If you’re managing a team with team members that have had to get used to home or remote working in the last few months you may have found a need to manage differently. As I’ve designed a virtual team management programme for an organisation in recent weeks, I’ve been looking into some of the context for team working and management and am sharing some of what I’ve found to help you think about what you may benefit from considering as a manager.
The Covid-19 pandemic has been global, enduring (who would have thought 7 months ago that we’d be where we are now), disruptive, (not just to our workplaces but to schooling, shopping, caring for our elderly, and so much more) and impossible to ignore. As we’ve adapted in recent months, its impact on our workplaces and our team members has been felt with statistics showing just how much:
- 62% of employed Americans are working from home (doubled since March 2020) [1]
- 60% of American workers would prefer to work remotely as much as possible, even when restrictions are lifted [1]
- 48% of employees will likely work remotely at least part of the time after COVID-19 versus 30% before the pandemic [2]
- 70 percent of gig workers were not satisfied with the support they received from their employers during the pandemic.[3]
Perhaps not surprisingly, executives have some concerns. A recent survey has indicated:
- 84% of executives surveyed recently are concerned about the ability of managers to manage remotely,
- 81% are concerned about a decrease in employee morale,
- 76% are concerned about a false read on productivity,
- 75% are concerned about home/life distractions,
- 74% are concerned about a lack of visibility on employees.
What does this mean for me as a manager?
While executives have been worrying about their managers’ abilities to manage remotely, the managers that I coach and train have been quietly getting on with working out how best to do this.
Many have intuitively recognised what David Rock’s 2008 SCARF model makes clear – a lack of certainty, or lack of an ability to predict our future, can be threatening. It’s tough to be able to provide certainty to team members over some elements of work when the external context keeps changing.
That’s why organisations are being encouraged in a recent Deloitte article to embrace a concept put forward by New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman – that of ‘dynamic stability’; Friedman encourages leaders to ‘build an eye that moves with the storm, draws energy from it, but creates a platform of ‘dynamic stability’ within it.’
Patrick Lencioni (author of 5 Dysfunctions of a Team) shared in an April podcast that at the start of the pandemic organisations were on their heels, playing defence, and that creating short term clarity, a rallying cry for 2 months, enabled teams to move from playing defense to offense. “It wasn’t just about surviving or feeling like a victim. It was about thriving and being on offense.” The rallying cry doesn’t have to be perfect but, as a temporary goal at least, it will give focus to your team’s conversations.
What can I do as a manager?
If you are a manager of a virtual team at the moment, pausing with your team in order to answer the following questions may help you with creating some dynamic stability:
- What has changed about your context that impacts the focus of your work?
- How have stakeholder demands changed and how can you harness your strengths to meet those demands?
- How have you already adapted as a team and what’s working or not working about this?
- What do we all need from each other to be at our best for the imminent future?
- Given all of the above, what are our primary focus areas both for performance and for team behaviour?
- And so what is our rallying cry?
Once you’ve found your rallying cry, set a date to review 6-8 weeks ahead in order to check whether it is already time for a new rallying cry.
As you pause and look to create dynamic stability, take time to provide temporary roots for yourself too so that you are not caught up in the storm but able to flex and bend with it.
Sources:
[1] Gallup – https://news.gallup.com/poll/306695/workers-discovering-affinity-remote-work.aspx
[2] https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/9-future-of-work-trends-post-covid-19/
[3] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/gig-workers-hardest-hit-coronavirus-pandemic/
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