As companies consider how to bring employees back to safe, COVID-compliant workplaces, it’s important to remember that few own their buildings. Corporate office owners lease these properties to organizations. While these companies consider establishing safety protocols and workplace adjustments, building owners often have multiple companies, including their own, sharing one property. As landlord and tenant, owners have to navigate returning to offices differently.
Building owners are using our platform in five key ways: to help their own employees safely return to work, to keep buildings Safe, to improve tenant experience, to streamline cleaning efforts, and to comply with legal and code regulations.
Owners Are Tenants
Building owners face a unique problem: preparing spaces in which they are both landlord and tenant. Owners have a vested interest in protecting the safety of their own employees and shoring up efficiencies so they save valuable resources throughout their portfolio. As tenants return to buildings, owners want to ensure the safety of their own employees when interacting with and working alongside tenant companies whose COVID-policies may not be exactly aligned with theirs.
Density’s platform enables them to monitor building occupancy in real-time, offer capacity data on digital signage, and empower their employees to feel safe when they come back to work. From common areas and amenities to workstations, owners can use Density’s people count analytics to mitigate safety concerns, clean spaces based on actual use, and help their team members make smart choices as they navigate the returning crowds.
Safe Buildings
Shared spaces compromise social distancing efforts in the workplace. Restrooms, locker rooms, fitness centers, and bike rooms offer ample opportunity for overcrowding. Building owners have installed Safe by Density to address this issue. With digital displays, owners can monitor the real-time occupancy of building floors and shared amenities with ease. Safe by Density measures capacity limits against actual occupancy and calculates approximate wait times until spaces quiet down. Using Safe Display, landlords can help their tenants avoid overcrowding in building spaces before entering. Safe Alerts enable workplace teams to respond in real-time to changes in foot traffic by enabling mobile alerts based actual occupancy.
The same is true for tenants navigating open spaces like rooftop patios, lounges, and food service areas. With the powerful data provided by Safe, tenants can trust displays to help them steer clear of crowds and return to areas when they are less busy. Since maintaining social distance is crucial to not spreading COVID, Safe Display gives agency to employees and helps them share the responsibility of keeping each other healthy in the office.
Improved Tenant Experience
Owners are also looking to improve tenant experience in the office. Curating a safe, efficient tenant experience greatly improves the tenant-owner relationship. Owners can design buildings that make health and wellness convenient and effective throughout. To that end, landlords are able to integrate Density data into tenant experience apps so employees can check the real-time occupancy of different building amenities from the comfort of their desks… or even prior to leaving the house in the morning. Providing tenants this information removes the stress from navigating busy spaces. This way, employees can avoid long lines in cafes and gyms.
Accurate, real-time occupancy data is actionable and reassuring. Owners have an opportunity to build meaningful relationships with their tenants. Investing in tenant safety demonstrates a commitment to providing safe, efficient, and healthy workplaces for the long run.
Streamlined Cleaning Efforts
Owners use Density data to target cleaning efforts and automate an otherwise arbitrary process. Through Density alerts or IWMS integration, owners can enable facilities teams to identify exactly which rooms and areas have been frequently used and need cleaning. Shared amenity spaces like restrooms and break rooms may be unevenly utilized for a number of reasons. Location within the office can play a big role in this, depending on directional footpaths, convenience, and general busyness. If cleaning crews service areas on a time-based schedule, they spend the same amount of effort cleaning areas that have not been visited as they do on rooms that have been heavily used.
Because the pandemic demands a significant increase in cleaning and sanitation, owners can pinpoint which amenities need to be addressed, when, and how to dispense valuable resources efficiently. Density’s real-time occupancy data helps organizations improve cleaning services and save money.
Code Compliance
Prior to bringing employees and tenants back to offices, owners are setting capacity limits across properties. Some of these limits are city or state mandated and, if exceeded, can result in costly fines. Owners rely on Density’s real-time people counting platform to help them anticipate surges in foot traffic. As buildings approach capacity limits, owners can trigger alerts to notify key team members about changes in occupancy. This helps companies avoid fines and code violations as they navigate their return to the office.
Density’s analytics platform also enables building owners to review occupancy over time, which can be helpful when proving code compliance to local regulators and enforcement teams. This data provides insights into foot traffic trends and empowers owners to adapt their re-entry programs as they go.
Designing a return to work plan is not one-size-fits-all. Each owner needs to review their respective portfolio, identify areas of potential improvement, and implement specific tools to address those needs. Density data helps building owners step up for tenants. Occupiers are looking for partnerships with landlords, and the right data can help bring employees back to offices, keep them safe, and save valuable resources in an uncertain time.
There’s this weird tension in our industry between efficiency and experience.
On the one hand, there’s the need to provide employees with a work environment that helps them feel supported (67% of workers left their last role in search of a better workplace experience; they felt their existing workplace was not optimized for their needs).
On the other hand, you want to reduce office space and amenities that aren’t used. 40% of corporate real estate is empty but paid for, and nearly 90% of commercial real estate (CRE) executives are not happy with the current use of space in their working environment.
The way to resolve these conflicting needs is by leveraging space (or workplace) utilization metrics.
Workplace utilization is the engine behind a data-driven workplace that delivers on both experience and efficiency.
Defining workplace utilization for this article
Workplace utilization tells you how many people are in a room compared to how many people it was designed for. This form of workplace data helps you understand if a space is being used in the way it was intended. Science reveals what your employees need — and what they don’t — to have a positive workplace experience that leads to success.
There are three core benefits to incorporating workplace utilization in your workplace strategy:
Reduces costs — Facility managers and executives concerned about reducing square footage need to know what space is underutilized and unnecessary.
Simplifies space planning — Workplace utilization tools like Density offer deep insight into portfolio management and how every square foot is used.
Validates needs — Employees are always asking for things, but knowing how they use your space tells facilities managers what they actually need.
Below are several examples of how teams use Density’s workplace utilization data to make data-driven space decisions.
Making smarter space management decisions
One of our Fortune 500 customers had recently converted a series of one-person office spaces into shared spaces and allocated them to an emerging labs team.
Even with this added space, the team said it needed more space. Our customer used Density’s occupancy data to get an accurate, unbiased view of the issue and learn how they could solve it.
They noticed some spaces being primarily used as intended. The graphic below shows how one meeting room was used by 8+ people the majority of the time:
Some spaces were being used as intended.
But our customer noticed other areas – particularly meeting spaces – were severely underused. The graphic below shows how one meeting room space was used by just 1 person nearly half of the time.
Our customer’s existing workspace floor plan wasn’t working for them.
Other rooms were being severely underutilized.
Based on the data gathered from Density, our customer carved out additional rooms using their existing space. They didn’t have to move teams around or explore additional space.
The office space everyone needed was there. It just hadn’t been allocated properly.
In another example, one of our customers discovered desk areas on one floor were being underutilized. This created the opportunity for over $50,000 in potential savings, without impacting staff or employees.
With an average of 40 unused desks across three desk areas on one floor at $450 per desk, this company was spending an average of $54,450 on unused desks every month. What’s more? One team was responsible for the majority of the problem: sales.
It turns out, the sales executives were spending most of their time on the road. Even when they were around, they were spending more time hosting clients in a meeting room. The client switched to a 2:1 ratio of desks to salespeople and were able to adopt the policy across their portfolio for additional savings.
Sometimes the number of desks needed does not depend on the number of employees you have, or even the number of people using an office. Rather, it depends on the proportion of time those people physically spend at a desk.
Historically, facilities managers would set static benchmarks for how many people would show up to high-traffic spaces (like cafes).
That approach delivers incomplete data, which results in food waste, overstaffing, and inefficient scheduling.
It also leads to a terrible employee experience.
A tech company that uses Density breaks up occupancy of their cafe by timeframe. This data alone can help our customer plan their food-service and cleaning needs accordingly.
However, Density also runs predictive algorithms against this historical data to tell our customer what the cafe traffic will be like the following week (see the lefthand graphic in the image below).
Maximizing workplace utilization
One of our clients was asked how to accommodate a 2x growth in engineering headcount at the company’s headquarters. With Density, our client was able to see exactly how many people entered each floor for any given timeframe. Our data revealed that the 1st Floor was visited more than the 2nd Floor. The one day with no visits?
Thanksgiving.
Our client was able to prove that the 1st floor had four times more traffic than the 2nd floor. This insight made it clear that the 2nd floor had the capacity to accommodate the growing number of engineers for their upcoming hiring spree.
By effectively identifying the best and worst-performing spaces, you can effectively determine how to better utilize under-performing areas. Conference rooms, for example, can go completely unused on a given day or at a given time. That’s valuable space that can be capitalized on for additional functions, or repurposed into a different kind of space.
Workplace utilization sensors are modernizing the archaic way of calculating office space utilization
When you think about workplace utilization, what comes to mind is usually people walking around with clipboards measuring how each space is used (or not). A slight improvement from that is analyzing patterns in badge swipe data.
Neither of these methods suffice.
Density’s occupancy sensors give facilities managers the flexibility to see how their space is used granularly (say, an individual room) and holistically (their entire real estate portfolio).
By measuring the actual utilization of space vs booked workspaces you gain a true view of usage.
The key benefits of utilization sensors
Density’s sensor technology comes with numerous core benefits that cannot be achieved through traditional spatial analytics. Your view of space capacity is in real-time, allowing you to see how workspaces are utilized at any given time. This data creates the opportunity for fast decisions on the repurposing of underutilized spaces, allowing you to create adaptable workspaces based on your current work patterns.
Your HR, Corporate Real Estate, Finance, IT, and Facility Management departments can all problem-solve swiftly through evidence-based decisions.
Workplace utilization sensors deliver real-time, historical, and predictive data — that’s consumable and actionable — to help drive science-backed space management decisions. They provide a complete view of your space utilization, allowing you to make informed decisions when it comes to your real estate portfolio.
Space challenges become opportunities when you have real-time data from sensors, revealing actionable insights that can be transformed into tangible, data-driven outcomes.
Social distancing will reshape the look and feel of your workplace.
Six-foot bubbles and signage are just some of the significant and likely changes coming your way.
But so much of what you’ll do to remain COVID-compliant relies on who returns to the office, when, and how they interact with your space. Most companies will implement a phased approach to their return to work — meaning not everyone will come to the office at once.
There are three obvious benefits to a phased approach:
It makes social distancing easier to maintain. Fewer people means more space to work with.
Some employees may not want to come back to the office yet. This gives those employees the option to work from home a while longer.
Resources like cleaning crews aren’t overwhelmed by a sudden influx of employees.
A fourth advantage that’s less obvious but equally important is seeing how a few of your employees use your space following the pandemic.
Your employees’ relationship with your workspace will likely not be the same as before the pandemic. They’ll come back to the office with months (if not at least a year) of isolation, hand sanitizer, and face coverings weighing them down.
Behavioral patterns will be different. Employees may prefer to eat at their desks rather than the break room, for example.
Your employees’ relationship with your workspace will likely not be the same as before the pandemic.
You won’t know what these changes look like until you bring employees back to the office. By bringing in a smaller number of employees at the start, you can monitor these behavioral patterns without worrying about violating social distancing guidelines.
You can then use your findings to make larger-scale changes to keep your workspace safe — allowing you to confidently invite more employees to return to work.
What this phased approach looks like
Before a COVID-19 vaccine becomes widely available, setting an occupancy limit to 25 or 30% of your total office space will be standard — to allow social distancing.
Setting even smaller (albeit temporary) occupancy limits will give you time to safely analyze and adjust. In the first phase, aim for 10% capacity. Increase to 20% for the next phase, then 30%.
By then, there might be widespread immunization, allowing you to return to full capacity. But until widespread immunization, your phased approach will help you shape a personalized and scalable social distancing strategy based on how your employees actually use your space.
Dealing with unexpected bottlenecks
Bringing in fewer employees at a time makes it easy to space out workstations. But employees don’t remain seated at a desk all day.
They come in through the front door. They walk to the bathroom, break room, and conference rooms. Is your workplace set up to maintain physical distance during these fluid moments?
Monitoring the walking behaviors of your early returners can identify potential bottlenecks throughout your space. Spaghetti diagrams are one way to measure these bottlenecks — though they require someone to physically trace the movements of employees. Occupancy sensors are a more efficient way to identify bottlenecks in real-time.
There are several ways to address bottlenecks, depending on where they occur.
If the bottleneck occurs at your entryway, consider staggered shifts. If the issue is by your break room, cafeteria or other common areas, prominent signs displaying a space’s current occupancy could help (see the image at the top of this post).
If the issue is in a hallway, you may want to tape that section off and redirect traffic elsewhere.
Social distancing signage
Social distancing signage helps you direct foot traffic patterns safely and efficiently. Arrows and do not enter signs let people know where they can and can’t go. Tape on the floor placed 6 feet apart makes it easier for employees to keep a safe distance — even while in transit.
At first, you’ll rely on common sense and assumptions to determine the most effective approach to your signage.
But monitoring your early returners’ walking patterns will help you identify areas that may need clearer signage, or that should be closed off.
Your employees’ behavior patterns aren’t the only ones you should monitor during these early stages of your return to work. How do contractors and on-site visitors interact with your space? Monitor their behavior to determine if you should include clear signage directed to their use cases.
Maintaining occupancy limits
Before the pandemic, you might have looked for ways to maximize office space (an open-floor plan comes to mind). But with social distancing, you need to give employees more space.
For managers of a 1-room office, this may not be so hard. But what if you manage an office with several rooms or floors? What if you manage an entire campus?
Assigning workstations and rooms can help limit room occupancy, but it doesn’t guarantee it. Plus, what about those unexpected visitors like vendors and clients? Only Density can provide reliable, real-time data on how people interact with your space.
While you likely won’t exceed safe occupancy limits with your early returners, you can identify and address troubling patterns early on.
Assigning workstations and rooms can help limit room occupancy, but it doesn’t guarantee it.
For example, do you see more people congregate on the second floor than on the first floor? Consider reassigning teams or cohorts to the first floor to balance out your people density, then continue to monitor each floor to ensure you remain compliant.
Vacant and underutilized spaces
Your early returners will help you identify areas of your workplace that remain empty or underutilized.
You may have kept that third-floor break room open. But what if no one uses it? Do you close it off or is doing so a waste of perfectly good space?
One option is to repurpose it as a quiet room, then let employees book the space for calls or deep work.
You can also use it as a safe space for any employees who appear to have symptoms of COVID-19 — or who become sick during the day — and can’t go home immediately.
Remote and flexible work
A phased-in approach will show you if your workspace is ready to handle a full return-to-work. You may discover more significant changes are needed (such as adding more office space so teams can work together safely). While you consider your options, extend your remote work policy and encourage flexible work hours. This is the easiest way to maintain ideal occupancy limits. Many of your employees will welcome the opportunity to work from home.
Adapt based on real behavior, not generic guidelines
You are responsible for providing a safe and healthy workplace. Part of that responsibility includes ensuring social distancing throughout the workday.
That means taking into account how your employees interact with your space. While at first, you may need to rely on logical assumptions, monitoring your employees’ behavioral patterns will help you shape a more personalized social distancing strategy that keeps your entire workforce healthy.
Collaboration hinges on trust — many virtual teams have never met face-to-face.
Teams collaborate easier when in the same space — many remote teams are distributed across widely different time zones.
But remote work isn’t going anywhere. Working with teammates you’ve never met is the new normal.
To help your remote team collaborate effectively, you need to know what they’re doing right and wrong.
That’s where things get tricky. What exactly do you measure — and how?
Don’t measure output
Many assume the better the quality of output, the more successful a team collaborates.
That’s not necessarily true.
When you focus on the end result, you risk failing to track project progress in real-time. You don’t know for sure how individuals on your team collaborated. Did a core group of three coworkers take charge while others sat passively by? Or did every team member contribute?
Measuring success by output also doesn’t show you where bottlenecks and delays occurred. You can’t fix what you don’t know about.
Instead, measure milestones
Don’t wait until the end of a project to learn how things went. Milestones let you measure group and individual progress at important stages of the project.
Every time a milestone is reached, have your employees write a postmortem that summarized the work done — and how they contributed. These postmortems will help you see bottlenecks and issues from different perspectives. They’ll also reveal how comfortable your employees feel with their colleagues. You can then take steps to address any issues before the project is complete.
You can’t observe team dynamics remotely
A team is only as effective as its individuals. Evaluating individual performances contributes to the greater good of the team.
But remote teams work in isolation. It’s not easy to observe your employees online — unless you take extreme measures.
Surveillance like that is invasive. It doesn’t motivate employees — it lowers morale and erodes trust, making it even harder to get your team to collaborate enthusiastically.
Use peer reviews
To find out how teammates work together, go straight to the source with peer reviews. Peer reviews offer an unabashed, collective perspective of each employee’s strengths and weaknesses.
Share this feedback with your employees to help them see areas where they can improve.
Peer reviews work best when:
Reviewers are guaranteed anonymity. This can relieve concerns of retaliation and hostility.
Merit increases are not tied to peer reviews. If employees feel their raises depend on peer reviews, they may spend more time cultivating relationships rather than focused on their projects.
There are clear expectations. Reviewers should know that you’re looking for fair and unbiased input. If necessary, provide reviewers with prompts.
Measuring time spent in collaborative tools is misleading
Just because a team spends a lot of time on Slack, Asana, or other tools doesn’t mean they’re collaborating well.
In fact, the inverse may be true. The more time spent with a tool, the less effective the collaboration may be. Measuring deep work is better.
Deep work seems counterintuitive to collaboration since, by definition, deep work is the ability to work in a state of deep concentration and focus for a long period of time, without distraction or interruption.
But deep work is the output of effective collaboration. Ineffective collaboration requires constancy because you can’t get it right the first time. Effective collaboration tends to happen in short bursts, followed by longer periods of writing, designing, coding, and thinking.
When employees are in deep work, productive collaboration likely preceded it.
How do you measure deep work?
Try daily scrums on Slack
At the start of each workday, employees post a Slack update sharing what they’re working on that day. Our marketing team posts updates in our dedicated channel. We couple a work update with an emotion update to stay connected as humans (not just worker bees) despite being distributed.
Using Slack is a remote-friendly way to hold daily scrums. Employees don’t have to adjust their schedules to attend a meeting. They share a post when they’re ready. Updates are documented for easy review.
Review these updates to ensure each teammate schedules time in their day for deep work. Work updates shouldn’t always revolve around meetings — that’s a sign of ineffective collaboration.
Help your remote team collaborate better
Measuring your team’s collaborative efforts gives you valuable context to help you make business-critical changes, like:
Evaluating your tool stack
Reorganizing teams based on personality dynamics
Optimizing your management structure
Investing in training to improve asynchronous communication
Once you know what to measure and how to measure it, you can help your team increase the value of the time they spend together.
The mass return-to-work movement hinges on the distribution of a successful COVID vaccine. This article (which we update regularly) outlines the latest developments surrounding all potential vaccines, to help you determine when to execute your return-to-work strategy.
The latest (updated on Monday, Dec. 21, 2020):
Two coronavirus vaccines are either being distributed, or well on their way, across the country, after the FDA authorized vaccines from both Moderna and Pfizer.
Early vaccines will go to front-line workers and high-risk people.
The consensus remains that the approved vaccines won’t reach widespread distribution until at least midway through 2021.
Mid-year 2021 is not all that far away — particularly considering what it takes to return millions of people back to the office. In the short tine you have before this return to work, do you know how you’ll keep your spaces safe?
Here are a roundup of useful articles to help you plan your return to work strategy:
Hot desking safety in the post-pandemic workplace.Hot desking helps maximize space, satisfy employees, and maintain specific occupancy limits. The biggest challenge you might face is convincing employees that hot desking is safe in the post-pandemic world.
We continue to work with our partners and customers to determine the most effective and safe ways for company leaders to prepare their workspaces and employees for a return to work. We will update this list of resources regularly as we publish new relevant content.
In March, Congress allotted $2.2 trillion of emergency aid funding via the CARES Act in order to help Americans directly affected by the pandemic. $14 billion of the fund has been allocated to higher education institutions and deemed the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund. This money is designed to help schools reopen campuses with improved safety measures and comprehensive student support to keep their communities safe and healthy.
Now that the money has been provided, the question is how should schools spend it? This challenge is two fold. First, schools have to figure out which safety measures are most effective, both financially and in terms of campus wellness. Second, the money disappears if they don’t spend it by December 31st.
So far, many schools have invested a portion of that money on stickers and signage that remind students to wash their hands, wear masks, and stay 6ft away from each other. However, these temporary placards are only so effective and will become obsolete once the pandemic subsides.
Fortunately, we’ve done some research and figured out that universities can apply that money toward Density’s people counting platform. Safe by Density is a highly accurate and effective solution that universities across the country are using to maintain safe capacity limits in common areas like dining halls, libraries, lounges, and gyms.
Safe Displays, Alerts, and Analytics enable facilities teams to monitor occupancy levels in real-time and empower students to self-regulate foot traffic all around campus. Unlike temporary signage, Density’s people counting platform also provides real-time data to help facilities teams clean spaces based on actual usage. Campus cleaning crews can identify highly trafficked areas and target them for additional cleaning protocols while avoiding spaces that have not been visited.
Schools like University of Notre Dame, NYU, and University of Florida are already using this technology to monitor the occupancy and activity in gymnasiums, restrooms, libraries, and cafeterias. Plus, as schools reopen and the pandemic eventually subsides, schools can use Density to help plan new spaces, improve campus experience, and save money by identifying areas of unused real estate.
To learn more about Density’s people counting platform and how to apply the CARES Act funding to our solution, we’d be happy to set up a demo with one of our product specialists. Please reach out to us via sales@density.io
The COVID-19 pandemic forced workplaces to shift gears and embrace a remote work environment quickly.
Some teams took to it naturally. They’ve long had a remote mindset as part of their company culture. Other teams fumbled their way, crossing off items on a checklist they believed made them remote-friendly. They downloaded Zoom for video conference calls; they established flexible work arrangements; they cleaned up their Slack workspace to focus more on work, less on gifs.
What many teams failed to consider, however, is how their new remote workforce impacts their security.
Your increased risk of cyberattacks
Before the pandemic, the FBI received 1,000 cybersecurity complaints every day.
That rose to 3-4,000 complaints since the pandemic.
That spike is, in large part, due to an overall increase in online activity. Bad actors know more people and organizations are online, which means more opportunities. But hackers also know many businesses created their remote work environments in haste — making them easy targets.
Here’s one example: government shutdowns forced call centers to close down. But customer service reps can (and do) work remotely. Unfortunately, their home networks aren’t as secure as a call center’s, making it easier for hackers to record sensitive customer information shared on calls.
It also doesn’t help that we’re all a bit distracted. Lockdowns, isolation, and the comforts of home have lowered our guard. We’re more likely to open an email from an unknown sender — from our kitchen table — than we would be in an office.
That’s why you need to step up your company’s security measures. You can’t assume your team members know how to be vigilant. Nor can you assume your business isn’t a potential target.
Every business — and individual — is a target.
Are you prepared? Are your employees?
You can answer both these questions through cyber drills.
What are cyber drills?
Cyber drills are real-time simulations that show you how employees and leaders respond in an emergency. They reveal chinks in your security armor and help you see what type of training your team needs. Some cyber drills are announced (meaning you warn the participants). Some are not.
Why cyber drills?
Many companies have existing security protocols in place. For example, they may require remote workers using public Wi-Fi to connect through a personal hotspot or VPN.
Personal hotspots keep employees off shared networks, while VPNs:
Hide the user’s IP address
Encrypt data transfers in transit
Mask the user’s location
Companies might also use a password manager such as LastPass or 1Password, both of which:
Create secure passcodes for your logins
Warn you of any duplicated passcodes
Notify you of security breaches to any platforms you log into
Allow you to share and restrict access to your 3rd-party services
These safety protocols give you a decent layer of protection. So, too, do encrypted websites (think of the padlock and “HTTPS” you see in a web address).
But they can’t protect your company against human-made vulnerabilities. Cyber drills can.
How to run cyber drills
When introducing your team to a new cyber threat, we suggest the following format:
Start with an unannounced cyber drill
Then, hold at least once announced cyber drill
Follow that with another unannounced cyber drill
Here’s why this approach works.
Assess prior knowledge — and respond accordingly
You don’t know what your employees know and don’t know about cybersecurity. Not until you see them in action against a threat.
Only then can you tailor your cyber plan based on your team’s unique needs.
This is called assessing prior knowledge in education. An unannounced cyber drill lets you evaluate your team’s prior knowledge to know what next steps to take.
For example, you could send out a fake phishing email to your entire team without warning. Pretend it’s from your CEO asking for the recipient’s phone number.
See who opens it, who reports it, and who ignores it altogether (the ideal response is to report it). The result of this exercise will help you determine what to include in your cyber response playbook.
Create (or update) your cyber response playbook
Your playbook should outline who is responsible for what in the event of a security breach. This includes human resources, IT, public relations, customer service reps, and so on. Organize your playbook by cyber threats (one section or chapter for each cyberthreat). This makes it easier to reference in the event of an attack.
When possible, reference the cyber drills you held in your playbook. This helps your employees create connections between old and new knowledge, making it easier for them to remember new processes.
For example, in your section on phishing emails, reference the exercise we detailed earlier.
Store your playbook alongside other critical information, like in your internal wiki. Require every new hire to read it as part of his or her onboarding.
Practice your new playbook
A playbook you don’t practice is useless. That’s like having a fire escape plan you read for the first time when your building is on fire.
Help your team prepare for an attack with periodic announced cyber drills. Using our school analogy again, announced cyber drills are like end-of-unit tests. Students know they’re coming, so they study and prepare.
These drills reinforce learnings through real-life action. They also help you assess the clarity and effectiveness of your playbooks.
Put your team to the test
With at least one dry run under their belts, your employees are ready to test their knowledge in real life.
Conduct another unannounced cyber drill. This time, focus on two things:
How close to your playbook script do your employees stick to?
At the end of the drill, is your company’s security intact?
If your employees stray from the playbook, you may need more announced cyber drills. If your company remains vulnerable, identify what went wrong and update your playbook accordingly.
When cyber drills aren’t enough
Phishing attacks are just one of the countless cybersecurity threats your business and employees are vulnerable to. Others include IoT and ransomware attacks as well as Asynchronous Procedure Calls (APCs) in system kernels. Many of these attacks can be thwarted by updating all operating systems connected to a network. While you can get creative with cyber drills to see how many employees update their systems, a more direct approach is to:
Require remote employees to activate automatic updates on their devices, and
Send announcements when devices and software your team uses release critical updates. Create an IT Slack channel where you post these announcements
Create a secure remote work environment that outlives the pandemic
The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will linger long after some semblance of normalcy is regained.
Face masks will take on new meaning. Handshakes will be met with an awkward pause. And many of today’s remote workers will demand flexibility in where, when, and how they work.
That makes it harder for you to ensure your employees follow security best practices. Cyber drills help you assess your current vulnerabilities so you can create tailored, more effective playbooks that empower your remote team to protect your company’s most sensitive data.
It’s expensive to find and hire new employees. Losing a new hire weeks or months after they join your team is even more costly.
To increase retention, human resource departments invest incredible time and resources into their onboarding strategies.
But these strategies require a fresh perspective as remote hiring becomes the new norm.
Consider what remote employees don’t experience when they start a new job:
They don’t walk into a room where new colleagues clap and celebrate their arrival
They’re not introduced to their new workspace
A coworker doesn’t show them how to make coffee in the break room
No one hands them a stack of takeout menus from the closest lunch spots
These are not trivial experiences. During the first few weeks of onboarding, these casual encounters help employees understand what to expect in their new role.
Sure, remote orientation programs exist. Employees can meet with colleagues over Zoom. Shared Google Drive files can guide new hires through processes, workflows, and even the company handbook.
But job satisfaction and company loyalty require more than an introduction to the how-tos of a job. They require a deeper connection to a company’s organizational culture.
How do you virtually transfer your team’s values and belief system to new hires?
It starts with understanding the theory of organizational socialization.
What is organizational socialization?
Organizational socialization is the experiences new employees have when joining a new organization, job role, or cohort. Think of it as learning the ropes, where new teammates discover what matters most at your company.
Through conversations, shared experiences, and activities, new members connect with the core of your company’s value system and norms — beyond the words pasted on a wall or website. Supervisors and coworkers play an integral role in shaping a new employee’s socialization at work.
The outcome of a successful organizational socialization experience is higher retention rates and a better chance that your company culture perseveres — even as you scale.
Here’s the challenge you face: Serendipitous interactions and experiences with coworkers come naturally in an office setting. Not so much with a remote workforce, where employees connect with colleagues through the confines of a computer.
Remote workers can’t absorb the ambiance of an office environment. They can’t stop by a coworker’s desk to chat. It’s up to company leaders and their HR departments to create an employee orientation strategy that does its best to replicate the real-world experience.
Why organizational socialization matters
Why is a well-thought-out socialization process so important to your onboarding? Research in organizational behavior reveals three theories for why a positive social onboarding experience matters:
Social exchange theory. If the costs of a relationship are higher than the rewards, then the relationship may be abandoned. This is particularly true in new relationships — like with your new hire.
The need to belong theory. People want strong interpersonal relationships — that includes in the workplace. 30-minute 1:1 meetings with new colleagues over Zoom isn’t enough.
Uncertainty reduction theory. People need to decrease their unfamiliarity with others to predict their behaviors — a critical part of relationship development.
Your existing onboarding process may do well to initiate locally based new hires. But how effective is it for your ever-growing remote workforce?
It’s probably time to revisit your orientation program to ensure your remote hires get the experiences they need to thrive.
Organizational socialization tactics for your remote hires
There are three stages of organizational socialization:
Pre-arrival stage
Encounter stage
Metamorphosis
The last stage, metamorphosis, is straightforward: When a new employee begins to identify themselves with their new organization. Rather than just consuming experiences, they contribute to the company’s goals and objectives.
They embrace and exude your organizational culture.
The success of this stage depends on how effective you are with the first two stages. That’s where we’ll focus our energy, below.
Successful onboarding occurs well before an offer is accepted.
New hires learn about your company before they ever join your team through channels like your website, social media, and review sites like Glassdoor.
Hiring remotely doesn’t change that experience. However, local candidates usually visit your office during the interview process. They get to see how the sausage is made. Remote candidates don’t get that experience. All they know is the digital impression you offer.
Prospects should have a clear understanding of what life will be like working for you — particularly in the role they’re applying for.
Make an effort to share the “office experience” on social media and your website. What do your all-hands meetings look like? Publish an article on your blog about your meetings. How do your teams collaborate? What tools do you use? Help prospects answer these questions.
Buffer has made transparency a cornerstone of its brand identity. The result? Candidates know exactly what they’re getting into before they ever apply for a role.
Also, encourage current employees to add reviews on Glassdoor and other sites. The more specific they are about the culture, the more effective the review.
Encounter stage
A candidate accepts your job offer. They’re now in the encounter stage, where their expectations meet the reality of the job.
This is where you can incorporate the theories we presented earlier.
Social exchange theory.
When a new hire comes on board, the demand for their time is high. They typically have a checklist of tasks to complete for their first 7, 14, and 30 days. At the same time, HR fills their work calendars with 1:1 meet and greets.
This experience works well for employees who report to an office on a set schedule. It’s less effective for remote workers. Remote employees expect a certain level of flexibility in their workday, in large part because they have to balance work and life obligations.
The more control they feel they have over their schedules those first few weeks, the more balanced a relationship they’ll feel they have with their new company.
The need to belong.
Remote employees can’t go out to dinner and drinks with colleagues after their first day at work. But these types of casual encounters are critical for helping new teammates feel welcomed in your tribe.
Remote teams compensate with 1:1 video calls and a company-wide introduction on Slack. These are a nice touch — but they aren’t enough.
A more effective approach is to arrange a group meeting with your new employee and the team she’s on. This meeting — which could be 2-4 hours long, should be a mix of work and non-work-related activities. For example:
The first portion of the meeting can be an icebreaker. Hubspot has a great list. This is to help set the tone for the rest of the meeting.
The second portion is a problem-solving team-building activity. Think virtual escape room. International Monster Hunter is a good example.
With the activity complete, you can focus on work. Each existing team member can talk about their role in the company.
Then, the team can discuss any current and upcoming projects.
Finally, the new team member can ask any questions she might have, personal or professional.
This group meeting helps your new employee see her new team’s dynamics — something she can’t do with 1:1 meetings.
Don’t get us wrong. 1:1 meetings do have their place — they help new team members reduce the uncertainty of their new surroundings if done correctly.
Uncertainty reduction theory.
We can tell a lot about a person from social cues and body language. Remote employees don’t have the luxury of either — not even with video calls.
To overcome this, give those 1:1 onboarding calls a focus.
Have everyone on your team create a user guide — a how-I-work document. Have your existing employees share their user guide with your new employee before their 1:1 meetings. The user guide is a great way for your new employee to learn more about her teammates and is a great starting point for a 1:1 conversation about work and life.
Refresh for remote workers — refresh often
The most successful companies retool their organizational socialization processes regularly. At the end of their onboarding process, have new employees share their experiences. Did their expectations before joining the team align with reality? Did they get to know their teammates before jumping into work? Do they feel like an integral part of the team?
By reviewing and refining your socialization process, more employees will likely remain loyal and committed to your company — and its culture.
COVID-19 forced companies to become remote — even if they didn’t want to.
But the pandemic merely sped up the inevitability of remote work. Technology made the traditional office a perk rather than a requirement. Cities like San Francisco and Seattle — hubs for some of the most successful companies on the planet — are too expensive for the average person to live in.
It’s no surprise, then, there’s a migration to rural areas, and that remote work has grown exponentially in recent years.
You may not have a choice in becoming remote, but you can choose what your remote work environment looks like.
For some teams, that comes down to choosing between being a remote-friendly company or a remote-first company. In other words, figure out how to make remote work with your existing processes, or become fully remote — forever.
This is a false dilemma. Just because you’re a remote team today doesn’t mean you have to be forever. In other words, your best option is likely both.
Remote first vs. remote-friendly
Remote-friendly companies view remote work as a benefit, not a given. They might have a remote work policy that states that employees can work remotely two days per week. Or, most of their employees report to a physical office, while a handful of distributed team members work from home.
A lot of companies were like this before the pandemic. They were remote-friendly so that they could attract top-tier talent and keep their employees happy.
For remote-first companies, remote work is the default way employees work. Every decision made across the organization is made from the perspective of a remote team.
GitLab is the gold standard. Their public handbook is 3,000 pages worth of priceless knowledge on remote-first.
Why would you want to be a remote-first company?
A remote-first company approaches remote working differently than other companies:
They value flexible working hours over set working hours
They default to written, asynchronous communication — which makes it easier to work across different time zones
They choose formal communication channels (documentation and emails) over informal communication channels (chat apps like Slack)
Remote-friendly companies can approach work in the same manner — they just often don’t. For example, let’s assume your company is currently remote. Is there any expectation that your remote employees be at their home office (or on Slack) at a certain time?
If so, you’re not remote-first. You’ve replicated the office experience virtually.
There are a couple of issues with that. First, your team isn’t prioritizing asynchronous communication. Asynchronous communication allows employees to structure their day as they see fit. It gives them room to dive deep into work without interruptions and distractions.
Lack of office distractions is one of the biggest benefits of remote work.
“Going fully remote was nice, but the real benefit was in going fully asynchronous.” — Sahil Lavingia, CEO — Gumroad
Second, you’re likely not prioritizing written communication. You value the immediacy of real-time conversations versus the structured thinking of documentation. This may not be as big an issue when your entire team works within the same physical location. But when you are partially (or fully) remote, lack of documentation results in lost knowledge.
The issue comes down to company culture. Remote-friendly companies try to fit remote work within their culture. They may use Google Docs on occasion to collaborate asynchronously — but they still default to real-time meetings.
Remote-first companies, however, bake remote work into their culture. Google Docs may be the primary way they communicate. Synchronous communication is the last resort.
GitLab, for example, has this simple rule for meetings:
Generally, if two people go back-and-forth more than three times on the exact same topic — it makes sense to temporarily pivot to synchronous or leverage a richer communication medium such as Yac, Soundbite, or Loom.
Why going fully remote may not be right for your company
Not every company wants to be fully remote. In 2017, remote-work pioneer IBM recalled thousands of employees back to a traditional office. Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer controversially banned remote work in 2013.
There are clear benefits to synchronous, face-to-face collaboration. The serendipity of office mingling around the water cooler can lead to a creative spark.
“Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.” — Steve Jobs
Plus, remote work burnout (and Zoom fatigue) are real — and potentially destructive.
Still, there’s the reality we’re in. Remote work kept businesses afloat during the pandemic. Employees are beginning to demand at least some flexibility in where and when they work.
What can you do to keep up? If you’re not ready — or are unwilling — to go “all-in” with remote work, what you can do is create a remote-first culture that you can adapt no matter what the future holds.
Creating a remote-first culture — so you become remote friendlier
Create your remote-first culture around the following areas:
Communication
Meetings
Hiring
Happiness
Tools
Communication
Slack has made it ridiculously easy to tap your coworker on the shoulder virtually. But those little pings aren’t so harmless.
It takes 25 minutes for most employees to return to their original task after being interrupted, according to a University of California, Irvine study. Now think about how many Slack messages you send out daily.
That can become an incredible time-suck. But it’s not Slack’s fault. Slack can — and should — be used as an asynchronous tool. Teams have chosen to use it as a replacement for real-life office pop-ins.
Build your communication around asynchronous channels. Choose narrative memos over meetings. Send an email rather than a Zoom link.
Asynchronous communication gives your employees space. It forces your team to think through their thoughts in writing before sharing them with colleagues. Plus, it creates a record of shared knowledge that your team can access in the future.
Making async comms be your default can be as easy as setting up response expectations for your communication channels. For example, employees should respond to Slack messages within 24 hours, emails within two business days, and so on.
Meetings
The solution to a problem isn’t always to introduce new tech. As beneficial as video calls are to keep your team connected, remote-first teams strive to keep team meetings to a minimum. GitLab subscribes to the mantra that meetings are not for presentations; they’re for discussions.
In other words, meetings should only occur after stakeholders are presented with information asynchronously, and only if necessary.
Do your remote team a favor — ban the practice of adding meetings to a colleague’s calendar. Calendar invites shouldn’t come as a surprise — they should come with a friendly heads up. Employees shouldn’t have to block off time for deep work — that’s what you pay them for.
Another consideration is where you hold meetings (when you have them).
Hybrid meetings are the mainstays of remote-friendly teams. This is when local team members meet in the same room, while remote team members join via video conferencing.
This can lead to remote workers feeling left out. Side conversations are inevitable. Bad tech causes lag and missed information. One option is to keep everyone on the same playing field by holding all meetings remotely.
“Either have everyone in an office or have everyone fully remote. The reason for this is so that you don’t create an environment where remote employees aren’t a part of the conversation.” — Buffer
There is an alternative, particularly as you look to return to work safely — meeting studios. When Dropbox reopens post-pandemic, for example, its offices will no longer house individual desks. Instead, all 13 of Dropbox’s global properties will be converted into studios. Employees will regularly work from home and use the studios when they need to collaborate in real life.
“Folks doing individual daily work, that happens from home or from co-working spaces,” said Melanie Collins, vice president of people for Dropbox. “[Meeting studios] are really explicitly for things like strategy setting, team building, community events, leadership development training.”
Hiring
Not everyone is cut out for remote work. Your best employees before the pandemic may struggle now to stay focused or be productive. Home distractions, isolation, and other external factors could impact their mindset or workflow.
Moving forward, make remote work become a part of your hiring process. Pay close attention to candidates’ virtual communication. Do they convey their thoughts clearly? Are they mindful of how their messages may be interpreted?
Include a virtual collaboration exercise for your highly-qualified candidates. Do they seem adept at working asynchronously? Are they organized, even-tempered, and effective?
Creating a remote-focused hiring process expands your talent pool, of course. But it also future-proofs your team.
“Hire carefully! Some people may be excellent candidates for an open position, but not necessarily the best candidates for a remote work environment.” — Edgar
Happiness
Working from home can be hard. There is no commute to separate your workday from your home life. Plus, it’s easy to check in on Slack or emails throughout the evening, night, and weekend.
You and your leadership team need to do more than encourage healthy work habits. You need to clearly outline your employees’ expectations. Some of this will be covered by switching to asynchronous communication and fewer meetings. Still, you should create policies that set a clear line for your team.
GitLab, for example, has employees remove Slack from their phones. If an employee is not on their laptop, then that message can wait.
Tools
The final piece of a remote-first company is its toolset.
The tools you use will empower your team to be productive and happy — no matter where they work. We could dedicate an article just to the different tools to use, but each team is different. Suffice to say, your remote team needs productivity tools (G Suite), chat tools (Slack), documentation tools (Slab, Notion), and video conferencing tools (Zoom, Google Meet).
It’s up to you which apps to use. But what’s most important is that you:
Minimize the number of tools your team uses
Default to open vs. permission by request
This ensures that knowledge isn’t lost. It’s incredibly frustrating (but not at all uncommon) for an employee to spend hours looking for critical knowledge across dozens of tools. In 2012, McKinsey reported that employees spend nearly 2 hours every day searching for and gathering knowledge.
As Thoreau once said, “Simplify, simplify.”
“We continue to invest in better tools and unique ways to engage our very committed team of home-based employees.” — American Express
Your remote team needs more than digital tools to get the job done. They need a workspace conducive to work. This includes a strong internet connection, headphones for conference calls, and a space to call their own. Some employees have this at home by default. Others don’t.
Support all your remote employees by offering to pay for equipment or, if preferred, a co-working space.
Remote is here to stay. Build the right mindset and culture
Adding Donut to Slack is a nice touch for keeping camaraderie alive in your virtual office.
But it doesn’t make you a remote pioneer.
Tech and tools can only take you so far. To truly become a culture that supports — and benefits from — a remote work environment, you must:
Embrace asynchronous communication
Commit to fewer meetings
Consider how new-hires will fare in a remote environment
Encourage healthy work habits
Give your team the tools they need to thrive
Going back to a hybrid team when you can? Base all your future decision making on this, and you’ll do just fine: your remote employees deserve the same access to knowledge and opportunities that their office-bound colleagues have.
Otherwise, you risk limiting the true potential of your remote workforce. And, if current trends remain, your remote employees will soon be your majority — long after the pandemic is gone.
