What have we learnt from Covid about managers and remote work.

What have we learnt from Covid, but also, what have we learnt from the lockdown? Sometimes I wonder. With this piece of writing I don’t mean to be nostalgic towards the Covid-19 pandemic at all, and I am sadly aware of all the lifes it has taken, but I am nostalgic of how people sometimes were during the lockdown. That self-reflection and the forced pause from the constant pursuit, the perpetual hustle, and the need to continually prove oneself, and the evidence that we can be productive no matter where we are . Nature seemed to breathe more, and there was a widespread awareness that change was necessary. People confined to small spaces undoubtedly yearned for more freedom and experienced challenges in maintaining their mental well-being, but for a moment I felt we could just be us.

Now I look around and I feel there has never been so much anxiety or longing for something: people of all ages are searching for more meaning, but at the same time they are constantly connected and stressed out, feeling guilty when they are not connected, and the memory of a more conscious change like during lockdown seems so far away.

Am I the only one feeling this way?? At workplaces, there is still so much discussion on how to adjust to working styles, and many leaders still don’t feel totally comfortable with people working remotely. In September I shared an article on LinkedIn that tackles what the next step for companies would be regarding the topic of diversity and inclusion: Where Does DEI Go from Here? (hbr.org) and again it was mentioned that people are more burnt out than ever. One freedom seemed to be particularly lacking: the freedom to step back sometimes, the opportunity of not having to be in the spotlight for a moment, so I immediately thought about remote work. Some leaders feel truly uncomfortable with having people working from home and sometimes allowing them not to be in the spotlight.

And, as I let go of the loss I feel now towards times in which the world was understanding what really matters, I think many leaders might want to let go of? control and start thinking how to deal with not physically see your employees sometimes. What if we could deal with controlling less and trust more? Precisely the thing that we were forced to do during Covid. Many people don’t see it, but we have gone through this already! We can do this.

In Italy we have something called timbrare il cartellino, which comes from the act of “checking in” at work with a sort of card (like the ones we would use nowadays for hotels, but office employees in the 90s used a paper card, for both desk and labor jobs), and they had to do it both at arrival and at finishing time, so the expression timbrare il cartellino has come to mean that aspect of work where you basically are present, but you are not actually doing quality work. A high representative of this for the Italian nationals was Fantozzi, who was the emblem of an oppressed workforce where authority was sacred and nothing was challenged. And he was doing paperwork, of course here we don’t talk about works that need to happen in person such as logistics manager or so. Here you can see the Italian act of “timbrare cartellino”: Fantozzi timbra il cartellino - YouTube. Nowadays is different: we have sufficient evidence to prove that quality work is more important than quantity and we have learnt more about trust and cooperation. Here an important learning that Covid given us: ?that it is possible to work productively from anywhere, provided there is an open communication; and we also know how to balance presence and distance a bit better.

If managers struggle to cope with the absence of physical presence and fail to cultivate trust and adapt, can we, as managers, handle this new form of communication? Specifically, can we candidly address our feelings regarding a particular employee's behavior? Can we say something like “I saw you were not online. That was working hours; can you share with me how you are organizing the time? It’s not to control you. It is to be aligned and open to each other”. Why is that still so difficult? The amazing article of Mortensen about remote work really talks about that too: the need to understand how to organize work from home around 5 W: Tension Is Rising Around Remote Work (hbr.org) and again, this is all about communicating correctly and learn how to do it. Another important aspect is to stop fearing difficult conversations and prepare for them. I recently placed a new freebie on my website which contains some of the steps that I use to prepare people and teams to do so.

If it comes down to a difficult conversation with a report about how we have imagined the work from home, we can prepare by being clear of professional values, by understanding what is important for the employees on a values perspective too, and trying to find a compromise. We don’t want to go back to timbrare cartellino phase anymore.