Challenges of Remote Work for Organizations and Employees
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work has gained popularity worldwide. While it has certain advantages, such as flexible hours and no dress code, remote work also challenges individuals and organizations. For employees, the main challenges are overload and a lack of privacy and communication. When the boundary between workplace and home disappears, the demarcation line between work and personal time is erased (Hayes et al., 2020). As a result, work gets into personal life, which leads to stress and fatigue.
A lack of a workplace exacerbates this problem, while the home environment does not encourage a person to work. One is tempted to relax or engage in odd jobs around the house instead of doing work. These negative factors cannot help but affect employees’ effectiveness and well-being. It has been found that people work less effectively when they work remotely since they have many distractions and, as a rule, no time constraints (Franken et al., 2021). Moreover, individuals who work remotely more often experience a feeling of frustration and anxiety than those who work at an office.
Remote work poses serious challenges for many organizations as well. Thus, Microsoft reported that remote work “caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts”, which resulted in greater difficulties in sharing information across the departments (Yang et al., 2022, para. 1). Apart from problems with communication, companies find it challenging to control remote workers.
Thus, Microsoft management said it was difficult to understand whether a person online works or is engaged in other activities (Yang et al., 2022). Companies are oriented by the amount of work done, but the quality of this work may often be compromised. Companies like Yahoo and IBM have launched initiatives to reduce remote work due to the lack of control and ineffective communication between the departments.
Leadership Strategies to Support Remote Worker Performance
Despite the difficulties remote work poses for companies, there are ways for supervisors and executives to maintain adequate performance of remote staff. Thus, my former supervisor created an organizational workboard in Trello with columns for different stages of work, and the status of each task was visible. Remote employees were encouraged to fill in the board once each stage was completed, which allowed supervisors to track work progress. Moreover, each employee was asked to state their status so that each employee could see what task a worker was engaged in at the moment.
Apart from filling in boards, it is worth holding online meetings or phone calls every morning so employees can discuss their tasks and the needed resources and help. Lengthy discussions should be broken into stages such as expressing opinions, analysis, integration, and decision-making (Wang et al., 2021). At each phase, employees can only do one thing — for example, voice their solutions or share concerns without a general discussion.
The integration phase provides an opportunity to discuss all the opinions and risks voiced. At the last stage, the participants vote for the options voiced in the discussion and make a decision (Wang et al., 2021). If these phases and rules are observed, all participants remain involved in the context of what is happening. In addition, this format usually eliminates conflicts — everyone makes the final decision. This initiative sets the working rhythm and provides transparency of work, reducing anxiety and confusion.
References
Hayes, S. W., Priestley, J. L., Ishmakhametov, N., & Ray, H. E. (2020). “I’m not working from home, I’m living at work”: Perceived stress and work-related burnout before and during COVID-19. Web.
Franken, E., Bentley, T., Shafaei, A., Farr-Wharton, B., Onnis, L. A., & Omari, M. (2021). Forced flexibility and remote working: Opportunities and challenges in the new normal. Journal of Management & Organization, 27(6), 1131-1149. Web.
Yang, L., Holtz, D., Jaffe, S., Suri, S., Sinha, S., Weston, J., Joyce, C., Shah, N., Sherman, K., Hecht, B. & Teevan, J. (2022). The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers. Nature Human Behaviour, 6(1), 43-54. Web.
Wang, B., Liu, Y., Qian, J., & Parker, S. K. (2021). Achieving effective remote working during the COVID‐19 pandemic: A work design perspective. Applied Psychology, 70(1), 16-59. Web.