Tools And Strategies For Managing A Remote Workforce

A growing number of businesses have teams working remotely. How can you stay on top of things? 

With the working from home army growing in leaps, it is becoming critical that leadership embrace new and different ways to manage their teams. Take the US for instance. Before Covid-19, 7 million active remote workers, or 3.4 per cent of their population, existed. that made up 43 per cent of employees. When Covid-19 came on board however, remote work was thrust upon us with next to nil preparation for the most part.

That being said, corporates such as EABL and Kenya Airways are no strangers to remote working, now constantly referred to as WFH (working from home). In a recent webinar titled Tools And Strategies For Managing A Remote Workforce, Peter Ndegwa Mungai, the Ag. CIO, KQ tapped into the BD article published last week citing that ’81 per cent of people working from home’ were ‘unproductive’ seeing how they were distracted by entertainment.

It raised further questions in his mind such as why? How can it be mitigated? What tools do you actually need to manage your team? Especially when we are dealing with so much change and a state of flux. It means things are not so simple.

“Right now we are dealing with socioeconomic impact. People are in shock, there is anxiety, there are job cuts, pay cuts, fear of the unknown all adding up to human behaviour,” he said. While it is true family disruptions are a challenge with children home from school, personality issues such as discipline of a workforce new to this. connectivity issues and a forced digital leap are according to his observations, all factors.

“Few people in our departments were already working remotely. Now the influx of people getting into remote work are challenging infrastructure. The speed and sheer volume of people who wanted and were looking for support and connectivity in such a short amount of time put a strain on resources. We kept restructuring our network but covid19 changed really fast. Then the flight schedule changed, so not everyone needed to work. But it was quite overwhelming.”

The difficulty was two pronged:

• tech-related
• people

Technology

This included but was not limited to connectivity, tech devices, collaboration tools, conference experiences, system success, security infrastructure down to support services. Once this are in place, there is the people factor.

People

“When we first started remote working management would come to me and ask, how do we measure productivity?” he points out. Bodies in chairs was the modus operandi “as opposed to output measures for team performance, putting more stress on managers and supervisors across the organisation to confirm delivery. In order for remote working to work, the whole management system needs review.”

How to stay normal 

These required the adjustment of processes such as maintain cadence aka regular meetings or one-on-ones as would normally be the case when in the office on the daily, making sure engagement was business as usual. Staff needing a quiet space to work on and self discipline deserves as much love as making staff aware of the dynamics of security. One of the hardest things to do was to continually communicating to and with the team seeing how some are working in isolation. It raised the issue of mental health, something he says cuts across the board during covid19 times.

Peter summarises that, “The future of work post covid-19 looks like this: people have rushed in, yes but they have also seen the benefits of WFH. Corporations’ overheads, needing physical space for the office and minimising both pose a huge benefit for an employer. As a bonus to all, not just employees, people find they can spend more time with their children now that they are no longer. The flip side however is that WFH somehow leads to more work from 8am to 8.30pm.”

Ken Ogwang’, CIO, EABL agrees with Peter in that EABL started their WFH journey almost a decade ago. WFH was therefore not a one-off event or something triggered by Covid-19. Infrastructure was already set up in scope, on cloud, with devices, about connectivity and through apps. “An example is SAP. We are on Microsoft Azure so the team can log in on and with every device, though this is something we were only able to achieve during Covid-19, a strategy cum accelerator.”

The new normal 

There was a moment when the team felt tools were being imposed because they were not as intuitive as wished. “If your team struggles to use a tool, it might not be the right one. UX should weigh a lot. We got inspiration from social media interface to come up with easy to use tools.” A lesson so well learnt when old computers coud not click with the system. Thus begun a divide between the UX in the office, and the better quality machines they had to work with at home. “We had to ask ourselves, how can we make the UX seamless? We were also trying to entice the nextgen workforce so had to make it cool.” It led to the adoption of simplicity with Zoom, Quip, Box, Okta et al, and new gen Lenovos, upgrading the UX both at home and at work.

Despite all these lovely experiences, it took change management for this to really work. “There are certain perceptions we had to work through before arriving at remote working. We had to work with HR, and bosses felt this was an opportunity to do your own thing instead of working. To break the stereotype, we pushed for a more results-driven initiative rather than supervision. Judge by output, not by time spent in front of the computer.” Basically, leadership had to come on board. “Whatever you do, involve them. The top-down approach is what eventually changed the user mindset. You have to manage the stakeholders.” It required trust, but it also meant using the available apps to participate and actively maintain that human touch. For EABL, Covid-19 was a catalyst as well.

Bring everyone on board

In comes Blen Woldeab, Change Manager, Diageo with best practices. Keeping in mind that the corporation is basically a community with its own rich ecosystem, one thing that happens when you WFH is that you have an extra two hours that would normally be spent commuting. Blen decided to ask, what good would these couple of hours do each day? She came up with My Learning Hub, an app connected to LinkedIn where you can study and on course completion, have your new qualifications posted, on LinkedIn, to make your profile more visible. Other features are meditation, yoga, self-help, career articles and trainings, all to engage and grow daily.

Change management also involved finding new ways to make webinars engaging and audience engaged particularly by using all the available Zoom features. “Remote  working and engaging users started in 2017 with our Mobile First campaign so long as it was secured.” Here is where the apps came in handy, connected as they were to you guessed it, the existing ecosystem and infrastructure. Other campaigns included ‘Supercharge Your Day, Supercharge Your Team, Supercharge Your Time,’ to engage employees with games, making them eligible for a Diageo draw. Campaigns had 24/7 help support, a Zoom line was also created just in case you needed to call and be assisted, by a local IT person.

It’s not all work and no play. Diageo are great at throwing Zoom parties too where the team plays dress up, turns up the beat on YouTube and have a dance party. One last thing. They do pay attention to mental health. Ken concludes that, “We engage staff as much as possible because you can’t have your old social life with your friends or even family. We talk to the team on what they are doing and how. One thing we did was getting counsellors to talk to people especially because of the unique emotional environment that we are living in now.”