You are what you eat and your company is your people. The first has always been true and the second has never been truer.
Two and a half months into the UK lockdown and we have seen millions of people working from home. During this period, and out of sheer consequence, people’s business lives and personal lives have been rudely forced into a state of inevitable co-habitation. For some companies that already have a well-developed approach to WFH, this quick unilateral shift will have been less disruptive. For others, it will have thrown up numerous challenges. Why some have adapted better than others relates more to the influence corporate culture has on a favoured management style than much else.
Historically, many businesses will have adopted the ‘conference’ call as part of their day-to-day toolkit. With the abrupt end of face-to-face meetings and heavily restricted travel, interaction is now conducted virtually from locations as salubrious as the dining room table next to a pile of washing, a sleeping cat, a home-schooling teen or a woofing dog. Tolerance and flexibility are a must. ‘Voice-only’ conference calls were wonderfully equitable, but the almost mandatory inclusion of video has introduced a WFH playing field that is, unsurprisingly, far from level. Personal circumstance means that whilst some may retire to a quiet, readymade, home office, others will do their best, camped out at the kitchen table with the cat.
Tolerance and flexibility are not just ‘nice-to-haves’ - they have become essential elements in the virtual management tool-kit. Take, for example, your standard weekly team meeting or team call. Depending on the personal style of the manager in question, it could well be that prior to the lockdown restrictions being in place, interactions were strictly ‘business’ focussed with little time spent circulating through the team with enquiries relating to how individuals were ‘doing’. Asking how the family was, or whether they were ‘coping’, might have been short, snappy, exchanges - serving more as largely meaningless preambles to the pressing business priorities at hand. As the business and personal lives of employees collided it became swiftly apparent that in order to manage business success it would be vital to understand the new, additional stresses that employees were having to deal with alongside their work commitments. You don’t need to do much research to know intuitively that stressed employees perform far worse than those that aren’t. More empathetic managers have quickly recalibrated their focus on employee well-being, ensuring that they take time to understand employees circumstances within the wider and more holistic approach to driving performance. It is quite simply a fact that employees, who feel they can be truly transparent and have the support from their managers, are happier and more motivated than those who feel emotionally vulnerable.
From this perspective the question arises whether, post Covid-19, a more ‘human’ style of management will remain. Let’s take a likely scenario and assess whether it might. To do this we have to take a view on a few assumptions. The first is that some form of social distancing is, in the absence of a vaccine, likely to be a feature of physical office life for the foreseeable future. That is not ideal, as socially distanced office environments present a gamut of logistical challenges, many of which come with new costs. Masks may need to be supplied and most likely refreshed on a daily basis. Work surfaces and office equipment will need to be regularly disinfected. Rightly or wrongly staff lavatories might be perceived to be particularly problematic. In contrast to the challenges of creating effective socially distanced offices, there will be many aspects of WFH that will have proved financially beneficial and so are likely to remain. Certainly there are short-term financial benefits for many employees. In the longer term there might be financial benefits for companies too as they evaluate how they can reduce costs associated with under-utilised office space. Whatever balance is struck between coming to the office or WFH one thing is clear: there will be a move to a much more home-based workforce. Even when the pandemic is over the die will have been cast for a new way of working. It must be one that is is flexible enough to accommodate the realities of working from home, be it an enthusiastic 3 year old waving a toy bunny in front of your webcam, Amazon appearing at the door with a delivery of clothes pegs, the dog barking just at the point you’re due to come off mute or your connection to the video call dropping because you had a power cut. Managers will have to accept the reality that when business and personal lives are forced to co-habit it is better to accommodate these changes than expend negative energy fighting them.
It is hopefully a real benefit that, because of Covid-19, employees are now much more likely to see their colleagues through a lens that is less monochrome. I think it is very probable that we will see the necessary rise of the ‘empathetic’ manager as one who can deliver success from teams that are more virtually connected. We are, after all, human beings not robots.
Further reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/deloitte/2020/11/23/leading-the-enlightened-workforce-in-the-next-normal/?