Under New Management

We have the technology to make remote work productive, but it takes a new type of leadership

The days of everyone working from home seem like a fever dream. The list of companies that have mandated a return to the office for employees reads like a who’s who of the Fortune 100. There are conflicting data about whether remote and hybrid workers truly are more productive or less productive. Unsurprisingly, employees tend to consider themselves more productive with a flexible schedule, while their managers are more skeptical. One certainty is that current technology makes productive remote work possible for almost any industry. Suites like Zoom Workplace and Webex have the tools to power productivity.

As Zoom CIO advisor Ted Brodheim put it, “Hire the best people you can find. Distance is no longer a limiting factor.”

We Have the Technology

The trick to successful remote and hybrid work is making the best use of that technology, with leaders who know how to do just that, says O’Connor Company president and CEO Clark Lowe. It’s about managers and employees finding ways to speak each other’s language and to understand each other’s worlds.

Clark Lowe

“A lot of how we communicate, we focus on like how people digest information now, which is Snapchat, text message, Pinterest,” Lowe, whose forthcoming book covers how history and technology have brought us to the era of remote work, told Reboot. “So, all of our communications, even around leadership, our corporate communications are all focused and being delivered in ways that people are used to receiving information.”

Lowe sends out a monthly CEO update in the form of a 9- to 12-minute YouTube-style video to O’Connor employees, who mostly travel or work remotely. Consultants send out 30-second videos or brief articles. Sometimes, communication comes in the form of a meme asking a question.

“That’s how we think about leadership, is, ‘How do we get people to digest information the way they’re used to seeing it?’” Lowe said. “It’s the TikTok world. It’s the Facebook world. It’s the LinkedIn world. So, we need to match how people are consuming information.”

Over the last couple of decades, there has always been some new piece of technology to come along to solve the major problems of the day. Now, save for more advancements in augmented and virtual reality, we have all that tech. What we need now is a new leadership model, Lowe says.

“One of the things I always ask is, ‘Are we starting to step outside of the Dale Carnegie/Peter Drucker era of foundational management and leadership of businesses. Are we entering a new era of leadership that CEOs and middle managers need to learn?’”

Manage Processes, Lead People

The distrust that has marked many return-to-office mandates led to a damaging arms race that included companies investing in employee monitoring software, employees countering by purchasing mouse wigglers, and employers reverse engineering ways to detect them in an expensive tit-for-tat. All it served to do was erode trust and detract from the mission.

“I don’t think anybody wakes up every day and is like, ‘I want to figure out how to suck at work today,’” Lowe said. “If there are people that do that, they’re the bottom 1 Sigma or standard deviation and nobody wants them to work for your company anyway and they stick out like a sore thumb.”

Previously, the career track for managers involved doing the same job the people they went on to supervise were doing. That created an empathy loop where managers felt like they understood what their charges were dealing with. But most managers didn’t do those jobs remotely. So managing remote workers breaks the empathy loop and makes it harder for managers to relate to their teams.

“I think we’re at a point now where it’s a leadership gap” Lowe said.

Processes are to be managed, and people are to be led, he said. Rather than micromanaging how a task is to be completed, leaders should emphasize the outcome and give their teams agency to realize that outcome.

“If you can separate those two arenas, you’ll generally do well as a leader in a remote environment. Manage processes, lead people, and develop leaders to understand the difference between the two.”

Creating Micro Moments

One of the biggest differences between remote work and office work is the organic interactions that come from colleagues simply being in the same place at the same time. Those interactions can provide valuable cohesion and collaboration, and managers don’t want to lose them.

“They’re worried that collaboration and innovation won’t happen,” Aruna Ravichandran, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Webex by Cisco, told Reboot, “because before the pandemic a lot of people used to have water cooler conversations, where they would come into the office, they would socialize in the office, and that is where the ideas and innovations were being created.”

Creating those “micro moments” is where middle management and executives need to learn to grow, Lowe said. He favors ad hoc conversations over all-hands-on-deck meetings because they can recreate that water cooler moment in a virtual setting.

Few industries are less amenable to remote work than construction, he says, so if it can be successful in construction, it can work for any industry. It’s a matter of developing new leadership skills and methods.

“When I talk to my leaders and coach them up, it’s always about, ‘Our business isn’t just construction. Our business is kind of us against remote’” and avoiding a disconnect that kills productivity. “The whole company is rallying around this idea of remote work, and a lot of very smart business leaders are going away from it for a reason. We all as a company need to be very diligent in the remote work world. We coach our employees up around perception and brand management.”

It’s a task that can pull managers out of their comfort zones, but a time where technology enables new forms of work calls for new styles of leadership.