Remote workforces are here to stay and managing talent just got harder

For more than 300 years, offices and the notion of work have been synonymous with one another. Ever since the first corporation and its legal home, the office, employees have been coming and going to work. Beyond just the fields, factories, and mills, work was also being conducted in offices, primarily by management who were tasked with strategy and profits.

The advent of management theory in the early 1900s led to further reinforcement of the office environment. It became a valuable tool that created a huge boost in productivity through the power of employee collaborating and working together in teams. This teamwork was especially crucial as tasks within companies had already started to become more complex as projects grew in scale and corporations started using technology and innovation to create new products and serve new markets.

Fast forward a hundred years and the world finds itself working from home (WFH). The COVID-19 pandemic forced global lockdowns and entire workforces were compelled to work from the safety of their homes. Many progressive companies embraced this new normal as part of their social responsibility. Firms like Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, Shopify, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Capital One, Slack, Amazon, PayPal, and Salesforce, were amongst the first to enable long-term WFH environments.

The year of WFH has had one unintended side-effect. Throughout the pandemic thus far, many companies continued to function almost normally despite most of their employees working at home. Previously compelling hundreds of employees to commute for thousands of hours to an office seemed to be crucial however now becoming less crucial. No doubt there are many benefits from employees meeting in an office environment, but the pressure to allow employees the option to WFH will continue to grow. Given that the current pandemic is far from over, companies will need to be fully WFH, a phenomenon that is likely to stay.

For HR departments and BU managers, managing employees from the office was a full-time job with its particular challenges now given the situation we are in managing employees outside the office has become even harder. The key areas where managers could face issues with a remote workforce is supervision, culture, and productivity.

When employees work from home, the first challenge a manager must navigate is the loss of in-person supervision. It is far easier to supervise employees when they are a few metres away. Face-to-face engagements can be informal, brief, and frequent, the latter being sometimes needed to provide managerial support to employees. To compensate, companies need to embrace technology and use talent management software that allows for performance tracking, two-way personnel reviews, real-time information, and knowledge bases. Weekly check-ins might be good enough in the office environment but WFH environments will probably require daily check-ins by supervisors. These would be shorter in duration but allow for a more bespoke supervisory environment, and can be accomplished using many collaborative or employee engagement tools such as our in-house solution, Feet's, or work tech like Skype, Zoom, LARK. Not forgetting the good old phone calls.

Without the traditional office setting, companies may struggle to create the sense of culture and identity that is common to so many companies today. Foregoing the discussions in the pantry or over lunch can make it harder to forge employee camaraderie. Smart companies will create safe opportunities for employees to decompress meetings with light banter and to plan virtual events in earnest with the view of cementing company culture.

Another common fear of WFH workforces is the decline in productivity. However, there is now enough data from across the world, to suggest that allowing employees to work from home can instead lead to improved productivity, as employees seek to maximise their work-life balance by being more efficient with the time they spend working while at home. 

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Source: Cllement Tan, Founder and Group CEO, RAMSSOL Group Berhad