This Isn’t Teleworking

You and the team you manage were not sent home to telework—you were sent home to avoid spreading a virus, to take care of loved ones, to teach children and to physically distance from everyone else in your communities. Even experienced teleworkers are facing a radically different reality. The work that your team will be able to accomplish under these circumstances depends primarily on your ability to recognize these challenges and to adapt.

Effective telework is predicated on well-defined structure—agreed upon work hours, clarity around tasks to be accomplished, even a dedicated work area and equipment. The structure is meant to ensure accountability by the team member and fairness to other staff who—in more normal times—are expected to show up at the office. Of course, accountability and fairness are vital to both successful telework and to a healthy workplace. But for now they belong on the back burner.

By focusing instead on engaging and supporting, managers stand a better likelihood of getting more and better work in the near term from beleaguered team members. When the dust settles and we’re on the other side of this, this approach will continue to pay dividends in terms of better relationships, characterized by more honest communication and greater trust.

Engage. Increased interaction with team members addresses the urgent need for people to connect in times of crisis, while at the same time enabling managers to learn how they can best support their teams. Team members are entitled to boundaries that protect their privacy, particularly given the power dynamic with managers. At the same time, managers will struggle to interact appropriately if they do not understand what’s going on the lives of their staff members. Accept this as tricky territory, be thoughtful, compassionate and just try to do your best.

Provide context. You are the conduit between your team and the rest of the organization. You’ll need to help them understand the bigger picture: What’s going on in the organization at large? Have organizational priorities been revised? How are finances holding up? How does the team’s work need to shift? 

Make good communication choices. How you engage matters. Use video conferencing whenever possible and telephone when it’s not. Emailing is generally a poor form of interaction. The normal weaknesses of email—tone, context, incompleteness—are exacerbated when folks cannot balance them by connecting with each other face to face. Pick up the phone.

Team meetings should be held at least once or twice a week. They can be quick. The substance of the meetings is less important than their value as a point of connection. Meetings provide a small reminder of life outside the house, an excuse to put on a clean shirt, and can help your team members stay in contact both to you and to one another.

One-on-one meetings should also occur at least a couple times a week. This is an opportunity to learn about the challenges that individuals are facing, and to negotiate shared expectations around work commitments.

Team Learning. If team members have the space, engage them in group learning. This can be an opportunity for a deeper dive into various aspects of your organization and it’s work. Maybe there’s a book or report that you can explore together. Or you can all just watch a movie [LINK] and discuss.

Professional development. Particularly for team members with too much time on their hands, this may be a great opportunity to address a long neglected item on everyone’s to-do list. Online courses, webinars, remote coaching, books—all continue to be available. 

Long term goals. Most staff struggle to find time and energy away from their regular duties to focus on longer term goals. Review team members’ annual goals to see if this is a good time to work on those. Alternatively, the crisis may mean that goals set earlier in the year are no longer attainable in which case they should be revised or discarded.

Social time. This may be more of an organizational opportunity than just for your team. Think about video coffee hours or lunches, group affinity discussions, pop up staff meetings, book groups, etc. Be creative.

Support. The prerequisite to meaningfully supporting someone is to understand what they’re going through as an individual. As a manager, you are limited to what a team member is willing to share, but you will have questions. Do they live alone? Do they have children? Do they have a quiet place to work? How are they experiencing the stress? To the extent you are entrusted with this information, use it only to strengthen your ability to support the staff person.

Here are some issues you may be called upon to address:

Isolation. Some people are home alone. We don’t know what the implications of this will be over an extended period of time, but there’s good reason to be concerned and, as a manager, to be proactive in helping your team member develop strategies to address this. 

Sporadic work hours. Many people at home with others simply won’t have control over their schedule. What do you need from them? Does it matter that they are available at specific hours? Focus on the substance of what you need them to accomplish and be as flexible as possible with when it needs to happen.

Unreliability. Given the competing demands that some on your team may be navigating, staff that were previously strong at meeting commitments may become less so. If this becomes a pattern, you may want to understand it better, but if it’s not causing serious problems, you may also want to just let it go, at least in the short term.

Inability to concentrate. Here, you’ll need to problem solve. When are the best times of day? What are activities that are easier to concentrate on? Experiment.

Craving structure. A day in the office has a certain flow to it. That disappears when people are working at home. Some team members will be able to create enough structure for themselves; others will need your help. Simply setting expectations or establishing artificial deadlines may do the trick, for others, consider breaking down larger projects.

Working too much. If you have team members who normally struggle with separating personal time from work time, sheltering in place isn’t going to help. Help them to disconnect from work by modeling, establishing well defined boundaries, and neither initiating nor responding outside of those boundaries.

Something a bit more tangible. If your organization can afford it, consider offering to provide additional monitors or even desk chairs. If there are problems with technology, help to see that these are addressed.

Existing dysfunction. Many managers don’t arrive at this moment having an existing constructive relationship with each team member. While the current crisis isn’t necessarily going to help—and can even make things worse—there may still be reason for hope. . . Problems between managers and team members are often rooted in challenges around accountability or perceived lack of fairness. Resetting the relationship to emphasize engagement and support at least offers the possibility for improvement. Start by acknowledging the existing challenge (without blaming) and committing to doing your best to engage and be supportive during this crisis. To the extent possible, you don’t want work—or your relationship—to be an added source of stress during the weeks ahead. Think in terms of marginal improvement rather than radical transformation.

What else can you do?

• Adjust your expectations as needed. Repeat.

• Practice compassion. Aggressively.

• Innovate. These are unprecedented times. And sometimes surviving means getting a little bit – crazy. If something isn’t working, brainstorm and come up with creative approaches to the work and to meeting needs. This is happening all around us. You can do it too.

Successful managers have a variety of lenses at their disposal to frame and reframe challenges so that their team members can be successful. At the moment, telework is unlikely to be a useful lens. The quantity and quality of the work you get out of your team over the next few months will soon be forgotten. The engagement and support you provide will become an enduring element of your relationship for a long time to come.