As COVID-19 Surges What’s Next in Your Plan?

As COVID-19 Surges What’s Next in Your Plan?

We are well on our way to the 6-month mark of our COVID response. It has been encouraging to see how countless organizations have pivoted their products, and services while totally re-imagining how their employees work in this Work from Home (WFH) environment. Leadership and HR did an amazing job in planning and creating strategies.

Back in March, organizations that were not shut down realigned themselves and juggled resources to support the new environment. I daresay a good percentage of organizations did not foresee that these changes would be long-lasting and far-reaching, but here we are just days from September with hot spots emerging in both rural and metropolitan areas. Across the country parents are finding that the remote learning of the children will continue into the fall or later, keeping many parents at home. Where do we go now with our organizational planning since it looks like COVID-19 does not seem to be going away any time soon?

Even with all the positive progress many organizations have made, we’ve recently seen research indicating performance may be stalling. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Chip Cutter highlighted the idea that companies are realizing that remote work is not so great after all, citing team performance issues, missed project deadlines, and more difficulty in hiring, training, and developing new employees.

It’s also no secret that some managers are still having trust issues with their remote workers. Many are skeptical about remote work being sustainable, believing that WFH performance has leveled off after the fear-induced surges in productivity early in the pandemic.

A July 30 HBR article shared some interesting findings:

• 53% of managers in non-managerial/non-professional roles agree that performance of remote workers is lower than those working in an office setting.

• 29% of managers report not trusting the competence of their employees.

• 41% of managers are skeptical about how motivated remote employees can remain in the long term.

At a minimum, the researchers in the article have found that many managers are struggling, and some are guilty of micromanaging their employees, creating a vicious cycle of more distrust and lower performance. Distrust of employees undermines their performance and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

WFH is not going away anytime soon. Even with the rapid progress toward vaccines and hopes that Phase III trials will yield great results, being able to scale for mass manufacture of vaccines for widespread availability to Americans has its own challenges.

On the bright side, I do not believe that lower team performance is inherent to remote work. I believe there are things that can be done to improve virtual team performance (See my blog series addressing team performance.)  I also believe that distrust of remote workers is not inherent to the WFH environment. Distrust was around long before the work from home environment happened and it can be addressed.

What should we do?

Evaluate the situation. How are your teams performing? How are projects going? Are managers floundering with managing remote workers? Find out why. Many of the measures we put in place for remote work were perceived in March as potential stop gap measures to “get by.” But here we are 6 months later. Do employees really have all the technology they need to do their jobs efficiently? Do managers have the needed skill sets and competencies for building high performing teams and managing remote workers without micromanaging? Do managers know how to address underperformance in the remote environment?

Create a plan. How will you address all the issues you discover in Step 1, above? It may be a good idea to create a cross-functional WFH task force to create your long-term strategy. The team could solicit employee ideas, assess the needs of the organization, create a plan, and marshal and distribute needed resources. Be realistic and supportive of employees’ wide ranging work environments at home.

It may mean totally re-thinking how you measure employees. Are you measuring employee results and employee output? Or are you measuring employee activity? I recommend training manager groups and then have them work to create plans to rethink how people are measured. Saying you want to measure outputs and result sound like a good idea, but if you’ve been judging people by their activity for years, it’s not so easy.

Define the behaviors you need to build in your organization and create a plan for building them. If managers are distrustful, it may mean providing workshops and work sessions for leaders and managers to develop needed skills for managing remote workers. If teams are weak, train the teams and implement effective team practices. If employees are floundering with the technologies for remote work, perhaps training or additional support is needed.

Create a plan for consistent communication cadences. These cadences should apply to work group, departmental, and company-wide communications. Employees working from home can easily feel disconnected. Many organizations have created highly effective communication mechanisms that go beyond daily or weekly check-ins–from open chat spaces, to virtual water coolers and managers’ open office hours in Zoom.

Implement the plan and measure results. In this current environment, everything is new territory and there are no experts in how to handle the Coronavirus, at least not expert for more than six months. Have regular check-ins on how the execution of the plan is proceeding, understanding that tomorrow’s news could promise more need to revamp the plan.

For more discussion or help in creating or updating your strategy or assistance in implementing the ideas in this piece, please contact me in LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/transformingorganizations/ or email me at [email protected]/.