Getting Promoted While Working From Home

How do we keep our employees engaged, working remotely, in a pandemic?

Employee engagement has always been a big topic in performance. We understand why it’s important, we understand that it’s necessary, but we have little understanding how to measure it and how to drive it because there are so many factors that impact it: benefits, family life, career progression, leadership, compensation, etc. Add in a remote working environment and it becomes even more difficult for people to understand how to connect differently and juggle home distractions. Throw in a pandemic and we have a recipe for constant stress. Our big topic becomes even more complex: how do we keep our employees engaged, working remotely, in a pandemic?

The truth is, remote working isn’t a new concept. With the globalization of organizations and the trends in the last 5 years of moving to remote work, it’s a concept that has been evolving. But the world is changing faster than we are ready for it to.

Companies have been forced to close their offices, have their employees work from home and the assumption was this would lead to a decline in productivity and engagement. A study done by Prodoscore shows that productivity has actually increased. “Employees are in fact more productive now, showing a 47% increase in daily productivity in March/April of 2020 versus the same time last year.” I think there are some assumptions that need to be taken into consideration, especially when we look at the volume of layoffs organizations have had to make to stay afloat and what is expected of remaining employees. However, despite concerns, we are starting to see that remote work may be a welcome change for most organizations, now we just need to understand how to do it well.

What we experience when we are working from home and we’re not ready for it, is it’s scary. Maybe our company is laying people off and we’re unsure of our job security, maybe we’ve got kids at home that need schooling, maybe we’re single and our lives have become too solitary, maybe we have family members or friends who passed away, maybe we’re just scared because we don’t know what’s happening tomorrow. Whatever the response, (hopefully there is a compassionate takeaway here that applies to stress outside of Covid), we need to give people time to settle and adapt. Then we need to change how we develop people because they’re going to be performing based on new behaviors.

For example, let’s say you’re in sales and you are used to taking customers out to lunch, visiting their offices and building relationships face to face. In sales, it’s really important to build those strong relationships so the customer can trust you and you can truly understand their pain points to help you negotiate more effectively. If we can’t have those face-to-face relationships and that’s your strength as a salesperson, what are you going to do? What do you do if your market is hospital systems? You need time to adapt to your surroundings and coaching that enables you to develop new behaviors (different fundamentals) that take you to the same outcome.

Performance is not a one-time occurrence. It’s an evolution of growth and learning especially as our environment changes. If performance is ongoing, so too should be evaluations. Performance management done well needs to be a continuous cycle of setting goals (both developmental and those that align the employee to the execution of business strategy), receiving feedback on behaviors or fundamentals, receiving coaching to develop behaviors and make any necessary adjustments, then having evaluations that rate a person against the benchmark for their goals outcomes. Data tells us that employees who receive meaningful, actionable feedback and coaching against their goals outperform those who do not. And if we’re developing new skills, frequent coaching is especially important so that we don’t create wrong behavior patterns.

It’s time that we take a realistic approach to managing our people. An approach that is lighter weight and more impactful. This starts with trust and relationships. If an employee doesn’t trust their peers when receiving feedback, if they don’t trust their manager when receiving guidance or coaching, if managers don’t trust their employees to rely on their instincts, then nothing will work. There needs to be an earnest intention to building relationships and trust, and that looks different in a remote environment versus the office. What we lose in instant connection, reading body language, and having more in-person touchpoints, we have to gain in have more meaningful and in-depth conversations. We won’t be able to make the same assumptions we used to. Instead, we need to ask. We need to reach out to our employees, to our peers and simply check-in. How are things going? How are you dealing with home-schooling? How are you feeling about working with this team? Tell me what you’re struggling with. And when we ask these questions when we spend time to get to know one another in a new way, there has to be an environment of safety and without agenda. 

If an employee feels their response will lead to retribution, they’ll never be truly honest. As managers, we need to role model the right ways to connect with one another that allows others to be authentic and feel safe. We need to foster a culture that is present, aware of how people are feeling, safe to fail which means we’re allowed to get it wrong before getting it right. I’ve had managers tell me I manage 20 people, there’s no way I can do this and do my job. This tells me, at a people systems level, we need to restructure.

If it’s impossible for a manager to be effective with the number of direct reports they have, they need development themselves, or fewer direct reports or fewer job function responsibilites. If we want our people to do well, we have to look at performance enablement and management differently. Our expectations and metrics for success have to be different. 

We’re entering a space where organizations have to be more compassionate, more forgiving, more accepting of differences, which will enable stronger performers. This is the decade that will make us put people first so that we can out-perform our competition as well as have a positive impact on our communities.