As public health officials across the world are attempting to stem the flow of new Corona virus cases, social isolation measures are being introduced. Whole countries are on lock down, social and sporting events are being cancelled and, crucially, larger employers are beginning to ask their employees to work from home. Is your company becoming a remote workforce employer now? If it is, as a leader you may be feeling anxious about how to manage your team throughout this process.
It may be the case that your organisation simply hasn’t had the opportunity to prepare for what Time Magazine is calling the World’s Largest Work-From-Home Experiment. In this Guide to successful COVID-19 remote working, I am giving you some essential tips to keep the ship afloat and avoid some of the pitfalls.
Clarity of task and outcome is more important now than ever before
Remote working is the quickest way for you to learn how clear you have been with goal setting. While everyone is sat together and you are there to keep things chugging along, you may not have realised that no one is working on their own initiative to a set of defined outcomes.
Now is the time to re-establish short term areas of focus with all your team members. In these extremely unusual circumstances, make sure to include all team members in a who-is-doing-what summary briefing.
Make expectations clear by breaking down the outcomes into distinct tasks. “You need to have achieved this specific thing, to this example standard, by this defined date”.
Don’t be concerned about offending anyone here, be tactful but direct when you explain that remote working is unchartered territory and requires unusual leadership techniques. A ‘We’re all in this together’ approach will ensure everyone is pulling in the same direction. Be sure to give as much detail as possible.
Digital Dilemma
Having been thrust into remote working with little preparation, you may be facing an equipment shortfall and information bottleneck. The key to successful remote work has been studied in some depth at the University of California. Professor Olson identifies that emulating the office environment closely in equipment and work groups is essential. This means giving them the equipment to be able to collaborate as freely as possible. Google Docs or similar programs are fantastic for this and readily available.
It would be very prudent to develop a new confidentiality policy which recognises how extraordinary the current situation is and gives clear boundaries for what can be shared on non-proprietary work platforms. Strike a balance between keeping confidential information away from software that does not encrypt data, but allowing collaboration over freely available conference software.
Establish good relationships
If you haven’t already developed strong working relationships with your team, now is the time to ramp up the effort in this regard. It may be the case that you are very busy, but now more than ever your employees need to know you are there. Make regular phone check-ins and ensure you are available as much as possible on any collaboration software.
Your check-ins should comprise an initial welfare check off the bat. This is essential to show you are aware that this is a testing time for everyone. After that, simply reviewing where they are currently against projected outcomes is plenty. As you all bed into the process, you’ll start to identify who needs more support.
Risk Assess Loneliness
In many cases, employees have trouble adjusting to the isolation of remote working and this too needs to be managed. Isolation caused by lack of ready access to work colleagues, materials and information can have a detrimental effect on your team’s mental health and wellbeing. The emotional response of loneliness was stated as ‘the biggest struggle’ by 21% of responders to a recent Buffer study of 1,900 remote workers around the world.
Unless your organisation has one already, to meet your obligations under workplace safety Legislation, you will need to produce a risk assessment for these new circumstances.
Discuss the isolation factors with your employees and put simple measures in place to mitigate them wherever you can. Ensure information and materials are readily available by establishing digital networks and unmanned physical stores if necessary.
Establish an ongoing conversation with each team member, where regular welfare checks are made, ask them, “Is working from home causing you any distress? Is it too quiet at home? Are you feeling left out?”
Keep a note in a diary or somewhere confidential of each of the conversations and make sure that you take their answers into account when considering their levels of performance over time. Seek advice from your HR department, or in smaller companies seek external help if you have concerns.
Communication expansion
To tackle isolation on an emotional level, ensure your team members don’t feel cut off from you and the rest of the team. Recognition of their achievements needs and concerns must be overtly communicated to them now. The distance factor means that your traditional communication channels are no longer anywhere near adequate.
Where you would have sent one collective email, individualising the communication is now essential. An email addressed to everyone will seem impersonal and easily overlooked, but individually addressed emails make sure the employee feels included in business.
Plan for more conference calls too to account for simple social exchanges that would have otherwise taken place around the water cooler. Be far more diligent about proactive communication with each team member and be sure to record how the exchanges went. Keeping the energy levels of the team high is now your priority. Being sat at home around things that they don’t usually associate with a working environment can easily lead to distractions and loss of momentum.
Whilst regular progress checks are essential, it is also wise to make it clear to everyone that document sharing is expected from the outset. Simply telling me that a piece of work is very nearly finished is easy but sharing it as the day bounces along focusses the mind more sharply.
Solidarity and self-care
Its not just team members who will be finding it tough to adjust to these new arrangements. You and other members of the organisation with leadership responsibilities will be affected by this shift in practice.
You’ll no doubt be anxious that you’ll be held accountable for drops in performance or negative impacts on team members. Being removed from a position of immediate oversite will mean that your ability to successfully coach and engage with your teams will be affected.
More cynical managers may struggle to trust workers to perform in this new environment. All these concerns will mean that you need new management strategies, most of which you will be unfamiliar with.
Pull together and offer support to one another where it is needed. Simply sharing knowledge and approaches that you have found to work will help but establishing higher tier communication groups is also essential. Make sure you have people outside of your immediate team that you can sense check your thoughts and actions with. Remember, the person in your team who is more isolated than most… is you.
Over to you!
Have you got any suggestions for the best ways to lead a remote working team? As you can see from the post, at letsworkhealthy.com we are giving simple practical help to leaders wherever we can. We would love to hear your thoughts on the tips in this article, so it would be great if you could leave some comments below!
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Greg Bennett is a Public Health Professional and
Leadership Coach
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