In the last 1-2 years, the way we work together has changed dramatically. Routines and habits had to be rethought and adapted. New questions arose that had to be answered quickly. How do we best communicate with each other remotely? How can we successfully start or complete our projects despite the local separation? How can we manage an entire team from home without personal contact?
Answering these and other questions will remain with us in the long term and will have a lasting impact on the way we work together. Remote work will play an increasingly important role, as 58% of companies plan to maintain the current scope of home office, continue to establish it in the culture, and expand it. A trend that will be well received by employees. 74% of employees were satisfied or very satisfied with working from home. Only one in six companies wants to eliminate the home office offer after the pandemic.
Own illustration of a survey by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) on IT security in the home office
This article aims to summarize some key learnings from the past year and show how projects can continue to be successfully managed remotely in the future.
1. Trust is the new control
Project work changed virtually overnight. From open-plan offices, we went to the living room, the kitchen, or the home office. On-site customer visits, daily personal exchanges with colleagues, the occasional coffee break – all of this was no longer possible from one moment to the next. Established structures, processes, and routines were undermined.
This situation required project managers to have an even greater degree of trust in their teams. Even if there were initial difficulties in one place or another, it has now become clear that the trust placed in them has paid off. It became clear that project managers do not necessarily have to control their teams from the office and keep them under constant observation. Especially in a globalized world, project teams have long been composed internationally and operate from different nations and countries.
In the future, the focus must therefore be much more on delivering high-quality results and not on employees sitting dutifully in front of their computers in the office for eight hours. The core task of project managers must therefore be to establish a motivating, open, and communicative attitude. This is essential to keep employees productive and efficient.
Now that all project managers should have learned to trust their teams, it is important to create a healthy balance between control and trust in the long term. To do this, it is important to give the team basic guidelines that they can follow and, in addition, to allow them sufficient freedom of action. To ensure that this succeeds, project managers must also develop a sense of who can drive their sub-projects forward independently and who may need some support, which may be the case with new colleagues or working students.
2. Virtual teams – successful through good communication
For cooperation to function smoothly in virtual teams, two factors are particularly important: regular communication and efficient information exchange. Especially in times when you only see each other irregularly, it is essential to continuously inform employees and the team about current events and results. The exchange of information between individual employees can quickly come to a standstill if you can’t just exchange ideas over a coffee or in the hallway or a shared lunch. The exchange on the so-called “short official channels” is no longer possible. However, if projects are to be successfully completed, regular communication is the most important means of keeping the team together and keeping the project on track. Regular jour fixes, status reports, but also workshops in a relaxed atmosphere can help.
In addition to the efficiency perspective, communication is also more important than ever for team spirit, for example to integrate new team members. And this is exactly where old ways of thinking have to be forgotten in the future. No one is a member just because they are present in the office. The important thing is to bring the new colleagues together digitally and form new virtual teams that can also work efficiently if they have only met virtually. Thanks to modern communication and collaboration tools, we live in a time in which we can ensure smooth online communication and probably have to in the long term.
3. Modern tools for more efficient project management
The correct use of suitable tools and technologies makes efficient work in the home office possible in the first place, and Corona has once again driven digitalization enormously in the past year. For around 70% of medium-sized companies, the pandemic has an impact on digitalization and the degree of acceleration.
When selecting tools, it is advisable to focus on a central tool, such as Microsoft Teams, especially in the area of communication and collaboration. This leads to more trust and security in dealing with the chosen tool. It also contributes to simplified, faster, and more uncomplicated communication with colleagues.
In a project-based working world, it is very often necessary to work together on documents. In order to be able to work on the same document with colleagues at the same time without sending it back and forth in different versions, the use of collaboration tools and cloud solutions is a suitable approach. The advantages of such an investment are manifold. For cloud solutions, for example, you only have to pay for the capacity used. Data and workloads can be moved flexibly. In addition, the services of the cloud solution can also be used flexibly. An additional positive side effect is that the e-mail chaos is reduced and the team can focus more on the relevant tasks.
For the future, this means that companies must invest more and more in this way of working, i.e. actively shape and drive digitalization in the company. At the same time, of course, it is important to focus more on IT security in order to protect your own data and systems in the best possible way at all times.
4. More flexibility through agile project management
In order to be able to react flexibly to uncertain, changing circumstances and situations, an agile project management approach is a good idea in the long term. The basic idea is to divide a project into several phases, with improvements and adjustments possible in each phase. This type of project management is designed to recognize uncertainties and accept them. This does not mean that costs, time, or quality suffer, but rather that an incremental and iterative approach can be used to respond flexibly to changing requirements. This means that requirements are divided into smaller and more manageable parts, which are prioritized and implemented by the team members within the framework of a so-called sprint according to their importance.
This also enables better monitoring and control of work progress. The individual work steps are meticulously planned in order to adapt to changes and are carried out during the entire life cycle of a project. Instead of aiming for a fixed goal, the agile approach allows the project team to react effectively to changing requirements. Agile project management is therefore designed to ensure that projects continue to contribute to success even in difficult situations and crises.
3 tips for project managers in the home office
In addition to the hard facts already presented for continuing to successfully manage projects from home, it is of course also important to pay attention to the soft facts. To conclude, we have therefore compiled three tips from these soft facts, which make cooperation from the home office easier and contribute to project success:
1. Turn on the camera
Of course, it is convenient to turn off the camera and start working directly in the morning without having to dress up beforehand. However, it is also much more impersonal and it is easier to build a relationship if you can look customers, team members, or new colleagues in the eye. In addition, turning on the camera enables the expression of professionalism even in the home office.
2. Leave space between meetings
Since you don’t have to move from your workplace to a meeting room in the home office and are therefore relatively constantly in front of your laptop, it often happens that meetings are lined up one after the other. You move seamlessly from one topic to the next and then forget to take sufficient breaks. How much efficiency and productive outcome these tightly timed meetings can actually have is questionable. It is therefore extremely important to always think about the meaningfulness and importance of the meetings and to leave as much time as possible between the individual meetings.
3. Take time for small talk with colleagues
As already mentioned, the water cooler conversations and meeting colleagues at the coffee machine are missing in the home office. In addition, there are numerous calls and meetings. Even if it sounds like a waste of time at first glance, social contact with colleagues should never be neglected, because a team that knows each other and communicates a lot with each other works better and more efficiently together. In order to strengthen the feeling of togetherness in the home office, you should therefore regularly organize virtual team events and smaller team-building events can also be easily integrated into longer workshops.
