Managing without seeing!

During the last year I’ve commented frequently on the employment law related aspects of the #homeworking trend, in blogs, newletters and during advisory calls to our helpline.?

In the early months of the #Covid 19 pandemic businesses were concerned about compliance and housekeeping issues, but have now moved on to longer term sustainability, so here I want to explore some practical tips for managing in this new environment.

Why are we talking about this?

This last year has been described as the world’s largest work from home experiment.?In April nearly 50% of the working population in the UK were working from home, and we can expect similar figures during this (Jan 2021) national lockdown.

There has been much debate about the future of work, and in particular whether we will ever return to the ‘office’ in such numbers as previously.

#Homeworking does not suit every job, or indeed, every person, but my guess is that post the pandemic we will return to a mixed economy of balanced amounts of home working and workplace attendance.

There’s been a paradigm shift in our attitudes.?Yes, I’ve heard a few concerns about productivity decline (although very often the concern is not backed up with evidence), but overwhelmingly I’ve heard expressions of surprise at about how well homeworking works.

Generally speaking, studies suggest that homeworking increases productivity, particularly in creative tasks, although recent research suggests that, hardly surprisingly, productivity at home has gone down during the pandemic.?An ONS study found that 25% of workers believed their productivity had gone down due to homeworking in 2020 (this is likely to be a short term effect influenced by care responsibilities, and for some, having to work at home under duress etc.) - see a summary of some of this data on productivity in a speech by Andy Haldane the Chief Economist at the Bank of England.

One thing is for sure, a poor performer is unlikely to become a good performer just because they work from home.?If issues were not being addressed in the workplace, they are going to be harder to resolve at a distance.

Many businesses have started homeworking arrangements on a ‘needs must’ basis, but we now need to think about how we manage people who we may not see as much as we are traditionally used to.

Here are my top seven management tips.

Guidance for a home working lifestyle.?

Ensure there is guidance and dialogue about how to work from home effectively.?Acknowledge that it is different and may be particularly difficult in current circumstances due to care issues.

In one US company I came across a great line to staff regarding not needing to worry about productively at home, they said ‘doing your best is good enough’.

Talk about issues such as designating space and time for work.?Working flexible hours, in the kitchen or 'WFB', can seem very attractive in the short term, but longer term most of us need a line between our work and personal lives.

If homeworking arises because of care issues, how is this going to be managed.?Have an honest conversation so that there are shared expectations.

Talk about the physical environment.?Not everyone will have space and you will need to address issues such as seating and display screen equipment etc.?One employer I spoke to gave everyone the option of having their office chair delivered to home during the first lockdown.

Encourage exercise and breaks.

Use resources such as #LinkedIn’s Remote Working Course which can be accessed free for a month, or these top ten tips from the #CIPD.

One size does not fit all.?Homeworking is not for everyone.?As well as it not being suitable for every job, it also does not suit every person.

Some people need the stimulus of people around them, or the discipline and social benefits of coming into a workplace.?Sadly for some, attending work is a necessary escape from unsatisfactory domestic circumstances – be sensitive to this.

Some of us have the self-discipline that is necessary, others need external drivers.?When dealing with flexible working requests in normal circumstances, some organisations engage employees in assessing whether homeworking is really for them using a resource such as this questionnaire available from the CIPD.

Replace the photocopier/coffee machine/water cooler.?These machines are great at their primary function, but they are also good for encouraging informal interaction that will not take place when large numbers of people are working at home.

Think about virtual coffee breaks – Shoreditch based data science company Profusion used AI to build a ‘Russian Roulette Coffee’ system to pair employees that normally have little contact with each other.

Another technology led solution is to use the ‘chat’ features in applications such as Microsoft Teams, Facebook Hubs, or dedicated apps such as Slack (a sort of in-house Whatsapp!).?Some of these tools (Trello is a good example) can also assist with increasing the transparency of what people are doing so that everyone knows what is going on, and how their work fits in with their colleagues.

Other brands are available!

Virtual social events such as quizzes, cookery classes, scavenger hunts, escape rooms, karaoke and even wine tastings have been popular.

Stephanie Hague-Evans, People Director at Fizzbox, a Brighton based experience marketplace that branched out into virtual events during the first national lockdown, comments:

‘We’ve seen a rapid uptake in virtual experiences, with a 300% increase in demand over recent months, and great feedback from our corporate customers about the positive impact of these events on staff morale and engagement levels. The focus for these businesses has moved away from the concept of teambuilding, towards the simple need for - and value of - connection.’

Above all, make sure that managers take their responsibility to communicate and stay in contact with their staff seriously.?Daily ‘huddles’ are a great idea and avoid excessive use of emails for things you would normally deal with in person - see more on this theme at RescueTime.

Also don’t forget that important though communications is, you may have to create protected time slots where everyone agrees not to make contact so that people can get their heads down in work they need to concentrate on.

Get better at meetings.

A warning, meetings do not always have to use video calling.

They have increasingly become the norm, with a ‘Zoom Meeting’ being the way to describe any sort of online video meeting in the same way as all vacuum cleaners used to be referred to as ‘hoovers’.

Old fashioned conference calls can be just as effective, and don’t have the disadvantage of the intrusiveness of a video call when the person is at home.

All the usual rules of effective meetings apply to virtual events, but there are extras:-

• Speak slower than usual and try to vary pitch and volume (there’s a tendency for some of us to shout a lot!)
• Headsets and earphones can improve quality
• Referee to ensure everyone gets a chance to speak – use the ‘hands up’ feature, ask people for their views (it’s very easy to be passive in a video meet) etc.
• Use people’s names more than you might do normally
• Repeat questions to ensure everyone understands
• Be disciplined about timing.

Manage outputs not inputs.

Now this is the Holy Grail – easily said by HR/performance management professionals, but not so easy to do in practice.

Traditionally much of our management has been focused on inputs which often have been about staff being present and on time etc.

Now we have to think about the outputs from their role.?It can be useful to share expectations about what the outputs from each person’s role are.?

Useful performance related questions might be to ask what would not happen if their job did not exist, who else depends on your contribution and what do they expect, or, if you are looking back on a good/bad day, what does it look like?

You’ll also have to work harder at ensuring people understand the big picture, because they won’t pick it up informally in the way they might do in the office.

There's a great guide for helping managers think about their role in the new normal at 'Ten Top Tips: Managing remote teams'.

Understand wellbeing

Early research from the Institute for Employment Studies into the health impacts of lockdown suggest increases in fatigue, musculoskeletal conditions, poor work life balance, reduced exercise and increased alcohol consumption.

At the very least, managers need to be alert to these issues, particularly in relation to distributed workers.?

There’s a ‘People managers guide to mental health at work’ on the CIPD website, and a great table on page 21 about spotting the signs of poor mental health (a two minute read that all managers should undertake).

Managers need to get used to reading between the lines, and that means all managers, not just the CEOs.

I’ve recently met quite a few SME CEOs taking on the wellbeing of all their employees instead of making sure that every manager is on the lookout for warning signs.?In the same research quoted above, 26% of respondents said they continued to work at home whilst unwell during this pandemic.

Again here, there are tech solutions that can help you monitor the wellbeing or engagement levels of your teams.?Business speaker and CEO of ‘clever stuff for babies’ provider Cosatto Ltd, and long time proponent of flexible working, Andrew Kluge raves about Tinypulse:-

“I absolutely love Tinypulse because it allows the team to anonymously and honestly tell me what I need to know about what is happening in the business – the good, the bad and the downright ugly. It also allows me to respond to that feedback individually as well as collectively, which shows that I am actually listening to them and that is incredibly powerful”

Don’t ditch the office.?

Whilst work may never be the same again, those who are writing the eulogies for the office are doing so prematurely.

I doubt whether the ways of working during the pandemic are a workable model for long term individual and organisational health.?The workspace will remain an important place for social contact, collaboration and creativity, and their may be real tensions where organisations become divided into those who have to attend, and those who can work elsewhere.

The workspace of the future may look very different, with the emphasis on individual work stations replaced by collaborative spaces.

Finally, you may have noticed that I headed this blog with a reference to ‘distributed’ workforces.?I deliberately avoided the more popular word ‘remote’.

My unashamed inspiration for this is a TED talk by @MattMullenberg, the Wordpress Co-founder.?Take a look at this 4 minutes of inspiration.

The challenge for managers is to ensure that homeworking does not mean remote working.?For the future we have to turn the necessity created by #Covid 19 into a virtue.

Ken Allison | 8th January 2021 | Paradigm Partners | www.paradigmpartners.co.uk

Ken Allison is an engaging trainer and speaker who manages to make his topics, highly interactive, challenging, entertaining, and above all, relevant to the 21st Century executive.

Ken uses his understanding of managing businesses to show managers what they ‘can do’ rather than what they ‘cannot do’.

Ken specialises in taking the strain out of employment law related and performance management people issues through training workshops for managers, and his firm’s ‘ExecutiveHR’ service, providing telephone based support services to businesses throughout the UK.