A key to understand a distributed organization best

We live in a post-pandemic world, when people faced and went through the unprecedented change in the world of work. It had a tremendous effect on their working lives. Coming to the office and meeting people in person appeared no longer to be a norm. On top of that, massive workforce migration caused by the war in Ukraine made lots of businesses face an urgent need to manage their chaotically dispersed workforce to survive. For them a remote work mode seems to be not a privilege or necessity anymore but rather a new reality. So what do we know about remote work?

Obviously, digital businesses understand distributed organization the best. As national economies were getting globalized, and the world was switching from industrial to knowledge economy, they have already been producing and delivering services online for decades, benefiting from access to the best global workforce. The entire philosophy of their existence is about making remote working happen, so most of them believed it to be a part of their vision.

Among the benefits of implementing remote working there are a 40% increase in productivity of teleworkers compared to their office colleagues, tremendous raise in performance, engagement, higher retention rates and profitability growth. There are a variety of options for the remote work approaches - WFH, Remote Friendly, Remote First - companies can consider to leverage their business needs, I would though recommend learning how to manage productivity in a new work context to get the best of this approach.

Many managers still require their employees to come to an office voicing their concerns of team productivity and retention or caring of already-set work processes. Well, those hesitant can learn from the SAP experience. With its 100,000 employees worldwide, it was one of the first digital companies to implement remote work ‘as a norm’ following their lockdown experience. With this decision, they demonstrated a high level of trust and concern to their personnel, as the internal polls showed up to 90% of staff would prefer to return to the office after the pandemic risks diminish.