Distributed Workforce: How to Remotely Support a Revit Team

HOLGER DE GROOT: Good day, and thank you for joining us today. In this session, we will talk about distributed workforces and how to remotely support a Revit team. But before we start, we'd like to take a moment to introduce ourselves and to give you a quick overview of what we do. So my name is Holger de Groot. I'm the CEO and founder of Modmation, but I'm also a seasonal lecturer at the University of New South Wales and I'm the vice chairperson at BuildingSMART Australasia. At Modmation, I'm advising and guiding our clients on the digital transformation, which can be both on a project or organization level, and we basically try to make them work for our clients.

MACIEJ WYPYCH: Good morning, and my name is Maciej Wypych. I'm CTO of Modmation. My role is to supervise and develop digital strategy for Modmation and implementation of digital strategies for our clients on organization and project level. So Modmation is an independent consultancy. We have been working for over 10 years in this space, and we're supporting over seven countries, and our strategies and experience reflects what we do. We are an independent consultancy focusing on people, technology, policy, and process. So we have built four different streams that we focus on and help our clients to establish and enable them to deliver their projects and implement digital strategies.

HOLGER DE GROOT: So now, let's start with the first remote support challenges. Now, with COVID pandemic, many project teams, and particularly, their BIM managers, have found themselves working remotely, and for the first time, they also are finding them separated from each other. So today, distributed teams are not just a temporary fix. They are a new way of working, and an opportunity, also, to reimagine traditional approaches to collaboration.

However, working remotely is one thing but supporting a remote team while managing a building information model can be a complete different challenge for BIM managers.

Some of you may know Deepak Maini who is an Autodesk expert elite and also author of a couple of text books, including the Autodesk Navisworks for BIM Managers, and in 2017 at the Autodesk University in Las Vegas-- so long time before COVID-19 started to have such an impact on us-- Deepak made this statement to underline that effective collaboration is the number one demand in our industry. And today with project requirements increasing, it is becoming even more important to maximize efficiency by collaborating effectively.

So to start, companies now need to reopen the debate about moving projects to people rather than moving people to projects. Companies also have to think differently to meet the demand changes and also to be able to adopt new workflows and to support the cope with remote working. Many companies, including Modmation, are already successful as 100% remote teams, yet it is still not a common company structure in our industry, particularly not in the construction industry.

So to better understand what is preventing companies from encouraging and hiring for remote work, Bessemer Venture Partners surveyed 21 of their portfolio companies in January 2020-- so that was in the early stage of the COVID pandemic-- and this survey showed that nearly all companies believed that their culture would be at risk if they encouraged remote work. In addition, 67% of the companies worried about effective collaboration. Another 67% also believed that management and training would be too difficult. And finally, a bit more than half of the companies believed that they would struggle with knowledge sharing.

So today, as companies are becoming more agile and upgrade their technology, using new technologies to cope with remote work, it is important to assemble teams that are capable of working in a remote environment. When supporting teams remotely, as a BIM manager, I need to understand the factors that can make remote work incredibly challenging. Otherwise, my teams may experience declines in performance and engagement when they begin working remotely, especially in the absence of training and support face-to-face.

I assume that we can all agree that email alone is insufficient. So remote teams need tools that give them visual clues, like if they were supported face-to-face. Teams often also express concerns about the lack of face-to-face interaction. Some feel that remote BIM managers are out of touch with their needs and thereby, are not really supportive. And this can cause team members to feel less belonging to a team and that can result in increased intention to leave the team, or maybe even the entire company.

Teams can also struggle with the added time and effort needed to locate information from other team members who are also working remotely. Especially new team members, like those who just left university, joining the team as either architects or engineers, may also struggle with reduced supervision and guidance to learn and grow. So all these challenges require a change of our mindset and the way we run our company, we run our projects. Our objective should be to support and manage a distributed workforce in a more fluid and integrated way.

MACIEJ WYPYCH: So first thing to help support a remote team is to establish rules of engagement. With the communication, we need to make sure that the organization is prepared to go through digital transformation and enable teams to use digital tools for communication and knowledge sharing.

And also, we need to make sure that we pick the best tool for the job, and not to all tools are equal. And we need to select the best one that will help us to deliver the knowledge to the users and support them when they need the support. Also, it's very important to set clear expectations-- how the communication will work and how the remote support will work. Teams need to understand how to ask questions and where to look for answers.

And finally, it's very important to give a clear understanding to the teams about the means, frequency, and the timing for the communication. What's the support availability? How often you can-- or you should contact support, when you can do it, and which tools you should be using when asking for support in a practical way?

So there are a number of means of communication. And when we think about in terms of bandwidth, the high bandwidth enables you to communicate with more just than words and lower bandwidth communication can be achieved with lower effort.

So starting with email, well, it's very easy. Everyone knows how to use email, and they can be great, but it can be quite formal in terms of trying to support someone. And it's great if things are not very urgent. Then we can go and start using instant messaging, for example, which definitely helps to speed up the communication process and can be less formal and gives you quite a bit of flexibility in the communication process.

Then we go into use an audio call, which is great and easy to facilitate but it's less personal than a video conference, which we'll get to at the end. So this gives you the best quality and almost simulates that face-to-face communication that you would have in person, but it may require a bit more effort to start a video call than just send an email. You have to book the meeting often and it just can be a bit more problematic and takes more time. So select the best tool for the job. The best way of communicating for practical tasks.

The next step in the communication process is to establish daily check-ins. This is important to make sure that the teams have this regular and predictable flow of information. And when he establish those daily check-ins, it's important for you to have those on a regular basis. Well, it's a daily check-ins, and make sure that you can find out what the current needs of a team.

And this could be done as a one-to-one call if it's a smaller team or with a larger meeting with the whole team. But these need to be regular and predictable. So just book a time slot in your calendar, have a regular call with the team so the team understands that they can have a forum in that meeting to talk about the issues in terms of the BIM or digital engineering management issues that they would have on projects.

The next step in the communication process is to overcommunicate. So in the non distributed workforce before COVID and before a lot of us moved to work remotely, the lack of communication was already a challenge. But now with that remote work, under-communication is a real risk. So within the organization, you have people that will be already aware about what's going on, they will seek help and find out things on their own.

And then you'll have the other spectrum of unaware people where it's going to be very important to make sure that you overcommunicate so that you reach those as well. Because not everyone will consume content the same way, not everyone will get the information the same way, and so we have to target those unaware people first and make sure that you target your communication for this audience. And BIM managers need to overcommunicate and create opportunities, such as regular meetings for everyone to talk about their private BIM challenges.

So the next aspect of this is how you communicate. So we need to communicate to the teams with confidence. So using phrases such as "this is challenging, but we can fix it" and "let us look for a solution" are important.

We need to make sure that we don't reflect our frustrations or our personal challenges on a team. We need to make sure that they understand that they can help from us and the support from us as BIM managers. And they need to be confident that we will be there to help them and overcome those challenges. So it's important to acknowledge those challenges the team member has and provide affirmation and our confidence in their skills so we can help them efficiently.

And the next element here is to exhibit empathy. So for those-- especially for those new members in a team and our people that just started working remotely, it's important for every manager to acknowledge stress and listen to concerns and empathize with their challenges because things may not work as they should, and it's often stressful for team members to be alone at their home or at their remote workplace. We don't have direct access to someone asking in which they can ask for help.

So if your team is struggling, but not communicating, ask them how they're doing, make sure that you give some information, how you can-- and find out how you can help them. And once you ask the question, let the stress, concern, or the challenge of your remote team member be the focus of the conversation. Make sure that you help them to overcome that and inform them where they can seek help, and make sure that, if there's any issues, just try to help them as much as possible.

And finally, you need to make sure that you establish those rules of engagement because you are also a human being and everyone needs to understand how they can communicate with you. So you also have some time for yourself and to do other things and just be direct support. So use those visual video conferencing for those daily check-ins and instant messaging for things where they're urgent, establish your team's expectations on the best time to reach for your-- reach you for at-work calls, and make sure that your team knows how they can reach you in case of emergency.

So it's important to have these clear expectations. Otherwise, you can get overburdened with too many phone calls at midnight if there is a teammate struggling. So they just need to make sure that if there is a person on call, if there's a larger team of people supporting them, could contact if there's a crisis and then when not to contact you. So publish your calendar, make sure that it is visible, and when you are available to take those calls. And have those regular meetings as well to make sure that everyone have that opportunity to talk to you if there is a problem and they know that there's going to be a meeting next day at a certain time, always at the same time so it's nice, clear, and easy to follow.

HOLGER DE GROOT: Once you have established the rules of engagement, the next step is finding a way how do you collaborate in terms of sharing the data? So that brings us to cloud collaboration. So as I mentioned before, remote team members are often surprised by the added time and effort that they need to gain access to knowledge. The issue can be addressed by implementing a knowledge sharing platform, such as Microsoft SharePoint, for example.

This phenomenon can also extend beyond training and support to finding and knowing about company standards, templates, and workflows. The implementation of a cloud storage system, such as Microsoft OneDrive, could be the answer to that issue. And finally, there's also the issue of data corruption when using unsupported workflows, such as file-based worksharing via VPN or FTP. That's when we start talking about cloud collaboration, using tools like ProjectWise or Autodesk Construction Cloud, to share information with team members and to publish information for external team members.

The solution that we use on most of our project is cloud collaboration, using the Autodesk Construction Cloud, which allows us to connect workflows, data, and teams, particularly in remote offices at every stage of the project. It enables us to bring all team members together from the design, the documentation, the construction, and the operational phase, all together in one single software solution.

An important part of the Autodesk Construction Cloud is Autodesk BIM Collaborate, a cloud-based design collaboration and coordination software, for those who don't know what Autodesk Construction Cloud is about. It basically connects us with the teams, and it helps everyone to edit and share information on a single platform. So Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro, formerly known as BIM 360, adds the cloud collaboration capabilities for model authoring.

As you may know, ownership, accountability, and trust are critical for the success of any project, especially when working remotely. Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro allows designers, allows us, to take ownership of the work we do within a cloud environment, using tools like Revit, Civil 3D, or AutoCAD Plant 3D. Using this unified platform for reviewers as well can increase the accountability for the results, which, hopefully, can increase the level of trust among all team members during a project lifecycle.

And finally, making the information accessible by sharing it with everyone. Everyone now has access to those information and can make informed decisions, which makes true collaboration possible, especially in the remote environments that we work within.

MACIEJ WYPYCH: So when we work with the teams and support them remotely, we have to establish our management style. So are we going to coach, mentor, or manage the teams? When working remotely, it's very important to continue this professional development of each team member, and companies want their teams to learn quickly and improve efficiency and productivity. That's a given.

And achieving those goals in both managing, mentoring, and coaching the teams. So it's important to understand the differences between those different styles of communication. The primary difference is based on the relationship between the individuals and the outcome they're looking for. And BIM managers should understand the differences between the disciplines of leadership, management, and mentor and coach more than just how they manage teams.

So when we have someone starting with Revit, and they just starting with the company, they haven't used Revit before, we have the phase one where they just don't have a clue what's going on. And then going to phase two, you have a peak of excitement. Someone is really excited, OK, Revit can do a lot.

Then phase three, it's the WTF phase, you've been excited but now you kind of trying to do something, you don't know what's going on, things that are not happening the way you thought they will happen. Phase four is slope of enlightenment. You're getting to be better, and you start figuring how to overcome those common challenges that you may have on a project.

And then phase five, you are an expert. So it's important to cater toward each user at a different phase with your communication. Make sure that the communication is targeted correctly. So if you have a group of users with mix levels of skills, you just have to pick the lowest common denominator there and make sure that they will understand what's going on, and also, that communication style needs to be specific to that person, or you may want to split this communication into groups as well.

So then when we talk about those differences between coaching, mentoring, and managing, the coaching is more personal. Generally, a short-term relationship with a team member that is fostered to achieve a personal or professional development. Make sure you listen what they want to learn, what their issues are so you focus your training and your support on this.

Mentoring is a mutually beneficial relationship with the purpose of developing a specific skill rather than achieving a task. So it generally lasts a year or longer. So you train someone over a year to make sure that they get those skills and then they can train others as well.

And managing is a professional relationship used to achieve operational status. It's indefinite in duration and defined by organizational structure. So basically, you have to say to your team members what they need to do. And also, of course, it's counseling. Well, we don't ready dare to counsel everyone, but we just need to make sure that we listen what they have to say and adjust our way of working so we can get the best results.

In terms of the coaching styles, so there are five different styles of coaching. So first is democratic-- only step in when it's needed and make sure that the team can resolve a lot of the issues themselves. And let them feel in control.

The other style is authoritarian. So decide what, when, and how to do it, and make the coachee understand that. But just basically give them a directions more top down approach. And next one is holistic. So you can give the coachee a sense of the role, help them to feel more connected, and show them how they matter within the organization and the project.

Next one is autocratic. So rather than opening a dialogue, tell the coachee what to do rather than asking what to do. And finally, that's a visionary approach. So encourage and empower the coachee by giving the direction and strategies for achieving different objectives.

So select the best style depending on the phase on where they are in terms of their skill sets and the personality of that individual because each of those has its own place depending on who you talk to and how they respond when they need support.

And there are also different mentoring styles. So first one is the challenger. So you have to be supportive but firm and push the mentee to focus on a specific goal.

Next is cheerleader. So be supportive and encouraging and push the mentee to focus on growing new skills. Then it's a connector. So use your social skills and teach the mentee how to network and create connections so they can find the knowledge themselves and ask multiple people if they have an issue and they want to get more understanding about certain things.

Then it's an educator, having a background in training and push the mentee to learn and develop their deficiencies. And finally, it's the ideator to use creativity to spark brainstorming and planning and push the mentee to get creative and find creative ways of overcoming an obstacle and finding a way how to resolve a specific issue.

HOLGER DE GROOT: So once you started to coach and mentor more than you manage, the next thing to keep an eye on is ownership, accountability, and trust. There's a strong link between team members who take ownership, having a culture of accountability, and having a high trust workplace. Ownership, accountability, and trust are not just critical for the success of any project. They are also critical for the success of your company, especially when everyone is working remotely from home.

So let's start by taking a closer look at the definitions of ownership, accountability, and trust in a distributed workforce. What does it mean for your team members?

Taking ownership is about taking the initiative. When teams take ownership of their work, they treat the project as if it were their own project. They will also be more driven, motivated, and have more initiative, seeking new and innovative ways to improve and develop what they are doing rather than going through the motions and fulfilling the minimum requirement.

Being accountable is about being responsible for the result. It is about acknowledging that your actions affect other teams' abilities to accomplish their goals. It is about follow through, but it also means you are forthcoming when you fall short. Therefore, being accountable is a major factor in building trust.

Trust encourages team members to take ownership and reinforces accountability because when you are trusted, you don't want to let down your team. If you don't trust your team, you will find yourself spending time and energy on following up and managing details you should not manage. Therefore, trust your team is also critical for your own success. It makes collaboration within your team possible.

So by taking ownership, you basically tell others that you can trust me to do the right thing. By being accountable, we will tell others you can trust me to do what I say I'm going to do. And by having trust in your team, we tell others I believe in you, we'll do the right thing, and I believe you will do what you say are you going to do.

So to summarize, what we talked about today, it is important to understand the common challenges from under-communication to lack of face-to-face supervision to lack of information. Improve the support of your remote teams with regular structured check-ins, make use of multiple communication options by using all the tools that you have, and provide ongoing support and encouragement to take ownership and to reinforce accountability. Remember also, the difference between the disciplines of leadership and management, and mentor and coach your team members more than you manage them.

But most importantly, remember that your trust encourages team members to take ownership and then reinforces their accountability. And to all the BIM managers here today who joined us who are facing remote support for the first time, we like to add our own note of encouragement to you by telling you-- you got this.

MACIEJ WYPYCH: Thank you, everyone, for joining us today, and we'll be getting your questions and trying to answer them now. Thank you.

HOLGER DE GROOT: Thanks, everyone.