Remote Work -
Our Work-from-Anywhere Future - Sun and Planets Spirituality AYINRIN
Sejkko
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Summary.
The pandemic has hastened a rise in remote working for knowledge-based organizations. This has notable benefits: Companies can save on real estate costs, hire and utilize talent globally, mitigate immigration issues, and experience productivity gains, while workers can enjoy geographic flexibility. At the same time, concerns include how to communicate across time zones, share knowledge that isn’t yet codified, socialize virtually and prevent professional isolation, protect client data, and avoid slacking. Research into work-from-anywhere (WFA) organizations and groups that include the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Tata Consultancy Services, and GitLab (the world’s largest all-remote company) highlights best practices and can help leaders decide whether remote work is right for their organizations.
Before 2020 a movement was brewing within knowledge-work organizations. Personal technology and digital connectivity had advanced so far and so fast that people had begun to ask, “Do we really need to be together, in an office, to do our work?” We got our answer during the pandemic lockdowns. We learned that a great many of us don’t in fact need to be colocated with colleagues on-site to do our jobs. Individuals, teams, entire workforces, can perform well while being entirely distributed—and they have. So now we face new questions: Are all-remote or majority-remote organizations the future of knowledge work? Is work from anywhere (WFA) here to stay?
Without
question, the model offers notable benefits to companies and their
employees. Organizations can reduce or eliminate real estate costs, hire
and use talent globally while mitigating immigration issues, and,
research indicates, perhaps enjoy productivity gains. Workers get
geographic flexibility (that is, live where they prefer to), eliminate
commutes, and report better work/life balance. However, concerns persist
regarding how WFA affects communication, including brainstorming and
problem-solving; knowledge sharing; socialization, camaraderie, and
mentoring; performance evaluation and compensation; and data security
and regulation.
To
better understand how leaders can capture the upside of WFA while
overcoming the challenges and avoiding negative outcomes, I’ve studied
several companies that have embraced all- or majority-remote models.
They include the United States Patent and Trademark Office, or USPTO
(which has several thousand WFA workers); Tulsa Remote; Tata Consultancy
Services, or TCS (a global IT services company that has announced a
plan to be 75% remote by 2025); GitLab (the world’s largest all-remote
company, with 1,300 employees); Zapier (a workflow automation company
with more than 300 employees, none of them colocated, around the United
States and in 23 other countries); and MobSquad (a Canadian start-up
that employs WFA workers). The
Covid-19 crisis has opened senior leaders’ minds to the idea of
adopting WFA for all or part of their workforces. In addition to TCS,
companies including Twitter, Facebook, Shopify, Siemens, and State Bank
of India have announced that they will make remote work permanent even
after a vaccine is available. Another organization I’ve studied is BRAC,
one of the world’s largest NGOs, which is headquartered in Bangladesh.
Forced into remote work this year, it is deciding what work model to
adopt for the long term.
If your organization is considering a WFA program, transition, or launch, this article can provide a guide.
A Short History of Remote Work
A
large-scale transition from traditional, colocated work to remote work
arguably began with the adoption of work-from-home (WFH) policies in the
1970s, as soaring gasoline prices caused by the 1973 OPEC oil embargo
made commuting more expensive. Those policies allowed people to eschew
physical offices in favor of their homes, coworking spaces, or other
community locations, such as coffee shops and public libraries, for
occasional days, on a regular part-time basis, or full-time, with the
expectation that they would come into the office periodically. Workers
were often also given control over their schedules, allowing them to
make time for school pickups, errands, or midday exercise without being
seen as shirking. They saved time by commuting less and tended to take
fewer sick days.
Thanks
to the advent of personal computers, the internet, email, broadband
connectivity, laptops, cell phones, cloud computing, and videotelephony,
the adoption of WFH increased in the 2000s. As the researchers Ravi S.
Gajendran and David A. Harrison note in a 2007 article,
this trend was accelerated by the need to comply with, for example, the
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and mandates of the U.S. Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission.
Millennials were excited by the idea of traveling the world while still employed.
Research
has shown performance benefits. A 2015 study by Nicholas Bloom and
coauthors found that when employees opted in to WFH policies, their
productivity increased by 13%.
When, nine months later, the same workers were given a choice between
remaining at home and returning to the office, those who chose the
former saw even further improvements: They were 22% more productive than
they had been before the experiment. This suggests that people should
probably determine for themselves the situation (home or office) that
fits them best. In
recent years many companies have allowed more employees to work from
home. It’s true that several prominent corporations, including Yahoo and
IBM, had reversed course before the pandemic, asking their employees to
resume colocated work in a bid to spur more-effective collaboration.
But other organizations—the ones I study—moved toward greater geographic
flexibility, allowing some if not all employees, new and old, to work
from anywhere, completely untethered to an office. The USPTO is a prime
example. Its leaders launched a WFA program in 2012, building on an
existing WFH program that mandated workers’ physical presence at
headquarters, in northern Virginia, at least one day a week. The WFA
program, in contrast, requires employees to spend two years at HQ
followed by a WFH phase, after which they may live anywhere in the
continental United States, provided they’re willing to pay out of pocket
for periodic travel back to headquarters (totaling no more than 12 days
a year). The patent examiners in the program dispersed all across the
country, choosing to move closer to family, to better climates, or to
places with a lower cost of living.
Most
companies that offer WFH or WFA options keep some workers—at the USPTO
it’s trainees and administrators—at one or more offices. In other words,
they are hybrid-remote operations. But the experiment with all-remote
work forced by Covid-19 has caused some of these organizations to
strategically move toward majority-remote, with fewer than 50% of
employees colocated in physical offices. TCS, for example, which employs
close to 418,000 people who were traditionally located either on
campuses or at client sites around the world, has decided to adopt a
25/25 model: Employees will spend only 25% of their working hours in the
office, and at no point will the company have more than 25% of workers
colocated. TCS plans to complete this transition in five years.
Even
before the crisis, a smaller group of companies had taken this trend a
step further, eliminating offices altogether and dispersing everyone,
from entry-level associates to the CEO. GitLab embraces this model at
scale: Its remote workers span sales, engineering, marketing, personnel
management, and executive roles in more than 60 countries.
Exploring the Benefits
I’ve
spent the past five years studying the practices and productivity
trends of WFA companies. The upsides—for individuals, companies, and
society—are clear. Let me outline them.
For individuals.
One striking finding is how greatly workers benefit from these
arrangements. Many told me that they regard the freedom to live anywhere
in the world as an important plus. For those in dual-career situations,
it eases the pain of looking for two jobs in a single location. One
patent examiner told me, “I’m a military spouse, which means I live in a
world with frequent moves and personal upheavals that prevent many
spouses from pursuing lasting careers of their choice. WFA has been the
most meaningful telework program I have encountered. It allows me to
follow my husband to any U.S. state at a moment’s notice and pursue my
own aspirations to contribute to my home and society.”
Sejkko
Some
cited a better quality of life. “WFA has allowed my children to see
their grandparents on a regular basis and play with their cousins,” I
heard from another USPTO employee. “Being closer to family has improved
my overall happiness.” Others talked about proximity to medical care for
children, accommodating their partners, and the ability to enjoy warmer
weather, prettier views, and greater recreational opportunities.
Millennials in particular seemed captivated by the idea that WFA would
allow them to become “digital nomads,” traveling the world while still
employed. Before the pandemic-related restrictions, some companies, such
as Remote Year, were aiming to facilitate that lifestyle, and some
countries, such as Estonia and Barbados, have created a new class of
employment visa for such workers. As one patent examiner said,
“Participation in [WFA] is outstanding for work/life balance. I live in
my favorite part of the country…I have more time to relax.”
Cost
of living was another frequent theme. Because the USPTO did not adjust
salaries according to where employees chose to live, one patent examiner
told me, “I was able to buy a large home in my new location for about a
quarter of the cost in northern Virginia.” Some localities, such as the
state of Vermont and the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma (where Tulsa Remote is
located), have made a concerted effort to lure remote workers, touting
the local community and lower costs. In San Francisco the average rent
on a two-bedroom apartment is $4,128; in Tulsa it’s a mere $675.
WFA
also helps knowledge workers deal with immigration issues and other
restrictions on their ability to secure good jobs. William Kerr, Susie
Ma, and I recently studied MobSquad, whose coworking spaces in Halifax,
Calgary, and other cities enable talented knowledge workers to bypass
the onerous U.S. visa and green card system and instead obtain
fast-track work permits from Canada’s Global Talent Stream. Thus they
can continue serving companies and clients in the United States and
other countries while living and paying taxes in Canada.
One
engineer we interviewed had come to the United States after graduating
from high school in his home country at the age of 12. At age 16 he
enrolled at a U.S. university, where he acquired degrees in math,
physics, and computer science in three years. By age 19 he was employed
at a medical tech company through the optional practical training (OPT)
program, but he failed to get an H-1B visa and faced deportation.
MobSquad moved him to Calgary, and he kept working with the same
employer.
In
interviews with female employees at BRAC, I learned that women whose
careers were previously limited by cultural taboos against traveling to
remote places or delegating housework had been helped by WFA. As one
explained, “Earlier I had to wake up early in the morning and cook three
meals for my intergenerational family. Working remotely has allowed me
to spread out the household work, get extra sleep, and be more
productive.”
For organizations.
My research also uncovered ample organizational benefits from WFA
programs. For example, they increase employee engagement—an important
metric of success for any company. In 2013, a year after it instituted
work from anywhere, the USPTO was ranked highest on the Best Places to
Work in the Federal Government survey.
Workers are not only happier but also more productive. When Cirrus Foroughi, Barbara Larson, and I evaluated
the USPTO’s transition from WFH to WFA, the timing of which happened at
random for workers who’d chosen that path, we found that WFA boosted
individual productivity by 4.4%, as measured by the number of patents
examined each month. The switch also led examiners to exert greater
effort. Of course, further research is needed to determine whether WFA
generates similar benefits for workers performing different tasks in
other team structures and organizations.
Work-from-anywhere may reverse the brain drain that can plague emerging markets.
Some
gains generated by WFA are more obvious. For example, fewer in-office
employees means smaller space requirements and reduced real estate
costs. The USPTO estimated that increases in remote work in 2015 saved
it $38.2 million. WFA programs also hugely expand an organization’s
potential talent pool to include workers tied to a location far from
that of the company. That’s a primary reason for the adoption at TCS of
what it calls secure borderless workspaces, or SBWs: It wants to ensure
that every project is staffed by employees with the right skills, no
matter where they are. Rajesh Gopinathan, the CEO, describes this model
as “talent on the cloud,” while another senior executive says it will
potentially allow the company to tap niche labor markets, such as
Eastern Europe, that have a large supply of skilled financial analysts
and data scientists.
Finally,
WFA can reduce attrition. Some USPTO workers explained that because
they loved their preferred locales but also recognized the limited job
opportunities there, they were motivated to work harder and stay longer
with the Patent Office. Leaders at GitLab, too, pointed to employee
retention as a positive outcome of the company’s decision to be
all-remote. The net benefit, they believe, including the productivity
increases and property cost savings they’ve seen, equals $18,000 a year
for each worker.
For society.
WFA organizations have the potential to reverse the brain drain that
often plagues emerging markets, small towns, and rural locations. In
fact, Tulsa Remote was established to attract diverse, energetic,
community-minded newcomers to a city still healing from historic race
riots a century ago. With an offer of $10,000 to relocate to Tulsa, the
company attracted more than 10,000 applications for just 250 slots from
2019 to 2020. Obum Ukabam was one of the workers chosen. When he’s not
busy with his day job as a marketing manager, he mentors and coaches a
local high school debate team. Talented newcomers of varied ethnicities
are arguably making the city more multicultural. Meanwhile, the
transitions at the USPTO and TCS have brought many people back to their
hometowns.
Remote
work helps the environment as well. In 2018 Americans’ commute time
averaged 27.1 minutes each way, or about 4.5 hours a week. Eliminating
that commute—particularly in places where most people commute by
car—generates a significant reduction in emissions. The USPTO estimates
that in 2015 its remote workers drove 84 million fewer miles than if
they had been traveling to headquarters, reducing carbon emissions by
more than 44,000 tons.
Addressing the Concerns
The
office—with its meeting rooms and break areas and opportunities for
both formal and informal interaction—has been a way of life for so long
that it’s hard to imagine getting rid of it.
And legitimate hurdles exist to making all-remote work not only
manageable but successful. However, the Covid-19 all-remote experiment
has taught many knowledge-work organizations and their employees that
with time and attention, those concerns can be addressed. And in the
companies I’ve studied, several best practices are emerging. Communication, brainstorming, and problem-solving.
When workers are distributed, synchronous communication becomes more
difficult. Tools such as Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams, and Google
Hangouts can help for those working in the same or similar time zones
but not for those spread farther apart. In research with Jasmina Chauvin
and Tommy Pan Fang, I found that when changing to or from daylight
saving time caused a one- to two-hour reduction in business-hour overlap
(BHO) between offices of a very large global corporation, the volume of
communication fell by 9.2%, primarily among production workers. When
BHO was greater, R&D staffers conducted more unplanned synchronous
calls. Group meetings are even harder to schedule. Nadia Vatalidis of
GitLab’s People Operations group says that having team members in
Manila, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Raleigh, and Boulder made finding a time
for their weekly group call nearly impossible.
WFA
organizations must therefore get comfortable with asynchronous
communication, whether through a Slack channel, a customized
intracompany portal, or even a shared Google document in which
geographically distributed team members write their questions and
comments and trust that other team members in distant time zones will
respond at the first opportunity. One benefit to this approach is that
employees are more likely to share early-stage ideas, plans, and
documents and to welcome early feedback; the pressure to present
polished work is less than it would be in more formal, synchronous team
meetings. GitLab calls this process blameless problem-solving. The
company’s leaders note that employees accustomed to a culture of emails,
phone calls, and meetings may struggle to change old habits; they solve
that problem with training during onboarding and beyond. At Zapier, in a
program called Zap Pal, each new hire is matched with an experienced
buddy who sets up at least one introductory Zoom call and continues to
check in throughout the first month. For synchronous brainstorming the
company uses video calls and online whiteboards such as Miro,
Stormboard, IPEVO Annotator, Limnu, and MURAL but also urges employees
to use asynchronous means of problem-solving through Slack channel
threads.
Knowledge sharing.
This
is another challenge for all-remote or majority-remote organizations.
Distributed colleagues can’t tap one another on the shoulder to ask
questions or get help. Research
by Robin Cowan, Paul David, and Dominique Forayhas postulated that much
workplace knowledge is not codified (even when it can be) and instead
resides “in people’s heads.” This is a problem for all organizations,
but much more so for those that have embraced WFA. The companies I’ve
studied solve it with transparent and easily accessible documentation.
At GitLab all team members have access to a “working handbook,” which
some describe as “the central repository for how we run the company.” It
currently consists of 5,000 searchable pages. All employees are
encouraged to add to it and taught how to create a new topic page, edit
an existing one, embed video, and so forth. Ahead of meetings,
organizers post agendas that link to the relevant sections to allow
invitees to read background information and post questions. Afterward
recordings of the sessions are posted on GitLab’s YouTube channel,
agendas are edited, and the handbook is updated to reflect any decisions
made. About
the art: Sejkko grew up between Portugal and Venezuela. His photographs
capture the traditional houses of Portugal yet often convey a sense of
tropical vibrancy and childhood nostalgia. Sometimes they look lost or
out of place; other times they seem warm and self-contained. | Sejkko
Employees
may see the extra work of documentation as a “tax” and balk at the
extremely high level of transparency necessary for a WFA organization to
thrive. Thorsten Grohsjean and I have argued that senior managers must
set an example on these fronts by codifying knowledge and freely sharing
information while explaining that these are necessary trade-offs to
allow for geographic flexibility.
A
related idea is to create transcripts, publicly post slides, and record
video seminars, presentations, and meetings to create a repository of
such material that individuals can view asynchronously at their
convenience. For its 2020 annual meeting, which was forced by the
pandemic to go virtual, the Academy of Management curated 1,120
prerecorded sessions, arguably expanding the flow of knowledge to
scholars—especially those in emerging markets—far more than would have
been possible at the in-person event, which typically happens in North
America.
Socialization, camaraderie, and mentoring.
Another major worry, cited by managers and workers alike, is the
potential for people to feel isolated socially and professionally,
disconnected from colleagues and the company itself, particularly in
organizations where some people are colocated and some are not. Research
by Cecily D. Cooper and Nancy B. Kurland has shown that remote workers
often feel cut off from the information flow they would typically get in
a physical office. Without in-person check-ins, managers may miss signs
of growing burnout or team dysfunction. Even with videoconferencing
that allows for reading body language and facial expressions, the
concern is that virtual colleagues are less likely to become close
friends because their face-to-face interactions are less frequent. As
GitLab’s technical evangelist Priyanka Sharma put it, “I was very
nervous when I was first thinking of joining, because I was very social
in the office. I worried that I would be so lonely at home and wouldn’t
have that community feel.” Houda Elyazgi, a marketing executive on the
Tulsa Remote team, expressed similar sentiments: “Remote work can be
very isolating, especially for introverts. You almost have to create an
intentional experience when you’re socializing with others. And then you
have to be ‘on’ all the time, even when you’re trying to relax. That’s
taxing.”
In
my research I’ve seen a range of policies that seek to address these
concerns and create opportunities for socialization and the spreading of
company norms. Many WFA organizations rely on technology to help
facilitate virtual watercoolers and “planned randomized interactions,”
whereby someone in the company schedules groups of employees to chat
online. Some use AI and virtual reality tools to pair up remote
colleagues for weekly chats. For example, Sike Insights is using data on
individual communication styles and AI to create Slackbot buddies,
while eXp Realty, an all-remote company I’m currently researching, uses a
VR platform called VirBELA to create a place for distant team members
to gather in avatar form.
All-remote companies must work harder to protect corporate and customer data.
Sid
Sijbrandij, a cofounder and the CEO of GitLab, told me, “I know at
Pixar they placed the restroom centrally so people would bump into each
other—but why depend on randomness for that? Why not step it up a notch
and actually organize the informal communication?” These “mixers” often
include senior and C-suite executives. When I described them to my HBS
colleague Christina Wallace, she gave them a nice name: community collisions.
And companies have always needed to manufacture them: Research dating
back to Thomas J. Allen’s work at MIT in the 1970s shows that workers
colocated on the same “campus” may not experience serendipitous
interactions if they are separated by a wall, a ceiling, or a building.
When
it comes to interaction between people at different hierarchical
levels, my research has revealed two problems with straightforward
solutions. Iavor Bojinov, Ashesh Rambachan, and I found that the senior
leaders of a global firm were often too stretched to offer one-on-one
mentoring to virtual workers. So we implemented a Q&A process
whereby workers posed questions through a survey and leaders responded
asynchronously. Senior managers at another global firm told me that they
had difficulty being themselves on camera. Whereas young remote workers
were “living their lives on Instagram,” their older colleagues found
virtual engagement harder. The company implemented coaching sessions to
make those executives more comfortable on Microsoft Teams.
Another
solution to the socialization problem is to host “temporary colocation
events,” inviting all workers to spend a few days with colleagues in
person. Prior to Covid-19, Zapier hosted two of those a year, paying for
employee flights, accommodation, and food; giving teams an activities
budget; and sending people home with $50 to use on a thank-you gift for
their loved ones. Carly Moulton, the company’s senior communications
specialist, told me, “Personally, I have made a lot of friendships with
the people I travel to and from the airport with. The event managers
will put us into random groups based on what time you arrive and depart.
I’ve always been with people I don’t normally work with, so it’s nice
to have a dedicated time when you have to make conversation.”
Finally,
at the USPTO, I learned another way to create camaraderie. Several WFA
examiners have voluntarily created “remote communities of practice” so
that a handful of them can get together periodically. A group living in
North Carolina, for example, decided to schedule meetings on a golf
course to socialize, discuss work, and problem-solve together. Another
manager created a “virtual meal” by ordering the same pizza for delivery
to the homes of all remote direct reports during a weekly team call.
Performance evaluation and compensation.
How can you rate and review employees you’re never physically with,
particularly on “soft” but important metrics such as interpersonal
skills? All-remote companies evaluate remote workers according to the
quality of their work output, the quality of virtual interactions, and
feedback from clients and colleagues. Zapier, for example, uses Help
Scout for customer support replies; a feature of this software is that
customers can submit a “happiness score” by rating the response as
“great,” “OK,” or “not good.”
In
the spring and summer of 2020, as groups suddenly transitioned to
remote work, I was asked whether managers should use software to track
worker productivity and prevent shirking. I am very much opposed to this
Orwellian approach. The USPTO addressed claims of “examiner fraud” and
“attendance abuse” in its WFA program following a review by the U.S.
Commerce Department’s Office of the Inspector General. Those claims
involved either overreporting of hours worked or shifts in the time logs
of completed work, such as backloading at the end of a calendar
quarter—neither of which related to the metric on which performance was
measured: the number of patents examined. Nevertheless, from then on,
all USPTO teleworkers had to use organizational IT tools, such as
logging in to a virtual private network (VPN), having a presence
indicator turned on, and using the same messaging services. But when we
compared data from before and after that intervention, we found that it
had no effect on average output.
How
to set compensation for workers who work from anywhere is an active and
interesting debate. As mentioned, it’s a benefit to be able to reside
in a lower-cost-of-living locale while earning the income one would in a
more expensive one. But that’s conditional on the company’s not
adjusting wages according to where a worker lives, as was the case at
the USPTO. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic (parent of
WordPress), another all-remote company, told me that its policy is to
pay the same wages for the same roles, regardless of location. But
GitLab and other companies do have different pay for different
geographies, taking into account the experience of the worker, the
contract type, and the task being performed. Although research is needed
on which approach is optimal, it’s possible that companies that tie
wages to location will lose high-quality WFA workers to rivals that
don’t. Another pertinent issue is whether to pay WFA workers in the
currency of the country where the organization is incorporated or the
local one, in part to ensure consistent wages across locations over time
given exchange-rate fluctuations.
Data security and regulation.
Several managers told me that cybersecurity was a big area of focus for
WFA programs and organizations. “What if the WFA worker takes
photographs of client data screens and sends them to a competitor?” one
asked. The CIOs of some companies with remote-work policies said another
key concern was employees’ use of personal, less-protected devices for
work at home.
It’s
true that all-remote companies have to work harder to protect employee,
corporate, and customer data. As TCS transitions to a majority-remote
model, it has moved from “perimeter-based security” (whereby the IT team
attempts to secure every device) to “transaction-based security”
(whereby machine learning algorithms analyze any abnormal activities on
any employee laptop). MobSquad has replicated its client security
infrastructure for WFA workers, and employees work on clients’ cloud,
email, and hardware in its offices for security reasons. All-remote and
majority-remote organizations I have studied are experimenting with a
wide range of solutions to protect client data using predictive
analytics, data visualization, and computer vision.
Transitioning
to an all-remote or a majority-remote organization sometimes requires
jumping regulatory hurdles as well. At the onset of the pandemic, when
TCS was forced to become all-remote, it had to work with NASSCOM
(India’s National Association of Software and Service Companies) and the
Indian authorities to change laws overnight so that call center
staffers could work from home. Other laws had to be tweaked so that TCS
workers could take laptops and other equipment out of physical offices
located in India’s “special economic zones.” Irfhan Rawji, the founder
and CEO of MobSquad, had to work closely with the Canadian government to
ensure that the economic migrants chosen by the company to move to
Canada could receive their expedited work permits and be integrated into
its model. Any all-remote organization thinking about hiring talent
globally has to consider local labor laws as they relate to hiring,
compensation, pensions, vacation, and sick leave.
Is This Right for Your Organization?
Of
course, WFA may not be possible at this time for some organizations,
such as manufacturing companies—though that could change with advances
in 3D printing, automation, digital twins, and other technologies.
However, with the right strategy, organizational processes,
technologies, and—most important—leadership, many more companies, teams,
and functions than one might have thought could go all or mostly
remote. My ongoing research with Jan Bena and David Rowat suggests, for
example, that start-up knowledge-work companies, particularly in the
tech sector, are well positioned to adopt a WFA model from their
inception. Take the all-remote eXp Realty: We found that lower real
estate, utility, and other overhead costs may mean a higher valuation
for the company if and when its founders exit the start-up.
My
studies of the USPTO and TCS indicate that large and mature
organizations, too, can successfully transition to a hybrid or a
majority-remote regime. The question is not whether work from anywhere
is possible but what is needed to make it possible. The short answer:
management. “If all senior leaders are working from an office, then
workers would be drawn to that location to get face time,” one
all-remote middle manager told me. But if leaders support synchronous
and asynchronous communication, brainstorming, and problem-solving; lead
initiatives to codify knowledge online; encourage virtual
socialization, team building, and mentoring; invest in and enforce data
security; work with government stakeholders to ensure regulatory
compliance; and set an example by becoming WFA employees themselves,
all-remote organizations may indeed emerge as the future of work.
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