Here's How To Actually Help Your Team Work Well From Home (Yes, It's Possible)

In the span of a few weeks, telework went from a maybe-effective, sometimes-possible work arrangement for a handful of people to a daily reality for most knowledge workers. And while some organizations have at least some telework experience, many don’t, and most weren’t planning on all-out teleworking, so many are learning how to manage remote employees on the fly.

There’s been ongoing debate over whether telework even works, with lots of press on companies who tried teleworking but then stopped (Yahoo and IBM, for example).

Suddenly, we’re beyond the debate over whether telework works: now we all have to figure out HOW to do it, and do it as well as possible. In the wake of COVID-19, we don’t really have a choice.

For organizations without experience managing telework and remote employees, it might be tempting to focus solely on time management: is your team actually working? How many hours each day? These are real considerations, but can lead you toward the wrong outcomes if that’s all you focus on with your team. 

One major struggle for teleworkers (and really, any employee regardless of what environment they work in), is fractured attention. If you want to help your team work well at home, you must help them overcome distraction and facilitate focus–as much as we can in the midst of a crisis. 

Instead of seeing the new reality of telework as an impossible challenge, try to see it as an interesting opportunity to shift your focus as a manager from how much work it looks like an employee is working to how much they are actually accomplishing. 

At MatchPace, we think that should always be the case, but it’s hard to overcome our ingrained belief that we have to see someone sitting at their desk from 9 to 5 (or 6, 7, or 8) in order for them to be viewed as productive. 

In our last blog on working well during COVID-19, we talked about revising norms. When trying to work well from home, there’s the standard advice about getting dressed, setting up an office space, and making sure everyone has access to the same online tools (it takes a while to get familiar with a VPN or Zoom). But teleworking well requires more than pretending you’re not in your home office (or at your kitchen table surrounded by toddler crumbs). 

Here are a few ways you can focus on effectiveness and work well outside the office: 

• We already mentioned a shift to outcome-focused work but it bears repeating. Yes, you can and should be clear with your team what hours you need them to be available for collaboration, but especially when people are juggling kids at home and taking care of friends and neighbors, allow them to work on their own time and at their own pace–as long as they are clear on what they need to accomplish by when. We suggest trying outcome-focused work for a week–and during COVID-19 is the perfect opportunity!

• Avoid micromanaging by using a tool like the Accountability Dial. This is a great tool to guide your team toward holding themselves and each other accountable in an effective, productive and positive way. When you see a potential need for accountability, start with The Mention and “turn the dial up” the more accountability is needed. Check out this article for more details on using the Accountability Dial. 

• Create clear opportunities for focused engagement. When we’re all checking the news, answering our 4-year-old’s endless streams of questions, and participating in a conference call all at the same time, there’s not a lot of real value added to a conversation. Continually give people a chance (and an expectation) to engage with each other–use breakout groups, have short-turn assignments (not ridiculously short-turn, but realistically short-term). 

• While adding new software tools isn’t always the answer, consider using something like Donut to encourage some watercooler interaction. Those “distractions” of seeing your colleague in the break room, talking about the game last night (welp, that’s out), or grabbing coffee or lunch together really help keep you sane in the day-to-day. And we need social interaction, even at a distance, now more than ever–so find some creative ways to replicate relationship building opportunities during the workday. 

And a few things to not do:

• Don’t make every day a marathon of constant contact. Communicate - Yes! Be available - Yes! But all the calls and video conferences are exhausting. Let people know there will be times they should *not* schedule calls and stick to them. Set aside a few hours each day, or one whole day a week where people can decompress (take a nap, shoot some hoops (by themselves), oh, and have some uninterrupted time to get work done!). 

• Don’t be the boss who says, “just get your hours in.” Really? If you’ve said that - think about the message it sends: “I don’t care what you’re doing as long as you’ve been ‘present’ for enough time.” That’s the fast track to disengaged employees, the last thing you need in these times. 

• Don’t be obsessed with productivity. I’ve seen lots of people citing that “when Cambridge closed because of the bubonic plague in 1665, Isaac Newton had to work from home and he developed calculus and the theory of gravity.” He lived before Twitter, with no children asking for a snack. We want to get the essentials taken care of, and some of the bonus work, but other than that–don’t expect your team to meet their annual goals in a month just because they’re “stuck at home.” In a week or two, you can start conversations about revised goals (or even better - employees, start them with your managers!) but dial down the “you’ll be able to get so much done” talk!)

In the middle of all of this, don’t forget that it’s your people that are going to see your company through. Our organizations can work well during this crisis–and we need to be focused on solving the challenges we’re facing.

Be patient, and make this new teleworking reality as easy as possible on your team by giving them clarity, compassion, and a target to aim for.