Why Your Manager Doesn’t Want You To Work From Home!

Marshall McLuhan predicted back in the 1970’s with pretty much accuracy the role internet would be playing in our lives at the turn of the century. The world becoming a ‘Global Village’ due to its interconnectedness with the ability to reach almost anybody and everybody in an instant, less of physical and more of digital socialising, the shrinking of the world due to modern advances in communications, you say it, he’d talked about it. Indeed, much of it has come true and tracing its manifestation in the modern labor force, it is increasingly becoming mobile, collaborative and dynamic. According to Stacey Epstein, CEO of Zinc, today's workforce comprises of multi-generations and all having diverse communication preferences. Having said that, the recent trend of asking employees to start coming back to offices instead of telecommuting has raised a few eyebrows, as it is against the anticipatory expectations of many labor speculators. Yahoo, Bank of America, Aetna — and, most recently, IBM, have reduced or completely eliminating their telecommuting programs.

What's brewing in the WFH cauldron

Work from home is on the rise, people are preferring it, however, the industry has been slow to react to such a change. Why is that? Are the managers to blame, or the workers don’t really perform from home as they should. Millennials, it has been reported, would even sacrifice a part of their salaries for the option of working from home. Miscellaneous problems encountered here on the managerial end, and this article primarily talks about that. Many managers feel that employees are missing out on updates from being away from the workplace, or are not being able to participate in process of decision making. We often hear managers say that ‘I need my employees here in the office, and that is just how collaboration and teamwork spring up from! Limited scope of innovation is another reason often supplanted, along with the claim that realization of ideas takes a long time due to a lack of face to face communication.

Lack of Trust

The real reason why companies are pulling the plug from work from home is that managers at all levels are fearful of change and especially fearful of change that requires them to step out of their comfort zone. A leader whose employees work from home or from Starbucks has to trust their teammates. Managerial leaders are known to revert to measures of power and control mechanisms for assuaging their fears, including forcing people to drive a car or take a train to work every day, just so that their supervisors can keep an eye on them. These and many other control mechanisms keep the leader's fear at bay!

The ideology and the archaic mode of working!

According to a Zogby Analytics study, close to two-fifths of workers attested to the infrastructural failures of their company in providing mobile communication tools for the organization. One could easily sense the slightly outdated means of performing day to day operations, such as bulletin boards and phone trees and other fashioned tactics preferred on the management’s part. The employees, on the contrary, prefer texts, Skype and Facebook Messenger as their main forms of communication. This lack of messaging platforms and technologies affects company communication. While 71 percent of managers feel up to date on work news, only 40 percent of staff feel the same.

According to Epstein: Consequently, information gets lost as individuals, teams, and management utilize different means of communication. Further, the enterprise is at risk collaboration and exchange of information are happening on insecure and untrusted platforms. This right here above is a primary reason for companies to call back their workforce into the ‘expensive’ office spaces.

The Road Ahead

The percentage of remote workforce expanded from 39 percent in 2012 to 43 percent in 2016, according to Gallup’s recent “State of the American Workplace study of US labor pool. And the 2017 Deloitte Millennial Survey found that 64 percent of millennials (who now make up the largest portion of the workforce) work from “flexible locations” as against 43 percentage the year before. To be honest, here, companies just cannot escape the ‘Work from Home’ culture, and rather need to embrace it. One of the easiest of managerial adjustments in this context could be, implementing a company-wide set of communication standards for simplifying the process for their workers, and issuing guidelines defining the apps and mediums for communications.

Conclusion

Contemporary organisations need to adjust and improve upon their remote work policies and capabilities. If a company is concerned about productivity and performance issues, creating standard key performance indicators (KPIs) for both management and employees indulging in work from home seems a decent resort. This way, remote team members are aware of expectations, and their realistic performance can be monitored.