We have all become part of the world’s largest remote work experiment. COVID-19 and its variants are keeping employees at home, and organizations continue to learn, create, and test ways to stay effective and efficient. While vaccines may be leading some of us back to the office, work from home (WFH) arrangements are likely here to stay. 

For Smarter Good, remote work is not a new concept. Since we started nine years ago, we’ve been working with social sector leaders around the world and we’ve learned how to foster trust and collaboration with clients in 30 countries while communicating (almost entirely) virtually. Our 50-person team, mostly based in Manila, Philippines, with others in the US, Panama, and Singapore stays in sync, despite the distance and time zones.  

Over the years, we’ve tried and tested many remote and flexible work arrangements, guided by feedback from our team. In this article, we share what we’ve learned from our experiments, in the hopes it can help you and your organization through this pandemic and beyond.

1. Put team well-being front and center.

Talent drives impact. For us at Smarter Good, it goes beyond hiring the right people. It means nurturing their talent by ensuring conditions that enable them to do their best work. 

Long, expensive commutes and doing one’s best work is always in opposition, pandemic or not.

Several years ago, we focused on arduous commutes as a significant barrier to our team’s best work and wellness. In 2017, we instituted  “Work From Home (WFH) Mondays”, which came about when the rush hour commute within Metro Manila – one of the world’s most congested cities – began taking 2-3 hours. It wasn’t an instant success, as there were worries that it might impair performance and that people would not get a solid enough start to the week if they were not in the office. But slowly and steadily, the team realized it helped their productivity and they advocated for improvements. Over time, Mondays became engineered to jumpstart the work week ahead, while reducing the health and time toll of post-weekend commute traffic on our team. 

Conduct equitable experiments. Having the whole team working from home on Mondays, even those who lived close to the office, was equitable and proved that it worked. Eventually, we started offering more WFH days by request, which was helpful for all team members, including those who are parents, caregivers, or live far outside the city center. Having a formal WFH request process meant that it was transparent and equitable and everyone on the team could benefit. We encourage all companies to reduce the commute burden for everyone, not just for the few who self-advocate for flexibility. Everyone has more healthful activities to do with their time than sit in toxic traffic. 

Get clear on your priorities and know what you are willing to sacrifice. As a people-first organization, we knew when COVID-19 hit that we had to find ways to keep our employees and support them through the pandemic. At the same time, we did not know how the pandemic would affect the global social impact sector and our finances. Since our priorities were clear, we were ready to forgo many items in the budget in order to keep our team whole and healthy. Because our People Partnership Team and Client Partnership Team had a strong practice of collaboration, we were able to quickly institute early cost-cutting strategies across our whole budget, letting us retain all employees and continue existing benefits. We were even able to provide special pandemic-era benefits, including a fund for internet and home office equipment and a “Take a Breathing Space” leave (an extra week off for employees experiencing setbacks due to the pandemic). Being clear on our priorities meant we didn’t need to spend time deciding what’s important, and only needed to focus on how to navigate the pandemic. Looking forward, companies may want to decide now on the priorities that will guide them in future crises, and have a shared understanding across the team on the sacrifices they will make for those priorities.  

Our earlier interventions that centered on team well-being paid off during a crisis. We successfully maintained high quality work, and remained financially stable throughout 2020. We even managed to hire a few new team members and increased our regular profit-sharing bonus for all full-time employees.

2. Take the time and effort to build the right solution for your team.

When the pandemic started, our team already had a good track record with flexible hours and locations. That made it easier to go fully remote overnight when lockdowns began, but creating the effective system for it didn’t happen overnight! We started years ago to build a core hours model, which we used alongside our WFH Mondays. With core hours, team members can leave the office (or log off, if they were working from home) after the first half of the work day, transfer to other locations, take care of personal errands, or take a few hours for a breather, and log back in later.

Give new practices time to settle before evaluating. The core hours concept was piloted with a few senior team members before being made available to everyone. Getting feedback and giving the team time to adjust were key to the process. Some managers needed more convincing than others that core hours would work. 

Communicate openly about what is not working. “It was important to make sure everyone was aligned with deadlines. This was sometimes a challenge whenever someone [left after core hours] and another [teammate was] waiting for a product. Some measures had to be put in place,” explains our Human Resources Officer, Venus Gatdula. There were even times when reverting to traditional office hours seemed like the better option. Instead of going down the road of enforcement, we tried to build empathy across the team for how it affected others when some veered off the deadlines. Ultimately, we distilled the core hours policy to two simple rules: 1) let your team know when you will be online and offline, and 2) meet your deadlines.

Despite the challenges, our team really valued the benefits of core hours and, over time, everyone built the habits needed to make the setup work without needing heavy oversight from managers. At all levels, Smarter Gooders are able to effectively produce deliverables and take time to attend to personal matters, which was even more important when COVID-19 lockdowns hit.  

3. Don’t be afraid to experiment and fail. 

Experiments are rewarding, even when they don’t work. Failures have given us valuable input to benefit our team – what works for them, what doesn’t, and how we can further improve.

In another effort to reduce our team’s travel times, commuting costs, and stress, we experimented with a satellite office, or what we called a hubspot, that was closer to some team members’ homes than our main office. The idea was that team members in those areas could use the hubspot on select days of the week. 

Survey everyone for input, even those not using the benefit. We surveyed the team and the results were muddy. Some team members found hubspots convenient and said it gave them a bit more time to sleep in the mornings – but at the same cost of traveling to the regular office. Other team members still preferred to go to our regular office in order to better coordinate with the rest of the team in the same place. Based on surveys, we extended the experiment to make tweaks to offer hubspots on more days and with larger groups. 

Be willing to call it, even if the experiment was not an abject failure. Eventually, we let go of the hubspot idea because the costs outweighed the benefits and it didn’t benefit everyone or the work they did. Our People Partnership Team was willing to drop the idea, knowing something better was out there that would improve everyone’s wellness and productivity. While the experiment technically failed, we gained more insight into our team’s priorities and how they prefer to work that informed our next experiments. Coming out of the pandemic, we will be experimenting with ways for small groups to meet up and leaning on the learning from the hubspot experiment. 

4. Trust plus communication – it’s a cost-effective, long-term solution. 

None of the systems or structures we put in place work without the whole team’s commitment and trust. Being able to trust each other and communicate openly has allowed us to try different options and collectively adapt to changes (whether forced upon us like the pandemic, or ones we created while trying potential policies). We trust that every teammate knows what is expected of them and that they appreciate having options and opportunities that help them deliver their best work. Likewise, this practiced flexibility and accountability helped the team feel more in control during difficult times and continues to contribute to their overall resilience in this crisis.