HR's Role - DC 19 (During Covid 19)

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” This old saying aptly applies to the COVID-19 crisis.

Many leaders have crossed the first hurdles of moving their teams remote: ensuring colleagues have set up their tech tools, defined their processes, and permanently logged into their video conference accounts.

But this is just the first step towards creating an effective work environment for remote employees. The next critical question we must ask is: How do you motivate people who work from home?

But some teams rise above the rest in times of turmoil, regardless of the challenges. They win market share. They earn life-long customer love. They keep their productivity high, or higher. In other words, they adapt. Though the academic research on remote productivity is mixed, with some saying it declines while others promise it increases, our research suggests that your success will depend on how you do it.

First, it’s important to note that right now, working from home is likely to reduce motivation.

Three negative motivators have been identified that often lead to reduced work performance. These have likely spiked in light of the coronavirus pandemic. Emotional pressure and economic pressure are soaring as people worry about losing their jobs, paying their rent, and protecting their health. The barrage of news, questions on how to safely get groceries, and fears for relatives are deeply distressing. Inertia for work is bound to increase as people wonder if there’s a point in even trying.

Three positive motivators have also been identified that often lead to increased work performance. We believe these are in danger of disappearing in easy-to-miss ways during the current situation. Play, the motive that most boosts performance, could decrease if it continues to becomes harder for people to get things done from home. For example, people may miss the joy of problem-solving with a colleague, or the ease of making a decision when everyone is in one room. Purpose could also decline with team’s decreasing visibility into their impact on clients or colleagues, especially if no one is there to remind them. Lastly, potential could decline if people can’t gain access to colleagues that teach and develop them.

If business leaders don’t move to change this, shifts in people’s motivation will ultimately lead to a decline in adaptability, quality, and creativity just at the time when the post-coronavirus recovery will require productivity growth.

What Can Business Leaders Do?

When someone is diagnosed with cancer, our first instinct is to reduce their work so they could focus on their illness. To be sure, there are times they needed 100% rest. But we quickly realize that we have taken away a major source of their play and purpose. Their work was a much needed break from the anxiety-inducing news they receive each day.

This was also true for the firms during the financial crisis. It was found that analysts trying to shore up the markets had the highest motivation levels of their careers during 18-hour work days. Military veterans talked about their highest-stakes days in the same way. For the same reasons today, you see that rather than sit at home, many citizens are organizing volunteer bike courier clubs. Fitness instructors are leading classes from their rooftops or streaming them for free online. Academics are running virtual classrooms and workshops with their students.

It’s important for leaders to follow suit and remember that work can deliver a much needed boost to their teams, even when there’s little choice involved in their work-from-home situation.

The key is resisting the temptation to make work tactical only through strict processes, rules, and procedures. While some degree of boundaries and guidelines help people move quickly, too many create a vicious spiral of demotivation. In such cases, people tend to stop problem-solving and thinking creatively, and instead, do the bare minimum.

If you want your teams to be engaged in their work, you have to make their work engaging.

The most powerful way to do this is to give people the opportunity to experiment and solve problems that really matter. These problems won’t be the same for every team or organization. They may not even be easy to identify at first. Your employees will need your help to do this. Ask them: Where can we deliver amazing service to our customers? What’s broken that our team can fix? What will drive growth even in a time of fear? Why are these problems critical, valuable, and interesting?

Today, collaboratiom with teams across the globe are seizing this way of working. A pharmaceutical company’s clinical trials team is experimenting with ways they can help hospitals prioritize trials and maintain safety during this crisis. Teams across the tech unicorn, Flexport, are generating ideas on how to ship critical goods around the world, keep their clients’ supply chains running, and share tips to keep their suppliers in business. An insurance company is testing ways to prioritize their skyrocketing internal chat volumes and process claims in timely ways. Productivity remains high, and in some cases, improves.

What has made them so successful is that they are not relying solely on giant new programs or approaches that need CEO approval. They are simply finding ways to make sure every single person on their teams feels like they have a challenge that they can help solve. In your own cases, this challenge can range from something as small as how to better greet customers or accommodate new schedules to something as big as moving your previously in-person business online.

Taking This Back to Your Teams

This all may sound great in theory, but if you’re wondering how to start, you’re not alone. Few organizations have been taught how to identify when and where it is OK to experiment with new ways of working — despite the fact that experimentation results in a 45-point increase in employee motivation.

Given today’s challenges with Covid-19, there’s a simple set of recommendations to teams who are working remotely.

First, what you measure is the single strongest signal to your people of what you care about. If you want to show them that you care about their motivation, you can measure it using our online tool or using your own preferred survey tool. Then, have a discussion with them about what might be driving their motivation up or down, and what would be helpful to maximize their motivation and experimentation in the weeks to come.

You might ask questions like: How is the current situation affecting you at the moment? What tips do people have for how to motivate yourself and find play and purpose in the current environment? This is your time to listen and create a safe environment in which everyone can talk.

Here are some suggestions, based on our employee engagement research, on how you can create the best employee experiences possible in this difficult situation.

Create a sense of belonging

·        Communicate, communicate, and communicate. Leading organizations we interviewed have COVID-19 task forces, including a group focusing on employee messaging. The more information you share, the easier employees can cope. You also confirm their value and show your empathy.

·        Solicit ideas. Don’t pretend to know all the answers. Ask your employees for suggestions. That reinforces your commitment to them – plus you are likely to get brilliant ideas you hadn’t considered.

·        Provide guidance. We talked to several companies that are putting their employees in new situations, such as working from home. They have quickly created online guides or short tutorials on topics such as how to use online conferencing tools, how to manage your time while juggling responsibilities at home, coping with isolation, etc. This provides leadership and again demonstrates empathy.

Enable teamwork and collaboration

·        Connect through collaboration. Use whatever tools you have to get people working together to solve problems. For example, social collaboration tools might be second-nature to some and completely foreign to others. Let the natives help the novices get on board (teamwork). Then use the tools to spread collaboration to mitigate the isolation of expanded work-at-home and other unfamiliar situations.

·        Welcome feedback. Not everything will go perfectly. Some people will be critical. Solicit and welcome feedback. A critical component to engagement is employees feeling that they are heard. Soliciting feedback demonstrates your willingness to listen. Also, let employees know how you acted on their suggestions.

Recognize and reward good work

·        Recognize good work and good deeds. People do extraordinary work and demonstrate astonishing kindness in crises. Make sure to encourage people to recognize each other in whatever ways are available. Management should take extra steps to recognize and, if practical, reward employees for going the extra mile to help colleagues and customers.

Show employees that their work is meaningful

·        Share success stories. Companies are working through a slew of challenges. Show employees their work is meaningful by sharing great outcomes.

·        Help employees cope. Everyone is stressed as the impact of COVID-19 continues to be felt globally. If possible, dedicate a team of people to help employees. For example, one company repurposed a “life events services team” that prepares employees for retirement, maternity leave, medical leave and other circumstances. Those people – plus reallocated staff from HR – now handle virus questions and track people at risk of exposure, helping as needed.

Give employees the freedom and authority to make decisions

·        Trust employees to make decisions. Our world is in flux. It will be impossible to control everything employees do. Give them as much direction as time and circumstance allow, welcome questions, then allow them to do their jobs. Let employees know you trust them. It will help you get through this and will carry over when the crisis subsides.

Seize the moment

Collectively, these actions can go a long way to reinforce your employees’ trust for the organization and improve their impressions based on how you react in the face of crisis and uncertainty.

The context of engagement, keeping employees motivated, and the overall employee experience has changed dramatically over the last couple of weeks, but the opportunity and importance remain. Seize the moment.

Adapted from the works of Claude Werder and Chana Perton