Working from home is not new, but working from home during a global pandemic is not normal. Managing employees to meet or exceed standards under these conditions is equally difficult, but there are tools to help stay the course.

Define Success

The first step is to define what success looks like now. For me, success involves healthy employees, ensuring business continuity, and meeting goals. To reach those goals in this moment, managers must adapt to changing operational conditions.

Determine Which Standards are Flexible

Look at employees’ office hours, projects, and deadlines. Speak with employees about their challenges.

Many employees, like managers, have been juggling work pressures, deadlines, social isolation, and work schedules. They have also been juggling child-care or homeschooling duties, too. There are good reasons that employers with remote employees typically have policies prohibiting employees from providing care to children during work hours.

It is hard and distracting. Although these challenges are an inevitable part of this pandemic, managers can help employees. Businesses and managers can relax some business formalities, such as defined working hours and professional office attire.

Some employees might need to juggle their schedules with their spouses’ schedules. Can you accommodate an earlier start time? Business professional attire is needed for court appearances conducted via Zoom but might be unnecessary for one-on-one videoconferences between managers and employees. Be flexible now, if you can.

Adapt Your Management Style

Managers should personalize their approach to managing employees. Some employees thrive with a lot of freedom, but others need more accountability. Managing people remotely requires trust in your staff, and feeling that trust can be hard when managers are ultimately accountable for employees’ work product.

But think about this – you already knew who your high performers were before this pandemic. You already knew who needed more support. You already knew that new employees need more guidance than seasoned staff members. So, tailor your management approach to individuals, their performance, and their experience. Focus your energy on developing and coaching staff who need it. You might have quick project-focused one-on-one meetings with self-sufficient employees but also provide them with opportunities to take on new projects.

Have Regular Check-ins With Your Staff

In the past, one of the challenges of managing people remotely was the inability to see nonverbal reactions to information, projects, and learning opportunities. Now that videoconferencing is more reliable, that is less of an issue. But no one wants to be on camera all the time, so creating guidelines for when and how to use videoconferencing with employees is helpful. In my own work, I use the following guidelines for videoconferencing:

• Use videoconferencing for wider group meetings, presentations, learning, coaching, and feedback.

• Use phone meetings for quick 15-20-minute meetings with a small audience.

• Use instant messaging (IMs) for quick project updates or questions. IMs are the remote employee equivalent of walking into someone’s office.

• Follow the preferences of clients and vendors when scheduling meetings with them.

• One-on-one meetings vary. I hold some of them via phone, Skype calls, or Zoom. I am more likely to hold videoconferences when meeting someone for the first time; I might switch to phone calls or email updates in later meetings depending on the project and the person’s preferences.

Your preferences may vary depending on your industry and your workload needs. If you are managing a temporary remote workforce, you still need to have regular check-ins with your staff. Confer with them.

How do they want to meet? How are they doing? Do they need any support from you? If an employee is struggling, can something be shifted? How are projects going? Is the employee on track to meet deadlines? What are the employee’s big challenges?

Ask these questions periodically. And provide the support an employee needs, or help them find a way to get it.

Measure Productivity

Now is not the time to buy spyware or have three daily meetings with each staff member. After all, if you need to check in with an employee three times per day, why is that person on your team?

Productivity is measured by providing deliverables and meeting goals. It is not measured by hours worked (unless you have billable hours) or a rigid work schedule. My work has always been project driven.

Productivity is measured by providing deliverables and meeting goals. It is not measured by hours worked (unless you have billable hours) or a rigid work schedule.

In the past, I have worked with staff to personalize measuring productivity. Ask staff, “how would you, or the team, like to provide me with updates about your work?”

Provide suggestions, though some employees appreciate control over the measurement tool. I might need an update on a major project by Thursday mornings, but I am okay with an email, a quick IM, or an update to a project plan in a shared OneDrive folder.  

Watch Your Budget

Many organizations are experiencing a significant loss of revenue. Departmental or division leaders must evaluate budgets and revenue.

Those involve difficult conversations about staffing needs, organizational and operational continuity, and expenses. Managers must work with their leaders to understand how business conditions affect their teams.

Ask yourself: What kind of performance do I need from my staff to meet financial and operational goals? Are these metrics reasonable given business conditions?

You must actively communicate with your leaders about these challenges to find solutions. When you can, tell employees about constraints, such as limits on overtime. Some businesses may be thriving under these conditions. In that case, managers must still evaluate expenses against their budgets.

Remote Work Location Policies

Allowing employees to work remotely from other states, counties, or cities triggers additional employment law considerations.

Does your employee want to work remotely from their cabin in another state? Do you know which city, county, or state employees are in now? Your organization might be subject to different rules about overtime, paid leave, minimum wages, exemption rules, and a host of other issues. Every organization should have a work location requirement that it communicates to employees, or it needs to monitor regulations in other jurisdictions.

If your organization does not have a work location policy, perhaps it is time to discuss the risks with your organization’s leaders and implement a policy.

Be Aware of Different Socioeconomic Challenges

Many offices have lower-wage staff who might be uncomfortable sharing their homes in videoconference calls or struggle more to meet financial needs right now. Consider these staff members when making decisions. For instance, if you are making an across-the-board wage cut, try to avoid cutting the wages of your lowest paid staff. If staff members use public transportation, review local transit availability before launching a return to work date.

Conclusion

Finally, take these lessons with you as you work remotely for the next few months, and upon your return to the office building. Offices will still require social distancing for a while, so managers still need these tools. Expect, however, to experience a longer-term change in working environments.

The COVID-19 pandemic has done more to promote working from home than technology has. It forced companies to create the largest remote workforce in history.

This emergency has been challenging; however, working remotely under normal business conditions is not this chaotic. And do yourself a big favor … do not judge an employee’s ability to work remotely based on these pandemic circumstances.

Employees were affected by circumstances unseen in our lifetimes, and many are still exceeding the goals set for them.