Vermont really isn’t a bad place to live. It’s green—except in fall when it’s incredibly colorful. You can ski. It’s filled with craft beers. And if you work remotely, the state will pay you up to $10,000 to move in.
In May last year, Vermont’s Republican governor Phil Scott signed a bill to attract technology workers by helping to pay their relocation costs. The money could be used to pay for computer software and hardware, for broadband access, and even for membership in a co-working space.
Applicants needed to become full-time residents of the state the following year to qualify for the grant. They also had to be full-time employees of a company outside the state and able to work remotely.
The idea was to draw in technology workers who want the quiet and the cost of living of a rural lifestyle but who don’t want to give up the kinds of high-paying jobs usually found in cities. It also shows the kinds of changes that remote working can create. When you no longer need to commute further than your local café, when you can hold meetings with people in New York, New Haven, and New Zealand without leaving your kitchen, what difference does it make where you live? Rural towns with aging populations can suck in young families by offering broad broadband, co-working spaces, and houses they can actually afford to buy. For a developer expecting to cough up an average $1.3 million for a family house in San Francisco, Vermont’s average $210,000 house price can look like a steal.
According to a study by FlexJobs and Global Workplace Analytics, nearly 5 million people now telecommute in the US—a figure that doesn’t include freelancers, entrepreneurs, or the self-employed. The average growth rate in telecommuting over the last five years has been 44 percent, a figure that has been driven at least in part by the development of online collaboration tools.
These cloud-based services allow remote teams to share work, to hold virtual meetings, and to keep in contact even when they’re in different countries and have never met in person. But are they the right tools for an increasingly popular way of working, and how can remote workers get more out of them?
“We all have our own preferences for how to work. When we work together with others, we need to find common ground.”
The Tools for the Remote Job
The tools available now very tremendously. Some have come from the world’s biggest tech companies like Google and Microsoft. Others started as small, independent projects that ballooned into some of the world’s most popular software.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft’s move away from selling its Office suite as a standalone program and towards offering its popular productivity software as a service, also enabled Office’s applications to better function as a collaboration hub. Subscribers to Office 365 get a terabyte of data to store all of their files online. They can access those files using any of Microsoft’s programs, including Excel, Word, and Powerpoint. So a member of a remote team could upload a file to a shared folder on OneDrive, and make it available to every other team member to use without having to worry about compatibility or formatting.
But collaboration isn’t just about being able to work on the same files. It also means being able to talk about the work being performed, to discuss plans, and swap ideas. That might have been one of the reasons behind Microsoft’s decision to buy Skype in 2011, for which the company paid $8.5 billion. Five years later, Skype for Business had grown into the most used workplace chat app.
But the real advance came in March 2017 when Microsoft launched Teams. That program copied many of the functions that Stewart Butterfield had placed in Slack four years earlier. Both programs allowed team members to chat within their channels, to upload files, to share screens, and to make conference calls, and even to video chat. Microsoft Teams has now grown to be more popular than Slack. A study of 900 organizations found that 21 percent of those companies used Microsoft Teams, while only 15 percent used Slack.
Slack
Slack might be older than Teams, and has now been overtaken by it, but it still sets the standard for cloud-based collaboration, mostly because of its user-friendly design. The free version is flexible enough for small firms to get used to before having to shell out for the full version, and while it can’t compete with Microsoft’s terabyte of storage, it plays well with third party cloud storage services, such as Dropbox and Google Drive. Because it doesn’t come from one of the tech giants, it’s agnostic about additional services.
But that’s also a weakness. The main reason that enterprises have drifted towards Microsoft Teams is that it integrates with Microsoft’s other applications and it comes with a subscription to its suite. Smaller companies like Slack struggle to compete against the comprehensive offer that larger firms can now make.
Asana
So it’s no surprise that Asana, despite being one of the oldest collaboration tools on the Web also trails Teams and Slack. The application’s strength is in project tracking, rather than in collaboration. It allows teams to organize their projects in a list or on a board. Instead of trying to compete with Microsoft or Slack’s communication tools, it focuses on organization.
Trello
Trello takes a similar approach. This isn’t a place where team members are going to be working on files together. Instead, they’ll be using it to allocate tasks and track progress. It’s a kind of digital Post It notes board that also integrates with other services, like Evernote, Google Drive, and Slack.
Know Your Tools… and Know How You Need to Use Them
What each of these tools show is that that the kind of cloud collaboration used by remote workers isn’t straightforward. First, the choice of tool will depend on the tasks the teams want to complete. Some tools are better for project planning and others for enterprise-wide collaboration in a company that’s using software from the same company providing the collaborative tool.
Even remote teams needs remote leaders.
But teams also have to use the tools in the right way—which means using it in a way that suits everyone. According to Lisette Sutherland, author of Work Together Anywhere: A Handbook on Working Remotely Successfully for Individuals, Teams, and Managers, one of the biggest challenges of cloud collaboration tools is getting everyone on the team to agree how to use them:
“We all have our own preferences for how to work,” she says. “When we work together with others, we need to find common ground. Where will files be stored? How will they be named? What are the email protocols? And on and on. When we’re in the same place, we can afford to be somewhat sloppy about our processes. When a colleague hasn’t stored a file in the right place, we can simply ask them about it. On a remote team, it takes more effort. We have to send a message or call. And every step (even something small) adds time and energy to the process.”
Sutherland recommends that companies “transition” teams to remote working rather than becoming remote in a single leap. A business thinking of building remote teams needs to first allocate the kind of professional equipment needed to make it easy for people to talk with each other. That means the highest quality of Internet connection available, a webcam, and a headset.
She also offers a template team agreement that team members can use to set expectations. The agreement states what information each team member expects to share and hopes to see from the rest of the team. It lets them suggest tools that everyone can use for different services, such as task boards, group chat, and time tracking. It even includes a table that lists each communication medium—email, group chat, phone, video conference, etc.—and states whether the team member prefers that they’re used for work or for social purposes, and the preferred response time. Team members can also use the agreement to lay out collaboration times and joint working hours.
That might sound like a lot of preparation to undertake before doing something as simple as using a cloud collaboration tool, but it is also necessary. Even in an office, people work in different ways. Some people like to communicate by walking down the corridor and poking a head into someone’s office to exchange a few words. Others prefer to send a quick text through the office instant messenger. Copywriters used to preparing their work in Word might not take kindly to having to rework it in Google Docs, while different naming formats used for different versions of the work as it’s being updated and revised can cause plenty of confusion.
“The idea is for the team to define the information they need for the projects they work on, the communication protocols necessary to get their work done, and the tools they need so that everyone knows what the other is working on,” says Sutherland.
Even with that agreement, Sutherland still recommends that members of remote teams meet up occasionally. How often varies. Jason Friend, co-founder of Basecamp and co-author of Remote: Office Not Required, has said that the remote team at 37signals “don’t meet in person all that often.” The company only comes together about three times a year in the Chicago office.
“And even that can be a tad too frequent if our goal is to really blow it out on the free-riff idea ramp!” he writes.
What Fried describes as the “spur-of-the-moment rays of brilliance” that can be sparked by a face-to-face conversation are more likely to be “rays of enthusiasm” than genuine flashes of brilliance. A shared screen and a good voice connection can be almost as effective, he argues.
Restricting those personal meetings also makes them special, a kind of rare treat that can sustain team members through the long months of instant messaging, emailing, and voice conferencing.
Collaboration Tools Are Too Good… and May Be Getting Better
The reason this preparation is so necessary is that collaboration tools are now sophisticated pieces of software. When Slack went public without an IPO in June this year, its shares leapt above the reference price of $26 to hit $38.50. That valued the firm at $19.5 billion. That doesn’t happen unless the company is delivering a service that people are interested in using and willing to buy.
But the freedom to use the range of collaboration functions in a single tool—the screen-sharing, conferencing, instant messaging, and so on—also means that team members will have different preferred ways of working. Some may prefer to use Microsoft Teams and do all of the work in Office, communicating mainly by email, and only joining a video call when absolutely necessary. Other team members may be more used to Slack and expect to start each day with a virtual stand-up, before continuing with constant, ongoing messaging and shared work on the same document.
Even remote teams needs remote leaders. It’s up to those leaders to pass out agreements like those offered by Lisette Sutherland to understand how each team member prefers to work. They then need to make a decision on how the team will function and communicate that decision so that everyone is on the same page, using the same tools, naming documents in a consistent way, and aware of how to reach someone they need.
And they also need to be prepared to adjust as the tools and technology change too. Sutherland suggests that a new generation of collaboration tools might incorporate AR/VR and hologram technology. If that arrives, remote workers won’t be able to stay in their pajamas all day, even if they’re working in a wood in Vermont.
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