Mainly by advocating a different style of work and communication. By teaching and coaching people how to communicate in a more organised rather than haphazard manner.
This isn't all that different from what in larger organisations is nowadays called agile transformation. How often do we hear "Yeah, that whole agile thing is nice but it doesn't work for us."?
The reason why 'agile' (or any other new approach for that matter) doesn't work in these cases often is that people are only used to doing things a certain way and are too lazy or otherwise unwilling to let go of that way and try a different approach.
Bringing about change on that scale is a long and often painful process. It's not that people are inherently lazy or stupid. It just can take considerable effort to unlearn habits you've gotten used to over a long time.
The crucial difference - at least so far - between the adoption of remote work and that of agile methods is that the latter for better or for worse nowadays seem to be largely accepted as the common approach for organising work (in the software industry at least).
As for remote work on the other hand there's no large-scale buy-in by (middle-)managers. I think this points to a larger issue at play here: Implementing remote work can surface shortcomings and waste.
If remote work requires workers to proactively communicate amongst themselves anyway what do you need traditional facilitators like middle-management for? With agile software development methods there are at least still roles like Scrum master or product owner that to some extent still resemble those traditional roles.
With remote work implemented properly we could very well arrive at a point where those roles aren't needed at all anymore.
This isn't all that different from what in larger organisations is nowadays called agile transformation. How often do we hear "Yeah, that whole agile thing is nice but it doesn't work for us."?
The reason why 'agile' (or any other new approach for that matter) doesn't work in these cases often is that people are only used to doing things a certain way and are too lazy or otherwise unwilling to let go of that way and try a different approach.
Bringing about change on that scale is a long and often painful process. It's not that people are inherently lazy or stupid. It just can take considerable effort to unlearn habits you've gotten used to over a long time.
The crucial difference - at least so far - between the adoption of remote work and that of agile methods is that the latter for better or for worse nowadays seem to be largely accepted as the common approach for organising work (in the software industry at least).
As for remote work on the other hand there's no large-scale buy-in by (middle-)managers. I think this points to a larger issue at play here: Implementing remote work can surface shortcomings and waste.
If remote work requires workers to proactively communicate amongst themselves anyway what do you need traditional facilitators like middle-management for? With agile software development methods there are at least still roles like Scrum master or product owner that to some extent still resemble those traditional roles.
With remote work implemented properly we could very well arrive at a point where those roles aren't needed at all anymore.