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Be transparent
McKinsey raises the importance of having a single source of truth for everyone in the organisation and suggests that this could be in the form of a handbook and other documents that lay out the rules and norms and is continually updated.
One of the best examples of this is the GitLab team handbook. The introduction to the handbook states:
“The GitLab team handbook is the central repository for how we run the company. When printed, it consists of over 2,000 pages of text. To uphold the GitLab value of being transparent, the handbook is open to the world, and we welcome feedback. Please make a merge request to suggest improvements or add clarifications. To ask questions, use issues.
For a very specific set of internal information, we maintain a separate Internal Handbook.”
In an article for Harvard Business Review, GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij says:
“One big concern about distributed workforces is that people will miss out on the knowledge transfer that comes from being in the same place and able to consult colleagues spontaneously. The handbook helps us solve that problem because it provides a single source of truth accessible to anyone at any time. Our team members can’t stop by a peer’s office to ask for help, but they can consult an up-to-date, collectively edited resource to get the answers they need.”
“GitLab is fortunate to have operated this way since the beginning. At co-located start-ups culture tends to emerge and spread informally. But as organizations
expand into multiple offices, cities, and countries, formal documentation and reinforcement of norms and values become more important. Many companies struggle with the transition. We never had to make that shift. We’ve always known how to ensure that our team, while fully dispersed, is nonetheless in sync.”
Be purposeful about where people work
Employees do not want to make a commute to an office to conduct work that they could have done elsewhere. It makes no sense to spend 2 hours on a commute to achieve what you could have done remotely.
Organisations must work with their employees to define the activities that make sense to be conducted in person when there are advantages to being in the presence of colleagues in the same place.
In March I wrote a newsletter called “Was It Worth The Commute?” and proposed that this question should be asked by every employee when they are working in the office.
“This is the key question to determine what work should be done where. If there was a marked increase in productivity, performance, innovation and collaboration outcomes, then the answer would be “yes.”
The commute to the office must be for a specific outcome that cannot be achieved elsewhere such as working remotely.”
I have also previously suggested that there are only 5 reasons to work in the office.