Remote not distant

For this article, our D&I Consultant, Laila El-Metoui, interviewed a range of LGBT+ professionals working remotely and looks at the new challenges it presents as well as advantages and support put in place by senior leaders.

What Professionals Said

‘It presents the opportunity to use technology we have never used to communicate with each other’ said an LGBT counsellor supporting vulnerable young LGBT people. 'The way we interact with clients has changed as a result of the lockdown and it’s interesting to observe how 1-to-1 counselling sessions are changing as a result of clients interacting virtually, some of them feel more comfortable talking about issues, they have few inhibitions.

The change over to virtual support required for my organisation to send them a laptop as they had been sharing theirs with their children as well organising to have a work telephone. Some of their services however had to be put on hold.

They keep in touch through Microsoft teams, Zoom and outlook. The weekly team is done remotely and the number of emails has also increased.

Our organisation has also reviewed its safeguarding policies and procedure and has had to stop some of its services.'

Vivian Chan and her wife run Studio Verve, a small architectural firm based in London. She said: ‘ We have weekly Monday Zoom meetings in order to check in on overall workload and progress of everyone... we used to do this fortnightly pre-Corona, but have increased to weekly in order to manage everyone remotely!’ We also ask everyone to populate their online calendar (even to 30min slots) so we know what they are working on day to day’. She expressed some concerns about the future of her own business is the lockdown was to be extended beyond the end of April.

The Findings

Challenges cited by professionals working from home include:

• not being able to have those 'watercooler moments' where you can interact casually with people and resolve mattees like 'Can I ask a quick question?'

• having colleagues in the team who are not very IT-competent and are reluctant to try and learn new things such as apps like Teams.

• increased screen time and the impact on people's health and eyesight.

Advantages cited by people include:

• not commuting meant more time to do additional activities such as spend more time with loved ones, decluttering, or time for doing creative activities.

• reducing the amount of printing they would normally need in the office and therefore reduce the use of paper.

• Costs savings (commuting, eating out, etc.)

• not having to face difficult colleagues.

• already having the technology in place to work remotely.

• reconnecting with their homes and gardens.

• appreciating peace and quiet, without office politics or gossip.

• using screen share to collaborate on tasks at hand.

How did they do it?

Platforms cited amongst people interviewed included email, WhatsApp, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom and even Houseparty!

In terms of best practice, policies identified were:

• weekly wellbeing meetings / check-ins to support staff, encouraging exercise, and to switch off and to not work out of hours.

• weekly FaceTime for a catch up and a team WhatsApp group to support collaboration.

• increasing the speed of response linked to technical issues.

• a daily email update from senior leadership to keep staff informed but also praise people for their work.

• creation of agreed online work practices - a lot what's happening is invisible, thus finding ways to make progress/ status transparent is key.

• consistent messages from leadership and management to their teams.

• virtual ‘water cooler moment’ to continue the social aspect of work and build teams together.

• reassuring staff about job security and wage security.

For task management, the following apps were suggested: WorkFront and JIRA - all of them allow for creating a big to-do list for the team, and you can assign each task to a team member. You can then create something like a table with headings To-Do, In Progress, Done (or whatever you decide), and the teams can track their items from one column to the next as they progress. WorkFront and JIRA are deemed to be big beasts however, requiring some effort to set up and to learn, so this should be considered by teams wishing to use them.

For more information, you can access guidelines produced by UCL on the link below

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/human-resources/remote-not-distant-ucl