Why Poorly Executed Remote Work Doesn’t Work

While the winter of 2015 might seem like a distant memory now that we’re in the middle of a steamy summer, those who remember it know that it was unlike any other. There was incessant snowfall, ice storms, and for those who had to commute into an office, it was hellish.

That’s why Timehop, the social media photo app company based in New York City, decided to implement a flexible work policy and allow its employees to work remotely. Although the idea made perfect sense at the onset (i.e. a technology company embracing workplace flexibility), the poorly executed remote work policy ended in disaster, according to the article, “Timehop CEO’s Failed Remote Working Experiment Revealed,” in hrgrapevine.com.

Here are some reasons why flex didn’t work for Timehop—and how it could have been (easily) fixed.

Employees were encouraged to work anywhere.

Although the definition of working remotely means that you can truly work anywhere, giving your employees free reign to work from home doesn’t mean that they are instantly going to become digital nomads. In fact, according to Forbes’ reports, employees were encouraged to “head out to exotic, hot locations.” Unless they had experience working as digital nomads (those who combine a love of travel with work), it is a recipe for disaster. Instead, employees should have simply been encouraged to work from home offices or someplace in their own neighborhood, like a local Starbucks.

Employees didn’t have experience working from home.

One employee, OS Developer Evan Coleman struggled with balancing work life with his personal life. His thinking: if he was working from home, it meant that he had to be working all the time that he was home. While the company implemented “Core Hours” from 1-5 EST, employees were left to figure out when and how they worked. For a previously only in-office staff, the transition was very difficult and stressful. Timehop should have encouraged its workers to work 9-5 from home, since they didn’t have any previous work-from-home experience. Mimicking a typical workday would have helped them make the segue simpler.

Employees missed each other.

Developer Rajesh Shenoy said: “ I missed talking to everyone. Social interactions help take your mind off work for a bit and I believe helps prevent burnout.” To us, it sounds like the staff wasn’t given proper tools to help them communicate with each other. Timehop should have created business accounts on social media sites such as Yammer and also provided videoconferencing and collaborative tech tools as a means for the staff to stay connected with each other, both on a professional and personal level.

Employees weren’t trained to work from home.

Yes, a major snowstorm is a perfect time to let your in-office staff work from home. But implementing a poorly executed remote work policy in the middle of said snowstorm is not a good idea. After all, employees need to know how to work from home ahead of time. Learning how to stay focused and keep productivity up while telecommuting is a skill that a remote workforce has to have; it’s not something that can be learned immediately. Timehop would have done better to implement a flexible schedule policy ahead of time and allow its staff to work from home on occasion to get them used to the idea of working remotely. As such, they could have ironed out any of the issues that their staff was facing (such as implementing programs to help the connect with each other) and measure their productivity levels as remote workers. It would have also given management the time to adjust their own practices and policies to better manage their distributed team.

Just like anything else that is poorly executed, poorly-executed remote work policies just won’t work. But that’s not a reason to assume that remote work doesn’t work in general, because it definitely does! Since Timehop is a tech company, it would serve them well to reconsider implementing a well-planned flexible work policy. That way, they can hire the best job seekers looking for computer and IT telecommuting jobs anywhere in the world.