Will the future of your organization be based on business needs, or your comfort level? COVID-19 has brought new changes to our working conditions, and itвЂ™s up to business leaders to determine if they will rise to ride the wave of a virtual workforce. We donвЂ™t question how we can ensure our staff is working or how our teams communicate because management and technology today are not the same as they were from 1980 to 2005. The questions we arenвЂ™t asking are equally as important to share with our clients. If the need for office presence varies by business unit, how does our business accommodate that?.Which of our divisions require an office presence?.What are we doing to ensure employees have access to training that is appropriate for their learning style?.How do we ensure that employees have face-to-face time with leads?.How do we onboard new employees in a cohesive way?.Is there a tax benefit to our offices that we must maintain?.Should we host monthly company-funded virtual lunches?.Do we need joint meetings once or twice a year?.How many social interactions are needed at a team level to drive cohesion that enhances retention?.How do we move forward as a technology company?.ItвЂ™s not even a part of the conversation.ДЄ traditional management style does not drive conversations at Sirius. Proximity to the team or client is not a limitation. In this context, the right candidate is better than the right location. This culture and flexibility allows Sirius to hire engineers wherever the best candidate lives.

This is because our teams operate in an agile fashion by hosting daily standup calls, using product boards to track tasks, regularly working across multiple time zones, and developing a culture that encourages engineers stuck on a problem to call in another engineer within 15 minutes. When Sirius went remote, the company experienced few impacts to its Managed Services cloud teams. And what does their choice say about the management style of their organization versus their competitors? What does this mean? Executive leaders need to ask better questions about what location means to them. Whatever their choice, the growing trend is for businesses to allow employees to permanently move to remote work, so leaders must identify if their organization is fully enabled for the future. The question we must ask is why? Is it because of an operational paradigm? Questions like this force leaders to provide valid reasons for requiring their employees to return to the office or continue to work remotely. Many of these same clients are now discussing moving back to the office as their staff gets vaccinated. Some did so with flawless execution, and some wished it had gone so smoothly. In 2020, many Sirius clients were abruptly pushed into a remote operations model. I propose a change of perspective that has value in business conversations-why should we?

Are we moving back to the office? Nearly every executive has received this question in the last year.

Questions to ask leaders about change