Returning to the office will bring new problems — and opportunities

Bringing your people back to the office after the crisis could present leaders with a whole new set of problems — and opportunities.

With workers having lived and worked in their own kingdoms for months, managers may find the game has changed when everyone finally gets back to the office.

Working from home may be isolating for some, but for others it is liberating.

Freed from controlling bosses or difficult colleagues, some are thriving during the remote working experience they neither sought nor anticipated.

The home office becomes a “kind of kingdom”, as one management expert explains.

And as the shutdown continues, will that increased autonomy shift employees’ view about leaders? Will they, for example, be less open to following directions, less inclined to defer to the authority of the boss?

As companies toy with the idea that a distributed workforce is also a cheaper workforce (think of the savings to be made in office space) they might also have to acknowledge that the traditional power ­hierarchies could weaken.

Chris Jackson, of the school of management at the University of NSW’s Business School, says attitudes towards leaders are unlikely to change in the short term but “if the distancing continues longer, we will potentially face those kinds of ­questions”.

The professor of business psychology agrees that people are likely to return to work with different ­expectations about how the workplace should run.

“Perhaps they will be less impressed with micromanaging leaders than in the past,” Jackson says. “They may ask for more trust and autonomy, and that of course is something which (people) have been asking for, for maybe 40 or 50 years. So that trend is ­probably only going to continue.”

He says managers have progressively become more trusting but, while they may wield less authority than their predecessors, technology allows them to have far more control.

“They have given more autonomy to people but at the same time they have also developed ways of monitoring performance to make sure people are not just watching Netflix all day,” he says.

“It’s not just monitoring when you log on or off a computer, but they can measure the amount of time on Facebook or time spent sending personal emails. It’s all collated and potentially analysable.”

Even so, a distributed workforce is hard to micromanage so he suggests that managers “might get back to their real job of managing rather than checking up on people to make sure they are doing things in the right way”.

Do we still need managers?

Are managers even needed when a scattered staff is forced to self manage to some extent?

Jackson sounds a cautionary note: “Managers have a lot of knowledge, so if you lose them you lose a lot of knowledge and that’s especially important because when people are working at home they are not sharing so much.”

He points out, too, that the role of charisma, which has been an important attribute in leadership, is more complex when employees no longer see the boss as a daily physical presence in the office. But while a ­distributed workforce may be harder to lead through personality, someone who is a charmer — whether a manager of an employee — could well be a winner in a Zoom meeting.

The working from home phenomenon has got Jackson thinking about the difference between ­extroverts and introverts in workplaces.

“We have always thought extroverts are the people who get ahead, who socialise better, interact better, work in teams, are better salespeople,” he says. “So we have wondered, why do introverts still exist?”

Well, now we know: introverts who quietly self-isolate would have naturally survived past pandemics much more than would extroverts, who love mixing with people.

The role of personality and emotion in the workplace is something that interests Jacob Varghese, the chief executive of Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, who says a challenge for leaders when staff work remotely is that they lose the ability to “read the room”.

Varghese says: “As a leader, most of the time you are operating in meetings and your job is to try to ­decide the best outcome having listened to all the ­people in the room.

“The tricky thing on a video conference is making sure you really have listened to all the people.

“There are so many non-verbal cues, and if you are the chair you are reading those cues to draw people out. There is a huge transformational skill in trying to do that through a video conference.

“The main thing you lose is eye contact. As the chair you can catch the eye of someone in the room who might be a little reticent but who, with a little ­cajoling, can be made to feel comfortable. There is a huge risk in not doing that in a video conference.”

Varghese says he initially found meetings tough when the firm’s 1100 staff switched to WFH, but within a couple of weeks he felt more comfortable.

“I think what happens is you become much more deliberate and formal, go through the agenda much more carefully,” he says, and adds that the firm has ­adjusted well to remote working, which “has all sorts of potential upsides”.

“We have 1100 people across 33 offices and the big challenge we have had is making 33 offices work ­collaboratively together,” he says.

“That’s a large part of what I have been focused on as CEO, (trying to have us) operating as one firm rather than 33 different practices.

“Now we have all had a crash course in using ­electronic communication. We were already doing it. We have made most of our files electronic for the past couple of years. We were already experimenting with backfilling — someone on maternity leave in Cairns could be backfilled by someone in Caboolture. (Now) we have become comfortable working across geographic locations.

“The second thing is we have for a long time ­wanted to provide as much flexibility as possible to people in how they can get the work done, so I think there has been a lot of confidence building on both sides (around flexible work).”

Freedom vs accountability

A common issue that has emerged with WFH is how firms manage the trade off, or exchange, of ­freedom for accountability.

Law firms have long had a crude measure of ­performance via billable hours, but Varghese says it’s now just one of a suite of measures Maurice Blackburn uses to hold people accountable.

“We use different measures of productivity, we also see the work being done and the progress of cases,” he says.

“It’s important for accountability but also transparency … to make sure we are achieving our clients’ goals. Those measures are transferable to home ­(because) computers are connected to the system.”

He won’t be surprised if, after the crisis, more ­people opt to work from home one or two days a week.

But he says: “We have to remember that we work in an office for a reason. Being around other people is a more productive way of working with other people and there is something lost (when everyone is working from home).”

And while WFH can work well when you have ­already developed a relationship with people, it would be hard to begin a new job online.

“I worry about new starters,” Varghese says. “How do they pick up the culture and vibe of the place (if they are not in the office)?”

Career killer

Another problem, according to Canadian academic Geoffrey Leonardelli, is that workers may worry that if they continue to work from home when the pandemic is over, it will limit their career prospects.

He tells The Deal from Toronto that while some companies may give workers the choice of staying home or going to the office, there are dangers in handing those decisions to the individual worker.

“It could create a competitive trade-off, with people feeling there are more professional opportunities from being in the office,” he says.

Leonardelli, who is professor of organisational ­behaviour and human resource management at the Rotman School of Management and professor of ­psychology at the University of Toronto, says the management challenge will be to create systems that deliver fair and equal opportunities to employees whether they are working remotely or in the office. This could mean managers ensuring they spend enough face time via technology with their remote workers to ensure they are not disadvantaged.

The fear they will become invisible and miss out on promotions because they are not in the sightline of the boss may pull some workers back to the ­office. Leonardelli says there also will be a strong push from managers to have people return.

“In organisations where there is a high level of ­interdependence between the employees and where managers have the role of co-ordinating that work, it’s hard to believe that they will not want people back in the workplace where it’s easier to do that,” he says.

But he believes the current WFH experience will bring changes to the way work is organised.

“There is a kind of confrontation at the moment where everyone is having to deal with a new way of working and one of the consequences will be that leaders will need to look at how they lead,” he says.

“At the very least they will recognise that leadership doesn’t have to be about strong control and they can instead turn to voluntary compliance built on honest relationships.”

Will we learn?

Karin Sanders, professor of human resource management and organisational behaviour at the UNSW’s Business School, says it’s too early to say how leadership will play out after the crisis, but it’s likely that controlling bosses will revert to type and want everyone in the office at 8am.

On the other hand, leaders who work on building commitment from staff rather than trying to control them are likely to continue to use that style.

Employees are likely to emerge more confident and autonomous because “they have their own kingdom” at home, she says. But the real question is “whether we learn from the crisis”.

Sanders believes that the real-time workplace ­experiment under way around the world deserves more attention from academic researchers.

She says it would be useful, for example, to track the leadership styles of managers during the crisis and see whether these styles change when staff return to the office.

Sanders launched a study across 15 countries in the first week of the crisis. She and university colleagues are analysing the emails sent to staff since January to inform them of COVID-19.

“These are high-level emails,” she says. “How are they formulated? How do leaders approach the ­issues? How are employees asked to contribute (to ease the financial problems of institutions)? Are ­people displaying leadership or not?”

Sanders says one early finding was that staff at one Italian university had received no emails advising them of the virus, which has caused a devastating number of deaths in that country. In effect, the leadership of the university had handed responsibility for communication to the government.

Sanders cautions that remote working is not for everyone and not everyone demonstrates the initiative to work unsupervised. As she says, claiming that your internet is down can be a handy excuse for some and “you can’t see what is going on at home”.

For other employees the office is a safe space where they can retreat from difficult situations at home with aggressive or violent partners.