A few years ago, our Twitter buddy David and his business partner, Jason wrote a fabulous book on remote working called, not surprisingly, “Remote: Office Not Required.”
Then earlier this week, David tweeted:
“Companies new to remote work are in for a bit of shock treatment. Yes, it's going to be confusing and frustrating when you try to go from none to all in a day. But these are skills and habits you can learn. It's not magic. Here's a comms guide.”
It’s an EXCELLENT comms guide. We strongly urge you to check it out.
Gapingvoid is a very remote-centric company as well, with employees scattered all over the country, with clients, even more so. So from what we’ve learned, three additional thoughts:
Remote working tends to shift the emphasis from verbal communication to written communication. As handy as Skype and Zoom are, nobody wants to spend six hours a day on them. Be ready and act accordingly
Crises tend to accelerate society along. A good example is a hundred years ago, during the First World War. With all the men fighting at the front, millions of women suddenly found themselves doing “men’s work” i.e working in munition factories. This caused such a dramatic social shift, it led to women getting the vote. So we’re thinking this current crisis will lead to other long term social shifts, everything from homeschooling to remote working to our relationship with globalism and especially, China. Watch this space.
As our friend, Mark says, ‘Culture happens in the spaces between people’. And so yes, these spaces do need to be consciously filled. Connections need to be facilitated, conversations held, off and on the record both need to happen. Though the culture may have to change, it still needs to exist. Helping companies build strong cultures remotely is already a huge industry, but just wait, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet...
When Boeing fired CEO Dennis Mullenberg late last year, the markets, investors, regulators, and other interested parties likely all breathed a sigh of relief. The man at the helm during two high-profile 737 MAX plane crashes was gone.
When performing their post-mortems on Mullenberg's tenure at Boeing, sources have blamed his insensitivity to victims' families, his cavalier attitude toward customers like Southwest Airlines and Boeing's overall culture of secrecy, among other issues. For me, however, the most significant issues are Boeing's refusal to consider divergent opinions when developing the 737 MAX and when addressing the safety/performance issues that caused the crashes, and simultaneously, the corporate culture that places profit over safety.
