
Workstyle Resilience – Remote Work Strategies
Building agility and capability within your structure, culture and people.
“Our people want more workstyle flexibility and we need to diversify and decentralise our talent but I’m not sure we have the culture or systems to support remote work.”
Regular remote work is becoming increasingly common within organisations of all sizes around the world, fuelled by globalisation and enabled by the internet and digitisation. Within organisations the spread of ‘activity-based workplace’ programs, increasing employee demand for flexible work policies and greater reliance on contractors and networked platforms to support business initiatives mean remote work is increasingly an intrinsic part of workplace and workforce strategies. Recently the benefits of an integrated ‘business as usual’ remote work strategy as a business continuity enabler during periods of social or environmental disruption have been brought into sharp focus. We view remote work as being much more than just a ‘work from home’ policy. Remote work includes fully as well as partly virtual teams, telecommuters/teleworkers, mobile workers, salespeople, contractors and ‘digital road-warriors’. They may operate from a ‘first place’ (home), coworking place, ‘third place’ (such as public facilities), and potentially in future also within a virtual or digitally-enhanced environment. A remote working strategy should be integrated into your structure, systems, culture, leadership style and performance management system. A robust remote working strategy is business-led, multidisciplinary and builds resilience and capability at the organisational, manager/team and individual levels. Many of the critical qualities and capabilities of remote workers are increasingly also critical future of work capabilities for all knowledge workers. In future, the qualities that determine knowledge worker success and ability to thrive will be the same qualities that enable most workers to engage in successful remote work, at least some of the time.
Successful remote workers are aware of their own workstyle preferences and know how make the most of different environments and experiences to be effective and efficient.