Working remotely is making companies less efficient and people less happy. We offer three simple steps to restore balance.
By: Faatima Kara and Richard Sherman
Can you remember what day it is?
In the 1980’s, the idea of being able to work with computers remotely was science fiction. In the 1990’s and early 2000’s it was slowly becoming real life, and as it started to become a possibility, it was the best fantasy an office-bound worker could come up with as they dragged the scroll bar up and down with their pre-scroll-wheel mouse.
How would they have reacted had a time traveller from 2020 burst their bubble, we will never know, but what we do know is that working remotely isn’t what we thought it would be.
Three of the biggest remote working problems:
1. Remote working enables procrastination
Besides the loss of productivity, this makes employees feel unfulfilled and unhappy. Stressful events compete for attentional resources, and the resulting procrastination that is becoming widely noticed in the current remote-working environment.
This also results in a lack of cohesion between staff.
2. Remote working makes managing workflows and documents difficult
This is one of the big surprises of the pandemic era – before the pandemic staff would sit in the same office and email and phone each other as if they weren’t in the same room, so it would be natural to think that the same staff working from home would continue to interact seamlessly – but the experience of most companies has been different. Collaboration using the same tools as an in-office workforce hasn’t been effective.
3. Remote working erodes peer socialisation and company culture
Besides those who are close friends, most employees used to socialise at some level in the office – and now 100% of their interactions are work-related as they only contact each other for work. The stress fatigue now affecting the workforce is turning team members against each other and with no team-building options open, company cultures that took generations to build are crumbling.
3 simple solutions to help restore balance:
1. Set a timetable for yourself
Most of us are conditioned to operate on a timetable, from our 12 years of schooling where we alternated subjects on a rotation of between half an hour and an hour – and it works surprisingly well to impose one on yourself as an adult. There are a lot of apps to do this, but it can also be as simple as writing a task list every morning or evening and assigning time slots to it.
2. Use a good document management system across the company
Many companies are experimenting with a plethora of online systems for sharing work, but the company’s work is often stored in disparate systems – emails, voice notes, documents with version conflicts and few tracking tools for management. Implementing a good document management system will help – and it should be compliant with legislation, have an audit trail and eliminate version conflicts.
3. Set social time for your team online
Since you can’t meet up for team-building, try some online options: play an online game together, have a virtual braai or even watch the same show.
There’s no time like the present.
Faatima Kara is the Marketing Lead at Kutame Konsult and Richard Sherman is the Executive Marketer at Focused People Consulting.
