How to Build a Winning Remote Working Experience?

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the way people work.  There is a big chance that you have recently experienced remote work. At first glance, benefits from working remotely as saving commuting time or reducing interruptions from office distractions can be appealing for most of us. However, in practice this new experience usually becomes less delightful as team collaboration can be challenging when team members are not in the same room.

One of the reasons behind this painful working experience is that most companies have not invested sufficient effort to create employee experiences that can take place outside of the office and be approachable for everyone.

This current crisis has further widened the gap between top digital performers and businesses that have fallen behind in this digital transformation race. One example that immediately comes to our mind is traditional retailers without E-Commerce capabilities, however, the implications of this context affect also large industrial groups whose businesses are closely linked to in-person interactions, whether for production or sales purposes.

From the positive side, this urgent need for remote working capabilities is a great opportunity for companies to shift their employee experience back to the center of their strategy.

At LABBRAND GROUP, we believe that employees are one of the key growth engines for companies and have developed a complete toolkit to realize companies’ brand’s cultural transformation (SpringPillar).

Numerous companies have recently adopted remote working tools such as Zoom, WeChat Work, and Microsoft Teams. However, those companies who became “remote” by necessity often pay very little attention to their employees’ needs, or put very little effort into building a remote working strategy. As a result, their long-term capabilities for the “new normal” is limited due to their negligence of proper employee advocacy and the lack of strategy.

To further respond to recent clients’ requests for guidance on how to build long term remote working capabilities, we at MADJOR (the digital experience agency of LABBRAND GROUP), have leveraged our proprietary approach - Digital Brand Experience Design to tackle this challenge in a comprehensive way with the goal to build winning employee experiences that can bring long-term business advantage.

Our consultants will start to conduct a diagnosis of your organization in order to understand the specificities of your business and the different challenges that your company is facing within the scope of the remote transformation. This preliminary step is essential as each organization is unique and requires specific solutions. During this process, our team will also evaluate your current technical infrastructure to already foresee potential constraints regarding the tools that can be implemented.

After having built a comprehensive understanding of your business, we will spend time with each representative of different departments or business units in order to understand the concrete needs of your teams. The outcomes of those workshops will be employee personas and employee journey maps that will be used for the creation of your remote strategy. Building empathy with your stakeholders in the first place is a necessity for creating solutions that can be meaningful for them. Ignoring those needs can result in frustration and ultimately a unfavorable employee experience.

In a context where talent acquisition and retention are top challenges across industries, empowering your Employer Brand in all your organizational initiatives should be a top priority. Through our 4 Facets brand analysis tool, our strategists will crystalize the distinctive components of your brand and define the guiding principles of your future remote employee experiences.

Here is what the process looks like through the example of Facebook employer brand.

Based on the insights collected during the first project phase, our strategy consultants will define custom solutions for each remote use case and persona. The goal is to ensure a good balance between fragmentation implied by personalization of use and integration to avoid complexity. Meanwhile, our solution will offer consistency in terms of employee experience across the entire organization. The Employer Brand Principles previously created will play an important role regarding that matter.

Once all the solutions are created, our team will propose you a set of tools that can enable you to implement the different remote solutions. Once the final tool is selected, we will co-create with your team a roadmap that helps you to visualize the different milestones and related KPIs of your remote transformation.

At MADJOR, we believe in iterative “test and learn” approaches. Our consultants will organize different pilots that enable you to experiment different solutions among different targeted users and collect feedback for improvement.

Ahead of the official launch, our team will also coach a team of evangelists that will be responsible for promoting the new solutions and the brand remote vision among their peers.

In order to facilitate a quick and highly efficient adoption of those new remote processes and tools, our team will help you to launch an internal campaign along with an ongoing training plan. The incentives associated with the internal challenges will give you the opportunity to strengthen the working relationships within your team and overcome the recent lack of interactions between stakeholders. We will also provide you detailed analytics on the different KPIs and adjust the training plan correspondingly.

The remote transformation of your organization can seem like a laborious process but in practice, it is an excellent opportunity to largely improve your employee experience and build a strong competitive advantage for the “new normal”.

From the in-depth remote audit to the implementation of the new remote work experiences, we are beyond happy to empower your organization in the post-COVID era.