Social distancing means an unprecedented number of employees are working from home. Headlines spoke to Zapier, a company that only employs remote workers, to find out the key to its success ...

The spread of COVID-19 across the UK has meant that many of us have been thrust into remote working to help protect the vulnerable and slow down the spread of the virus.

For those of us that have never worked from home, remote working can seem like living the dream. Who doesn’t want to avoid a stressful commute; the opportunity to walk your dog on your lunch break; or to carve out some proper time to spend with your family? 

And the benefit to employers of enabling remote working can be massive too. A robust two-year study conducted by Stanford University found that remote workers weren’t just more productive than their in-office counterparts – they also took shorter breaks, took fewer sick days and took less time off. Oh, and they cost less to the company than office workers.

Now that the Government is asking all employees to work from home when possible, we are in the middle of the largest work-from-home experiment the world has ever seen. 

The brewing mental health problems facing remote workers

Despite all of the benefits of remote working, there’s a certain aspect of working from home that’s not really being talked about – the mental health of remote workers. 

Isolation, loneliness, an inability to ‘switch off’ and communication challenges are all issues facing remote workers that threaten their mental wellbeing – and these issues will only be amplified by self-isolation. 

In 2017, the United Nations found that remote workers were twice as likely to report high stress levels compared to office workers. 

Buffer’s State of Remote Work report at the end of 2019 provides some interesting insights into the different mental challenges facing remote workers. 

Luckily, all three of these challenges can be alleviated with good internal communication. Here’s how:

1. Helping remote workers to collaborate and communicate

If your workers feel like they aren't able to collaborate or communicate effectively, it’s time to look at your comms channels.

Chances are that the majority of communication is being funnelled through emails. Relying on one channel for the vast majority of communication with remote workers is bound to cause burnout. If every email could potentially be important, the temptation to open them after every alert can be too much. 

Home workers need to have different comms channels available to them to fit their particular needs. 

This is where technology plays a huge role. For example, instant messaging apps like Slack, Teams and Workplace are ideal for collaborating with team members in a less formal environment. It’s a world where a well-timed GIF or emoji can say everything that’s needed. The short, fast-paced nature of the messaging mimics conversations that workers would have in an office. 

Sometimes, a text conversation just won’t cut it. Talking in real-time while you can actually see the other people will be 100% necessary. This is where you need to find a great video calling solution that’s extremely easy and reliable for the team. Video calls are ideal for tackling more complicated issues, or for more personal meetings – like one-to-ones. 

Zapier, who only employs remote workers, goes so far as randomly pairing 2-3 members of a team together for a weekly hangout where team members are encouraged to just chat and get to know each other. 

Headlines spoke remotely to Zapier’s communication team to understand how the company’s 100% remote workforce collaborates and communicates. The team said: “There are two standard ways people collaborate in an office setting, either a ‘whiteboarding session’ or walking around the office and hoping something sparks creativity. You can't do either of those when working remotely – and honestly, that's a good thing. We don’t recommend relying on random, chance encounters to do creative work.” 

How to collaborate and communicate while working remotely, according to Zapier:

• Use an online whiteboard – If you're used to using a whiteboard, there's no reason to give that up cold turkey. Instead, you can use an online whiteboard. It gives you the benefits of visual thinking and collaboration without having to be in the same room as your teammates.

• Have a video call – Working remotely doesn't mean you can't talk to the folks you work with. Hop on a video call, whether it's one-on-one or with a larger group, and have the same conversation you'd have in person — just be sure someone's taking notes.

• Brainstorm alone – There's a decent amount of evidence to suggest brainstorming is better alone. (Though groups can help edit ideas, but that has to be structured.)

• Start a Slack channel and use threads – If you want to brainstorm together, but asynchronously, Slack is a great place for it. Start a channel-specific to the brainstorm, and then folks can drop ideas in there. For every discrete idea, start a thread riffing on it.

In short, finding the right technology that enables all of the different types of conversation that happen in the workplace is key to helping remote workers feel like they have the communication tools they need. 

But it’s not enough to just put in place the right comms channels, you need to lead by example – making sure that the Internal Comms function introduces, plans, proactively manages and reviews each of the channels.  

2. Helping remote workers deal with isolation and loneliness

Working by yourself is bound to be isolating – especially if you were used to working in an office environment. But remote working doesn’t mean that your team has to be lonely.

One of the key challenges facing Internal Comms people looking after remote workers is how you build a team culture. What’s your team’s personality? How do they talk to each other and collaborate? 

Part of this problem will be solved by dealing with the first point – setting up and implementing appropriate comms channels. Giving the team a space to send each other stupid GIFs, make inside jokes, swap interesting articles or to talk about which couples will last in Love is Blind will inherently start to build relationships, personality and, ultimately, the culture. 

“Zapier views social time as a core part of work. You have to figure out what it is that your employees miss the most about office culture — things like taking a coffee break or eating lunch together – and try to make the virtual version of it happen.” 

“At Zapier, teammates set up virtual coffee or lunch dates to mimic that experience. We also use Donut to randomly pair employees with a team member for a chat each week so they can connect with someone from another department regularly.

“We also have over a hundred channels devoted just to socialising. All of these off-topic channels are prefixed with #fun-: there's #fun-gardening, #fun-parenting, #fun-home-ownership (which is arguably not fun). People can congregate around these shared interests, show off pictures of their new puppy, or show a more personal side of themselves. The time people spend in these channels isn't seen as slacking off—it's valuable team-building.”

The best way Internal Comms can help with building a culture for remote workers starts at the very beginning of an employee’s relationship with the company; their onboarding. Basecamp’s employee handbook is a best-in-class example of the art form. It’s insanely detailed, open, honest and unambiguous, oh, and it’s easy to navigate. (If you can’t tell, I’m a big fan of Basecamp and how they treat their staff. Just take a look at the benefits and decide for yourself.)

3. Helping remote workers unplug after work

When you work from home, you physically live in the office. This makes being able to switch off after ‘work hours’ extremely hard. The temptation to quickly open the laptop and answer some emails is always there, especially if you are still in ‘work mode’. This problem can be particularly pronounced if there are a mix of remote and office workers, or if workers are in different timezones. 

Again, good Internal Comms can help deal with this problem. This is where clear communication with all stakeholders is critically important. It’s all about setting expectations. Every member of the team needs to understand what is expected of them, and what isn’t. 

An ‘always on’ culture can force colleagues to feel that they are not dedicated if they don’t respond to emails as and when they come in, even outside of office hours. 

“Remote work can be challenging because your laptop is in the other room, and the temptation to grab it and do ‘just a bit more work’ is often there,” adds Zapier’s communications team. “Most of the expectations to be online 24-7 are self-inflicted. We certainly don’t expect that of our teams. 

“Leaders are responsible for setting expectations and ensuring people know it’s okay to take time off, to sign off and to disconnect. They should also model this behaviour — if leadership is always connected, firing off messages to coworkers at the oddest of hours (night, weekends), it sets an implicit expectation to employees to be always available.”

Remote workers need to be encouraged to share openly with their team when they will be available to answer work-related queries. Again, a lot of this comes down to providing the team with the correct tools. Shared calendars that clearly show and define each team member’s activities and proposed work hours will help set expectations for everyone else. At this point, it’s imperative to make sure that managers are practicing what they preach. That means not sending emails that require a response to people outside of work hours, or scheduling emails so that they land at appropriate times. 

Helping everyone to become great remote communicators

Given all of the above, it’s really important that remote workers are supported and trained in the best way to communicate. Zapier’s communication team says: “Everyone is trained on communication best practices at Zapier. We introduce how we communicate and use different tools during your first month of onboarding. We’ve even published our internal guide to using Slack. 

“Good communication is fundamental to any company. In a remote environment specifically, the biggest hurdle for managers and individual contributors alike is how to build alignment and demonstrate accountability. Managers want to be sure their reports are getting things done, and employees want to prove to their managers that they're being productive.

“Defaulting to transparency and documenting your work is necessary for anyone working remotely and it extends beyond the manager-report relationship. At Zapier, we have all conversations in public channels. It mimics the open-office feel and allows everyone to search the chat logs if they need to find something that happened when they weren't around.”

COVID-19 has triggered the world’s largest working from home experiment, by following the points laid out above, we can make sure that everyone stays healthy, stimulated and productive. It’s unprecedented times but with good, clear communication, we can get through it and come out the other side better for it.