What does research say about remote work?
Given all the challenges with forced presenteeism, how do we find connection and collaboration in remote-first workplaces? Despite the dangers, here are great success examples from committing to remote work and the freedom it gives people. Research has found that the ability to work remotely is correlated with productivity for developers.4
Software teams in particular can thrive under the asynchronous and flexibility allowed by remote work when they are able to collaboratively trade generative and collaborative code work between teammates who may be in different time zones or have different expertises to contribute.5
The key is not to have no connection in remote workplaces, but to commit to meaningful connections that places real problem-solving at the center. Unfortunately, we often miss this. Research on software teams dealing with sudden transitions into remote work have noted that practices like pair programming can vanish for software teams.6 From collaboration to solitude and back: remote pair programming during Covid-19.
Additionally, developer teams report missing unmonitored social time like brainstorming–even more during the pandemic.7 In this study of 600+ developers, 65% of respondents reported a decrease in feeling socially connected with their team. And less awareness of what colleagues are working on (which is reported by 58% of respondents) was associated with a decrease in productivity.
These studies highlight the importance of the organizational transparency engineering insights platforms provide. Flow dashboards instantly enable engineers to not only see what they’re currently working on, but also a snapshot of cross-team connectivity and a holistic understanding of current team tasks.
Remote work solutions
Making remote work successful for developers isn’t a matter of enforcing “presenteeism” but in making sure teams get time for the rituals that really count. It’s time for us to think carefully about meaningful presence, not “performance presence.”
Recommendations:
Leaders should guard against digital presenteeism. Set quality targets, not quantity targets for teams. We all know total lines of code written does not equal productivity.
Invest in time together that counts–rituals like retrospectives and mentorship are foundational for developers to both increase their knowledge base and feel more connected.
- Use software metrics to free people’s time to focus on the actual issues they’re experiencing within your software delivery process. When you have the metrics that show where the bottlenecks and blockers are, you can spend less time determining what the issues are and more time solving them.
