Building a Secure Startup with Remote IT Solutions

What we have found regarding productivity, based on our interviews and secondary sources, is that the productivity does not decrease when organizations shift from the office to remote work. All three managers that we interviewed are satisfied with the results that their employees deliver. The expectations are met, and even though remote work seems to work better for some people and worse for some, there is in general higher focus on the work and 

less “nonsense”. What all the managers said can be reinforced by an article in New York times where a study showed that the most Americans are happier and more productive when they work from home. In addition to our own research and the secondary sources there are previous researchers that have done different studies that show the increase in productivity 

when working remotely. Bloom et al. (2013) showed in a study based on a Chinese travel agency that the productivity increases by 14% when the employees work from home instead of in a traditional office. Based on all the information from different sources we can, with considerable confidence, say that working from home really has positive effects on the 

productivity We think that it is important

as a manager, to keep in mind that not every single employee increases their productivity, we suppose that there are exceptions and people who are not willing to work remotely because people are different and for some people it does not work to ”move the office” to home and keep working in an equally productive way. The fact that our interviewees had different thoughts and feeling regarding remote work could be explained by their emotional stability 

(Jansen Perry, et al., 2018 p. 578). We believe that this means that managers need to know their employees more than they did at the office, in order to optimise their working situation and gain the positive effects of remote work while offsetting the negatives. In addition to this recognizing an employee’s so-called virtual intelligence is important. Each employee will be 

differently capable of recognizing, directing, and maintaining (Meetings and communication overall is still very important for the managers, so they still have meeting to a similar extent as before, but the most obvious change is that the meetings are now on distance like over “skype” or “teams”. As with many other things there are both pros and cons, M1 mentioned that it is easy to talk over each other, and in an online meeting there is a lack of body 

language and facial expressions

you only hear the voice without seeing how they react on something that you say and if they are about to talk or not. These results further support previous research that has found the lack of body language to an issue of remote work (English, 2017). There seems to be no real difference between planned remote work and remote work due to a crisis when it comes to 

the loss of body language. We believe that this means that this is an issue that is much more complicated and harder to solve. One solution is to include video in the meetings, but as M1 says, this can be limited by bandwidth or other practicalities, and as previously noted eye-contact remains an issue in video chats. M2 highlights positive aspects of online meetings. 

According to M2 the meetings are much shorter and more efficient because there is less talk about other issues than the meeting actually is about. However, according to the industry experts an important aspect of remote work is to maintain casual or non-work-related conversations (GitLab, 2020, Marais, 2020, Microsoft, 2020, Ryder and Moon, 2020). This 

means that the no nonsense meetings

may be detrimental to the overall connections and socialization of employees. Additionally some of the secondary sources quoted employees saying that they enjoyed getting to know each other on a more personal level, meaning that by excluding “nonsense” you further risk losing some of the positive aspects of remote work (Cramer and Zaveri, 2020). When it 

comes to the negative aspects of online meetings, M2 and M1 shares their experiences that it is hard to understand and see feelings when you only hear the employee’s voices. It is easier to share information physically and see how the employees react. Another reflection is that you only need to tell something, such as news, decisions or instructions once when everyone are gathered on one place, but on distance the same thing sometimes needs to be told a few 

times, in order to reach everyone. M3 mentioned in our interview that one of the hardest things is to keep the “team-feeling”, which can be partly explained by what Thalia Wheatley said in an interview, that the more eye-to-eye contact people in an organization have the more connected they get (Semuels, 2020). This is tied to ancient parts of the human brain, and 

Conclusion

since face-to-face interactions have been the norm for thousands of years, humans have evolved to get a lot of information from body language. Another downside of online meetings is that people multitask during the meetings and not always pay full attention (Semuels, We believe that these things together can lead to decreased team-feeling, if you cannot share an eye-to-eye moment with your colleagues, and start to not pay attention to conversations that 

relate to the organization, then you risk losing the team-feeling within the organization. Finding solutions to these issues are key to making remote communication work. Although the eye contact is currently difficult to solve, managers can make conscious efforts to increase focusduring meetings. For example, managers can ban cell phones during meetings, and make it clear that during meetings you do not work on other tasks. We think that 

different, so to be able to collaborate in an organization people need to communicate, talk, listen, and understand each other. When we looked into the advice of experienced companies we found that most of them recommend that you establish clear standards and rules for communications, as well as to embrace asynchronous communication and encourage communication (Donovan, 2020, Microsoft, 2020, Ryder and Moon, 2020). This is furthe