How managing home office colleagues will change our leadership

So, are your employee's kitchens the new office?

6 months down the devastating Corona-consequences, it looks like employers and employees have found at least a temporary way of moving forward. Some companies have stated that this situation will remain until mid next year. I am sure the debates about home office or not will pop up in many discussions as we starts to see the effects. Not just the financial effects or the virus spreading effect but the leadership challenges we will face.

From a leadership point of view, the first initial months has just been to fight in an extraordinary situation with extraordinary means and methods and most people have been very adaptable and adjusted their workplace, location and tasks according to the extreme situation.

The upcoming challenges in leadership

As we can see now more and more, there is a tiredness among citizens in many countries, people are not fully accepting or not respecting the restrictions as temporary actions are slipping into become more longterm solutions.

First challenge – technology

The first hurdle has been to overcome the technical challenges, finding the tools, setting up temporary office spaces at kitchen tables, TV-sofas with an initial lack of technical communication devices in the market. In some countries, the back bone infrastructure of internetaccess has been the major challenge. In highly industrial countries like Germany, the lack of bandwidth become a major challenge and fiber to home is not deployed everywhere.

However, the challenge to change communication ways, finding the new working habits and ethics as well as handling the overall recession with short time work has been a whirlwind that have occupied us all. The common understanding is that this piece of the transition to home offices went quite well.

Second challenge – perseverance

After the current summer break in Europe, people will most likely not just come back from vacation and return to their kitchen table (where they just before had relaxed breakfasts with family) and continue as it was.

Some companies has already stated that either we continue the home office setup for at least a year or this is the new normal. There is, aside by the crisis, some companies that has seen this as a major opportunity to shrink the structural cost for office and work environment. The conclusion has been like “Hey look, it works, let's do it!”.

Not so sure about that.

The big challenge ahead of us – Leadership

Now, after setting up infrastructure, technical equipment and some basic reporting strategies, we have just overcome the first phase. Like if your house caught fire, first months you are fine with living in your neighbor’s basement. But then, do you really want to do it permanently?

Next phase is upcoming and here comes the real challenge.

Many leaders know that remote management is a pain. If you have managed people in different locations or a remote office you are well aware of the issues in this kind of leadership.

With a (more or less) fully distributed workforce you can most likely imagine what kind of challenges this will have in our leadership.

How shall we lead, motivate, encourage and really see (as in acknowledge) our employees now when we have located our employees in their homes? And in most countries, the employer is still responsible for its employee’s psychosocial working environment. So, how do you monitor that?

My impression is the major issue still is seen as; how do we know that people actually do what they are supposed to do when we cannot surveil them? (When in fact it looks like the issue could even be that people work too much instead of cheating their employer)

One challenge in this leadership is how we manage our direct reports, do we control or trust them?

One argument that sometimes is heard is that we have had remote workers for a long time and it has been working just fine. Sure, the Nomad workforce has been around for some time and they are most likely a phenomena in major cities with an urban (and most likely young) workforce who works at home, in cafés or why not from the bed. Managing those individuals is something different and it is most likely practiced as Management by Slack.

One major obstacle that is already obvious, and will in many companies slow down some of the business development processes, is the lack of spontaneous meetings that normally occurs around coffee machines, in cantinas and when you meet your other colleague from purchasing in the elevator and you find out that both of you think logistics department suck. How do you create those boiling plates?

One of the strongest motivation factors (and drivers) is to be seen and heard. Seen as in recognized and observed and being appreciated with a quick comment, a look or a thumbs up in the open office as an appreciation from a boss (or the boss’s boss). The modern leadership is built on self-leading, trust and motivation. So the challenge will be to find sustainable feedback loop systems that are honest, open and encouraging.

So, one of the new and screaming demands that we most likely will see coming up are (online) trainings in how to manage your staff online when they work remote. Or, to exemplify; what will be the key driver for a long term member of customer technical service who has been working and appreciated the cooperation with colleagues and peers and now sit alone at the kitchen table with a cat? How do we handle him/her?

Will Digital/Remote leadership go the same way as social networks?

Let me do a comparison with another megatrend that has been overwhelming us the last decade. The digitalization of our social networks.

Going from the small village hundred years ago, over the urbanized society during industrialization to the digital social network with Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or any other semi-social communications has driven us into a very narcissistic behavior, playing a role on social platforms that is not really our true selves but rather a wannabee of ourselves. So, to make a very quick and dirty analogy with comparing our private social life going digital and leadership gong digital I can only pray we do not see the same artificial behaviors being copied. May we have learned that there are many differences to have “friends” and “colleagues” online compared to have the friends and colleagues close to you, in real life?

You can always argue that colleagues is a more closed and defined group than Facebook, for example, and that we most likely not will behave as “childish” in an online leadership situation. Looking at the younger generations there is both hope and despair.

Our Generation Z that soon will be our managers and (maybe) owners and they are on one hand looking with a bit of shame on (us in the older generations and) our behavior in social medias (like an absurd version of the TV-phenomena Big Brother) but they are also extremely controlled, scared and incapacious by their own (more group oriented) platforms. Let’s hope they will be able to use the good and skip the abnormal in these new networks. It is easy to be seen as a digital dinosaur (and yes, I got my first internet email address in 1988) but it is really scary to see how controlled many of the younger ones are by their own groups and behaviors.

The new leadership style will become much more psychosocial oriented

As everybody working with leadership are aware of, the last years we have had flood of psychosocial illness the last decade or two. Whether it depends on working environment, work-life balance or the above mentioned social networks we can let be, but it has in many occasions being detected at work and also treated with the help from the employer (of any reason, either because of labor laws or out of empathy) and with management by Slack, email or Zoom, this will be very difficult to handle. There must be efficient way and methodologies to catch and treat this.

Being a good leader will be very hard the upcoming times. It will put a lot of responsibility on the shoulders and I am not surprised if we will find C-level roles like CWE (Chief Working Environment) in major organizations soon, having a responsibility for the remote workers health and security as well as the strategic management of that workforce.

So, how shall the new leaders be and behave?

A leadership with a highly distributed workforce, in time also more geographically spread, will be a challenge to manage. Of obvious reasons it has to build more on trust than on control. In some cases the traditional working hours also will be challenged. This can of course be an opportunity with organizations that follows the sun in support or service functions. But it will sure be tenfold more difficult to monitor and manage.

Will the new remote managers be a totally new species? Absolutely not, but there will definitely be new type of personal attributes that will be much more important to look for.

I would guess that three obvious characteristics would appear:

• Responsive. Being able to pick up deviations in peoples behaviors and act on that. Using the sensibility and senses without being physically close.
• Intuitive. Leading a group where group dynamics does not build on physical conditions but psychological will be a challenge.
• Enthusiastic. As a manager today, this might not always be on your top 10 list today but for a remote manager, you have to encourage staff to work and work together. Your enthusiasm will be so much more crucial as a critical success factor.

Finally, time will not be our side. As the current stressful situation will continue we have to adjust our leadership models to fit into the new landscape. Our employees will not wait for it, they will ask for it!