What it is
Remote work is an organizational structure that eliminates the physical office for most or all employees, instead allowing them to work from wherever they please, be it their house, a coffee shop, or a coworking center.
Async work is a work style in which the majority of activity takes place asynchronously. This means each employee works on their own schedule on a day-to-day basis.
B2E UX means business-to-employee user experience. It refers to the use of UX design to improve the performance and satisfaction of employees.
Output-driven accountability is a way of evaluating employee performance based on the value an employee creates for your company instead of input-driven accountability which evaluates employees based on meaningless factors such as time in office, e-mails sent, or meetings attended.
These four concepts cannot succeed without each other.
Why you want it
Offices are expensive
If you want your employees to come to the office, that means you have to spend a lot of money on real estate. Any metropolitan area where you will find a large talent pool is going to be even more expensive. And then you have to provide your employees with equipment to do their job. You will need to provide gear that equals what they have at home, which after the pandemic is a lot better than it used to be.
It's good for morale
Study after study shows that employees love remote work and the freedom it affords them. They do not have hours of their day robbed from them in commutes. Remember that, if you locate your office in a tech city, most people won't be able to afford to live nearby. And studies also show that employees are at least as productive when they work remote.
It opens up the talent pool
When you restrict your workforce to only the people who live in driving distance of your office, you are leaving a lot of the best workers out of the running. More experienced professionals who are no longer interest in living in chaotic, poorly run tech cities will be living elsewhere, and they will dismiss non-remote jobs out of hand.
Remote-async work forces better accountability methods
Offices enable toxic input-driven accountability. The ease of access to employees means that companies rely on lazy metrics like adherence to a 9-5 schedule or attendance of daily stand-ups. But these metrics create a false picture of your organization. Remote-async work necessitates an entirely new set of heuristics to evaluate your team performance. Instead, you will evaluate your employees based on how much value they create.
What I do
In order to switch to an output-driven accountability model, you will need to determine what "output" means. How does your organization correlate business outcomes to the output of workers? This discovery process is the first step in any remote-async project.
We will also need to perform user research with your research, understanding their workflows, how they view their contributions to the organization, their frustrations, and how they work together with others. You need to preserve the healthy parts of your culture while eliminating the unhealthy parts.
I have also developed a proprietary tool called XenBuild which can be used to monitor the day-to-day workings of a software product. One way it can be used is to track product performance and correlate it to the actions of your team, down to a granular level. I use it as part of my B2E UX process.
How to get started
Every organization has unique needs, so every remote-async conversion will be different. The big question is, are you still working from an office and looking to go remote, or have you gone remote and now you're encounter challenges? Either way, book a call, and we can work together to solve the problem.