Remember when you were in college?
You were required to attend class and attend labs, but you primarily decided how to best use your time to be effective.
Then, sometime before the pandemic, you graduated and joined the working world.
On your first day, your boss probably told you something like, “I expect you to be sitting here at your desk each day at 8 am. If you are more than five minutes late, you will get written up. Then, you need to sit here until noon, take no more than an hour for lunch, and then return and sit here until 5 pm. In that way, I will know that you are putting in a full day of work.”
You may have initially thought to yourself; I haven’t had restrictions like this imposed on me since I was a child. But you figured these were the adult rules, so you played along.
Of course, you eventually figured out you could spend half of the day at your desk on Amazon Prime, but “face time” was the criteria the boss used to determine if you were indeed doing your job.
Our COVID-19-infected world now requires better key performance indicators than just face time.
Surprisingly, according to studies done by Gallup, team members who work remotely average four more hours per week than those who work onsite.
Remote work and employee engagement
A two-year Stanford University study of 500 people who spent time virtually and in an office found that virtual workers averaged an additional full day’s work each week.
As a leader, you need to determine what constitutes a work day for your team. Face time is no longer an adequate measure.
Because they no longer need to spend time commuting, your remote workers may be working longer than those under your watchful eye. Therefore, both you and they need to know when enough is enough.
To answer the question above, according to Gallup in the State of the American Workplace, employees who work 100% of the time remotely can be the least engaged. As the leader, it is your job to ensure that your off-site employees continue to feel connected to the team.
Employees who work 100% of the time in the office are disengaged to a lesser extent, maybe because they can feel micromanaged, as in the example above.
Those employees who work remotely 60 to 80 percent of the time yet spend some time in the office reconnecting are among the most engaged.
Maybe because their work experience is more like college rather than kindergarten.
