Being remotely successful

Hypothetical case. Pardon my limited knowledge of London and its surroundings.

Disclaimer : This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

January 6, 2020 (pre New Normal)

Harper is a bright professional who leads client relations for a marketing agency, Peanut Butter Inc. She is working with Peanut Butter Inc. over 14 years now. She has been able to rope in good revenue by creating and sustaining the client base. Her company operates from multiple locations in UK and he operates from Hemel Hempstead. Evelyn is her manager.

Evelyn is the Marketing head for Peanut Butter Inc. Evelyn is presumptuous manager. Her focus is more on the recognition, sales quotas, and bonuses. This takes precedence over her people and the value she is responsible for building within each person on her team. She along with most of her team and senior management operates out of London office. 

Harper travels 26 miles every Tuesday and Friday to meet Evelyn and the team. As we know working together in a room tends to solve problems quickly. Teams must work from a single location to work cohesively and collaborative (this is pre COVID-19 version).

Following is the snippet from their routine interaction -

Evelyn to Harper, “Your performance is commendable. I would like you to come more often to London office”.

Harper, “Evelyn, it takes a lot of toll to travel this distance. My most of the clients are based in or near Hemel Hempstead. I come twice a week to be with you and team despite it impacts my productivity. What stops you to recommend me for growth?".

Evelyn, "Your flexibility is the main concern. You must work on enhancing your visibility here at London before seeking growth."

Clearly here Harper is struggling keeping herself with 'in-sight' of her manager and work on increasing her 'visibility' with senior management.

It is said a good manager will bring out the best in you and have a more uplifting effect on all aspects of your life. A bad boss won't just jeopardize your career growth, they also negatively impact your personal life.

With the new normal, 90% of people are working remotely and it is said to be the way forward as per announcement made by Rajesh Gopinathan, CEO TCS -

"We're not going to go back to where we were. The reason we have been able to get on top of it is that we had invested in building those processes and systems,” said Gopinathan. Over the past few weeks, TCS claims that they realised they don't need to have more than 25% of their workforce in the office in order to be 100% productive."We don't believe that every employee needs to be present all the time at our offices. I think it's sufficient that they spend 25% of their time in the office,” said Subramaniam."We also believe that 25% of the project team may not be located in one single location,” he added.

How will the Evelyns of the world sustain in the new normal. It is quite natural, we are social being and are more comfortable with human face to face interactions. We have been working very-very hard all this while to be omnipresent and not to fall out-of-the-sight for our people.

No i am not sharing tips here to how successfully work remotely. But there is definitely a need of orientation on how successfully lead teams remotely.

Steve jobs was an opponent of remote work, he believed that Apple employees' best work came from accidental bumping into other people, not sitting at home in front of an email inbox."Creativity comes from a spontaneous meetings, from random discussion," Jobs said.

According to him, you run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say 'Wow', and soon you are cooking up all sorts of ideas. This can happen virtually too, read my article on Socializing for getting ideas.

Companies are becoming more intentional in their approach towards people dynamics than they did operating in person. We will face more people challenges in of motivation, communication and conflict management. Working remotely will act as a magnifier to underlying people issues in companies that were easily handled in face-to-face teams.

As mentioned in my earlier article Virtually Connected, companies will need to do acknowledge and recognize talent more often to motivate people, create virtual coffee rooms to promote social bonding, virtual town halls to lessen the power of distance and very clear norms and etiquette around meetings and internal communications. As Chip Massey says -

"When everything is on the line, it comes down to relationships".

Here is the link where Burt Helm shares Masseys ways to build rapport virtually.

In words of Bill Gates: 

"As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others."

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Morning brew coffee - The purpose of Morning brew coffee is to share learnings and experiences that contributes to people development and success. The views are personal and outcome of the vast and diverse management experience. For more content visit Personal Branding Consultant and  Blog.

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