How to manage three main challenges of remote working?

1. Remote Working Introduction: Not so long ago, most of us who are working used to wake up, get dressed, and commute to our workplace. Then COVID-19 happened and it fundamentally changed the way many organizations operate. Working virtually, working from home or working remotely, whatever name you may call it. This became a modus operandi for most of us. Remote working offers many benefits. At the same time, it also brings certain challenges which if not taken care off, can have damaging consequences for employers and employees. This course discusses three major challenges of remote working. It also talks about some of the actions those working remotely and the managers can take to mitigate these challenges. A warm welcome to my course. 2. Remote Working Evolution: Remote working was introduced in the 1980s by Control Data Corporation and IBM as a way to use computer programmers as freelancers who are in high demand, but short supply. Opportunities for remote working rose gradually in the 990s, along with the capabilities of home computing as people were selling items on eBay and sharing work using eLance of freelancing, using their own personal computers. Shift from manufacturing to an information economy, expanded number of jobs that could be done remotely. In the early 2000s, many big companies started allowing employees to work virtually facilitated by corporate communication and collaboration tools. The 2003 outbreak of sars, which spread to 29 countries and 911 attack on the World Trade Center in New York gave this agenda a huge momentum. Around 2012, 13 low cost collaborative tools were being made available and video costs started falling. People also learned how to divide and distribute tasks. This led to more organizations join this movement. Another key driver for recent surge in remote working is the changing workforce. Young people expect to communicate cheaply and rapidly from anywhere in the world. And they want to apply this in their work-life. Likewise, all workers forced to or choosing to delay retirement, prefer to have a better work-life balance, which they think is possible if they're not required to face a grueling daily commute. With the COVID-19 pandemic, many have begun working from home with short notice. Today, people working remotely and not just young parents who prefer to work from home, or people experimenting, working at office three days a week and two days from home. Or freelancers and consultants. As Professor Linda, greater than a leading authority on the future of work says, remote workers are everyone and they are everywhere. 3. Remote Working Benefits: Remote working has been a win-win scenario for employees and their employers or leaders. For individual employees, remote working provides numerous benefits. These include time planning freedom, increase autonomy, increased family and leisure time, increased happiness, boosted morale, improved productivity, increased job satisfaction, and increased employment opportunities, particularly for women with children, students, and disabled person. Likewise, remote working also offers reduction in commuting time, travel, and other costs. The rise in remote working is not mainly driven by increasing workers demand, but also by growing awareness among business leaders of its pivotal role in achieving organizational success. The business leaders are critical factor is the ability to use remote working as a benefit to attract and retain top talent. For many job seekers, remote working availability has now become a key differentiator. When faced with a choice between similar jobs. For instance, four out of every five respondents in the EWG 2019's survey stated that given the two similar job offers, they would turn down the one that didn't offer them flexible working. Furthermore, as cost to replace an employee's huge, employers are using remote working to reduce turnover and improve retention by providing to their employees improved work-life balance and reduced commuting time. Another issue is related to productivity. 85% of the respondents in the I WG 2019's study confirmed that productivity has gone up post implementation of flexible working. On the other hand, remote working is expected to help employers reduce the capital and operating expenditure. 4. Remote Working Main Challenges: Despite many benefits that remote working offers, there are some critical challenges as well. It's not all rainbows and unicorns. E.g. buffers survey in the state of remote work 2021, showed that remote workers find it difficult to unplug, face communication problems, feel alone, find it tough to get motivated, and find distractions at home. In the upcoming lessons, we'll take a closer look at some of the critical ones. I will explain why these challenges arise in remote work environment. But talking only about what challenges are, isn't enough. Mastering remote working requires us to tackle these challenges. Avoiding the pitfalls requires remote workers to take certain actions. There are quite a few relatively quick and inexpensive things that remote employees can do to address these challenges, but there is more to it. Indeed, employers and managers also play an important role in the success of remote working by providing supportive culture, best practices and appropriate tools. That's why I will also talk how managers can help to tackle challenges they're remote team members are facing. Let's get started. 5. Difficulty to Unplug from Work: One of the reasons many organizations don't approve of remote work is they fare employees will slack off without that physical in-person oversight. But research shows the opposite tends to be true. Remote workers are more likely to overwork. A survey by Cloud infrastructure company, Digital Ocean found that 82% of remote tech workers in the United States felt burnout, with 52% reporting. They had work longer hours than those in the office. 40 per cent feeling as though they needed to contribute more than they're in office counterparts. People working remotely often feel more grateful to their employers for allowing them to adopt this working lifestyle. That feeling of gratitude can lead some remote employees to keep their foot on the gas until they run out of fuel. Such individuals feel they have to show extra effort in order to return benefit to the employer or manager. When does the work they start. When does it end? Afternoons will blend with evenings. Weekdays will blend with weakens. And literal sense of time off will remain. Drawing boundaries between work and home. It's tough. Even though it is important for our mental health. Many times, employees and work-related communication outside office hours, making it difficult to maintain boundaries for the managers. Other time, the manager intensifies workload with requests that cannot be accomplished within certain time frames. Pandemic like COVID-19 might amplify these pressures. Even for employees who have a natural preference to separate the work and personal lives, the current pandemic circumstances may not allow them to do so. In the journal article, all in a day's work boundaries and micro role transitions. Blake, Ashford, Glenn, crania, and male forgot describe the ways in which people distinguish the transition from work to non-work roles via boundary crossing activities. Putting on your workloads, commuting from home to work. These are physical and social indicators that something has changed. You've transitioned from home you to work you. In the Harvard Business Review article, laura go Jay and Vanessa bonds recommend that we should continue to maintain physical and social boundaries between our work and non-work roles, even working remotely. This can be done by getting ready, like going to work, putting on workloads are smart casuals every morning. Replacing morning commute with a walk to a nearby park, or even just around your apartment or home. Before sitting down to work. Remote workers need to have a designated workspace. Whether it's an entire room, a breakfast nook in your kitchen, or a corner in the living room. Avoid working from a bedroom as much as possible. While working remotely, maintain temporal boundaries as much as possible. Remote workers need to find work time budgets that function best for them. They also need to be conscious and respectful that others might work at different times than they do. They should coordinate their time with others in the team as well as with the managers and maintain the worksheet. You'll as much as possible once agreed. It is important that remote workers make commitments that forced them to end work on time. E.g. set appointments for Jim, grocery reading, playing board games with family on your calendar for the end of the day. To get yourself out of your work mode. Once the work time is over, leave your to-dos in your designated space so you can mentally disconnect from work and properly recharge. You can simply do this by locking the home office door when you end the workday. If you work from lounge, dining area, put your work laptop out of sight when the work ends. Turn off work-related e-mail and phone notifications before and after working hours. According to some estimates, the average knowledge worker is only productive on an average 3 h per day. And these hours should be free of interruptions to maximize productivity. Hence, it's important to prioritize work. Have a work plan in advance for each day. Take advantage of various task or project management software such as Trello, JIRA, monday.com, Asana, Zoho projects, to name a few, limit the number of tasks you can plan to do each day. You can use Eisenhower Matrix or plan to do just one big thing, three medium things, and five small things per day. The 135 rule, working all the time even on your most important tasks, isn't the answer. Employees who feel on all the time or at a higher risk of burnout when working remotely than if they were going to the office as usual. Take mini breaks. According to authors and Harvard Business Review columnist Liz for saline and Mali West Duffy, stepping away from your desk periodically for even five-minutes helps you relaxed and stay focused. You can use the app timeout, which reminds to take periodic breaks to stretch, walk around, or change, position a desk. You can also opt for Pomodoro technique, which is a time management technique that uses a timer to break down work into intervals separated by short breaks. There are many pomodoro timer apps available, such as Commodore, marinara timer, and forest, to name a few. Remember, remote employees are tougher to diagnose with burnout because you cannot see changes in their personality on a daily basis. Therefore, as a leader, you need to ensure there is a process of checking in and being aware of the signs. Act if your people are consistently showing certain behaviors, working longer hours, answering emails late at night, putting time in on the weekend, coming in sick, or piling up vacation days. These are behaviors related to burnout, not high performance. Encourage your people to speak up when they feel overloaded with work and are finding it difficult to unplug. Be empathetic about employees personal lives and priorities, work-life balance, and their professional development. Help your team members find solutions for problems they face in these areas. Lead, by example, change up your own work routines to fit in your personal, family or health commitments. Leaders should also recognize that people need some uninterrupted time to focus and work effectively. Therefore, they should refrain when possible, from sending communications outside of agreed workers. If you must send a late-night e-mail, make it clear whether you need an immediate response. If not, state that your team members can wait until the morning to reply. Be conscious and respectful of different time zones and time slots. Others in the team are working. In the article. Fixing the overload problem at work, authors suggest that leaders should identify and reduce low-value work. For instance, meeting without agendas, duplicative tasks, and unnecessarily record keeping, take time away from real work. Likewise, in their article, y times signals matter when working remotely. Elana Feldman and Melissa has many an advocate. If leaders have less urgent questions or information to share, they should consider aggregating points into fewer messages to cut down on the number of interruptions. Leaders should give employees clear direction on their performance goals and priorities. Importantly, the leader should evaluate their people on the quality of output, not on how quickly they respond to an e-mail, or how often they're online on your system. When you people are offline, don't assume they are not working. In a nutshell. Leaders should trust the team members to get their work done within a reasonable timeframe. They should prioritize which tasks are important and urgent while which can wait. Leaders can also use Eisenhower Matrix. Leaders should encourage employees who are working together to create informal collaboration hours. During this time, employees can work on individual tasks, but keep a Zoom or Google Hangouts window open for impromptu questions and discussions. Leaders should also allow social interaction through virtual check-ins and coffee breaks with employees. These virtual opportunities for togetherness keep employees aware of what their coworkers are up to, allow for immediate coordination needs and maintain relationships while people are physically separated. 6. Communication Problems: As you go, co-founder Josh law is shared in his MIT Sloan Management Review article. One of the issues with remote working is the loss of face-to-face communication. As organizations primarily use text-based electronic mode of communication, such as email and chat. Although text-based communication can accomplish a lot, it lacks richness and social presence compared with face-to-face conversations. Importantly, conversations may not necessarily happen in real time. When communication is text-based, It's more difficult to tell when messages have been received and read unless receipt is specifically acknowledged. When people don't interact face to face, it can create an out of sight, out of mind effect. That translates to a lower willingness to give coworkers benefit of doubt in difficult situations they may face. This also makes it challenging for remote workers to develop personal relationship and trust. In their book, remote office not required authors Jason Fried and David Hein MI or highlight this issue there, right? When the bulk of your communication happens via e-mail and delight, it doesn't take much for bad blood to develop unless everyone is making the best efforts. To the contrary, small misunderstandings that could have been nipped in the bud with a wink of an eye or a certain tone of voice can quickly snowball into drama. The communication problem is compounded if some of the team members work in the office while others work remotely. In such a scenario, remote workers are likely to miss all the overheard discussions and cubicle wall meetings. They might feel paranoid that others are having interactions and making decisions. Unless the company has built a culture of inclusion for remote workers, they might be out of sight and out of mind. As Professor Linda gradient suggested in her article, three elements for successful virtual working. Remote workers need to make technology part of the regular flow of work and match it with the task at hand. For instance, they can use group platforms such as Zoho for project work, and use telephone to catch up. They can use leaner, text-based media such as email or chat, to convey information in one direction, such as circulating routine information and plans and collecting sample data. Remote workers can use video conferencing for complex or sensitive conversations, problem-solving and negotiation. Similarly, Sharon Hill and Catherine bottle in there MIT Sloan Management Review article recommend that remote workers need to be crystal clear about their intentions when communicating. They should review important written messages before sending them to make sure they have struck the right tone in their communication. In their written messages. Remote worker should also underscore important information. Highlight parts of the message that require attention. Use response requested in the subject line or separate requests into multiple emails to increase the importance of each one. Sharon Hill and Catherine bottle add that as remote workers, it is also important to share information about your local situation, including unexpected emergencies, time demands, and priorities. Acknowledged receipt of important messages, even if immediate action isn't possible. Seek clarifications to better understand others behaviors and intentions. Before jumping to conclusions. Be mindful of time zone differences. These behaviors and actions increase transparency and reduce communication challenges. First, leader should ensure that the people are given proper tools and resources. Do people have the requisite technology or access to it? Who has a laptop? Will those who have can connect to the organizations easily? What about employees who don't have laptops or mobile devices? How do you ensure they have access to the resources they need to in order to complete their work. Whether it's Facebook, workplace, Slack, Asana, Trello, google suite or any other. Find a setup that works for your people. Remember to leave time to train and get two people will comfortable using tools or else you'll be stalled. Even before you start. Let people know what's expected of them. Specifically, what's encouraged and what's not acceptable. For this. Professor's Sharon Hill and Kathryn Barton suggest to develop a protocol that describes how you will work together. In the protocol specified technologies the team will or won't use for different tasks. E.g. don't use email to discuss sensitive interpersonal issues. The protocol should also mention standard formats and adequate for written communication. E.g. highlight or bold text to emphasize action items in emails. Also state plans for keeping everyone in sync. E.g. let the team know ahead of time if a commitment or a deadline cannot be met. In the protocol, you also need to mention expected time to respond to requests, e.g. acknowledged receipt within 24 h. Don't forget to mention type of communication that should be shared with everyone. E.g. use the wood. Do you want to know rule of thumb in this case? In all employee interactions, be empathetic to employees needs and concerns. Communicate frequently and keep the dialogue open. If your people have never worked remotely before, that can be a challenge. So don't assume they know what to do or can transition into this remote working environment, comfortably. Talk to your people for any questions or concerns. If you have team members were experienced remote workers use them as ambassadors. Let them lead by example and model how others can do it. As Alice and McCulloch, founder of quipped right? People are more often comfortable chatting with a peer than the boss. So it's important to have these surrogates in online work community to mentor others and escalate issues. 7. Interruptions at Home: For many of us, working remotely is synonymous to working from home. When you work from home, you are most likely to face interruptions there. Earlier in the course. I refer to the article all in a day's work boundaries and micro role transitions. In this seminal article, the authors argued that one of the ways people manage their working lives when their identities are distinct is by creating mental boundaries between the roles often facilitated but clear transitions. Let's understand this issue more with an example about my family. My wife has two distinct identities, a dentist and caring mother. She transits between the roll through prompts such as putting on workloads or activities like driving to a clinic after dropping our child at school. Likewise, I have been working from home for the past few years. I also create similar boundaries and rituals such as moving into my home office at around 09:00 A.M. from Monday's to Friday's to prioritize work time when it's 03:00 P.M. during weekdays, I go to my kid's school to pick her up. These transitions help to maintain mental boundaries, minimize distraction, and allow creativity. With the COVID-19 pandemic, these traditional boundaries of going to and coming from work or removed. There are now multiple transitions. Work, look after child work, prepared lunch, work, play with Kidd, et cetera. There are distractions such as television, internet, and food. Additionally, partners work styles and preferred work schedules may also differ. According to Professor Linda, greater than managing multiple boundaries at home is tricky and stressful. It also adversely affects concentration, productivity, and ultimately creativity. Some even argue that family distraction presented by the new work from home reality is one of the most pressing management issues of the COVID-19 crisis. It's the one that if unchecked, could lead to a significant drop in productivity and creativity. So let's talk next about how we can tackle this. We need to understand and accept that tensions are here to stay for long and we need to manage them. In their seminal article, micro foundations of organizational paradox. The problem is how we think about the problem. The authors found that when people need to do multiple tasks together in times of crisis like this, they need to adopt a paradox mindset. This means people should consider the world with a both and approach instead of either or one. Then we can see tensions as opportunities, confront them, and search for strategies to improve job performance and creativity. If you have a family at home, particularly kids, then keep usual structure of the day the same as it has typically been. According to opening Patel Thompson, CEO of modern village and Harvard Business Review, contributor. Routines will give you familiarity and steady guideposts for building your work and childcare responsibilities. Then build a weekly schedule by including these routines at a high level, as well as your task list and other new responsibilities such as household work and childcare, put this information into your calendar and allocate shifts and duties to your partner. Up new Patel Thomson suggests the following three shifts. Long shifts, these are two hour uninterrupted time in which one partner works and the other kids for kids, use this time to work on high priority tasks. Eat the frog during this time. Short shifts, these are 30 min to 1 h sessions that rotate among partners. Finally, video shifts. These are less than 30 minute sessions when kids engage in video chats with family or watch program on television. Both partners can use this time for quick phone calls, are responding to emails that need brief responses. Establish a policy of kindness and patience in communication and behavior among all residents at home. Talk about work style preferences and needs related to optimal work. Agree upon what is workspace as well as what is not. Set up. A kind of signal that let others know when you are in Focus Mode. If you have adults or older kids in the house, put up a sign, close the door, or provide some other signal for when you can't be disturbed unless in emergencies. Be clear and justify about the kind of interruptions that are okay and those that can wait. You also need to understand that it's impossible to avoid all interruptions from your family if you are the only caregiver at home or just your expectations, recognized limitations, and be adaptable. Communicate with your manager and team that you have care-giving commitments to attend to at home, negotiate for more reasonable deadlines, and talk to your boss about a needs and limitations. When you find yourself distracted, not by other people, but buy a home environment, use this to your advantage. These includes thought such as, should I do my laundry now or shall I take my dog for a walk? Plan for these breaks and use them as a reward. E.g. if you're having trouble starting the article, you need to write, decide that as soon as I dropped the introduction, I will take my dog for a walk. Gain insights from your employees about their specific situations. Show empathy by adjusting work practices in time. E.g. allow employees to work nonstandard hours or give virtual breaks more often if needed. Identify blocks of time when the people will be on, and blocks when they'll be off. Share these schedules with your team members to manage expectations. Develop a working protocol. Encourage your employees who are working at home to set work norms and routines. These include responding to calls within a certain timeframe, finding private space to work at home. You also need to guide your people to prioritize tasks that have to be done. Coach them about using the Eisenhower Matrix. Create collaborative platforms that enable employees in similar situations to find each other, to mentor and coach each other, and to share ideas and interesting experiments. You can even implement peer coaching to help employees share challenges, stresses, fears, and hopes. 8. Way Ahead: Physical boundaries that define work are disappearing. Individuals have realized that they can work remotely and be part of any organization from anywhere in the world. Our ability to get important work done depends lesson where we work and more on how we work. This is the new idea that many of us have never considered before. But now most of us are adapting to it in order to reap benefits of better work-life balance, improved productivity, and lesser commute times. Leaders, on the other hand, are looking to keep their business running, get access to wider talent pool, raise employee productivity, and reduce certain expenditures. Both leaders and their employees, however, need to be aware that remote working brings some unique challenges. By examining the literature, my interaction with business leaders and remote employees. And through my own experience of remote working, I have shared some handy tips on how to tackle some of its major challenges. These tapes broadly revolve around three key elements of remote working. As suggested by Professor Lindbergh, written. Broadly speaking, to tackle remote working challenges, you need to develop resilient habits on making technology. Part of your regular workflow. Build social connections, and create daily rituals and routines. Employers and managers, on the other hand, can contribute by providing supportive culture, best practices and appropriate tools. As remote working gets adopted by increasing number of people and organizations, new challenges may emerge. Only way to tackle them is by being inventive and adaptive in our responses.