HISTORICALLY SPEAKING, working together in the same space — what is known as ‘co-located’ work — has been fundamental to maintaining managerial authority and control. The manager’s physical presence, the thinking went, helps to ensure that work is completed and meets standards. Take away co-location, and leaders lose their influence.
The COVID-19 pandemic challenged this assumption head-on. Organizations the world over turned to remote work out of necessity; and for many, it went remarkably well. So well, in fact, that we now find ourselves in an era of hybrid work, where the majority of office workers split their time between the workplace and their home office.
Although on paper, it might seem challenging to lead remotely, managers can do so effectively by following a few key principles. In this article I will present three tactics for driving effective management and employee engagement in a hybrid work environment.
TACTIC 1: Give Employees Greater Autonomy
Office work provides a ‘boundedness’ that remote work does not: there is a time and place for work and the required tools are readily available. But working remotely often entails a blending of work and non-work life, without the constraints of arrival and departure times. With this blending can come divided attention from moment to moment. The solution, then, is to free employees to do their work with fewer requirements to impede them. To that end, here are three recommendations.
Work is often, but not always, interdependent, requiring input from multiple co-workers to achieve a goal. When this is the case, such work has rested on ‘synchronous communication,’ which entails real-time communication between
