WFH can be a mental challenge for managers but it’s here to stay
Originally published in The Mandarin
WFH is largely dependent on trust. (ake1150/Adobe)
I’m a lifelong advocate of work-hard play-hard, get it done and then get out of there. I started out in newspapers and magazines overseas, where you did your work and met expectations or you were fired. No one was watching your time, just your delivery.
You were rewarded with time for your efficiency, promoted for quality, and if you needed to, were able to take longer to achieve the same thing. It was a very transparent system — paid for delivery, and the delivery criteria were very clear.
So, you can imagine the culture shock when my first APS manager lost his temper several times because I had no concept of ‘core hours’. It made no sense that my value to the organisation would be measured by the time I sat at a desk, during ‘core hours’, even if there was nothing for me — or my colleagues — to do.
Well not everyone just sat there; some people were quite inventive. One started and then operated a successful courier company from his APS 5 desk; another had a monthly smoking routine near the fire alarm (at around 2.30 on a Friday), at which point we all evacuated the building and dispersed into the weekend; and another gained a post-grad qualification in statistics while I was there.
Looking at the ‘core hours’ approach, it may have given managers a sense of control, but it also screamed a lack of so many critical elements of good management: clear shared direction; clear roles, responsibilities and accountabilities; clear expectations, performance and success criteria.
If we accept that compliant timesheets (or being seen in the office) rarely directly correlate to productivity, performance and achievement of organisational goals, and we accept that getting this right in the ‘old world’ was difficult enough — then how do we tackle the challenges of performance and productivity in the new world of ‘work-from-home’?
Start with the definition
When someone asks or expects to work from home, what do they really mean?
A recent current affairs program interviewed someone who was struggling to find work. They were looking for a position where they could work from home so they could look after their child. That’s actually what they said, even though it may not be exactly what they meant. I can only guess that they meant they would like to work flexibly, while still meeting the full requirements of the role — or did they?
So, if you’re having a WFH conversation with a team member, have the detailed conversation to make sure you have a shared understanding of what it really means. If they want their work-life balance to tip more towards life, then have the conversation about part-time role options. It’s still relatively early days with seemingly lots of room for interpretation.
Follow by the requirements of the role
If you can’t be very clear with your team members on the outcomes you are asking them to support, their specific role and responsibilities in contributing to those outcomes, possibly what you expect and require in terms of deliverables, what success looks like and how you will both measure this, then managing a WFH workforce with confidence is likely to be challenging and frustrating.
As a manager you need performance, and if you are only planning to measure that in units of ‘hours worked at home where I can’t see you’, you’re leaving the door open for some fun and games. I hear the crowds roar in protest — “but what about trust?”. If your experience gives you confidence that this will work for you, in the absence of clear expectations etc, then give it a run.
Our business runs on trust (and project time tracking), underpinned by very clear expectations around quality, timeliness and the support available if you are having trouble meeting these. We operate on a very flexible model, as long as quality and timeliness are not compromised, and we have rituals to ensure that we establish and maintain shared understandings around these.
Then consider the requirements of the team
As a manager you need more than individual performances, you also need collaborative, cooperative, collective performance, where complementary skillsets deliver greater results. Some WFH models don’t yet support this, and it doesn’t happen by accident.
In our work, quality is always improved through collaboration so we have multiple mechanisms in place to ensure that the collective capability is leveraged. In the beginning, many of these can seem artificial, forced, or even cumbersome but over time they become the way you work, in support of and supported by your dispersed team.
As a team member, once the novelty of WFH wears off, the need for connection creeps in — for most people anyway. We’re humans, and isolation is not good for us. Managers play a key role here, once again in establishing mechanisms that help and encourage your team to connect as people, and these too may seem artificial in the beginning. I can think of five ways we proactively connect in a week — beyond our project collaborations. As a militant introvert, even I would miss these rituals, and I fully appreciate the value and depth of these personal connections when the pressure hits us.
Most people love the concept of WFH-or-wherever. It makes sense, and it works well when there is no ambiguity about what is required, what success looks like, and what happens if a person doesn’t deliver.
As a manager, if you set these simple conditions with your team members, create the collaboration and connection infrastructure into your daily practice, and can have the difficult conversation if someone doesn’t deliver, you’re probably loving it too.
