Watching the detectives

Once again we are indebted to covid for shedding light on the state of UK business management.

At a breakfast meeting today I was talking to someone who runs an IT business.  He mentioned a trend he is seeing;  his clients are asking him to monitor the activity of their employees who work from home.  He said it is relatively simple to use email server and telephone system logs to assess how active employees have been and when.  He believes that his findings sometimes lead to disciplinary action.

This story reflects an anxiety some of my clients are feeling about the productivity of their remote staff - although as far as I know none of them has resorted to spying on them.  Having said that, one has instituted a daily morning videoconference "...so I know they are out of bed and working".

Leaving aside any moral or legal aspects of spying on your employees, what does it tell us about management?  It certainly throws up a couple of fundamental management beliefs:

• Management is about controlling hours worked and activity levels, not helping people achieve results
• Left to their own devices, employees are shirkers

I have no doubt that every business owner will be able to point to evidence from their own experience supporting the second of these two beliefs (and of course, some employees are lazy and/or stupid).  The problem is that shirking is brought about even in good employees by a management style based on the first belief:

• In the old office-based organisation it is far easier to control the hours employees are in the office and the way they spend their time than it is to build trust, engagement, alignment, capability and motivation.
• In the old office-based organisation it is not necessary to expend effort on developing a compelling purpose for the organisation, a purpose that employees can believe in and want to be part of.
• In the old office-based organisation it is not necessary to have meaningful conversations about how success in a role is measured, or to invest time in coaching employees to achieve this.

It is difficult to change management style, organisational culture and employee attitudes at the best of times, let alone in the teeth of a pandemic, over Zoom.  Those organisations who were mostly doing things right will have coped well with remote working and those who weren't will not have coped well (and be devoting time and resources to spying on employees instead of addressing the real issue).

The old office-based organisation may come back.  If it doesn't, remote or hybrid workforces will need a different (and better) management style in order to succeed.

More on this and other management issues at https://www.nickbettes.co.uk