How Can HR Leaders Manage Challenges in the New Realities of Working at Home?

5 min read |

Last Updated on 27 December 2023

The global coronavirus has jolted the entire world. We are most concerned about our health and safety, and we mourn with those who mourn for lost or isolated loved ones.

From this pandemic, new realities shape work:

Social distancing,
online (virtual) work,
self-isolation,
lockdowns,
shutdowns,
quarantine,
shelter-in-place,
essential businesses, etc.

These concepts reinvent where and how to work by exploring and requiring working remotely (called working at home, working virtually, telecommuting, etc.). A few years ago, the SOHO (single office, home office) emerged as a unique place to work. Now, it is a dominant reality for nearly every organization.

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So, how can business and HR leaders manage this new work reality of working at home?

Many have offered helpful administrative and logistics tips for working at home (e.g., using technology, finding a space for work, and managing distractions. We have examined the telecommuting literature, interviewed business and HR executives, and adapted insights from the future of work literature. We supplement tips on administrative logistics to offer guidance on overcoming four challenges.

And paying attention to three critical success factors for working at home. By so doing, we exhibit that working at home can strengthen talent, leadership, and organization responses to today’s crisis.

Four challenges and solutions to working at home

Drawing on work by thoughtful colleagues and through recent interviews, we heard work at home challenges such as: How do I manage my time at work vs. time with family? How do I connect with others? How do I build trust and relationships? How do I make sure my work gets noticed? From this work, leaders should pay attention to four challenges with remote workers.

1. Finding the right work-life balance

Working at home removes traditional boundaries of going to and from work, creates pressures of doing work while managing children (especially when children face school closings), and requires discipline to avoid other distractions (e.g., television, internet, food, and family matters).

Leaders encourage working at home employees to set work norms and routines (e.g., respond to calls within a time frame, find private space to work) and to prioritize tasks that have to be done.

2. Overcoming workplace isolation

Social isolation is a leading cause of mortality, and working at home often distances employees from each other. Leaders can promote interactions among team members with frequent contacts (email, video calls), provide coaching and mentoring by personal “check-ins” on how employees are doing, and encourage employees to connect.

3. Compensating for the lack of face to face communication

Cognitive and emotional trust often comes from face-to-face interactions. And those are more difficult when working at home. To compensate, leaders can do video contacts. Employees can show their personalities by wearing hats, setting backgrounds, or sharing personal moments.

4. Compensating for lack of visibility

Employees want to know how they are doing and to have their contributions recognized. These celebration moments often occur through casual and straightforward comments in the office. Leaders can be conscious of celebrating success in remote settings by sharing success stories, offering personal comments to remote employees, sharing best practices, and giving credit to employees who deliver results. Positive performance conversations can occur remotely and frequently to help employees feel visible.

When leaders recognize and deal with these four challenges, remote workers feel less isolated, experience more connection, and increase productivity and well being.

Three critical success factors for finding opportunity in working at home:

Colleagues have studied companies who have managed to telecommute (e.g., Best Buy, the US Government, Yahoo!, Automattic). And found three common critical success factors to ensure that employees are receiving what they most value from work:

believe (meaning),
become (learning and growing),
and belong (feeling part of a community).

Coordination

Coordination focuses on specific tasks. By breaking down an overall project into specific tasks, a remote worker can focus on a unique task. Then combine that task into the whole project to feel more connected. We have called this work task planning that evolves workforce planning. Coordination also comes when sub-teams are assigned a job and work together to report to a larger group. Leaders can consistently probe, “how are we doing at making sure we work together as a team?”

Communication

Without a doubt, leaders need to communicate even more. This means developing protocols to stay in touch with remote employees, have virtual meetings at times that work for remote employees, share even more information, and engage in formal and informal communications. Leaders can continually ask remote employees, “how well do you know what is happening to the organization and how you fit in with it?”

Culture

We have defined the “right” culture as the firm’s identity is key to customers’ minds. This means that culture defines an organization’s brand, identity, or reputation with key customers. For remote workers, making sure that customer promises (e.g., for innovation, service, relationships) show how remote workers are treated. Leaders can monitor how the external commitments show up in internal working relationships by asking, “how well are we modeling what we promise our customers?”

Companies that thrive have a holistic approach to working at home. Through attending to coordination, communication, and culture, employees find more belief (meaning and purpose), becoming (learning and growing), and belonging (feeling part of the community).

Implications of remote work for talent, leadership, and organization

We believe that remote working challenges can be turned into opportunities to improve talent, leadership, and organization--keys to responding to this immediate pandemic crisis. At RBL, we have recently done HR and leadership academies for employees working at home to improve personal skills and create organizational capabilities that help organizations succeed in these difficult times.

We have also done consulting projects where we can collect data and solve problems virtually. Finally, our state-of-the-art pulse checks with information collected via remote methods prove valuable to navigate these difficult times. We hope to share how we can improve talent, leadership, and organization for those working remotely.

The Corona pandemic will eventually decrease, but the insights about working at home will endure. By facing the challenges and recognizing the opportunities, we envision a new normal for where and how work is done.

This article is co-authored by:

Dave Ulrich

He is the Rensis Likert Professor of Business at the Ross School, University of Michigan and a partner at the RBL group. He has published over 200 articles and book chapters and over 30 books. He edited Human Resource Management 1990-1999, served on editorial board of 4 Journals, on the Board of Directors for Herman Miller (16 years) and Board of Trustees at Southern Virginia University, has spoken to large audiences in 90 countries; performed workshops for over half of the Fortune 200; coached successful business leaders, and is a Fellow in the National Academy of Human Resources.
He and his colleagues have shaped the HR profession and he has been called the “father of modern HR” and “HR thought leader of the decade” by focusing on HR outcomes, governance, competencies, and practices. He spearheaded a “gift” book on the future of HR (The Rise of HR) distributed to over 1,500,000 HR professionals), in which 70 thought leaders freely share their insights.

Julio Zelaya

A global expert in entrepreneurship, he is the author of the Amazon #1 best selling books “The Voyage: The Power of Entrepreneurship” and “Catalyst: Change Management and Transformation”. He is the author of the online course “La Travesía: El Poder de Emprender”, available on Udemy. Co-author of the best-sellers SuccessOnomics with Steve Forbes and Transform with Brian Tracy.
He is a fellow of the Central American Leadership Initiative -CALI– of The Aspen Institute and member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network and a member of EO (Entrepreneur’s Organization). His work has been seen in ABC, NBC, CBS, E!, and FOX, as well as in the main Latin-American mass media. Speaker at TEDx with his talk “El Regalo de Soñar”, “The Gift of Dreaming”. He is a visiting scholar at Highpoint University, Penn State University, and Tulane University.