Building a virtual office

Accessibility

The most obvious one is accessibility. Your disabled team members and team members with long-term health conditions really got their first taste of workplace equity during those early days of the pandemic, when everyone was forced into a situation where they had less access to the physical workplace.

In forcing people to return to the office, you’re likely decreasing access once again for a huge percentage of your workforce, who can definitely do better work and potentially for more hours if they’re not required to navigate the built environment and/or commute in order to do their jobs.

As well as your disabled colleagues, you’re going to be reducing access for people with responsibilities at home (such as parents and carers), people with busy social lives and many others. If a colleague’s commute is an hour in each direction, that’s 10 hours a week they’re expected to do in addition to their office hours.

Geographic diversity

This country is hugely London-centric. But London and the whole of the southeast accounts for 27% of the population of the UK. Do you really want to cut yourself off from all the talent in the other 73% of the country?

I’ve lost count of how many tech jobs I’ve seen advertised which say “must be in London office 2 days a week”. Guess what? I’m in West Yorkshire - I can’t do that. No, I’m not moving for you, and neither are any of my friends. We like it here. We’re still really great at our jobs!

There are all kinds of challenges building a team that’s international, but this “in the office” challenge is the only one when it comes to building a team that’s distributed across the entire UK and can take advantage of that huge talent pool.

Cost

And let’s not forget this factor too:

The cost of running an office that can fit every member of your team is almost always going to outweigh the cost of buying equipment for your homeworkers, even if you maintain a smaller office with hotdesks for hybrid working and meetings.

And of course there’s a cost saving to your team members too, since they no longer have to pay for their commute.

Collaboration is easier

It’s often said that it’s easier to collaborate in an office environment. You can get together in a meeting room with whiteboards, notebooks, sticky notes etc, away from the distractions of your emails and notifications. Ideas flow freely when everyone is in a space that’s designed to focus people together as a team.

People are more productive

I’ve heard this one often. When people work from home, they’re distracted by real life - their laundry, their kids & pets, longer lunch breaks, whatever.

And anyway, how do you know they’re working a full day when you can’t observe them at their desks, tapping away?

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you already know what I think about a culture of “being at your desk all day”.

The power of small talk

Teamwork isn’t made in the formal interactions. It doesn’t happen in meetings, in emails, in reports. It happens in the small off-the-cuff remarks.

Someone asking a colleague what they did at the weekend; someone grunting at their desk and another person looking up and asking them if they need help; the chatter about colleagues from other departments during a shared lunch trip to Momo Canteen.

This intangible quality of the office environment is totally missing when everyone is working remotely, isn’t it?

The real reason?

This one never gets stated out loud, but I’ve seen it time and time again. One other reason why managers want people to come back to the office is because they liked how it was before and they’re lonely when they work from home. The office is a surrogate social circle and work is just more fun when there are other people working with you.

Maybe it’s not the manager who feels lonely, but a member of their team.

Is loneliness a reason to force everyone to come to the office, even if they’re not lonely themselves? What if you could do something else to address loneliness whilst still keeping homeworking accessible to everyone?

Stream of consciousness

The most critical part of any virtual office is the feeling of other people being present. Of being able to “look over someone’s shoulder” and see if there’s any way to help. Of being able to hear their frustration when things are challenging.

In my experience, the best way to do this is to build out places where people can chat freely that don’t result in endless notifications. Keeping the number of channels lower usually means more chatter per channel, which is usually a good thing.

Once these channels exist, it’s important to encourage people to be constantly narrating their lives. Talking about what they’re working on, what their current challenges are, what things they’re excited to have completed and so on. And to lead by example - leaders should be very active in these chat channels too.

And then there’s the social channels. There should be channels where people can chat about new movies and albums. Where they can ask each other what they’re doing at the weekend. Where they can vent about third party technology you all hate. Again, it’s important to lead by example. If leaders are not posting nonsense in the social channels, other team members will follow and be more silent during the day.

The goal is for every team member to post in some combination of channels multiple times a day, not just once at your daily meeting. Who knows? If the stream of consciousness is verbal enough, you might not even need a daily meeting!

Some additional tips for these channels:

• Try to make the topic of the channel broad and inclusive - fragmentation into smaller channels can make channels feel small, isolated and lonely.
• Try to use the “visible” or “standard” kind of channel rather than “private” channels. People should be able to find and search channels even if they’re not invited. The more conversations happen in private channels or messages, the less like an open office this conversation will feel.
• Finally, ensure you use “channels” and not “group direct messages”. The difference is subtle but, in most tech, “channels” have a lower notification level: they’ll alert users to new messages visibly but without a popup or auditory alert unless someone is mentioned by name. This allows people to feel more comfortable posting a lot without necessarily disturbing people with endless push notifications. (If your tech is MS Teams, there are two kinds of “channel” - I recommend “Threads” rather than “Posts”.)

Building social time in

Part of the appeal of being in the office is the little social interactions. If you have a virtual office, it’s more important to actually build these into people’s days.

As well as the social channels described above, it’s a good idea to have at least a weekly checkin where people can talk about their weekends, a couple of coffee chats spread throughout the week, and occasional more advanced social activities like board games or a book club.

You can also have chat-based social activities like a weekly playlist and a 15-minute quiz.

I’m planning a whole blog post about social activities soon so I’ll not expand too much on these here, but if you want to know more… get in touch!

Face-to-face communication

If people go without meeting their colleagues face-to-face for extended periods, sometimes an unpleasant thing happens where they start to dehumanise them a bit - they start to treat them more like “strangers on the internet” than their close colleagues.

That’s why it’s important to build video calls into every team member’s diary, even if they’re not really needed at meetings. A really good way to do this is with periodic retrospectives, but also things like a weekly team call, daily checkin meetings, “body doubling sessions” and more can help with ensuring your colleagues regularly see each other’s faces.

Just don’t forget to ensure that this happens across teams too! We wouldn’t want to accidentally create silos and cliques!

Asynchronous working

Some activities only work “synchronously” (with everybody in the room) when you’re in a physical office, but with technology they can work asynchronously in a virtual office.

Wikis, online whiteboards, collaborative documents and more can all be worked on by people at different times, with the appropriate level of notification built in so people know when there’s something new for them to engage with.

I’ve seen aggressive pushes towards “async for everything” aka “this could have been an email”, but I think you do need meetings sometimes, if only to solve the face-to-face problem above. But perhaps you don’t need quite that many meetings!

One-off team days

And you’ll have some people on your team who just always benefit from face-to-face, in-person, flesh-and-blood working together.

Encouraging the people who need it most to work together - either in your smaller office or at a shared coworking space - will help with this, but occasionally you will also benefit from an in-person team day.

Plan these days enough in advance - choose the date, the venue and the start and end times upfront before any other part of the agenda is settled. This will allow team members travelling from further to book their trains and accommodation. And, if you can, move these around the country a bit. London is way more accessible than anywhere else, but if a large part of your team is based in London maybe they need to share the burden sometimes too.