Enabling Remote Working – Trust and Communication

Why use remote working?

The primary motivations for companies moving to remote working are to reduce overheads and improve staff retention but many larger organisations are still reluctant to loosen their grip. In the small business sector though, remote or home working has been well-established for a number of years, indeed in its latest South East Business Monitor Survey http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/SouthEast_files/HotTopic809.pdf   Business Link found that the proportion of small business opting to operate completely without premises other than a home office is steadily increasing.

As experienced home workers Skillfair’s members – who are independent consultants and freelancers – are well placed to identify what works and what doesn’t so we recently surveyed them to find out how important technology is to remote working and what other factors are involved in a successful remote relationship.

Does it work?

The first and most obvious conclusion was that remote working clearly works for our members and their clients. More than 80% of consultants work remotely from their clients at least 50% of the time and many rarely meet their clients face to face, if at all. While the consultants all referred to the need to set expectations with the client it seems that clients are more worried about getting a particular task or project completed than about where the work is done.

What technology helps?

Email was identified overwhelmingly as the most useful technology in remote working, with voice communication in its various forms (phone, Skype, teleconferencing) coming in second. By contrast social networking tools were identified as the least important technology and there was a resounding silence when it came to the use of collaboration tools. In part this may be a reflection of the consultancy market, when you work for many different clients in the course of a year, each with their own VPN, collaboration tools etc, it can be very difficult to keep switching environments.

Since consultants tend to be in the 35-55 age group it’s no surprise that texting and instant messaging were less than popular. Given that the common theme was the need for frequent communication we can perhaps expect the popularity of these forms of communication to rise as the current generation of twenty-somethings acquire family responsibilities and move into remote working in a few years time.

That doesn’t mean that this group are in any sense anti-technology though, simply that they use the tools they know to get the job done. Such as the consultant who was working in the Middle-East when an urgent requirement to investigate a warehouse fire in Berkshire came through. He says, “I surveyed the site using Google Earth, inspected the buildings and submitted my draft report into the incident, via satellite, and checked out the buildings in real life when I returned a few weeks later – the tools were there and I just needed to get the job done for the client”.

What Else Matters

As suppliers to their clients rather than staff, our members take a high degree of responsibility for the success of their working relationships. The majority work with their client to produce a written brief for each project and provide regularly, usually weekly, status and progress reports to keep their client informed. All spoke of the need to build trust between client and consultant by regular, frequent communication of progress – by whatever means the client prefers, sharing draft reports or other material and being open and up front about problems and delays.

What was more striking was the apparent lack of interest shown by clients in making sure that consultants were making progress. A number of consultants felt that the client left reporting entirely up to them and made few demands for information. While it’s clearly in a consultants interest to do a good job for a client there may be a lesson here for managers about to embark on remote working with employees. Setting out what you expect in terms of progress reporting and communication from the outset will mean the employee knows what is expected of them from the off and any failure to deliver or problems with the working relationship can be picked up sooner rather than later.

Building Trust

Working remotely requires a high degree of trust from both sides and the happiest and most successful consultants in our survey reflected this. As one consultant said, “The quality of all interactions is important via phone, email and face to face. Trust is born of clear unambiguous communication, whatever the medium”