5 reasons why managers dislike staff working from home – and how to get over them

Written for LinkedIn: view the original here.

 As Coronavirus planning invariably ramps up across the business landscape, we will hear a lot about allowing staff to work from home. This is a topic that in my experience, divides opinion with as much ferocity as the scone/scon debate, or cream versus jam first.
For some, it is a great way to offer employees increased flexibility and is a clear business winner! No more short-notice holidays because they are expecting a delivery; because the dog is sick, or the kids’ school is closed.

For those managers who don’t like it, Coronavirus is very likely to give you cause in the near future to suck it up and get over it, unless you are prepared to accept larger losses in productivity than are necessary.

Let’s take a look at 5 reasons why managers don’t like staff working from home and how to get over them.

Time and presence are great proxies

Telling whether someone is working hard, doing their best and adding real value is not a precise science. Without a better way to assess it, we can easily fall back on what our eyes see and our ears here.

The familiarity of people showing up, breaking and leaving at known and unchanging hours is a comfort. In an age of remote working an ever-improving technology, time and presence are pretty terrible proxies for measuring an employee’s value, but we are still wedded to them.

We don’t know what they’re doing

Related to this, present employees can look like they are doing the right things. This makes us happy.

Have you ever looked at a senior colleague’s diary and wondered if you are really doing a good job because yours isn’t half as packed out? I know I have. Have you ever looked over at that colleague not typing half as frantically as you and wondered if they are really working all that hard?

The trouble with supervising each other in this way is that we are often guided by our impressions and reactions. These are often deeply flawed. As managers, this can give us a false sense of control, believing that if we know what’s happening, we can swoop in and change it if our fear that the job isn’t going to get done becomes too great.

When colleagues work from home and take responsibility themselves for how they will deliver the outputs expected of them, we are unable to surrender to our tendency to mistrust. The important thing to remember, however, is that regardless of the arrangement by which a colleague works, you can’t deal with a problem unless it actually exists. You might wonder if your staff are really working, but unless you have evidence that their performance is suffering, you can’t confront them.

In terms of your management approach, therefore, it makes no difference to your options if they are sat at the desk opposite or at home.

IT has a negative effect on the workplace culture

This is an argument for balance, not for forbidding the practice. It’s fine to request that people be present for a certain number of days, or for certain occasions such as the departmental meeting. What’s more, if your team spirit and camaraderie are as amazing as you think, people will enjoy coming to work.

Yet it says just as much about your culture if you recognise that the rest of our lives don’t cease to exist between 9 and 5; that sometimes demanding and difficult work requires focus and freedom from distractions that is simply not possible in your open plan office; that the daily burden of several additional hours spent commuting can get exhausting.

IT creates unfairness because not everyone in the business can do it

This is a rubbish argument, but one I have genuinely heard. Of course it’s true that not every role can be carried out at home. Yet not every role requires shift patterns, or work at weekends and over bank holidays either. When we accept a job, we choose to accept all the demands of that job.

Though technology is revolutionising how we work, for many people work still needs to be tied to a location. But unless you would like all your staff to work evenings and weekends in solidarity with the teams that have to, this isn’t an argument.

Worries about their wellbeing

This, by contrast, is a noble argument. IT recognises that as an employer you still have responsibility for your staff even if they are not at the workplace. It still matters that they take breaks, work at an acceptable workstation and aren’t regularly working more hours than they should be.

It also matters that they can access the support that their organisation might have in place should they run into difficulties, and that they are taking full advantage of any training and development that is available.

IT means that you still need to maintain a close working relationship with staff who work from home, just as you would with staff who are often travelling as part of their work.

Ask them questions about how they are working. Make resources and guidance readily available on your intranet, and if that intranet can’t be accessed from home then please get into the 21^st century. Same applies for remote or cloud access to content at work – there’s no excuse not to have this anymore.

We don’t need people chained to their desks to look after them properly. What we do need is to keep them connected and feeling a sense of belonging. Home working or no home working, an organisation that can’t find the creativity and ingenuity to do that is an organisation in trouble.