Adjusting to Remote Work During the Coronavirus Crisis

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Welcome to the hbr ideacast from harvard business review. I'm alison beard. We're taping this show in the middle of a global health crisis. The coronavirus pandemic is fundamentally changing the way many organizations operate. Governments and businesses around the world are telling those with symptoms to self quarantine and and everyone else to practice social distancing. For a great many of us, then remote work is our new reality. How do corporate leaders, managers and individual workers make this sudden shift? What can we do to maintain productivity, ease anxiety, and continue to effectively collaborate with both colleagues and external stakeholders? How quickly can we implement current best practices or develop new ones? Finally, could this big transition change the way we do business forever? Our guest today has spent two decades helping companies learn how to manage dispersed teams and she's here to give us some advice on how to cope with the current situation. Sidal Neely is a professor at Harvard Business School and founder of the consulting firm Global Matters. Sidal, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

So let me start by asking, are most organizations well prepared for making this sudden jump to remote work?

The vast majority of organizations are not well prepared to suddenly move their entire workforce wholesale into remote work, even though they've had portions of their organizations participate in dispersed work or even global collaboration. So no. This is an unprecedented type of scenario that we're seeing today.

So if I'm a C suite leader, cto, head of IT department, or even just someone who's trying to manage their team, what is the first thing that I need to do to make sure people are set up to work effectively outside the office?

Number one, you have to make sure that your infrastructure is set up to accommodate your workforce, meaning that you have the equipment, the technologies, and that you're prioritizing appropriately. Who needs what very quickly and ensure that you have the capacity to deploy the equipment and also to start training people at scale. And if you're a manager, you're thinking along those lines as well. But you're also asking the detailed questions to ensure that individuals have the preparation at the home front, to ensure that every individual has the capacity to dial into the office if they need to do that, to get work done, to get through firewalls and things. You need to make sure that every individual has access to the devices that they need and the skills that they need. To use their devices. And you need to make sure that no one feels left out. You have to make sure that everyone's included.

So it sounds like this might mean investment in both technology that's sent to people's houses and also training.

Absolutely, technology training, also prioritizing who needs what, when and all related to the work that you're doing, the stakeholders that you need to serve, and the deadlines that you need to make sure that you need to achieve. It's really a set of activities that have to be thought through very carefully while at the same time ensuring that your organization is dealing with the traumatic events from a socio emotional, psychological perspective. Once all of the infrastructure, the technical means are set up, you have to have managers do their team launches, their working from home team launches, and that has to happen right away.

So what are some things that leaders can do to make that launch and create an effective remote culture for people who haven't ever done this before?

Every team, every group has to have a launch. This is some of the fundamentals or success factors in teams and groups. For a scenario like working from home, it's even more important to begin a new way of operating with these launches. My suggestion is that to do it using some form of enabling media that has a visual element like video conferencing, maybe Zoom or Google Hangout, whatever you're using in your organization, but something that can allow you to see other members of your group. And you say to your team, hey, we have a new situation and I want us to talk about how should we communicate now that we're on this new platform? How often should we communicate? What's the best way for us to communicate? What are everyone's preferences? Solicit the suggestions from your group and begin to re establish a new way of engaging a new way of communicating. Whatever you used to do, communication wise, you want to increase those. The other thing that you want to do is you want to establish how you're going to remain connected formally as well as informally. One of the things that you're going to lose when everyone is working from home is going to be the water cooler conversations, the let's grab lunch together or let's take a walk together. That goes away. So you have to find ways to recreate this virtually.

You mentioned that this is an emotional struggle for people as well as a practical one. How do managers and colleagues ensure that everyone is feeling okay and adjusting to this transition?

You know, this is a very interesting question because on the one hand, managers are not therapists and psychologists and they have to be very careful. But at the same time, managers have to be quite attuned to whether or not their employees are present, are connecting. One of the biggest battles that managers are going to have as their employees or their team members are now at home is isolation. And they need to identify people that are isolating, that are withdrawing. They can identify those by seeing that people are withdrawn during regular meetings. If they're typically much more participative during group discourse, and suddenly they're not, that's a sign. If they're much more verbose in their writing on email, and suddenly they're not, that's a sign. So once you observe that, it's important to reach out and to check in to make sure that this is not a matter of people not knowing how to really engage and work remotely. Because, by the way, remote work is an actual skill. It's a learned skill. People don't just do it well organically. So it's important to help people, to coach people, to provide resources on how to do it well. So you have to figure out, is this a matter of people just don't know how to do this and there's a gap there that we need to fill, or is this because of isolation and dealing with world events? And if that's the case, I would be prepared to connect people to employee resource groups to help people get through whatever struggles they may be going through. That's beyond the adjustment to working from home.

So what are some of those best practices that you recommend managers share with people? But then also people start employing themselves to become more effective at doing this.

You have to create your routines, your regular routines at the home front related to work. Meaning you have to get up at the same time. You have to take a shower. Yes, yes, you do. You have to get dressed. Not necessarily what you would wear on a regular basis when you go into the office, but you have to get dressed. No pajamas. You've got to go carve out that space where you would work, that comfortable space, negotiated space. If you have a partner at work, you've got to figure out what that space is. And you have to be very, very disciplined. You've got to figure out what your physical activities are going to be on a regular basis. Otherwise you're going to start feeling bad very quickly.

So what I'm finding is that routine is very important, but I also need to have flexibility. You know, like many people, I have kids at home now who are disrupting my day to some extent. So how does a manager and an Individual worker, yes. Navigate that balance. Sort of knowing you need to try to replicate work as much as possible, but knowing that it's impossible.

I'm so glad you brought that up, actually, because flexibility is actually one of the greatest benefits of remote work. You can have these disciplined ways of starting your day and ending your day, but what you do in between, or even deciding that you're. You'll work eight hours a day, but when you begin your day and when you end your day first, your commute is now, what, three and a half minutes long. It's, it's so, so, yeah. So commuting has gone away. Nine to five may not be the way people work. Someone may work from 4am to 8 and then, you know, spend time homeschooling, as many people are nowadays, for two, three hours and then pick it back up for certain periods of time. But you need to communicate with your manager, help them understand that the rhythm of work has changed a little bit. But the most important thing, Allison, is that managers have to trust their teams 100%. You have to trust that people are working, that they're going to fulfill their responsibility. If you have hired and you have trained and you have competent people in on your team, you give them full trust, you equip them, you support them, and you trust that they're going to work. And that flexibility is part of the gift that comes with remote work. And you accept that, that their workday might look like an accordion. And that is perfectly fine.

And can we as organizations and individual workers expect productivity to be the same?

Ordinarily, productivity does not get affected with remote work. And in fact, evidence is that productivity actually goes up with remote work. Having said that, what I think will happen during this particular unprecedented era is that it is possible that we might see a dip in productivity because there's this radical change, kind of this tsunami level shift that we're seeing in our societies right now, and people are distracted. Communities are being affected wholesale. And there's so much uncertainty all around us. Entire industries are shutting down. Our clients, customers, our ecosystems are shifting all around us. So do we know that productivity will remain steady in this kind of environment? No, we don't. Does remote work affect productivity on an ordinary basis? Absolutely not. So this is kind of the tension that we have before us.

Do you have some tips for staying.

Focused, being very, very disciplined and working in bursts? Turn off all of the things that would draw us in during a particular period. Period, meaning cut off all access to external social media when you're working television. No way, do the things that you would do normally, be very disciplined about those. But after a certain period, you've, you've done that for an hour, an hour and a half, two hours. It depends on what you do. You should get up, move, walk around, stretch, and then come back to your position and then go at it again.

So let's talk about virtual meetings, because I know that's something that people struggle with. It's one thing to talk one on one with someone on a video chat, but to make sure that A team of 10, for example, can discuss an issue and everyone can feel included. How do I make sure that they work virtually as well as they would have in person?

Virtual meetings can be virtual, very effective, as effective as face to face meetings. Distributed work and remote work have been around for more than two decades. This is not a new idea. Global employees have been doing it for a very long time. You want to make sure that you've set certain norms like turn off your phones, don't email, don't multitask, so that we focus on our conversation. A video based digital tool is the best way to do it. You see everyone's face, you can see what everyone's doing. The other thing is you don't want to jump straight into the conversation or your agenda. You want to spend the first six to seven minutes checking in with people. It's kind of this open ended space. We call this structuring, unstructured time. It's akin to the water cooler conversation that you no longer have access to. But informal communication has direct bearing on performance. Just to check in, how are you today? Allison, how's it going? So and so. Mary, how are you today? Kurt, how are you today? It could be a specific question that you go around asking people. So very quick, check in. Everyone feels seen, everyone feels heard. And then you can jump into your topic.

What about meetings that are challenging in person already? You know, really large meetings or things like brainstorming sessions. Are there things you need to do differently now that there were in a virtual setting?

The difference is that you can only treat one or two challenging topics at a time because you don't have the opportunity to work out any lingering issues through walking into someone's office or multiple offices after the fact to smoothen things or to do any social lubrication the way that you would if you were in a physical space with a group. So for that reason, you have to be thoughtful about when you raise issues and how much time you have to work these things through. The best practice that we've seen is that you thoughtfully raise one or two difficult conversations. Over time, people will develop the muscle. But for now, you training and teaching people how to do remote work. So I would really be thoughtful about how I raise these difficult and challenging issues.

Yeah. So we've talked a lot about how managers can be interacting with employees and how a team can interact with each other. What about external stakeholders? You know, clients, customers, suppliers, investors. How do we start doing all of that business virtually?

We do them in the same way. Listen, we're going to be online, we're going to communicate through all of these digital tools and media, and we need to think about doing them in similar ways. If you need to develop rapport, rapport connection and relationship with people, it's really important that you select the tools that will allow you to do those as quickly as possible. So the visual ones really are important. I was joking earlier in that I actually have just in the last 24 hours, used at least four different digital tools because I engaged with four different external parties. So I ended up on Zoom, WebEx, Skype, and this other system that I'd never even heard of. And it took me a few minutes to figure out how to work it and in fact, 20 minutes before the actual call. And I figured it out eventually. So this is what's going to happen. Not everyone is going to use the same digital tools, so you'll have to adapt quickly. If you've never used it before, you can propose to use your own. And if others don't know how to use yours, be prepared to use theirs. Suggest to use video if it's possible, and if not, adapt. But this is our reality and we have to adapt. We've got to go with it. You can't wine and dine like you used to, but you have to learn quickly, engage fast, and try to communicate with people frequently.

And your research shows that redundant communication is really good too, right?

Absolutely. Redundant communication and pairing various modes of communication can help influence people in various ways. And importantly, it ensures that people's communication or intended communication has gotten across quite clearly. That might be an important thing to do nowadays as people learn to convey their various intended messages through digital tools that they might have never used before.

Right at the top of this episode, you talked about the need to equip everyone. What if it's an organization where some of the people are able to work from home, but some people still have to go in? How do you keep everyone feeling unified and like a team?

There's been such an unusual role reversal with the vast majority of employees working from home with some having to go to work and those having to go to work feeling like they're losing contact and losing connection. And managers have to remember that those who have to go to work need attention, they need contact, they need communication so that they don't feel like we're the ones who have to go in, maybe even put ourselves at risk. Risk when all of the others are safe at home with their families and we don't want to get into us versus them phenomenon, which is what you typically, typically get when you get into these subgroup differences. This is some of the basic things that we see. See when you have dispersed workers, you can easily get that with we the at home people and we are the office people, us versus them. So a manager has to work very hard to ensure that there's this psychological oneness among the group. Yes, they're there and yes we're here, but we are part of one team. And those who are home have to routinely make contact with those who are not home and even express gratitude for what they're doing.

Two forward looking questions. We're all struggling. We're all bumbling around trying to get the technologies to work and figure out how to do this.

Well, yes.

How long is it going to take us to feel like we've got it down?

Not long. It doesn't take long. Listen, I received an email today from a 70 year old. This person actually is retired from a very senior executive position. This person currently sits on boards of extraordinary companies. But this person sent me me an email saying that he held an online meeting and used virtual background on his zoom meeting and was very excited about it. He knows how to do this now and that is exciting. So I don't think it's going to take long. This transition, the technical transition is going to be the easiest thing to happen and you're not going to turn back. People are going to feel like they've known this stuff all along and will be glad for it.

Yeah, so that gets to my last question. Do you think that this period of forced remote work is going to change the way we operate as organizations going forward even when the crisis is over?

I don't think it's going to change our way of working wholesale, but I do think it's going to increase our capacity, our repertoire as individuals and organizations overall. I also think that our global talent pool will expand as well. We will all realize as individuals and even organizations that we can actually have employees from anywhere in the world, work remotely and be part of our organizations and individuals will also realize that they can be remote employees and be part of any organization from anywhere in the world. And I think that's a new idea that people would probably never have considered. The third thing that I think is going to be happening is people are going to have empathy for all of the remote workers that have been part of their organizations, whether global or not, for many, many years. And they never quite understood what it was like for them to either work from home or work in another country and be part of their teams. And today, they know exactly what that's like. And through this empathy, they'll be better team members, they'll be better managers, and in the end, better organizations.

Sadal, thank you so much.

Thank you. It's always a pleasure talking to you, Alison. Thank you for having me.

That's Sadal Neely, a professor at Harvard Business School and founder of Global Matters, a consultant consulting firm. This episode was produced by Mary Du. We get technical help from Rob Eckart. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. Thanks for listening to the hbr ideacast. I'm alison beard.