what seemed impossible has become reality

Working on trust

When a person is not present or barely visible (be it a manager or a colleague), collaboration is only possible on a foundation of trust. Otherwise, the cycle of solving a problem quickly transforms into a cycle of stalking each other, looking for mistakes and reasons to trip up. Remote and hybrid employees are able to work quickly and productively, provided they have important motivation – access to various “non-office” opportunities (flexible schedule, late start of the working day, opportunity). Trusting an employee in the presence of such a number of temptations is the ability of a confident manager who knows how to unobtrusively, without spies and strict supervision, direct an employee in the right direction, motivate him.

However, you need to remember that a remote employee is not the same as a remote employee. One can work two jobs, remain efficient and grateful, while the other will look after his own interests first, distributing time on work tasks on a residual basis. And, by the way, both will perform their tasks, but with different levels of motivation and involvement. Therefore, trust should not be a universal deficit (I don’t trust anyone) and not consumer goods (I trust everyone), but an exclusive and valuable tool of motivation, which should be noticeably and clearly distributed to those who truly deserve it.

Time as the highest value

Remote work gave people a sense of time, I would even say, a taste for time. At first, everyone appreciated that they didn’t have to waste time on the way to the office and back, then many liked the lack of lunch as such (pasta on the keyboard is a thing!) and the reduction in time spent on coffee and chatting at the water cooler. However, following the expansion of the resource, there were some distortions:

greed for time – the employee snatches every minute to work, works overtime, gets tired, burns out;
waste of time – work is done slowly, personal matters are also not very fast, since the employee has the illusion of a huge number of free minutes and even hours. Very often work issues are resolved between trips to the store, doing laundry and reading the next chapter of the book over a cup of coffee;
time imbalance – the most responsible employees, having taken up working time with personal matters, compensate for this with evenings, nights, weekends, work from 8 am on January 1, etc. But this is rare, of course.

However, most employees noticed that time is valuable, that too much of it was spent on travel, lunches and empty conversations. Everyone is free to manage it and take this time back – a demotivating and difficult process. The manager's task is to figure out how things are with time and then offer employees a flexible schedule, frequency of office visits, or even part-time work (many do not even suspect such an opportunity, and may be quite ready to sacrifice part of their salary for the sake of health, a hobby, a pet project, etc.).

A fly in the ointment

Yes, alas, not a spoon, but a whole ladle. The new model of work and relationships in a team gives rise to a lot of problems, which can sometimes lead to burnout and even dismissal, collapse processes and quarrel between everyone. And this is one of the most uncontrollable parts of the new reality.

An imbalance appears in the team: someone (who, for example, has been working for 10 years) is given much more privileges and is given more trust. Meanwhile, it happens that a new employee is just as trustworthy and sometimes works much more productively than his “bronzed” colleagues.
Many processes become poorly controlled, as a result, the manager may think that the remote employee is doing nothing. At some stages, there may be delays, replacement of responsible persons, and failure to meet deadlines for various reasons.
It is much easier to lure employees to another job, since a significant part of the non-material motivation is lost – in fact, no one holds on to their colleagues, the atmosphere, the cute tradition of pizza on Friday evenings. Moreover, against the backdrop of uncontrolled burnout, the decisive factor in moving to a new job may not even be the salary, but a new interesting project (yes, many people regret it later).
It is difficult for the manager and HR to monitor the “mood” in the team and the state of individual employees. If many issues were previously resolved by face-to-face conversations, in remote and hybrid mode there is often not enough time for this, or the conversation itself becomes non-verbal, in chats or, at best, via videoconferencing, turning into a non-working formality. As a result, you can only learn about an employee's problems when productivity drops to zero.
Outside of live communication, communication acquires new variables: conjecture, guessing and false reactions. Employees guess each other’s mood by emoticons, periods at the end of sentences, imbue other people’s messages with the desired tone, etc. This is the bane of any online communication, but when it comes to work processes, the problem of “reinterpreting” other people's text messages takes on significant weight.

It is really not easy for managers now: they need to be able to balance the team, take into account the interests of employees, develop products and services and, of course, not lose people. And here there are two ways. The first is authoritarian: impose your decisions, set rules by directives and say goodbye to those who are not ready to follow them. This is a path full of stress and costs. And there is a second one – not democratic, but a path of respect and consideration of all interests. Difficult, with unpleasant obstacles, difficult decisions, changes in habitual patterns of behavior and management. But this is the path of a leader, next to whom the team is ready to grow and develop. In our times – a significant competitive advantage.

¹ ^{https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/dlinnyy-covid-sovremennoe-sostoyanie-problemy-obzor-zarubezhnyh-nauchno-meditsinskih-publikatsiy/viewer}