During 2020 many people started working from home, remotely, as a result of Covid-19. It happened fairly quickly and quite seamlessly, thanks to the technology we have at our disposal.
Now, in 2021 when most people are returning to work after a Christmas holiday break, the remote working arrangement is continuing due to the fact that the Pandemic is far from over.
It will be interesting to see if the remote work arrangement will continue when things do return to normal one day, or whether it may become a permanent arrangement, perhaps following a hybrid approach where employees may continue working from home 2 or 3 days a week.
With this trend, it is very beneficial for employers and managers to ensure teams have home offices that enables high productivity.
Find below an Infographic covering the rise of remote work, the challenges people experience with that and details of office accessories to help with success.
This year, the world has undergone a vast remote working experiment. Although some companies had already introduced this option for their workers, COVID-19 drastically accelerated the levels of remote working out of necessity.
So has the experiment been a success? What are the pros and cons of remote working?
The Advantages of Remote Working
Let’s start with the advantages of remote working.
For the employee, there are wide range of benefits that include:
Greater work-life balance. Rather than working rigid 9-5 office hours, with a potentially punishing commute further consuming the day, remote workers can work from a location of their choosing. With less time spent commuting, they can fill their day with more personally rewarding activities – whether that’s spending time with the family, going to the gym, or simply relaxing at home.
Saving money. Whether it’s a rail ticket or fuel for the car, commuting can also cost a lot of money.
Improved focus. Formany workers, a noisy office is not the most conducive working environment. In one survey of UK workers, 68% felt they were more productive or equally productive at home.
There are also benefits for employers, with some of the most significant being:
Greater productivity and a more engaged workforce. Happy and healthy workers are also more productive workers. It’s not surprising that remote workers’ enhanced levels of wellbeing can lead them to work more effectively too.
Lower costs. The cost of running an office for five days a week can be substantial. Whether businesses implement remote working full-time or part-time, they will end up saving some money.
New talent. A remote working setup allows businesses to seek talent from further afield.
The Disadvantages of Remote Working
Although remote working undoubtedly has many benefits, there are naturally some downsides that need to be considered too. Although video conferencing with colleagues is great for work purposes, it’s far from ideal for socialising. It’s difficult for more than one person to talk at the same time, and so group chats can descend into incoherent chaos. Face-to-face communication is important for the social culture and togetherness of a company, and remote communication is not quite able to fill the gap – yet. In future, of course, it could be that new virtual reality technology will improve matters here.
For the individual remote worker, too, this isolation can become depressing. It’s important to guard remote workers’ mental health, and ensure that they still feel involved as much as possible. Although remote working has some definite upsides for mental health, the potential downsides should not be ignored.
Many businesses have been historically wary of introducing remote working, but the experiment during the pandemic has dispelled some of the misconceptions they might have had. Remote workers do not slack off, but continue to work productively – and some studies even suggest those who work at home are actually moreproductive.
For the workers themselves, working from home can be something of a mixed blessing. Many have celebrated the improved work-life balance and wellbeing that remote working has brought them, but there are signs that remote working full-time can start to take its toll. Others have experienced increasing isolation – craving the social atmosphere of the office.
It may be, of course, that the right balance lies in the middle ground – remote working a few days a week to improve wellbeing, but also benefiting from office socialising. In general, however, it’s clear that the remote working experiment has been largely successful: opening up new horizons of possibility for employers and employees alike.
More great resources
Working from Home Guide
Please find below an in-depth guide on creating a healthy and productive workplace for people working from home. This is very useful since many are still under COVID-19 lockdowns. It will help you gain an understanding of the biggest challenges faced by remote workers dealing with stress, anxiety, and maintaining work-life balance at home.
Your home and your wellbeing: how to achieve a work-life balance while working from home
This guide offers helpful insights:
65% of people value a good work-life balance as the most important factor when looking for work.
As of April 2021, 31% of workers still worked remotely for the majority of the time.
The proportion of people working remotely varies hugely between sectors. In the Information and Communication industry, 81% of the workforce is remote. In contrast, just 8% of Accommodation and Food Service employees work remotely.
As of December 2020, there were 22% more people who worked from home in rural areas than in urban areas.
For more helpful information about:
Changing attitudes and behaviours to work-life balance
Tips on how to adjust and be more productive when working from home
Red flags that you’re not managing work-life balance well
How working from home affects your mortgage
How to achieve a work-life balance while working from home
In light of this crisis, some of the best things a Project Leader can do, is to arm yourself with information and to be a pillar of strength for your project team(s).
By now we all know that the Coronavirus, known as the COVID-19 pandemic, has serious implications for economies all over the world and is causing a huge business impact in every country where it is spreading. Countries, organizations, and individuals are faced with extremely serious risks, uncertainties, challenges, questions, and decisions—in many cases existential in nature. It is important to arm yourself with accurate, comprehensive information to manage your organization and teams through this crisis by making informed, thoughtful decisions.
Let’s look with a broader lens before we try to understand the impact on project teams.
Based on the rapid, exponential spread of COVID-19 across the world over the past month, McKinsey has revised its Scenario Analysis (as shared in the previous article) to include 9 potential scenarios. These scenarios capture outcomes related to GDP impact, public health response, and economic policies.
Stages of Recovery
Different countries have had different levels of success in handling this crisis, therefore McKinsey is proposing 4 stages of recovery readiness.
Overview of the 4 Stages of Recovery
To understand what state of readiness a country is in, the 9 scenarios are mapped to the 4 stages of readiness. The best prepared areas are in the upper right box.
For every country and territory, there is a path to recovery—before parts of the economy can be restarted, you must first slow the spread of the virus. If you prematurely restart the economy prior to truly containing the spread, you risk re-starting the spread. Most countries expect to experience significant decline in GDP in Q2 of 2020, which would be the first time since WWII. In fact, GDP drops to its lowest point globally in Q2.
COVID-19 Scenarios Overview
Based on the COVID-19 scenarios, here are the proposed paths to recovery.
If you examine the Stage 2 scenario: A3-Virus is contained, which captures the situation where the virus is contained by mid-Q2, it is expected that public health containment and mitigation efforts, along with a seasonal decline, leads to a reduction in case load.
The result is that by the end of 2020, beginning of 2021, GDP will have recovered to the pre-pandemic levels for most countries.
Under the A1 scenario (medium virus spread), we endure a slow, global recovery—there is severe and large-scale human and economic impact. Most countries will take over 2+ years to recover to the pre-pandemic GDP levels. In this scenario, the GDP shows a gradual U-shape recovery stretching multiple years.
Implication for Companies and Projects
If the Stage 2 scenario (A3-virus is contained) materializes in your country, you have the possibility that the economy should return to normal within a year, with little impact on larger projects and programmes that were able to continue, despite wide-scale lock-down measures in many countries. Of course many small projects would have been put on hold, postponed, or cancelled altogether due to the economic downturn.
However, in the event of a possible A1 scenario in your country, the slow economic recovery, may cause many planned projects to be postponed and multiple cost-saving measures are expected to be implemented by stable companies who will try to survice over the 2+ years that it will take the economy to recover to pre-pandemic GDP levels.
Our response
There is no point in panicking about the situation we as project practitioners are finding ourselves in. Rather prepare for the eventuality that uncertainty, challenges and difficult decisions are lying ahead for most companies.
In another McKinsey article: “Saving our livelihoods from COVID-19: Toward an economic recovery“, they state:
The pandemic could give rise to a new era of human development
McKinsey, April 2020
Recognise the impact of COVID-19 on people’s livelihoods. There will be an increase in unemployment and poverty. This means that some of your team members are experiencing a decline in household income that could last months. This will have a demoralizing effect on families and on teams we lead. We need to raise our awareness and focus on providing emotional safety to our teams. When people feel safe (a basic need) and still secure in their jobs, they will stay committed and motivated to work productively.
It will be the government’s responsibility to help companies to safeguard employment. People will be allowed to return to work under strict health protocols. We need to support those protocols in order to contain the virus and still stay economically active.We can expect that companies will make structural changes during the economic recovery period like leaner operations, digital and industrial reconversions, the introduction of new channels, agile organizational structures, digital innovation and innovative learning techniques. These changes will certainly have an impact on how projects are prioritized and executed in future. As project professionals we need to position ourselves to have market related skills to fill the demands of the recovering economy.
We need to work on being more resilient in these difficult time and keep developing our leadership skills. This is why I’m reading a book called: “Prosper!: How to Prepare for the Future and Create a World Worth Inheriting” by Chris Martenson and Adam Taggart. It gives specific, attainable steps you can take today that can limit your vulnerability and help you to live your life with greater purpose.
Keep yourself informed, be realistic, but stay positive while leading your teams as best as you can through these uncertain times. As long as value is delivered by projects and the outcomes serve companies and their customers, you will stay in high demand.
Please comment and let us know how you are dealing with the pandemic crisis. How are you supporting your teams through this? Share anything that will help others who are in the same predicament.
The best way to go about implementing a monitoring policy is to:
Establish a goal from the beginning and use it to guide your policy
Remain transparent through the process to keep your team in the loop
Tailor the policy to your team and acquire software that they’re comfortable with
Adjust accordingly after evaluating the effects of your new policy
A good remote working policy comes down to what works best for you and your team.
Few people could have seen this coming; the importance of remote working to slow the spread of COVID-19. Many businesses had to send their workforce away to continue business operations at home. Working from home is a safe alternative to commuting to the office, but also creates new issues some project managers may not have faced before.
Work from home challenges
Transitioning to work from home has its own challenges since team members must practice even more self-discipline now that their colleagues are not around. It also requires employees to carve a space out at home to focus on their work.
On top of that, many may have stress and anxiety surrounding the state of our world and find it hard to push through the day.
Doctors and psychologists both recognize that our “new normal” is taking a toll on many aspects of our health and difficulty to keep up productivity, is expected. For project managers in the era of COVID-19, it’s important to strike a balance between being empathetic with our team while also keeping our projects on track.
Remote Work Policy
This balance gets tricky when deciding how to keep track of your team and project progress. A remote work policy can include a set of protocols to follow, protections for the business as well as increased monitoring.
Setting clear expectations and protocols might be all some teams need to keep projects on track and to keep project managers in the loop. Requiring periodic check ins and status reports might be enough to keep track of your team without keeping a closer eye on them.
However, this might not be enough if you start to see things falling through the cracks, deadlines not being met and other red flags. These red flags can signal issues with productivity or more serious matters.
Uncertainty with remote working can partly be mitigated by getting some protections for your business. If you don’t already, you should consider fidelity bonds. These bonds protect you and your clients from employees who commit things like theft and embezzlement. Although assuming the worst can put you down a rabbit hole, implementing protections provides at least some peace of mind.
Monitoring and time tracking
Remote monitoring software helps project managers keep a pulse on projects and how efficiently tasks are executed. Time tracking software is simple and can help manage project scope while more advanced software can track online activity to ensure your team members are on track.
There are many risks and benefits associated with monitoring. On the plus side, you’ll have clear, unbiased oversight of your team. Consequently, some team members may feel stressed and may interpret the increased monitoring as a lack of trust. You can consider a hybrid of self-reporting and software monitoring to streamline some tasks while giving your team some control.
Decide if monitoring is necessary
JW Surety Bonds put together this flowchart to help you decide if you should begin monitoring your remote team. This decision map walks you through key questions and scenarios to think of before diving headfirst into a monitoring policy. Take a look at the flowchart below and see if monitoring is the right move at this time for your team.
Please
include attribution to JW Surety Bonds with this graphic.
While the whole world is currently dealing with the Coronavirus, and more specifically known as the COVID-19 pandemic, the project management community has a responsibility to deal with this issue on our projects in a decisive, direct manner. What are the important things to do?
When faced with such an extreme risk, uncertainty and challenge, the first thing to do, is to arm yourself with accurate, comprehensive information to best prepare to manage through this crisis by making informed, thoughtful decisions. As Project Management Professionals we need to be planning for this on our projects. Of course this will include to put it on your Risk Register, including a series of scenarios, the expected impacts and mitigation actions with risk owners.
Take the project conversation to your Sponsor and Steering Committee to consider if the project should be put on hold or delayed. You will need signoff on decisions made.
Business Implications
According to a McKinsey article, on the COVID-19 implications for Business, published prior to the lockdown of several countries, there are 3 potential economic scenarios for the Coronavirus Disease. They are:
Quick recovery: The case count continues to grow, given the Coronavirus’s high transmissibility. However, countries are able to achieve rapid control, as seen in China and the virus is assumed to be seasonal.
Global slowdown: Most countries are unable to achieve the same rapid control that China managed. In Europe and the United States, transmission is high but remains localized, driven by strong countermeasures taken by individuals, firms, and governments, while virus is assumed seasonal.
Global recession: In this worst case scenario, the assumptions are similar to that of Global Slowdown, except the virus is not seasonal—i.e. unaffected by spring in the northern hemisphere. Infection cases grow throughout the year, resulting in healthcare systems being overwhelmed for many countries. A recovery in consumer confidence is pushed out to Quarter 3 or later.
The sectors to be most impacted by the pandemic, forecasted by McKinsey, are Aviation and Hospitality, as well as Consumers.
The immediate actions that organisations are expected to take, with application to dealing with this on your projects, are discussed in the next paragraph, based on the McKinsey recommendations.
#1 Protect Employees
Provide clear communication to employees on what to do. Companies, and specifically Project Managers, need to provide clear, simple language to local management and teams on how to deal with the Coronavirus pandemic. These recommendations should be consistent with best practices outlined World Health Organisation and other health agencies.
Secondly, provide autonomy to local managers, so they feel empowered to deal with any quickly evolving situation. With that said, corporates should also monitor and ensure guidelines are being safely followed.
The third one is very applicable to Project Managers to remember. For any crisis, telecommuting has been an important tactic for maintaining operations. Provide an infrastructure for remote work.
To this point, do the following:
Allow employees to telecommute.
Train our leaders. Leaders should be sensible and reasonable in their expectations as to when workers are available for work.
Identify employees who are most crucial to maintaining business continuity. Ensure these employees have the proper tools and infrastructure to work remotely.
Develop a disaster recovery scenario that incorporates telecommuting.
#2 Setup a cross-functional response team
We should set up a cross-functional Coronavirus response team that should include members from every function and discipline within the organization. The leader of the team should report directly to the CEO.
This response team will have several workstreams, focused on the following areas:
Center for communication and coordination
Employee protection of health, welfare and ability to perform their roles
Financials stress test and development of a contingency plan
Supply Chain Management including monitoring, response and long-term plan within the context of Business Continuity Management
Sales, Marketing and Customer engagement including responses to demand shocks.
It’s important for this team to think through different scenarios, to create a single source of truth, to provide clear policies and guidelines, to monitor issues with rapid responses, to track adherence to policies, to update demand forecasts, to support supplier stability and more as applicable to the industry or sector you are in.
#3 Ensure sufficient financial liquidity
It’s recommended to have at minimum 3 months of cash at hand, to have an adequate buffer of stock or other parts at hand, to understand how prepared key suppliers are.
#4 Stabilise the Supply Chain
The activities related to Supply Chain Management include medium-term risk management in our Supply Chain. In the aftermath, there are long-term actions to take related to Business Continuity Management (e.g. supplier regional diversification).
On projects you should consider procurement commitments, including possible delay in deliveries of materials or bringing in contracted staff. A common occurrence on projects, is where people are outsourced from national or international Agencies and you need to consider the implications for those commercial contracts too.
#5 Practice Customer centric design principles
Engage with customers and ensure transparency.
On projects you need to make communications on of your top priorities to address uncertainty, fear or possible panic. Be open with your team, stakeholders, and your sponsor. Communicate your scenarios and plans, and then update with how events are affecting your project and changes to those plans. Also plan for regular review cycles to reconsider plans and responses.
#6 Help the community
Look for ways to support the community. We should adopt strong Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices. Some important activities could include targeting nonprofits and community outreach organizations in your local area, encouraging our employees to volunteer. Let others know what your organization has done. The communication should include only the most pertinent details, including the amount of funds committed, the key beneficiaries and recipients, and what you aim to achieve with your donation.
As Project Managers we have valuable skills to offer, so it’s important to link into responses among your wider business and social communities and offer your help.
Finally, you need to consider your own role. Who will step into your role, if you are taken ill? What about work-stream leaders and other key people on your project? Convene your top team and sketch out alternates for everyone – and alternates for those, if your project is big enough. Even consider the possibility of an orderly temporary shut-down of your project.
Coronavirus COVID-19: Facts and Insights, McKinsey, 2020. www.mckinsey.com
Flevypro – Impact, implications and immediate actions.
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