainly because you don’t see each other face to face all the time. I have seen this development in our own company, where in the beginning we had our team in the Netherlands in one office and suppliers offshore/nearshore. Right now, we have 7 sales people working from 5 different countries as one team. And on top of the suppliers, we have 3 development offices in 3 countries. This requires a very specific behavior of people.
2. Technological advancements. 6 years back there were almost no online project management tools. Today, there is abundant choice, both open source and paid. 6 years back, version control had just started. Today, we have github, which replaced svn, which replaced other systems that existed earlier. Version control gets integrated with project management tools so code is linked to specific tasks or functionalities. People invent new tools every day to facilitate remote working. Without the internet it was hardly possible to work remotely. Without skype, communication was very expensive. In 10 years we will have tools that will make us feel as if we are sitting next to eachother at the same desk (a solution already exists for this).
The question I raised in the title is what work could be done remotely. What is the limit to the type of work that can be done by someone sitting on the other side of the planet? I believe that anything that can be done using a computer and a wire, can be eligible for remote work.
In the world is flat, Thomas Friedman describes some cases that seem futuristic, but might become reality on a big scale. There are fast food restaurants in the US that have a drive-in where you ring the bell, the order is taken by someone in India, entered into a system and within minutes, your order is made ready by the local US person and you take it with you. I also spoke to someone at Deloitte who told me that they are flying in many consultants from India to their customers in the US and Europe. And the research and reports that they make are also created in India on a large scale. And that’s just the beginning he told me.
In our company, we also try to do as much of the work from our Indian office. Our bookkeeping, financial reporting, lead creation, social media marketing is all done from India. I write a blog article and Sini in India coordinates the translation, then posts the article, uses the content in our newsletter and spreads it in social media. Babitha creates our invoices with Twinfield, an online system (which didn’t exist few years back!), sends them to our clients and administers all reminders and payments. The only thing that we do locally is sales and personal support for our customers.
Bridgys from 6 nationalities are connected with a clear communication process….
Dear Reader,What do you think? What is the limit?
About Hugo Messer
Hugo Messer is a Dutch entrepreneur, distributed agile team specialist, and author. He is the founder and owner of Bridge Global, a software services provider, and ekipa.co., an agile coaching agency. He has been building and managing teams around the world for the past several years. His passion is to enable people that are spread across cultures, geography and time zones to cooperate. Whether it’s offshoring or nearshoring, he knows what it takes to make global cooperation work.
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The people who is expertise in one domain and have no time to spend in office,those will prefer to work from home. This thing is happening all over the world.
Hugo, I do not disagree with you at all, I had similar experience when we had 12 people team distributed over 6 offices in NA, Europe and Asia. The biggest question for me is potential trust issues. Physical proximity is very essential for long-term trust, when people realign their personal and career goals by discussing them face-to-face. This is especially vital when it goes about key employees and founders. My boss was addressing this issue by sending people from different offices to 3-4 trade shows per year in cross-office teams. This way we had a chance to build personal relationships, discuss long-term goals and exchange best practices. I`m curious how do you deal with it at Bridge?
We try to minimize travel because i believe travelling around the world all the time is not the way to overcome distance. We are in an era where our environment is under pressure so we humans need to find ways to cooperate across distance using the technologies available. A bridge we have a strict schedule of weekly and daily skype meetings. And every quarter we do personal development meetings which focuses on each individuals aspirations a nd goals. Per quarter we also set company and personal company related goals. And in between we try to have regular skype calls when needed.
Does it really work without having an occasional dinner or a glass of beer together? Can you feel confident your people are truly open with you on Skype calls when it comes to their deepest desires and long-term needs? For example, it is hard to read body language on Skype, especially when the other side is in the office environment, opposed to informal environment.
Sure you do need to meet from while to while. I think it’s absolutely essential. But I also believe that we human beings can adapt. Natural inclination is to get in the car or plane, burn fuel, spend time, all to meet up. Which of course is nice and has advantages. But with current technology you can do a lot. I learned that if I use skype to do for example personal development meetings, I can absolutely read body language. Because I do it every day, I do pick up signals, I can read emotions from faces. And openness can be stimulated as well. I hope they share their deepest desires, but I will never know if they don’t maybe? :)
Great feedback, Hugo, thanks for sharing!
All you can do is not remotely true communication (already think addicts Social Media differently). Real communication is the exchange of words (yes, that’s possible with social media), nonverbal communication (yes you can with Skype, for a part then, because you seldom see the whole body), odors (here we go, it may still not), and by the sense that newly discovered, the top of the nose that picks up something other than smell.
And yes, a Kyrgyz programmer works against € 7.50 per hour, where there walking around who dare ask tenfold. With Catia you competitor engineer with engineers over the world (just remember the few seconds that it takes the signal) and there are nice tools to homeworkers on its own servers to work.
But the strength of any organization is the sum of the forces of people and that sum you lose if you only by means of digital signals the illusion of contact.
There is no digital system that can replace humans!
I believe in herself that if you want, and you believe that other people can work without being physically in the same room or the same country to sit, this is possible. All my colleagues are working from different locations and I communicate throughout the day via skype. It is definitely nicer and more pleasant to live together, but at the same time I experience that digital work can be much more efficient. The strength of any organization is the people, totally agree. The way these forces work together in this digital era only unlike last century, and there have many people are used to it. E there are many technological improvements. Let the digital smell but come …
Hugo I know it can, I had and have teleconferences with people from around the world, great saves travel time and travel expenses. Yet you suddenly see a very different (and often much more pleasant) man when you meet face looks and then it also work pieces efficiently. then very old work (what we now call the new work) came to an end and the people from their homework to collective spaces increased productivity went great. And there are forces between people we do not know and therefore can not perceive. We can digitize only slightly if we know something and therefore a computer never replace the man. How much time does it take a computer to a face or facial expression recognition? And how long can you do that? ICTers I see that the power of the computer heavily overestimate the power of people severely underestimate.