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Canada Association of Tourism Employees

Distant Working Challenges You Want To Overcome

4 challenges without simple solutions

There is general consensus that, despite an improved ability to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic in the future, most organizations will retain some level of home office options “forever” for a variety of reasons. The obvious advantages are the time and cost savings for commuting, flexibility, savings through reduced office space and the social benefit of a lower carbon footprint.

However, it appears that there are significant challenges to be overcome in adopting work-from-home protocols as well. And many companies are rushing to adapt their existing ways of working to support their new home work protocols.

4 major remote working challenges, each with considerations for solving them

1. Mindset

A few years ago, during an assignment at an international retailer that had recently introduced a controversial time recording system, I remember a specific debate on the board of directors. The crux of the debate was that it was relatively easy (if expensive) to systematize the management of employee time and attendance, but that it really only managed the time that employees “physically” spent at work. The real challenge was creating a mindset where employees not only bring their physical presence at work, but also their commitment to harnessing and expanding their talents to further the organization’s purpose and be great people to work with.

Consider the following: Regardless of a time and attendance system, when a person crosses the “physical threshold” into their work environment, they “physically stamp themselves” in to work. Cy Wakeman (author of No Ego) offers an interesting insight into this. In a different context, but perhaps relevant, it describes the mind as a binary system operated by a “toggle switch” that can be turned either up or down. It motivates people to be able to choose the position of the toggle switch through self-reflection. In Cy’s context (the lower position represents the low self-state and the upper position represents the high self-state) the state of mind initiated by the position of the toggle switch is either one or the other. It cannot be both at the same time.

So if this is true of a complex mindset, then how can we use it to constructively influence a relatively simple mindset, that of “I’m at work, albeit from home” versus “I’m at home, juggling work with.” the competition for personal, domestic and / or parental priorities?

Different interventions activate and maintain the right mindset for different teams at different times. There are many inspiring and innovative ideas. It is suggested that creating and maintaining the right mindset must remain a priority by including it as a discussion point on each team’s weekly agenda. Questions to ask are: What works? What does not work? How do we ensure that each member and we work together as a team in an optimally productive manner from home? What can we learn from other teams? And what insights can we share with other teams?

It is a prerogative of leadership to work actively and persistently to help remote individuals and teams switch their mindset to “I am at work, albeit from home,” and this position with focus on important work topics for the people Maintain duration of each working day. every week, every month, every year.

2. Focus

Focusing is a significant challenge when working from home because distractions are numerous and easy to succumb to. While a small distraction can only take up to five minutes, the loss of focus and continuity of the task at hand can cost many times that. It is then not difficult to “lose and / or not be able to do productive accounting” for a significant part of a working day.

Think About It: Research by Cy Wakeman (mentioned earlier) suggests that the average person spends up to 2.5 hours a day engaging in drama that is unproductive and generally only leads to feelings of unhappiness. The propensity for drama is certainly increased by the situations created by the pandemic and with it the possibility for people to be distracted from work by the drama (from media, messaging and social networks). Add to this all the other distractions that abound in the home working environment and employee contributions can be significantly watered down.

I would like to suggest that the focus in the work from home context consists of 4 key elements. These are attention to the right things, active engagement, continuous feedback, and accountability. In that regard, I found the following short video clip from Chris McChesney (author of The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals) to be incredibly insightful and practical for building solid team practices around this.

Another thing to consider is that there will be many distractions at home during the work day that offer what appears to be greater and more immediate happiness and that rival the work activities of employees. In this context, the term consonance is relevant.

3. Consonance

Laura Glassner Otting (author of Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life) promotes the concept of consonance to help people be successful and happy. She observes that many people are successful but are not happy because they are following someone else’s idea / path to success. It is obvious that success cannot be sustainable without a feeling of happiness. In summary, Laura advocates the concept that people can only be happy and successful if their (work) efforts are focused on what is important to them.

She explains that there are 4 elements of consonance. These are calling (having work that serves an idea that is bigger than you are), connection (having work that matters), contribution (having work that benefits us), and control (having sufficient agency to make such a calling connect and influence).

It makes sense to me that employee consonance will play a crucial role in their sustainable ability to work successfully and happily from home. Team leaders need support to create a sense of harmony in their teams. A good starting point is to explore this concept together by bringing in a suitable moderator from within the organization or, if necessary, an external moderator.

4. Leadership

Last but not least, this is probably the most challenging, but with the most leverage opportunities. How can we better lead remote work teams?

Disruption and extreme events challenge leadership skills. The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly done so in terms of running home work teams for the purposes of this article. How have the executives fared? Anecdotal evidence suggests that without understanding how to lead home office teams, many managers resort to command and control management styles or simply give up leadership to “virtually be absent”.

Do we just need to adapt our current leadership practices, or is this a push to rethink the way we facilitate leadership learning? I believe it is the latter.

I have been fortunate to work with a number of great leadership gurus in great organizations over many years and to support the leadership teachings. I realized that leadership learning is not a linear or synchronous process. It takes a multidimensional (the insights of many thought leaders from different walks of life), eclectic approach and cannot be separated from teaching the things that make us better people. Also, learning needs to be slowed down over time to wrestle one concept at a time and curiously explore and experiment, reflect, learn and then integrate it into the fabric of the leader and the person you want to be .

I consider myself fortunate to experience this approach in the current free YOLB (Year Of Living Brilliantly) program, which is moderated by Michael Bungay Stanier (author of The Advice Trap, The Coaching Habit and Do More Great Work, among others). The course consists of carefully curated weekly contributions from incredibly diverse thought leaders via video link via email, as well as a call to action to learn from, share and apply the incredible insights. It works out. I would like to quote some relevant, brilliant findings, but there are too many and it would be unfair to choose some over others.

In summary: thought provoking, not final

The aim of this article was to be thought-provoking, not final. The challenges identified are significant and the solutions are not easy. However, the challenges certainly deserve our attention and our best.

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