Distributed Work – Next levels

Do Software as a Service developers and companies go into the physical data centers to work together? No, they work remotely from the datacenter and securely connect in and create wonders.

Now is the time where we could stretch the collaborative nature of our work into higher levels i.e. different approaches that would be successful since <company> under Covid19 has already proved that a completely distributed workforce can achieve incredible results during unprecedented situations.

Options to explore under the guideline of follow the sun and acknowledgement that workforce is distributed and available from any time to anywhere. Experiment with core hours instead of co-located hours. This already occurs now as teams are spread across multiple time zones now, the next step is to formalize this into core hours

• Segmented core hours set at organization level, but individuals can then work around or space in hours to complete their assigned tasks on top of those. This might mean some team members are available from 3pm – 12am others may choose to sign in at 4am – 1pm etc. These are extremes I thought of off the top of my head
• Standups, are they necessary? In a distributed workplace written documentation and communication is key. The guidelines of the standup are to address the following three questions.

1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What will you do today?
3. Are there any impediments in your way?

Writing these answers in dedicated communication channel slack/teams would inform team members asynchronously and provide a record of actions and allow for inclusive decision making as team member are available. These would be written before core hours are to start so that alignment on important decisions can be made asynchronously

• Floating holidays – Instead of stating that certain days are holidays why not give every team member 12 holidays per year to be used at their discretion, scheduled no more than 2 per month and requested at least 2 weeks in advance. I know personally I would have no qualms working December 25th, January 1st, Thanksgiving holidays ( I have done it before at several jobs ) and would rather take 1 holiday every month to split them as under the current calendar system they are quite sparse in summer time.
• Bring your own device – Associates can use the company approved option or select and purchase their own laptop with a reimbursement of say $1500 (when you choose this option you do not get IT support except for issues with required monitoring software). As we are working from distributed locations we are already providing the support on our machines now just formalize it and bring up performance issues that are blocking. In this case I would get a new laptop with 128 GB RAM, M2 drive