13 minute read
The management challenges: The 5 questions you should be asking
by CMI_
Adam Gale
1. What are the downsides?
The upsides of remote working are fairly clear. For a lot of people, though certainly not all, it improves the efficiency with which they do certain tasks, as well as their work/life balance.
One of the primary critiques is that while remote working may work in the short term – because everyone already knows how to work with each other – over time it erodes the relationships that glue organisations together.
Kevin Ellis, chair and senior partner at PwC UK, says this is a particular problem for the 1,800 school-leavers and graduates that the professional services giant recruits each year, many of whom have never experienced working in an office full-time. “They won’t know how much you learn by observation. How do you build rapport? How do you run a meeting? How do you gather the views in the room and judge how comfortable everybody is, from the most junior to the most senior person? That peripheral vision is really hard to learn from a textbook,” he says.
New starters will also be less likely to meet people outside their teams, leading to the creation of silos and impoverishing their professional networks. Even seasoned employees can find communication a problem without those moments of impromptu interaction that happen in the kitchen or outside a meeting room.
“You get a lot of paranoia remotely when someone sends an email and people read things into it. But if you’re in the office you can just ask what they meant. That’s all part of the culture – and our only long-term competitive advantage is culture,” Ellis says.
Then there’s the increased risk of under-management – and its evil twin micro-management – in remote teams.
With under-management, the challenge is that out-of-sight can very easily turn into out-of-mind. Phil Jones CMgr CCMI, managing director of Brother UK, says that, like all management, this is really about knowing your team and learning who needs extra support. This is significantly harder when you can’t “walk the floor” as you can in an office. “Someone can give the impression that everything’s fantastic on camera, when it really isn’t,” he adds.
Micro-management can arise as an instinctive over-compensation to this problem; if you can’t see someone working, then they must not be working. But constant monitoring, Jones says, is “route one to losing trust – and if we break that trust, we will never make hybrid work.”
2. Wouldn’t it be easier just to make people come in to the office?
Not necessarily. Just because managing remotely is hard, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
At Brother UK, Phil Jones is trialling a return to the office on a 3:2 basis, but is also exploring virtual-first measures. “An effective team might dial in on a Friday between 1pm and 3pm, cameras on, while working on their own projects. That gives them space for those free-ranging discussions and allows informality to flow again,” he says.
Managers need to find the virtual version of walking the floor, Jones says – regular, off-script checkins that aren’t about monitoring progress, but simply to see how someone is, whether they’re struggling with anything and what’s going on in their day.
Jose-Luiz Moura, senior VP and chief operating officer at Salesforce UK and Ireland, says there are processes you can introduce to make this easier. New starters and hiring managers at Salesforce receive regular email prompts to carry out certain actions and have certain conversations during their first six months, for example. He insists this is really a matter of culture first, policies second.
“Managers’ skills will need to adapt to handle hybrid teams with potentially contrasting working styles and evolving team dynamics,” says Moura. “At the heart of this is nurturing trusting relationships.”
Developing this trust is the solution to micro-management – whether remote or otherwise. Jones says that for managers to trust people, they need to see the advantages of flexibility, focusing on results rather than how quickly someone replies to an email. “We need to educate our managers,” Jones explains.
You may nonetheless decide that the best way to mitigate the management challenges of remote working is to have less of it. Ellis, for one, thinks there’s no substitute for face-to-face time, at least two or three days a week. The idea is that people learn, bond, collaborate, manage and are managed when they come in to the office. And so long as they come in to the office often enough, it doesn’t matter too much if those things happen less when they’re not there.
So, how do you get people to spend time in the office in a hybrid system? Professor Sir Cary Cooper CMgr CCMI, an organisational psychologist at Alliance Manchester Business School, warns that mandating attendance is “silly” and “illogical” because it destroys the main benefit of this new way of working: not the fact that people work from home, but their freedom to choose.
“Even before the pandemic, the science showed that if people could work flexibly, then it enhances job satisfaction, reduces stressrelated sickness absence and, where you can measure it, improves productivity,” he explains.
Flexibility requires negotiating a “new psychological contract” between employer and employee about their work arrangements, with terms that work for both parties. Such conversations are unlikely to cause any problems with the overwhelming majority of employees, in Cooper’s view. Forcing workers to come in (or, indeed, to stay at home), on the other hand, risks actively disengaging them – particularly when many of their peers in other organisations do have flexibility.
If you can’t force workers to come in to the office, then you need to convince them to want to come in. Ellis says this requires reimagining the office to be as attractive, comfortable and appropriate for collaborative work as possible. “People aren’t going to commute for an hour and half each way to work in a rabbit hutch when they can just do that at home.”
Jones adds that leaders have a particular role in selling the physical workspace to reticent employees. “We’ve all been in our caves so long that we’ve lost the sense of what being in a sociable office environment is actually like, so it’s incumbent on us to create that energy, that buzz of being around colleagues again.”
3. Does it matter if some people choose to come in more than others?
The short answer is yes, unless you’re careful. While some roles clearly need people to be in more often than others, there are inclusivity implications.
On one level, the advent of widespread flexible working ought to be an excellent development for inclusivity and gender equality in particular. After all, women have long been more likely to want flexibility and suffered career penalties for requesting it. In principle, this bias should disappear if everyone is flexible.
The risk, however, is that an “in crowd” develops – people who come into the office more often, who have those important, informal conversations that characterise office life, and who (intentionally or unintentionally) don’t bother to include people who are working remotely. Those people, Cooper says, are still disproportionately likely to be women. “Will that have implications for their career progression and development? Will men have an edge when it comes to promotion because they’re showing more face time? Will senior men select other men who are presentees? I’m worried that might happen,” he says.
The obvious solution, of course, is to stop forming “in crowds”, but that’s easier said than done as it involves challenging deeply ingrained biases. “I’ve got to make sure that if I’m promoting somebody it’s not because they’ve worked very hard for three days to be visible with the right people, to game themselves into a promotion, rather than earning it through pure competence. We’ve got to design those biases out,” says Jones.
One way to do that is to build inclusivity into the culture, so that if anybody’s out of the room – man or woman – it’s more likely that people will remember to include them. “In years gone by, there would be drinks down the pub, and that’s where all the decisions got made. We’ve really focused on breaking down that perception,” says Chrysta Poppitt, senior director for HR at planning consultancy Turley, which has been operating a flexible working model since 2015.
“It has become a value for us that if you see someone doing something that isn’t terribly inclusive, you politely ask why they’re doing it that way or make a suggestion as to how they could be more inclusive,” Poppitt says.
Ellis says that PwC has found a simple way of making hybrid meetings more inclusive: defaulting to video calls even if almost everyone on the call is in the building. “It creates a level playing field, but it can still feel a bit clunky for those who aren’t in the room, particularly if it’s a whole-day meeting,” Ellis admits. “But it’s still a lot better than when we used to do conference calls.”
4. How do we co-ordinate people if they choose where they work?
Giving people flexibility doesn’t mean abandoning structure altogether. Indeed, if you don’t pay attention to the practical considerations of co-ordinating people, freedom can soon turn into anarchy.
What happens, for example, if one person chooses to come in specifically to be with a colleague, but their colleague chooses to stay at home to finish a report? Or when one person wants to work from 5am to 1pm, another from 1pm to 9pm, and they can’t find a time to meet? Or when the whole organisation chooses to stay at home on Fridays but come in on Tuesdays – only to find when they do that half of them don’t have a desk?
Jones points to an emerging inoffice issue: people making video calls in open-plan spaces, unaware of how distractingly loud they are. “All those office conventions need to be sorted out,” he says.
One way to do that is to impose rules, rotas and core hours. But if you’re too heavy-handed, this can have the same disempowering effect as telling people where they should be working.
Ellis notes that it can also be done more organically. Indeed, matrix organisations such as PwC, where employees often work on multiple projects simultaneously, have long had to deal with similar challenges. Certain ground rules can make sure that managers and team members alike are sensible and considerate in their decisions.
“We want people to get into the mindset of planning further ahead, looking at their calendars, deciding what days they’re coming in and making that work with their assignments. This requires all of our partners, myself included, to be very open about when we’re coming in too. It’s important that people know I’m at home today but in London tomorrow, so they know they can stick their head through the door, which has always been part of our culture,” Ellis explains.
These ground rules – which may simply be that it’s best that the whole team meets face-to-face two or three times a month, or that we try to schedule heads-down work and one-to-ones when we’re at home – shouldn’t be imposed, but negotiated. For Cary Cooper, that means absolute transparency: “I would talk to direct reports and say, ‘Here’s what I’m thinking, what do you think?’ The more transparent managers are in this process, the better.”
5. What’s the most important thing I can do to make hybrid working work?
In the end, a lot of this comes down to skilled management. “The hybrid model requires a different kind of line manager who can build teams where some are in the office and some are working substantially from home. Do we have this kind of line manager in situ now? The answer is no, because managers tend to be promoted based on their technical expertise, not their people skills,” says Cooper.
He adds that empathy, social sensitivity and emotional intelligence are more important than ever because it’s harder to get to know people or read their body language when you’re not together. Often, the only sign that someone is struggling with an unmanageable workload or unrealistic deadlines is that they’ve gone a little quiet on team calls.
“The challenge is what do we do with the existing cohort of managers. Let’s say a third of them have the natural social skills, and 30 per cent can be trained. My worry is that the other 20 per cent are just untrainable,” he says. He goes on to suggest that we need to think differently about who we select for management roles and, concurrently, how we develop people who are technically able but not suited to managing people.
Transitioning to a hybrid model clearly won’t be easy, but that shouldn’t really be surprising. We had decades to figure out how to work in offices; we’ve had less than two years to understand how to work effectively as remote organisations, and even less time operating as hybrid ones.
This is a learning process that requires constant evaluation and re-evaluation. Salesforce, for example, introduced daily pulse surveys to measure wellbeing, and weekly global all-hands meetings to raise and answer questions during the pandemic. These will remain, says Moura, helping to guide the company’s approach post-pandemic.
While we may not always get hybrid working right first time, we are likely to get better at it with focused effort. Let’s not lose sight of the opportunities it brings, despite the immediate complexities. In fact, it may be that flexibility forces us to address problems – such as poor line management and communication – that we tolerated for far too long.
Case study: The value of small moments
A recent McKinsey study found that in companies that saw the biggest productivity increases during the pandemic, managers and leaders encouraged “small moments of engagement” among their employees. These moments were “microtransactions” in which coaching, mentorship, idea-sharing – and, yes, physically working alongside one another – took place.
Russ Lidstone, group chief executive of The Creative Engagement Group, is a big believer in the power of the small moment.
Russ Lidstone, group chief executive at The Creative Engagement Group
“It’s the serendipity that we have really missed,” says Russ. “The things that you wouldn’t and can’t plan a specific Teams call for, with someone you don’t necessarily work with day to day.” He gives the example of two senior members of his team bumping into one another while grabbing a coffee, leading to a discussion in which both realised that they were looking to solve similar problems for separate clients, and so combined forces and perspectives to formulate a stronger approach.
His own ability to read situations is far stronger when face-to-face with colleagues, he says. “After seeing one of my team in the office for the first time in 18 months, I realised that someone I thought held up well (on camera) was having a challenging time,” he says. “This is something we were able to act on, and it brought home a critical benefit of hybrid working and face-to-face interaction.”
Small moments can also lead to better deals, says Lidstone. Shared values and cultural alignment play a big part in, say, mergers and acquisitions. “When doing this virtually, you have to work much harder to ensure you’re confident regarding the ‘fit’. There is no substitute for the down-time moments, the glass of wine or social chat before you conclude a deal,” he says.
“Spend five minutes in live conversation with someone, and you’ll largely ascertain whether they’re a good egg or not.”
