One of the most covered topics in recent months is how COVID pushed Remote Working as a Management trend. The comments on whether people should work in an office or from home are clearly an indicator that most of us are merely reacting to the current situation and not taking the opportunity to make a leap forward on how we perceive work and employment relations.
We should all be thinking about how we prepare our organizations for asynchronous work relations, which unlocks so much more productivity and autonomy, alongside the obvious benefits for ecosystems and general life in metropolitan areas.
Irrespective of all the articles, training and talks around purpose, autonomy and meaningful workplaces, we still prefer to have our teams available during working hours, if possible in the office. 9 to 5 is still king.
Future challenges in workforce planning in the IT sector will force companies to invest in distributive work relations, hiring talent anywhere and everywhere available, and giving individuals the opportunity to manage their energy in the best way possible to deliver results. This means, (truly) trust employees will do their best to perform and start focusing on delivery outputs instead of hours spent working in the office or at home. Although nothing of this is new, this represents huge challenges to management: from learning to let go to empowering people and to organize workflows in a more predictable way, including clear ethics around synchronism.
Trust doesn’t mean leaving employees on their one, without support. It actually means to empower them and give them the conditions and tools for them to thrive and be successful. It’s a long and hard road, but it pays off, in both satisfaction and productivity. Taking time to get to know people, coaching instead of micromanaging, setting clear expectations regarding delivery and communication, recognising mistakes as opportunities to learn, giving freedom to take smart risks and celebrate achievements, are all good tools to start nurturing meaningful and trustworthy relations. We have all seen it: When we trust and support people and teams, magic happens.
Nothing of this is new. But do we deliberately do it?
by Tiago Roxo, People & Culture Director at InnoWave