Key Points

• When it comes to remote work, there is no substitute for good processes. 
• The unfortunate truth is that while remote work is popular, it still has its challenges, including avoiding distractions. 
• The hope is that Six Sigma is the answer to ensuring no productivity is lost with remote employees. 

The benefits are hard to ignore when you consider everything good about remote work, like having a better work/life balance and spending more time being productive rather than commuting. However, staying focused when working remotely is a very real challenge as many daily distractions can occur. 

Thankfully, remote work and even hybrid work are here to stay, much as CEOs and C-suites might not like to admit it. As a result, there is a reasonable concern that a struggle with productivity could lead to inefficiencies, so it begs the question of how something like Six Sigma can thrive in a remote work environment. 

What Is Six Sigma? 

Designed by telecom giant Motorola in the 1980s and popularized by other companies like General Electric that adopted the quality management approach, Six Sigma has become one of the largest and most successful business strategies of the modern age. 

Following a structured approach known as DMAIC, which stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control, there is hope that productivity-related issues can be solved through good strategy. If you try to look at Six Sigma through a remote work lens, it leans heavily into digital workflows and virtual collaboration. 

What Are Remote Working Challenges? 

It doesn’t take long to figure out the challenges remote work can introduce and how Six Sigma can apply. 

Communication 

While Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams are great tools for video chats, they don’t solve the problem of communicating with a distributed team, which is often a real challenge. The reality is that email and chat have replaced in-person meetings, but this doesn’t mean that everyone communicates as well when you can’t run into them in a hallway and remind them of a due date or an upcoming meeting. 

Technical Issues

Technical issues can and will happen in remote work, and in some ways, they’re to be expected. There are quirks with this technology, and even though it’s been a few years since remote work really took off in a post-pandemic world, this doesn’t mean every bug has been fixed. Better yet, new employees must be trained on new remote work technology when starting with a new company, which is never easy. 

Time Wastes

As much as remote work is an excellent foundation for a better work-life balance, this doesn’t mean it’s all sunshine and rainbows. In many ways, this work-life balance can also get in the way, as the home office is full of distractions. Whether it’s a television, a family member, or even something as simple as a dog barking, you must be highly disciplined to work through an entire remote day without getting distracted at least a few times. 

Inefficient Processes

While the hope is that this isn’t the case, there is no question that inefficient processes are one of the worst aspects of remote work. Without structured meetings, it’s common for employees to get bogged down in the weeds on a project or suffer from slow approvals because they can’t reach someone who might have otherwise sat a few feet away from them and just needed a tap on the shoulder. 

Start With The 5S Method

Before diving directly into Six Sigma, look at your workstation and understand how critical it is to your success as a remote employee. While it was mostly designed for in-office work, it can easily be applied to working from home. 

Sort

Start by removing absolutely everything from your home office area that isn’t necessary or required to do your job. This could mean anything from a television to a video game system, anything that could be destructive. 

Set In Order

As you move throughout your workday, make sure you put things that you might need to recall later somewhere they are easily found. This could be files you printed to review or a notebook with important meeting notes. 

Shine

Exactly as this “S” suggests, shine means keeping your work area neat and free of dust, debris, or anything else that might be considered dirty or serve as a distraction. 

Standardize

For the fourth “S,” look at standardizing everything in your life so that you are organized daily. This is essentially saying that you will wake up every day at 6 am and do one task, while saying you’ll complete another task at a different time later that morning, but keeping this same schedule every day. 

Sustain

Once you have set your standards, like saying you are going to wake up and work out every day at 6 am, you need to make sure you are keeping up with this every day, like clockwork. There are always exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, your schedule should be very sustainable. 

Jumping Into Six Sigma

Okay, with your office and workspace all organized, it’s time to get to the meat and potatoes of this question and truly learn how Six Sigma applies to remote employees. 

Define

In the case of the define phase, you have to identify what, if any, problems are being discovered by a remote employee, either by yourself or by others around you. For most people, the define phase would surface as identifying the time spent on non-work activities while working remotely. As a result, the time it takes to complete your daily task list is now taking longer than it should or would be expected. 

Measure

If you define what’s taking up time, you can now measure how much time is wasted. Are you eating an hour lunch in 10 minutes and then spending another 50 minutes watching Netflix? No doubt this is a typical remote work issue, but the result is that you are not getting your work done earlier in the day, so you have more time to watch Netflix after work hours. 

Analyze

As soon as the data is collected from both the define and measure phases, Six Sigma will help analyze it and locate any root cause of inefficiencies. Not only will combing through this data answer your questions about why you have so many time leaks, but it will also help you learn how to optimize your task list better.  

Improve

As with any employee, the hope is to improve, gain a promotion, and earn big bucks. In other words, the improvement phase is where you will eliminate any issues causing roadblocks and set yourself on a path toward success. 

Control

The last and one of the most essential steps of Six Sigma, which undoubtedly applies to remote work, is to make sure and commit to doing things differently. In this phase, you will avoid wasting any time and complete your work in a way that makes you feel good and helps you look good as an efficient employee who isn’t playing it too close to deadlines. 

Benefits Of Six Sigma In a Remote World

When you consider the benefits of Six Sigma in remote work, there are some easy-to-identify opportunities to highlight these benefits. 

Cost Savings

Any opportunity an organization has to cut waste and allow employees to get more done will yield plenty of cost savings. Any time cost savings can be found, they can then be invested into revenue-driving parts of a business like marketing, research and development, or even new technology. 

Employee Satisfaction 

If you’re a manager and you can create a level of inclusion among remote employees with something like a happy hour on Friday afternoon, it will leave your employees happy and relaxed ahead of the weekend. This is a win-win for everyone, including the organization, which benefits from increased employee engagement and satisfaction. 

Adding More Scale

As an organization, you should always be looking for ways to add more scale, which, in turn, drives more revenue. The best aspect here is that Six Sigma will give you all the tools you need to increase overall efficiency with processes without sacrificing quality for those working at home.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

The hope is that introducing Six Sigma in a remote work world will only further demonstrate why this quality management approach is embraced by so many companies worldwide. Remote work will undoubtedly cause challenges for companies, but processes like Six Sigma should only improve things. 

Alongside digital transformations and artificial intelligence, the workforce is changing, and remote work is helping to lead the way. For this reason and more, companies should be heavily focused on making sure processes like this are rolling out so that employees of organizations large and small know their exact requirements ahead of a remote-work announcement. 

Conclusion 

Six Sigma is unquestionably one of today’s most valuable and beneficial quality management processes. It should go without saying that when companies like Motorola and General Electric say something is good, there is no reason to doubt they have tried and tested any number of systems and landed on something like Six Sigma because it’s the very best, even in a remote world.