Remote Work or Remote Control

Covid-19 has been the world’s biggest work from home experiment. And in many places, even after the lockdown, there is a good chance that a chunk of the workforce may start believing that going to the office on ALL DAYS of the week is NOT necessary to be able to pull off work. After all, travel is a big part of our work lives and not many are happy about it. On the other hand, many would like the idea of taking care of family while being able to work from home versus everyday dividing time between office and home. 

Interestingly, when one of our Board members, who runs a large IT Services company, called over the weekend, asking about how we were counseling our customers on these new ways of working and managing, I highlighted the following 3 things: 

1. Building a culture of trust: Traditionally, “The default for most companies is that they don’t trust you. Managers end up micro-managing.”  In a remote or hybrid working environment, trust is critical. And trusting people and treating them as adults becomes important 
2. Which are the ‘helpful’ distractions that can be done away with? Companies have all these “helpful” tools and platforms to connect digitally. Some of these tools are essential to getting daily stuff done, but some are just noise.
3. Are the Managers and Meetings still dragging productivity? Are the managers enabling remote work or wanting a remote control? Are they still judging someone negatively by the number of breaks, social media time or the hours someone puts in.

At the end we concluded (in some of the most non-conclusive times :))

“Some businesses are seeing this as a “one of” and are waiting for April 15 to figure it out. Others are taking the experiment seriously and are critically figuring out how to make this work in the long term as this will be an irreversible trend for the future of work globally” 

Our world has changed faster than we anticipated – and this Work from Home and Managing from Home is here to stay (even after the lockdown). Of course not everyday, but for some days or many days of a month! And our managers need to be prepared to enable remote work instead of being the remote control. 

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