Here's how you can maximize the advantages of remote work for mobile designers.

The "Workspace" for a remote creative person has to allow for a SUBMERSIVE experience and free from distractions. This makes it harder for staff with family and children and aren't able to carve out a space that allows them to meditate deeply. The best workspace might be placing the desk against the door or working in a coffee shop. If the Designer is single, then optimizing a workspace is more of a technical exercise as opposed to a herculean struggle.

"Routines" are fine, but Managers really need to KNOW their designers, in order to know their optimum routine. Being a designer requires solitude, which is more difficult if the Designer has a family with familial routines of chauffeuring the kids, cooking, cleaning, and PTA meetings. However, a manager might not really care as long as they get the work done, because chances are, the Manager has the same familial responsibilities. This is where open and honest communication on expectations is critical to find out what the designer's routine is. For example, the Designer might work best at night after dinner from 5pm to 2am when everyone's asleep and then submit content for review. Meetings should work around such a routine.

Tools for Designers are pretty specific to their industry, such as Miro, Adobe, and Zoom, since these are stand alone applications. The problem arises with the "communication platforms" aspect that involves Administration, Project Tracking, Records Management, Budget and the lingo and nomenclature used to discuss them. The best approach, regarding these Communication Platform Tools is for the Design team to have a strong Design OPERATIONS team at a 9 to 1 ratio. So for every nine Designers, there's one person to handle admin, training and tools. This way, the Designers can focus on designing, Operations can grease the process and the Manager can focus on relations and projection.

Collaboration is probably the hardest part for any team and requires the manager to have a strong understanding of everybody's psychology, strengths and weaknesses. Like any action adventure movie, the hardest hurdle is getting all the various protagonists to come together as a team and fight to win the day. It isn't simply about setting a routine, having tools and meeting regularly to share progress. It mostly comes down to TRUST, which is a very complicated and sometimes scary thing. A teammate has to trust that if they say or confess something detrimental, that there won't be irrevocable repercussions. For example, if Jimmy doesn't have the skill set to design a prototype on time, then hides his shame until delivery, that's a fail.

Not everyone is the same. Creative people are traditionally really bad at time management and I wouldn't trust that all Designers can effectively manage their own individual learning. It would behoove management to conduct group certification training with the Design Operations lead making sure everyone's skills are at industry standard.