What made you interested in this topic? knowledge and experience in participatory culture and intentions of spreading it
Has the presentation (or the event, if you participated) provided valuable ideas for your work and have you found different solutions which may apply? If yes - can you tell us about this? The presentation was helpful in giving overall overview on why and how distributed work can work. It is not readily applicable for own current work (laboratory-based research), however it provides ideas to implement international collaboration and setting up projects over distance - which is an aim which I have been recently starting to manifest and am learning from experience how to make that most efficiently for everyone involved.
Please, tell us about the best remote work experience you had up to this point: International collaboration of young researchers, artists, psychologists and enthusiasts from various other backgrounds joining to create a novel type of field scienctific project.
The communication, role distribution, self-reliance, active participation and stepping up was of a great experience. The efficacy and means of remote collaboration could be indeed improved, but for the first experiment among previously unknown people, that self-created itself by joint volunteered efforts gave a clear idea of how advantageous and prospective this new type of co-working is!
What are the most common problems/challenges you face with remote work in your organisation? N/A
On what kind of projects do you work? research studies
How big is your organisation? How many collaborators do you work with remotely? commonly 5-7 people, somtetimes up to 20-30 (not involved in core organizations, but contributing rather passively)
What is your role within your organisation - do you have a mandate or budget to invest in improving how your organisation does remote, distributed work? N/A
**What would be a reasonable budget for your team/organisation to put into lowering risk of burnout of staff? ** N/A
What would engage you to make a financial contribution towards building an online training program on best practices for remote work and collaboration? If and when my/our coworking projects themselves become for-profit instead voluntarily driven
Do you want to schedule a short phone call to explore potential collaborations with Edgeryders and or other participants in the event? No
Thank you Nadia, I read the booklet and found it REALLY nice to read.
Am I wrong or the style you used is something new? I really appreciated the references to books and movies, the hero’s journey structure, the illustrations and the writing style. These things combined pushed me to read it until the end.
Things that could improve: I didn’t get until the end what was the document goal. Practical techniques? Only inspiration/motivation to change? When I reached the end I was just a bit disappointed because I was hoping to have learned more. This can be solved just by setting the goal and the ideal reader more clearly from the beginning.
During the Zoom call I really liked the “good practices” slide with your manifesto. It was simple and clear probably it could find space also on the booklet in some sort of way?
Last thing: page editing, at some point I found the text a bit too small to read (but since it is digital I can zoom).
Thank you for the feedback - the idea that we point the reader to a series of resources that people can use to go from understanding to doing. There is a long list of options - here is a first peek : https://anywhere.edgeryders.eu
Yes, we should make that a lot clearer in the beginning - easy to do.
here’s what I came up with to add as a final chapter
What to pack for the journey?
There are five areas we identified as critical for success in teams and organisations that use remote work:
Communication: Document like a good developer. Write like a journalist.When you’re not precise and comprehensive, you create delays or interruptions in the future, or both.
Collaboration: Asynchronous work as the new default. We can’t stress this enough: by default head for asynchronous work (different place and different times).
Socialising: For distributed teams, it’s a conscious effort. Because it does not happen on its own anymore, but is essential for team health and frictionless communication.
Tools: In a distributed setting, you cannot not use a tool. Because even when talking, you use a tool.
Organization Building: More than working from home during Covid. When you can change more basic things in your organization around, use that power to become distributed-first.
You are already on your way! But you may need to slow down now, to go faster later…
Most organisations and teams had to adopt some amount of remote working during Covid.
In general they took what they were doing offline into the online environment. The intuitive approach is to see work as being done in a constant dialogue, like in a room together – in a distributed environment that causes interruptions. For example when they make meetings to be zoom meetings, or worse, zoom meetings with post it notes.
So how to do distributed and remote work well?Aspire towards a culture and management framework where asynchronous work is the default.
When people have the freedom to choose their own worktimes and are rarely interrupted by urgent demands or questions, that’s a good indicator for an asynchronous work environment.
How the Edgeryders does it:
Autonomy: Give collaborators high level of autonomy in managing their own time and workflow - goal oriented management. Use the least invasive successful way of management for everyone individually. Surveillance is expensive and counterproductive: you don’t want to know their mouse position at each moment.
Organisation manual: documenting is a skill (and mostly value-based). The onboarding process is cheap when your org is properly documented.
Parallel work is what avoids interruptions: When you get blocked, switch to another task and wait until your colleague unblocks your progress. For that, we communicate tasks including their dependencies. Tools that allow to express these dependencies help.
About tools: If you’re happy with the tools you have, don’t change a thing. But don’t let yourself be forced to use tools that don’t work for you and that you can’t adapt for your purposes. We decided we rather want to trade some polish for the freedom of free software that allows us to shape our work environment.
Not every organisation can or should make the full transition to this model. But even taking a few small steps can make significant contributions to saving time and money and reducing mental strain.
Learn more about how Edgeryders can help your organisation to adopt good practices for remote work and distributed organisations at remote.edgeryders.eu
What made you interested in this topic? We are a small tech studio that is becoming a remote-first company.
Has the presentation (or the event, if you participated) provided valuable ideas for your work and have you found different solutions which may apply? If yes - can you tell us about this?
Please, tell us about the best remote work experience you had up to this point:
What are the most common problems/challenges you face with remote work in your organisation? Social distancing
On what kind of projects do you work?
How big is your organisation? How many collaborators do you work with remotely?
What is your role within your organisation - do you have a mandate or budget to invest in improving how your organisation does remote, distributed work?
**What would be a reasonable budget for your team/organisation to put into lowering risk of burnout of staff? **
What would engage you to make a financial contribution towards building an online training program on best practices for remote work and collaboration?
Do you want to schedule a short phone call to explore potential collaborations with Edgeryders and or other participants in the event? No
What made you interested in this topic? The reality of work is changing (and it was changing even before the COVID-19 pandemic); adapting our way of working and organising work as teams and organisations is crucial for the success of our organisations and for our wellbeing as workers.
Has the presentation (or the event, if you participated) provided valuable ideas for your work and have you found different solutions which may apply? If yes - can you tell us about this? I could not seize a specific solution that I may apply, but I think several interesting suggestions were made.
Although the event was rather short, I found interesting that it addressed the topic from the concrete experience of the presenters and that participants were asked to share their own experiences.
Please, tell us about the best remote work experience you had up to this point: Within a consortium of three companies, working on setting up a large scale online training platform for the European Commission, and producing 22 self-paced online training courses in 28 languages. From day 1, we decided to move most of our communications and activities related to the project on MS Teams, where we could write posts, simultaneusly work on documents and provide comments, hold meetings, etc… This reduced the number of emails and centralised all the information, communications and documents in one online space. Most people learned quickly how to use this tool.
What are the most common problems/challenges you face with remote work in your organisation? 1) Remote work can be great, but personal presence for certain activities remains necessary or better than remote. Personal exchanges “in presence”, even informal chats or quick feedback or information sharing, are often undervalued, but they really help create strength and cohesion in a team.
2) Remote work requires some degree of IT skills that not all members of a team necessarily have, or are capable of developing. In any case, I see a challenge as many organisations tend to take for granted these IT skills. A serious capacity development effort should be undertaken by organisations to bridge the skills gap within their staff.
3) If remote work is not deliberately chosen and planned, it may become messy. I see a high risk of multiplying the online tools an organisation uses, and considering the learning curve that each of them requires before it becomes an optimal tool for the specific purposes of an organisation, I see the risk of wasting time in a myriad of tools.
Resuming: as an organisation, I believe remote work should be deliberately chosen and accurately tested and planned, and such plan should include a capacity building/development component. Finally, balance between remote work and presential (traditional) work should be explored, depending on the type of work and organisation.
On what kind of projects do you work? Mainly training projects, usually related to development cooperation and humanitarian aid.
How big is your organisation? How many collaborators do you work with remotely? The organisation I work with counts around 130 staff members, spread across more than 10 offices, in 3 continents (Europe, Africa, Asia).
What is your role within your organisation - do you have a mandate or budget to invest in improving how your organisation does remote, distributed work? Within my organisation, I have a primary role, acquisition & project manager, but I also act as trainer and consultant, basic IT support, strategic adivisor… I don’t have any mandate with a budget, but I initiated some internal projects, with the back up of the management, to improve remote work. Notably, the development of an internal database of projects managed by the organisation, and a push to move the management and communications of at least some projects to MS Teams.
**What would be a reasonable budget for your team/organisation to put into lowering risk of burnout of staff? **
What would engage you to make a financial contribution towards building an online training program on best practices for remote work and collaboration? The possibility to involve the organisation I work with, as we are mainly a training provider and an enterprising partner…
Do you want to schedule a short phone call to explore potential collaborations with Edgeryders and or other participants in the event? Yes
