Organisations with strong management behaviours have been found to consistently have employee engagement and performance among their focus areas. Now, mass unplanned transitions are testing the agility, resilience and ability to deal with ambiguity of people managers, leaders and business operations functions. These challenges to business-as-usual offer an opportunity to adopt more efficient and human-centric approaches to coaching, productivity and management practice, quickly.
We find ourselves operating in new scenarios where we are driven in an accelerated fashion to reshape how we work, engage with our people and interact with and deliver services to our external and internal customers. This calls for creativity and innovation, but most of all empathy and authenticity – attributes that are normally important, are now critical.
The new normal has managers waking up in the morning with questions on how they can keep their teams motivated, prevent drops in engagement and productivity and provide support that team members need to deliver their work; all while trying to keep the business engines running.
Leaders may more effectively drive team engagement and performance by modelling leading management behaviours while adapting (along with their teams) to remote work environments all enabled by the right tools.
Leaders need to set the standard in behaviour. They need to give purpose and structure to their teams’ and provide the flexibility for people to learn and decide how they can perform their best, virtually.
In addition, Strong management practices and routines that may have been neglected in an office setting must now come to the fore. A key part of this is how we continue to drive performance with readjusted capacity levels.
More than ever, employees must maintain self-discipline and self-motivation, deriving satisfaction from the work process and their output. Clear effective communication is key for team morale, especially for those who may feel disconnected.
Providing teams, the resources they need to be high functioning, promoting transparency and efficiently identifying risks, gaps, and opportunities in delivering business outcomes should form the baseline of any remote-working protocol. Operating on standard events and cadence creates regularity, enforces process, and allows teams and entire programs to focus on prioritized work while enabling transparency. And while we’re at it, try to keep it light to help with well-being.
Lastly, selecting the tools that will best enable us to be effective in this new environment will be important - both leveraging what’s available and selecting additional tools where needed.look at your policies that impact remote working. Set clear guidelines on what is encouraged and the boundaries to operate in, to maintain privacy and confidentiality. Leveraging existing technology to rapidly resolve staff queries and other problems will enable better adoption of the new ways of working.
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Martijn Schouten
People and Organisation - Workforce Transformation Leader, South East Asia Consulting, PwC Singapore
Tel: +65 9667 4961
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