Making Work From Anywhere the New Norm

“We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”. — said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, addressing the effects of the pandemic. In these uncertain times, the founder and executive coach at Impact-Coaches Inc, Sandra Oliver, offers her advice on successfully leading teams through Work-from-home to Work-from-anywhere in this detailed article by Forbes.

A study from Pew Research finds that most people want to keep working from home even after the pandemic ends. According to Oliver, work-from-home is turning outdated, and work-from-anywhere is drastically becoming the trend of our future. So, it is about time for business leaders to adapt to the work-from-anywhere concept as speedily as possible.

The article highlights that we ought to carry along the takeaways from the pandemic to lead a work-from-anywhere (WFA) team successfully. Oliver further states that promoting asynchronous brainstorming sessions is an excellent approach to boost creativity at the workplace and maintains that conducting synchronous brainstorming sessions weekly or monthly is significantly essential for the growth of the company.  

Furthermore, the employees working remotely are facing communication challenges. The informal office dynamics practised during face-to-face interaction does not work for the employees working remotely and comes at the expense of the productivity of an organization. Therefore, a prevailing sense of urgency is witnessed to make clearly defined policies and easily accessible workplace guidelines.

She also pointed out that business leaders triumph at organizing formal events while entirely missing out on the informal ones, which are equally important in this virtual world. One should work towards conducting enormously influential virtual meetings to gradually make difficult yet essential conversations comfortable. This step needs to be the first of many.

She concludes that WFA brings the freedom of working from anywhere in the world, provided we succeed in making proper use of technology and leveraging the platforms enabling virtual communication.