Enabling your teams with a consistent approach to technology & tool adoption

Staying connected, efficient and supported through the effective use and approach of your technology and tools. 

Remote working certainly doesn’t feel new anymore. But whilst many of us are still in full remote working flow, there may still be some practical improvements required to enhance the experience. We’ve put together some practical steps to help your organisation support remote working, whatever stage you’re at.

Do your research

The start of lockdown was a bit like being thrown in at the deep end of the pool and grabbing on to anything you could to stay afloat. This may well have led to team members adopting different tools and approaches, and whilst this kept us buoyant for that short term change, we need to reflect and reorganise for the medium term.

Therefore, before jumping in with what you think the team needs, take a moment to ask them – carry out some research to inform the development of any additional guidance, tools, training and support.

At Manifesto, we conducted a staff survey to understand any challenges the team may have been facing as well as identify areas to enhance the WFH experience. This ranged from the physical elements such as home working set ups, to balancing work and family commitments, and remote working tools to name but a few. We made this anonymous to gauge a general temperature check of the team to help inform the tailored support and focus of the training and your business continuity planning.

Remote workshops

Bring together a broad and diverse range of your team, or stakeholders, for an interactive workshop session. Encourage them to share their experiences and challenges, whilst also providing ideas and solutions. A session like this could highlight where there are gaps where people’s needs are not being met and build consensus on what tools and processes should be implemented to meet these needs.

A shared experience often builds people’s confidence and hopefully generates some clear actions to make remote working more effective.

This doesn’t have to be a one time thing. Checking back after time has been given to implement those findings is important. Review how they have landed, how they have been adopted, and use another survey to see if happiness, productivity and comfort with changes has improved amongst your workforce.

Continuous, incremental improvements are often better than big bang approaches, especially in times of substantial (and uncontrollable) external change.

Remote toolkits

Review the tools you had implemented for a physical workspace and ask yourself if they are suitable and delivering value in the remote workplace. This could be represented in a shorthand guide for users to:

• Understand the purpose of each tool
• Functionality and capabilities 
• Tips and how to get the most from the tool

In combination with the workshop you could explore additional tools too – and look to describe a process around how tools are adopted and retired.

Here’s an example tool guide we’ve created for Manifesto. You can style them up or down depending on what resource you have available.

By creating these guides, you will help to promote a consistent approach and use of all your tools, and the confidence of this guidance will provide clarity for your team, in turn improving efficiency and effectiveness.

Platform Assessment Tool

Assessment tools are great to help triage ideas your team may have for platform requirements. Lots of ideas and suggestions are great to throw into the ring, but you need a way to assess these and ensure you only implement those that meet the necessary requirements. For example a technology radar tool, created by Thoughtworks, could be used to identify which tools should be:

• Adopted
• Trialed
• Assessed
• Put on hold 

You can also check out Thoughtworks remote working playbook where they share what they have learnt during this experience.

Coaching sessions

It’s not as simple as it once was, to just ‘pop’ to a colleagues desk to ask a quick ‘how do I do this’ question when it comes to new tools and platforms. So check in with your team, ask the question “does this need a bespoke coaching session” to increase the team’s confidence in using this?

This question could be asked via a survey, and a follow up coaching session would then identify the pain points that came out of the survey. This also helps you to make sure you have the right people in the (virtual) room too.

Most of the ideas shared can be pursued yourself – but if you need support, get in touch with Manifesto to see how our expert team can help your organisation through these changes.