Managing during a 7-week lockdown

I have often wondered how my work has changed with the lockdown that COVID has been imposing on us for the past 7 weeks and what was the role of the manager in this very special period.

Handicap International / Humanity & Inclusion is used to distance management, Skype meetings and videoconferences. The pace of teleworking fo all quickly became the new normality after a first week of astonishment. The pleasure of working with my flip-fop came with new constraints imposed by the distance management: the fact to be deprived of direct contact with colleagues, peers and management, a direct contact that video can't completely replaced.

Lockdown has been a huge accelerator of digitalization, imposing new ways of distance working in a collaborative way, beyond teleconferencing. The manager must ensure that all employees adhere to these methods and that no one is left on the sidelines of this transformation.

Sharing information is key: in an organisation that can sometimes operate in silos, it is essential to circulate information, create links and fill in the informal spaces that used to exist in the office (the famous coffee machine break, which regulates our moods and disseminate also the rumours). The feeling of loneliness or isolation can easily lurk when one finds oneself alone for whole days in front of one's computer. New interactions have to be reinvented, from the morning e-coffee to the virtual link on WhatsApp, to all the more formal meetings: crisis cells, team meetings... However, this new tools require respect for privacy and a good separation between the private and professional spheres, which is not always easy when the computer is installed in the bedroom.

Several articles dealing with telework raise the issue of the control that some managers want to be able to continue to exercise over their employees. This control is not the indispensable complement of delegation but a way of testing the involvement of colleagues during their working hours at home. The exceptional situation created by the crisis, where telework is not a choice, but is sometimes imposed in complex family contexts (limited space, children around you...) implies accepting a slightly degraded way of working. This may explain why control has not had to be exercised in a strict way. But above all, I believe that trust is the key word: I have the chance to work with an involved and committed team, with whom it has never been a question to exercise any control over working hours, but rather of securing the means to achieve the results we have set ourselves together.

May 11 will not be the end of the lockdown, nor will it be the end of normality. It will mean new forms of work, maintaining physical distance and probably for a time teleworking. We will have to take a step back to analyse what remains positive from this professional experience and to build on the improvements in our new simplified practices and processes (and I am not talking about the challenge of rethinking our society and our world). But this "new normal" that awaits us, with its constraints and barriers, must not distract us from the social being that we are. I am looking forward to regaining the real and not virtual interaction with my colleagues that I was already longing for on the first day of confinement.