Working from home; what is the reality for managers?
John Mortimer, 29 July 2020
Short versio of this article published in the MJ, 30 July 2020
https://www.themj.co.uk/The-reality-of-working-from-home/218304
In the short term we seem to be coping remarkably well, working from home using conferencing calls and laptops. But what about the long term? If this is how many of us will now be working, what does that mean for those who manage and oversee service organisations, and what does it mean for staff at home.
A Re-Focus for Managers
A vast global work from home working experiment has been forced upon us, with little warning or choice. Thanks to technology, we have been able to remain connected in ways that, just a few years ago, would have been impossible. But much of the findings and writing recently posted about this, seem to focus on the technology, and the practicalities of doing this. There is talk about the productivity of staff, and the saving of lost time commuting.
But let us stand back, and see our organisations for what they truly are. Surely now, there are fewer of us that still see our organisations as simplistic machines, with staff simply cogs tied to the machine by procedures, following daily instructions. We know that the staff, as people, are the core of how a public sector organisation works and how we respond to fluctuating operational requirements. We know that the staff, team-working, and the behaviours of managers, play a huge role in the well-being and enabling how value is created.
If we move away from simplistic machine metaphors and look at the reality of local government.
We are humans. As employees, are social rather than logical beings, and through social interaction we feel connected to work and to people. We value interaction, and that interaction feeds the connections we make with each other to get work done, and decisions made in the work. The way we feel about each other shapes our communication and cooperative behaviours. We often automatically create workplace rituals to support these aspects of work.
At work we tackle problems, we synthesise, we achieve and contribute to a greater whole, and we receive feedback. How much of what we experience about work is tied up in these intrinsically motivating activities that can go almost unnoticed by others?
Much of this is actually invisible to the formal elements of an organization.
- We learn from being together.
- We make decisions, collectively
- Intrinsic motivation is the primary reason we get up in the morning and go to work.
- The most effective method of communicating in complex environments is face to face.
- Creating psychologically safe spaces at work, essential for a health team, happen through social interaction.
We separate work from home life. The physical act of leaving work and arriving home; observe how we summarise what went on in the day on our way home. By the time we arrive home, we have put work away, we have a ready made important psychological message; that we have left the world of work behind, until we choose to enter it again another day. We control this daily shift, and it is us that chooses how we re-engage again.
Observations of Working from Home
So, what is the real impact of working from home, communicating on social media, on the above mentioned characteristics of the reality work? Let us take a simple example; as part of team building I encourage staff to stop using emails to communicate with each other, and get up and talk. Engaging in conversation is so many times richer than simple one way words imprinted on a screen. However, working from home is driving us in the other direction, and causing us to write down our communication that should be verbal.
Today, I just finished a call, where a senior manager, to her horror, suddenly realised that she had not come out of her front door for four days, and how easy it is to slip into.
There are some employees in a particular council, who start work at 8am, and finish thinking about work around 6pm. Maybe they are not actually doing the work all day, but their mind is continually thinking about they are doing.
Working from home will merge the world of work with home; it takes recognised separation mechanisms away from us, and it makes retaining control of our time and activities that much more difficult to achieve. The kitchen table is now a work object; how can we escape? The email arrives on the phone, and the familiar ring makes us want to read it.
Being In Control
The concept and action of us being in control allows us to disconnect when we choose, and ultimately switch off. As soon as we feel that we are not in control, what happens to us? Our anxiety remains at work levels, and a part of our mind cannot breakaway and relax.
When we work from home; how can we continue with the well worn rituals we have developed over time at work? Who even knew we had rituals, but we do, we have lots of them.
Risk
Home is home, and not usually designed for work. If staff are going to be working from home as the norm, then their home environment will begin to fall into the necessary oversight that our organisation puts towards safe working. The staff’s comfort and safety when doing work will become more important.
So what could we do to maintain a balance?
Retain control. We all need to retain control our lives to remain psychologically stable. We need confidence that our organisation has recognised that to switch off is a good and necessary thing to do. The working late hero metaphor should be now be long dead.
Separate work from home. We need to have a deliberate way of establishing that separation. A clear instruction from our manager that we should stop work by a certain time, gives us the confidence not to feel guilty of not doing more. A daily alarm on our phone can remind us to stop.
- Set up clear times to start and stop and do not read emails outside of that time. Tell your staff to do the same.
- Close laptops during lunch.
Working with others. To avoid de-humanising work, we need that work based interaction to remain a normal part of work. Effort needs to be made so that online calls are seen as meetings or conversations, and emphasise when they are used as person catch-ups. Book in chat time if we need to.
Explicitly create new rituals, that encourage wider behaviours that incorporate all the communication and social mechanism that we wish to maintain. Check-in and Check-outs are an effective mechanism to keep our social connections working. Some of the examples here will be activities that create new rituals.
Pull in people into the team. Allow for everyone in a remote call to have a say, as they would have if you were all in a room. If someone has not spoken up, ask them specifically and encourage their contribution. Make an effort to contact those who you have not spoken to recently, and make a point that you have called them up just because you have not had a chat for awhile.
Come into work. for those who would like to come into work. Some staff will be desperate to link up in the way that they know. And we have to recognise that sometimes there is no substitute to getting together. There will be times, especially when pulling new teams together, that a real meet-up might be essential.
Get together for no other reason that you have decided that it is time to do that. Bring some sandwiches and invite people into the biggest room you have. Or if the weather is good, arrange a picnic in the park. For those that have done this, the feedback from them has been surprisingly positive. They needed that.
- Organise a virtual social drink, where everyone meets to chat socially with a drink in their hand.
For New Staff joining or leaving, they will miss all the subtle introductory activities that they go through on their first days. They will be in urgent need to connect with colleagues, to introduce themselves and find out what each is like. Again, this should be a real get-together.
Zoom fatigue, may well become a recognized issue! One of the ways to decrease this is to help the online meeting to be easy. So, squinting at a poor quality picture, or a too small picture. The quality of the sound is important as fatigue increases when effort is needed to listen. So, invest in ensuring that staff have a good and big picture of the meeting. And that the speakers do not simply use laptop microphones. Lapel (Lavalier) mics are cheap and offer far better sound.
A Managers Key Ability; Managing Wellbeing — Listen and Understand
Some public sector work is dealing with complex situations, supporting people. The mechanism that make this successful are less to do with standard operating procedures and roles, and more to do with delegated decision-making and working together with other colleagues. If this is how we work, then what will happen when we work from home? A recent successful COVID-19 Hub demonstrated one thing in particular, and that was that front line staff still need the flexibility to work together in ways that they themselves choose. Sometimes that will be working in the same location, and others it can be from home. The control was with the staff themselves.
As managers, we need to focus our efforts to understand what our staff need, and what they are telling us whilst we remain distant from each other. It is a quirk of our nation that we do not have the most open and transparent communication culture at work. Assume problems will fester and grow, before they become large and impactive. This perhaps is our greatest challenge, as we need to perceive the indications that we are receiving, to understand and act accordingly.
This perhaps is a competence that we may not be well used to, and will become far more important working from home.
— — — — — Helpful Summaries — — — —
Example of a Wellbeing Plan, from Helen Sanderson
A brief summary of Psychological Safety (NOBL)
Psychological safety is not:
• About one individual (rather than the group) feeling safe or unsafe
• Saying whatever you want
• Reacting “authentically”
• Acting the same way at work as you do at home
• Bringing your whole self to work
• Using radical candor
What Psychological Safety Looks Like
High psychological safety behaviours include:
• Lively yet respectful debate
• Yes, and… answers
• Personal experiences shared
• Many different people speak
• Low-level people are engaged
Low psychological safety behaviours include:
• Waiting for the leader to speak before voicing your opinion
• Never debating
• Insinuations, rather than open referencing
• Low level people never speak (and are never asked)
