[MUSIC] Now let's look in detail at each of the Phases of Remote Adaptation. As we do think about what your remote transition might look like. Again, it's common to go through more than one of these phases, though you might not go through all of them. For more information, please help yourself to the linked resources. Skeuomorph is a term that roughly means imitating the features of something else. In this phase organizations may be operating remotely, but they are imitating many or most of the characteristics of in office work. The best example we have of this is the sudden shift to remote work that many organizations experienced during the global shutdowns of the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Companies did not have time or resources to develop remote strategies. Their immediate goal was to continue operating as well as possible just remotely. In this phase most people will try to recreate common scenarios as carbon copies, just in a different environment. So a typical hallway conversation will become a one-on-one direct message or a pre-planned meeting at the office will be replaced by a video call with the same participants and pre-existing meeting hygiene. There's also a high amount of employee monitoring since managers tend to be concerned that they're not able to check what team members are doing during their remote work hours. Because this transition often happens in response to a major change or upheaval, team members may not have the equipment and the tools they need to perform their job as well as they did in the office space. The challenges of this way of working should be easy to understand. Remote work and in office work aren't the same, and they can't be done the same way. Teams in this phase will quickly run into inefficient workflows, unequal access and difficulty remaining productive as well as high friction as expectations encounter the remote reality. Working in this way is not recommended, even temporarily. If you have recent experience with this, as many of us do, please Share your story in the discussion forum. If we think about benefits of this phase of adaptation, the primary one is that it allows the team to continue operating during a crisis, and that can be very important indeed. And as we saw during the 2020 crisis, there was a secondary benefit as more teams became comfortable with remote working and open to trying it in the future. Many organizations will skip the skeuomorph phase or move quickly out of it and into the functional phase, which is characterized by making functional changes to facilitate efficient remote work. In this phase, teams start to leverage technology such as shared documents, project management tools, even automation to make work more efficient, and remote friendly. An excellent example of this can be seen in schools and universities, many of which have been steadily adopting online learning tools and systems, both before an after the COVID-19 crisis. This allows teachers and students to improve their experience, facilitating better online learning. The primary characteristic in this phase is at the level of leadership. When leaders begin to ask, what if we didn't do things the way we've always done them? This opens up a new range of possibilities. For an organization to enter the functional phase, it must also be truly functional. In the sense that employees must have the equipment and the tools they need to do their work usually provided or reimbursed by the employer. It's also typical for organizations in this phase to have an increased push toward documentation, recording meetings, taking notes, and sharing documents. Internal communication strategy will also take shape with preferred channels of communication, such as a directive to use shared slack channels instead of email or private messages. Challenges are still quite common in the functional phase. For one thing, the new policies may be applied inconsistently as organizations in this phase may not have fully developed guidance on best practices, or people teams maybe under supported to ensure compliance. It's also common for there to be friction among leadership management and the people teams who are not fully trained or convinced on remote adaptation. Communication breakdowns and inefficiencies are common. This is the phase where you will see a huge amount of meetings as information may be difficult to find and there isn't a strong practice of asynchronous work. Nonetheless, employee satisfaction and performance will tend to rise as people start to enjoy the benefits of a flexible schedule and a lack of commute. Not to mention having the essential tools for everyone to perform their job function adequately. As individual agency increases, your organization will gain momentum toward the advanced phases of remote adaptation. As you've seen, there's a lot to take into account. It can take a long time and a lot of adjustment to reach the functional remote phase. We'll pause here and in the next video we'll look at the next more advanced phase of your adaptation, asynchronous. [MUSIC]