Remote Working : where autonomy meets productivity

Here, at Taksu Digital, we pride ourselves in giving our employees the flexibility they need to help us grow our agency. We live in a world where digital has taken over our lives whether we like it or not. From our phones to our watches all the way to our wallets, our connectivity to the digital space has never ceased to increase. It has given us a level of autonomy in our personal lives never reached before.

So why don’t we take this opportunity to give people the same level of autonomy in their work lives? In this blog post, we will get to define what remote working really is, how it has been working for us here at Taksu and how to get you started.

 

What do we consider as remote working?

Remote working can have different forms. I recently stumbled upon an interesting article from the social media management platform Buffer where the author explains in detail the five different “points” on the remote working scale:

Picture 1: Remote Working Scale By Buffer

As illustrated, remote working can be as simple as allowing your employees to work from home once a month. It can also go all the way to having your entire staff spread across ten locations, four continents and no office spaces.

People tend to assume that remote working rhythms with lazy working, thinking employees are sipping cocktails on the beach and pretending to be online. That’s not what remote working is about.

With hundreds of studies that have been conducted on this topic, it has been confirmed that remote working increases productivity. By definition, employees are working away from an office space where distraction from colleagues and frustration from not accomplishing anything in those working hours typically hinder the quality and productivity of their work.

In addition, employees generally feel happier to be working from a cozy and warm place which lowers their stress level. Ironically, the lack of interaction when working remotely increases the willingness to interact with others and employees’ level of engagement becomes higher. And ultimately, there is even more motivation to dedicate time to self-learning initiatives, from attending online workshops to learning new skills on their own.

 

So how do we do it at Taksu Digital?

We have remote workers in our agency, myself included. Our degree of remote working isn’t comparable to other companies with employees spread all around the globe. But with offices in Hong Kong, London and Bali, we “only” have two different time zones and somehow we make it work! All of us have a base, a co-working space to commute to every morning, in a city we still call home and a place we need to be if we want to scale our business.

However, we’re not only able to work from home, we also get to work from our home country. We have and do everything as other traditional agencies: minimum working hours, team meetings, client projects, quarterly reviews, training and even happy hours! We just added an ounce of flexibility in the mix.

No but really:

• We don’t over complicate our days with useless meetings
• We hire people that have the discipline to work on their own, and well
• We hire people that are already coming up with solutions when they face problems
• We created a structure in our processes from the very beginning, but we’re very agile too
• We think responsiveness and reliability are the key to working successfully remotely
• We use a variety of online tools and software to make our lives easier
• We have offices in co-working spaces to get access to bigger communities

 

Here’s how you could get started

Thousands of software, digital tools and apps available on the market can now allow anyone to run a successful and profitable business from anywhere in the world. Whether you choose to run an e-commerce platform or a digital marketing agency, the digital world will welcome you with open arms as long as your curiosity feeds you to learn more about it.

It also means that you have a wide choice of tools available for your employees to use and here are a few ones you might already know. Here are my top five!

• Slack: for all of your internal & external communications with different workspaces per client and “channels” within them for each topic
• Trello: if you are a project management freak, this is your tool! Easy to use, and integrative in many other platforms, it will allow you to keep track of all of your existing projects, tasks, deadlines whether for your clients or internally.
• Harvest: a time tracking that will let you enter the time spent on each task, project and client.
• Google: from Gmail to Meet, the Google suite has a lot of products to offer to make your life easier!
• Loom: If you want to show and explain something to a colleague or client that needs more than a couple of lines or images in a Slack message then Loom is great for creating and sending explainer videos.

Picture 2: A Trello Board Example from Trello

It is within your reach!