Employees of Health Information Technology & Services in Michigan Medicine embraced remote work long before the COVID-19 pandemic, with some working from South Carolina, Florida, and even overseas.
The lessons learned from those experiences were the topic of the latest installment of Empowering Blue, a community of practice that connects U-M staff and faculty members interested in workplace improvement and innovation.
“My belief is that the clearer that your team understands their purpose and understands what I refer to as systems of work — the way we get things done — where they (team members) are becomes less and less important,” Michael Warden, senior director of Business IT for HITS, said during the Empowering Blue session he led Nov. 2.
During the most recent Empowering Blue session, Warden talked about the lessons his team has learned about remote and hybrid work. He said flexible environments have less to do with being remote and more about conceptualizing what it means to work together.
Warden said that in the past, individual employees had to get special approval to work remotely. In 2015, his team decided to “lean into it a bit more,” and working from home became the norm rather than the exception. Employees appreciated the flexibility, he said.
“In most of those experiences, what we learned was there was never a problem that working remotely raised that didn’t already exist on-site,” Warden said.
Because of its experience with remote work, HITS was able to pivot and adapt quickly when the pandemic hit in March 2020. Today, about 80 percent of HITS staffers work remotely, including about 95 percent of the staff at Business IT at HITS.
In fact, remote work is going so well that a $1 million plan to renovate the HITS Service Desk call center was scrapped, Warden said.
“We actually believe that our reduction to our physical space allows us to consume less of the university’s resources,” he said.
Warden said HITS and Michigan Medicine have fully embraced a “flexible first” approach, with plans for continued flexible and remote work environments.
“Our focus on delivery of results is really what drives us. Where you sit doesn’t matter,” he said.
The next session, Dec. 7, is called, “A community discussion: Celebrating successes and working together on challenges.” Participants will be able to share what they’ve achieved over the past year and discuss the challenges they face.
Read the full article in The Record and visit the Empowering Blue website to learn more.
