Working from home and the Monitor vs Motivate Dilemma

Working from home creates new managerial challenge - Motivate rather than Monitor

The Covid era brought many employees to work from home, either partially or fully.

What previously was something inconceivable, today became a reality that many managers struggle with. How do I find the balance between monitoring my subordinates and their work and motivating them to be more responsible, more accountable, more productive?

This has to do a lot with intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation.

In the “prehistorical pre-Covid” era we were used to see our employees behind their desks, thinking they were working hard and producing (which was not necessarily true - 77% of workers use social media at work, and the average employee spends 12% of their working hours using unproductive social media applications, according to a research reported by Chris Kolmar from Zippia).

Today managers struggle to monitor the work and conscientiousness of their employees. According to Harvard Business Review (“Remote Managers Are Having Trust Issues” - July 30, 2020) this leads to managers starting to micro-manage, which leads, of course, to less motivation rather to more from the side of the employees.

While, of course, money and benefits are important, they are not the only motivating factors for employees. In fact, a recent study found that the most motivational factors for employees are a good work-life balance (21%), peer motivation (20%) and an encouraging boss (15%).

It is in these three areas that managers need to look into and make progress, if they want more motivated remote workers.

Helping your employees or direct reports to have a better life-work balance has to be inspired by at least two things: your own personal experience, trial and example to others, and candid, supportive conversations about this topic with them. Such conversations might not be very easy to do, but they bring a great message of trust and care to them, which is so important.

Doing the same with peers, and your direct report's peers will create a butterfly effect that will spread the word around (which flies, anyway – so it'd better fly in the wanted direction) and only do good.

Finally, being an encouraging boss does not cost you anything, but yields a lot of good fruits, try it out! Much has been written about the higher effectiveness of rewards rather than punishments. Research shows that, too.

Encouragement works even better than reward, and much better than punishment. When encouraging the heart, you help people be more brave and daring and committed, and it has more long term effects than rewarding for an action or an accomplishment. It is more of “teaching how (and why) to fish, rather than giving people fish”. As a coach, I prefer teaching how to fish.

We must take the risk of trusting and encouraging our employees! We will be rewarded and encouraged by the result!

Most people do not wake up in the morning intending to sabotage their work place, bosses or their own careers. Then, let us give them at least the credit of doubt, if not much more than that!