The remote working reality: are you thinking ahead?

When re-organising resources, we increasingly find that whilst many old roles are being dropped, often new roles are emerging. For those in roles that are being discontinued, it goes without saying that any redundancy must relate to the role, not the person. When selecting from a number of people in the same or similar roles these, I believe are the ones who will be most at risk:

People …

• with the wrong skills
• in the wrong jobs (wrong skills for the role they are doing)
• who don’t pull their weight – minimal effort kind of people
• who refuse or fail to adapt
• with limited potential
• with bad attitude or who simply don’t care
• who are ‘invisible’

I said in early 2020 – that remote working will end in tears. Not for everyone, but for some it will. And I’m talking about organisations, as well as employees.

The Jaluch team was already doing some remote working pre 2020, so we were well-prepared. As a manager, I had already observed that while some thrive at home, free from the constant distractions of an open-plan office, a fair number of people are far from thriving when working remotely. I even recall one employee telling a colleague she had missed my call because she was gardening!

We are all complex human beings…

An additional complexity, of course, is that Kevin, this week’s supercharged home worker, could easily become Kevin, the ‘battery drained’ home worker next week when a mountain of personal issues suddenly lands on his plate. After all, we’re all human!

Whether it’s the sun beckoning (relatively unlikely in the UK), a child who needs collecting from school, a partner who needs you to run an errand, a new relationship blooming, a carrot that needs peeling, an optician’s appointment or the new tyre needed on the car, the list of distractions whilse at home are huge.

How many of us can genuinely maintain great focus with all that going on?

Even people who tell the rest of us that they have it cracked, still jump up from video calls to answer the door, speak to the plumber or berate their kids walking in without taking their shoes off! They see how others are distracted, but perhaps don’t recognise it in themselves?

But don’t get me wrong here, I’m a fan of home working and it’s fantastic when it works well, as it can do. It’s also really important to remember that regular two-three minute screen breaks can be really good for us and don’t damage productivity unless you are one of those rare employers that demand an unrealistic and probably unfair 100% focus each and every day.

Successful and effective remote working

In a team that has great work ethic, good communication, good relationships and high integrity and accountability, home working creates huge opportunities for everyone with each team member flexing and adapting to what is required, taking time out sometimes, but making time up at other times. The only problem is that’s a pretty rare team.

Read through the list below, how many apply to your current team right now?

• Great work ethic
• Good communication
• Good relationships
• High integrity
• High accountability

How did you fare?

And if you did this again but thinking about each individual team member at a time, what insight would it give you into where your management challenges lie?

Not so effective remote working

Recently I read that Keir Starmer has endorsed remote working. Excellent. I’m curious though as to the extent of his checking into remote working behaviours before he made his statement or does he just like it ‘on principle’?

If you ask around for examples of behaviours when home working, you will hear an endless succession of stories of people having a lie in, watching TV, gaming, holding down a second full time job, being out and about with friends etc. all whilst supposedly working. We even read about quiet vacationing, where remote workers just log off and go on holiday without authorisation as though this is a reflection on management’s poor behaviours, rather than their own lack of integrity.

And let’s not be deluded that this is an employee problem as from what I can tell, as many managers are taking advantage of this new world of work as the employees they manage. Senior managers too – this has become an epidemic of distraction and laziness in some organisations. So much for leaders being great role models! My best tip regarding this is start managing from the top downwards!

While it’s important not to do a disservice to remote workers with great integrity and accountability, for far too many, putting their feet up instead of working has become the norm, not the exception. Many don’t even try to hide it, as I saw recently when a news team took their cameras into Reading city centre to interview remote workers leisurely enjoying coffee with friends. Anyone who believes remote working is a roaring success is either ignoring the problems or lacks an understanding of what it takes to build a successful organisation that will still be thriving in 10 years’ time.

A fatal flaw in our thinking?

Is perhaps the fatal flaw in our decision making and management of remote workers that we, by and large, trust too much? I read recently that …

• 6M people in the UK –  1 in 5 of our employees – are using self-checkouts to steal from shops
• 48% believe that shoplifting should not be treated as a criminal act and
• 26% believe that stealing something of low value should not be considered any kind of offence.

I read recently of a doctor who took sick pay from her hospital only to be accepting shifts at other hospitals. Theft is theft, however you have decided to ‘normalise’ it in your head.

Take a minute to look again at these statistics about the basic honesty of adults in the UK and reflect on how they might show up in the workplace of today. I think we need to take steps to ‘limit’ the temptations available when it comes to taking money for hours that simply have not been worked – let’s help our employees be more honest.

But now let’s talk about consequences because for every action there is a consequence. It might not always be obvious or immediate, but life generally deals out consequences. Let’s look at consequences in the context of the next business reorganisation.

The consequences of our behaviours

I’ve submitted a claim to the small claims court. I first phoned for advice on it in January. No one picked up. I then emailed. 8 weeks later I got a 2 line email back saying please send a letter to the judge. So I did that. 12 weeks later I got a letter back asking for clarification of a couple of points and asking me to resend. I did that. Now it’s nearing September and I still haven’t formally had the claim accepted, let alone scheduled for a hearing. This process used to take just weeks. What has changed? Clearly there has been a lot of personnel changes in recent years resulting in knowledge walking out of the door, but we also know that there has been a huge shift to remote working for public sector workers.

When you work so little and so slowly that the service you are delivering comes to a standstill, then there will be consequences. For me, the individual unmanaged behaviours of a small group of people have resulted in an erosion of my confidence in the justice system in the UK, the small claims court to be precise. When its just me, it probably doesn’t matter, but when it becomes the same for 10,000 people what happens then? I don’t need to spell it out, but eroding confidence of our customers seldom ends well for the organisation and its staff…a grumble becomes a complaint becomes an avalanche.

I suspect the consequences in the public sector will be limited as they’re propped up financially, but its going to be very different in the private sector. We should be under no illusions about that.

When you are remote, and do very little or don’t communicate much and seldom have your camera on, whilst it might look all sunny and rosy today because you have money in the bank for minimal effort, these are the likely long term unintended consequences:

• Erosion of both skill set and confidence, leading to lack of personal /career growth
• Increased mental health issues and reduced social wellbeing due to isolation
• Reduced access to training and others’ awareness of your training needs
• Stagnation of skill building across the whole team leading to reduced employability
• Working on tasks that have become redundant, no longer important
• Your value to business reduces or is annihilated (worst case scenario)
• Few opportunities come your way to do new or different work and few opportunities emerge for you to develop relationships and network at work
• Deteriorating relationships with some colleagues and customers leading potentially to conflict and mental wellbeing issues
• Failure to achieve your own potential
• Whole team makes itself defunct as its out of date, not changing and complacent

Selection criteria and scoring: how would remote workers fare?

If Jaluch advised your organisation on the selection criteria for your next reorganisatsion,  how will your current remote workers fare if our suggestions are:

• Regularly seeks out new opportunities to develop skills and bring value to team and organisation – give example/s
• Effective communicator, is proactive in communicating and communicates effectively with manager, customers and colleagues – give example/s
• A known problem solver and/or innovator – provide example/s
• A role model when it comes to customer or internal service, encourages high standards in others – provide example/s of role modelling
• High outputs, regularly exceeds outputs of others (eg customer interactions successfully managed) – provide data or observations
• Highly accountable for own workload and steps in to ensure wider team success as necessary – manager’s assessment of their accountability and provide example/s
• A can-do, positive attitude to work and team– example/s

Perhaps not today or tomorrow, but there will be consequences for those who ‘check out’ of work.  

Consequences for the organisation

And consequences for the organisation if you don’t manage this withdrawal of effort? A slow erosion of your:

• brand, credibility and revenue
• ability to innovate and adapt
• market/customer/investor confidence
• customer service
• employees’ confidence in your managers’ ability to manage those who undermine the success of the rest.

It’s astonishing how one day you can tick all the boxes for being an employee-centric employer, only to find that next year you are facing the consequences of being so focused on doing what makes you popular with your staff, and the PR accolades that come with that, that you have damaged your own business.

5 top tips for re-setting standards and expectations

Not happy to face these consequences? Here are our 5 top tips which, contrary to popular belief, may well be welcomed by most of your employees:

• Be clear on your organisational vision and the values that support that.
• Identify where values are not aligned or not being delivered on and create a plan of action to rectify that – including taking tough action where that is required
• Create/identify role models in the senior team for future thinking and work ethic and manage out those in senior roles who undermine your work in this area – you can’t afford to have people who hold you back and equally you can’t afford to forget to shout about those who are already doing great things.
• Move down to the more junior team members….reset vision and values (including expected behaviours) through communication and open sessions. Set out why this is important plus the consequences of failure to do what is required and why this is needed – remember that poor/bad attitude is a personal choice and not something we are born with – therefore an act of potential misconduct.
• Its time to really manage your people – firm but fair. To achieve this train your managers so they are both competent (knowledgeable) and confident and able to manage, or manage out, those who are falling short.

Not all remote working is ‘bad’ and when it works well its fantastic. But sloppy practices have been creeping in and too many managers don’t have the knowledge and confidence to manage the ‘slop’ which is increasingly damaging organisations.  

Are you prepared to risk that?

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