Smart money - spends that are worth their weight in gold

Summary
Many leaders have access to discretionary budgets so they can run their teams or their departments. I have a few ideas for you to use that money. If some ideas are beyond your pay grade to execute, be an advocate and influence those who can change things.

1. Run a survey to collect people's remote work preferences and figure out how much space you really need. You don't need to expand the space as more people will work remotely each year.
2. Help your team get access to productivity tools that'll help them work together effectively.
3. Support people's personal development by instituting a learning and development budget. They can use this for online courses, periodicals and conferences.
4. Facilitate team bonding through social events and retreats. While each team can have a fixed sum of money to use each month, you can also plan regular offsites for larger groups.

Depending on the level you operate at as a leader, you probably have some discretionary budgets available to you. You might be the founder of a company, the leader of an engineering unit or a team leader. The amount of money you have and how you exercise your discretion, depends on the type of company you work for and your role. Regardless, there’s one thing common across these situations. When you spend money as a leader, your company wants you to get the most bang for their buck.

In today’s post, I want to explore four areas of expenditure that’ll make a big impact on your remote teams. Especially so when they operate in an async-first mode. Now you may shrug your shoulders and say that some of this is beyond your pay grade. I understand. Hark back to the idea of being part advocate, part guerilla. Use advocacy to influence your bosses and use guerilla tactics to improve things under your control. They didn’t build Rome in a day but they were laying bricks every hour. Think of this as a guide to influence slight changes at short frequencies. Enough said, let’s look at those smart spends.

Office or not?

Let’s get this one out of the way. By this point you know my biases. Offices are interruption factories. This is something we’ve known forever. Well before the pandemic, Forbes reported that 71% of people experience frequent interruptions when they’re working. This is at odds with “deep work” - one of the big reasons we want to work asynchronously. 

How many days would you want to work remotely? A distribution of responses from a major tech firm.

There is one more data point to be mindful of. Let’s look at data from a prominent tech firm I surveyed. I asked people how many days they’d like to work remotely each week. This is how the percentages lined up.

• Never - 14.29%

• 1 day - 5.33%

• 2 days - 14.7%

• 3 days - 23.24%

• 4 days - 10.02%

• All the time - 32.41%

If you extrapolate those preferences, you’ll learn that this tech firm needs office space for just 40% of their people. The cool thing about this data is that people’s preferences are shifting towards remote work rapidly. When I surveyed the same firm about a year back, only 16% of people wanted to work remotely. Within a year, people have become more proficient at remote work and the percentage of people who want to be all-remote has doubled! 

 So here’s what I recommend with budgeting for office space.

1. Survey your employees and ask them how often they want to come into the office. Do this intending to honour their preferences.

2. Extrapolate that data to calculate how much seating capacity your office needs. Even as your company grows, that office space should be adequate, because every year more people will prefer to work remotely.

This way you can be judicious about how much money you spend on real estate. And that’s just the traditional way of looking at office space. Here are two more ideas for the future.

1. Instead of locking in a leased space, how about working out a pay-per-use arrangement with a co-working space? Your employees can then go to the space closest to them and save themselves the commute. People in a certain part of town can get together and work with each other in hyper-local chapters. 

2. When you lease space, how about you reimagine the office for the future? Think about quiet, library spaces for work, soundproof pods for video conferencing and areas for social interaction. Clive Wilkinson architects have created 12 building blocks of the new office, which you can implement in part or full to get the most out of your real-estate expenses.

Productivity tools

Now that we have real-estate out of the way, let’s discuss how you can make remote work productive. Even when people go to the office, you want to level the playing field between people who’re working in close physical proximity to each other and those that are remote. Follow the “treat everyone as remote” principle. 

To follow this remote-first approach your people need the tools to be productive. We’ve already described a wide range of tools earlier on this blog. You can’t have everything, of course. Your company’s software procurement policy will also be a limiting factor when you decide which tools you can introduce.

If you can approve software spends though, listen to your team carefully. If you can’t approve these yourself and you discover your team needs certain tools, then here are a few ways to get them.

1. If you work as an internal team, explore if you can get software licences only for them. This may mean that you bill the expense to an internal expense code. 

2. As a consulting team, you may have a bit more flexibility. Talk to your clients about how these new tools can help the team be more productive. Clients can often purchase software for a consulting team as part of their IT budgets.

3. Explore your company policies and find out if employees can purchase certain tools for themselves using a company allowance. Not all organisations allow this, but if your employers do, then this is an easy way to introduce new, productivity enhancing tools to your team.

4. If none of the above approaches work, make a business case to whomsoever it may concern in the business so you get the tools you need. This can be a long, frustrating process in bigger companies. I never said being a leader is easy!

Whatever you do, don’t fall prey to the “shiny new toy syndrome”. There’ll always be a new tool in the market that does a certain task a wee-bit better. That’s no reason to introduce the tool to your team. The cost of onboarding your people to the tool may outweigh the benefits you get from it. 

Oh, and don’t forget your people’s home offices. As people get more comfortable with remote work, they’ll figure out workspace hacks and improvements to make themselves more productive. Real estate prices vary across the world, but if you take a median cost of $1500 per year per employee for office space, you’ll save quite a lot of money each year when you adopt a remote first strategy. Plough some of that money back into people’s home offices. It doesn’t have to be a huge amount. Your employees will appreciate every bit of support in making their work lives more flexible and productive.

Personal development

You can also use the savings from real estate expenditure, to help your people build their skills. If you’ve hired competent people and if you’ve created an environment for deep work, this’ll have a positive side effect. Flow begets flow. People will want to be in the Goldilocks zone all the time, solving challenges that are at the very edge of their capabilities. What’s in the Goldilocks zone today, will be too easy tomorrow. So smart people will want to keep learning and honing their craft.

On one hand, this means that you need to shape work, so it’s challenging. On the other, people need the flexibility to learn the skills that they feel most excited about. With learning, one-size-doesn’t-fit-all. Give your people a discretionary budget each year, so they can learn new skills. Between Coursera, Udemy, Pluralsight, EdX and other platforms - the world of online learning has never been richer. You can strike corporate partnerships or just let people expense a certain sum of money each year for personal development. 

Throw in benefits such as conference attendance to help people build their professional network. This doesn’t just benefit the employee. It also benefits the company. Remember how weak ties can help find novel solutions to problems? Professional networks are a kind of weak tie. 

Team bonding

Async-first remote work needs intentionality. In fact, asynchronous work rests on a bedrock of trust and camaraderie. The stronger the trust and camaraderie on your team, the easier it is to assume positive intent in written communication. The easier it is to default to action without fear. You can’t leave this to chance. Teams need mechanisms to build that camaraderie and I’ll be the first to say that a lot of this should happen face-to-face.

Many companies already have team budgets so people can meet occasionally for lunches, dinners and team activities. I support this and if your organisation doesn’t provide such budgets already, advocate for them. Set aside a monthly sum of money for the team and give them the freedom to use it as they please. In the teams that I’ve been on, we’ve used this budget for many things. The most common one use of such a budget is a team lunch or dinner. There are other ideas as well.

• A team activity. This can either be in person, like a bowling night or even virtual, like an Airbnb experience.

• An overnight trip. Sometimes we’d save up money for three months and do a fun trip with the cash we accumulated.

• Team swag. When many people couldn’t come for a team event, we’d just buy some goodies for everyone, to build that feeling of togetherness, even when we were apart.

 Examples aside, the point is to put your money where your mouth is. If you care about culture and building teams - invest in it by setting aside time and money for it. The decentralised team activities apart, I strongly recommend that companies or departments should organise retreats for people to get away from work to just get to know each other better and revisit their collective purpose.

Chase Warrington, Head of Remote at Doist

As remote work goes mainstream and the offsite/retreat (or whatever you want to call it 😅) becomes a cornerstone of how we build team culture and camaraderie, optimising how we spend this precious time together in-person is more critical than ever.”

My employer, Thoughtworks, organises company-wide events called away days, which I must admit are harder to organise as the company gets bigger. The logistics get too complicated and people can get lost in a sea of unfamiliar faces. Depending on the size of your company, you may need to split up these retreats by team or department. Regardless of how you execute them, make sure you do them. The value far outweighs the cost as some research already shows.

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If you aim for level 4 of the distributed work pyramid, you’ll be a more productive unit, while also lowering operating costs, such as real estate. It’s tempting to add those savings to the company’s bottom line, but I recommend otherwise. Use those savings to get yourself to level 5; i.e. “nirvana”. When you invest in productivity tools, in your people’s learning and development and in building team cohesion, you’ll see payoff over the long run. Be it in productivity metrics, employee satisfaction surveys or in retention. By blending advocacy and guerilla tactics, you can take the long view and set your people and organisation up for the future.