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The Remote Work Audit – an Insightful Snapshot of What’s Really Happening in Your Organization

The Remote Work Audit – an Insightful Snapshot of What’s Really Happening in Your Organization

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written on October 2020 by Marek Grygier

What’s inside?

Introduction
What’s Remote Work Audit and What Is It For?
The Remote-how 4 Step Audit Process
Step 1: Remote Work Score
Step 2: Team Interviews
Step 3: Remote Work Policies
Step 4: Final Report and Recommendations
How This Works in Reality
Mastering the Remote Transition
Talk to Us about Your Audit Opportunity



Remote Work Audit Framework is a complete guide on audit your company’s current remote status.

Get it now!

It’s free!



What a year 2020 has been for us all. Over the past six months, we’ve been flooded with messages and questions from team leaders, managers, and employers who all want to know the same thing: “How do I manage this huge transition to remote work?” It’s a monumental change to make. Companies have found themselves in this strange new position and have had to do the best they can in a short amount of time. But implementing a successful remote set up isn’t a task that can be done overnight. 

After thinking long and hard about what we can do to help the situation, we finally came up with an idea. Through combining all our expertise, services, and tools, we can now guide a company’s workplace remote transformation with our new Remote-how Audit. 

We start by boiling down and distilling a company’s current remote situation and look at it from multiple angles.

Only by seeing what’s being done well, what’s being done not so well, and what simply doesn’t exist can you plan a way forward. The audit process isn’t something that can be executed easily internally within a company. To get the clearest picture, an audit needs to be done by a knowledgeable, experienced, and impartial external figure. Just like any other audit that would take place. Transitioning to remote work must be handled carefully.

When designing the audit process, we broke down our goals into simple and clear parts. From our point of view, if we successfully achieve them then your company should also be on the way to achieving their own personal goals. The overall vision here is to fast-track and implement successful remote work practices, but this can’t be done all in one go. Let’s take a look at what an audit seeks to achieve and the goals we need to hit:

➡️ Gaining a comprehensive understanding of the current remote work/hybrid situation of a company, its related employee experience, and identification of improvement areas.

We can’t move forward without knowing where we currently are. The different remote setups that a company can operate are varied, and not everyone is even sure of exactly which one they have. The employee experience is just as important too, as remote work benefits both sides of a company: the employer and employees. Without this understanding, there’s no way for us to paint a full picture and make sure positive changes are made with everyone in mind.

➡️ Distilling company employee data into actionable insights

After achieving the first goal, we move onto turning our newfound understanding into goals that each company can achieve. It’s easy for almost everyone to see the problems, but our remote experts can turn these into action points that will help solve your issues with their suggestions.

➡️ Creating a plan to elevate and improve the remote work/hybrid setup

Without a plan, actionable insights are just that… only insights! Once we’ve achieved our first two goals, our next aim is to help turn our ideas into reality. This is where our practical experience over the years comes rightly into play. Through our resources and tools, such as the Remote-how Academy and Virtual Office, we can guide each company closely on the way to becoming a robust, remote smart organization. 

By achieving our three goals, Remote-how will put companies in the best position possible to enact real change. Our goals are your goals, and your success is our priority. 


Get our free Remote Work Audit Framework now!


The Remote-how 4 Step Audit Process

The methods and processes we use are fully tried and tested. From our experience in supporting remote work conditions around the globe, we know best how to take stock of a company’s current remote assets. The next step we took after establishing our goals was to develop our auditing method for transitioning to remote work. Again, we wanted to make this brand new concept as simple and understandable as possible for everyone involved. 

➡️ Remote Work Score

If there’s one group of people who know your remote work policy best, it’s your employees. The drive for remote has previously come mainly from a company’s workforce and many people already have some prior experience. We’re working from a bottom-up perspective at this point. Through anonymous, online surveys, our auditors gain a general view of how employees view remote working at your company.

➡️ Team Interviews

In this stage, we move towards selected critical employees in the remote work process. Team leaders, members, and decision-makers are all important parts of your company’s remote ecosystem, so we need to take everyone’s perspective onboard. Our auditors will organize 1:1 discovery calls to get to the bottom of what is working, and what could be improved upon.

➡️ Remote Policies & Tools Review

Now we start to take a look from a top-down perspective when it comes to remote work in your company. The frameworks and policies laid down by management play a hugely critical role in the work that employees get up to. We’ve all had to make huge changes recently with flexible working conditions, and the time hasn’t been there to hone and perfect new remote policies.

➡️ Summary & Recommendations

Once we’ve spent enough time gathering all the information we need from throughout the whole organization, we turn it into something more easily digestible for decision-makers. An in-depth report, executive summary, and recommendations all come together to finalize the auditing process.

Our method takes a holistic approach across a whole range of areas that are targeted in the audit. Implementing remote work conditions successfully, unfortunately, doesn’t just rely on one part of a company! We’ve broken our audit’s coverage down into the 8 core topics and themes that make up any top-performing remote company.

Audit AreaDetails
Remote ReadinessRemote strategy, current situation & learnings, expectations vs reality
Culture & ValuesOrganizational culture, peer-to-peer relations
Satisfaction & Well-beingJob satisfaction, socio-emotional well-being
Work OrganizationWorkplace flexibility & ergonomics, productivity and efficiency metrics
CommunicationDirect communication, meeting habits, company information flow
LeadershipRole of leadership, team expectations, struggles and fears
Knowledge & Self-developmentKnowledge management, learning and development needs
HR PoliciesHiring, onboarding, career development

Get our free Remote Work Audit Framework now!


How this works in reality 

From the survey setup to the final report presentation, the whole process takes only 5 weeks for our auditors to complete. Time is now of the essence with the current pandemic situation, so we have made the audit as swift as possible. It’s also unintrusive so as to minimize any disruptions to your standard working schedule. Most employees will simply need to lend us roughly 20 minutes of their time to complete the online survey, while a select group will also need to take part in an up to a 45-minute personal interview.

Mastering the Remote Transition

If there is one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic has helped us all realize, it’s that the future of work has to move towards a remote setting. Companies have been forced to make a decision that previously seemed intimidating and simply impractical. But now everyone has had a taste of the benefits that remote work has to offer, it’s difficult to place it back in its box. Now is the time to strike while the iron is hot.

It’s not the time to get left behind, so take the opportunity to get yourself up to speed while the whole world is doing so too. No one wants to play catch up. 

With our audit service, you can make sure that your company’s work policies are truly future proof. Saving precious time and effort with no need for experimenting yourself can give you the upper hand when it comes to this period of monumental change at work. The benefits of having a remote workforce are clear and numerous. From productivity gains, improvements in work-life balance, all the way through to a reduction in operating costs, there’s no point in wasting time. 

You need a solid set of policies and rules for interaction to create a cohesive culture in a company that has employees working from numerous different locations. If a remote company doesn’t have a strong sense of shared identity and good working practices, remote employers and colocated ones can feel like they are out of the loop and isolated. Getting the model correct is important, but there is no one size fits all solution here. That’s why the Remote-how Audit has been created, to take out the guessing and experimentation and provide a straightforward and clearly signposted path to a company that makes remote work a success.

Talk to Us about Your Audit Opportunity

To get yourself on board and hear more about the auditing process, get in touch with one of our remote work consultants, or download our free Remote Work Audit Framework!

One of the biggest risks that we face at the moment is inefficiently managing this change. Without the proper organizational structure in place, you can risk the integrity and unity of your company when operating with a rushed hybrid remote model. We’re here to make sure that simply doesn’t happen.

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