How to lead remotely, without growing remote

The pandemic may be receding but it looks like hybrid working is here to stay. For those tasked with managing teams from a distance, both opportunities and challenges exist.

John Shaw, country head at Legato Health Ireland, has seen staff numbers grow from zero to 145 over the past year. In a tight labour market in which the IT skills he seeks are in particular demand, the kind of workplace Legato offers has played a significant part in its recruitment success.

“We follow a radical hybrid model,” explains Shaw. “The majority of people work from home the majority of the time and we create meaningful events for the purpose of getting together.”

That includes a recent event to celebrate its first anniversary, a two-day event which on the first day included talks from the president of the company, a government minister and expert speakers.

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Day two was all about innovation and “looked at how do we move from having a start-up mindset to having an expanding mindset,” says Shaw.

Every six to eight weeks his teams find a reason to come into the office to meet, work and socialise. “Every time we get together we include a social dimension, to celebrate our success,” he explains.

In order for this way of working to work, a certain kind of leadership is required. “We are delivery-focused as a team,” says Shaw. “We are building a culture based on trust. We are not interested in presenteeism or micromanagement. If you study high performance teams you will see that they always have a high level of trust.”

But presenteeism was always an “illusion”, and a dangerous one for organisations, reckons Shaw.

“What drives success is your culture. It’s not about getting everyone in front of you,” he says. “We follow the servant leadership philosophy. My role is to enable people in the team to be successful, not to dictate. You hire smart people and you listen to them.”

The desire to pull people into the office, simply so that you can see them working, is wrong-headed. “People want to be trusted,” he says. “It’s personally offensive to be distrusted.”

Not every organisation has established its position so clearly. “Over 50 per cent of our workforce does jobs that mean they need to be on site, whether in care, in hospitals, retail or transport,” points out Mary Connaughton, director of CIPD Ireland.

Leaders in such establishments are presented with a completely new set of challenges that didn’t previously exist.

One of growing concern is how to compete for talent in a labour market that wants flexibility, if you can’t offer it.

To succeed requires fresh thinking about how jobs are composed, suggests Connaughton.

Being open to new ways of doing things will be especially important in organisations where you have both on-site and remote workers, says Connaughton. Keeping a common culture will be harder as a result. “When everyone did the same thing, it was much easier for managers,” she says. “The variability in ways of working is resulting in challenges that leaders just didn’t have to think about before.”

The issue comes into sharp focus at recruitment stage. Connaughton says that new employees can be particularly demanding about remote working rights. That’s not necessarily younger Gen Z entrants either, “but anyone changing jobs now is likely to be looking for particular ways of working, such as saying ‘I’ll do one day a week on-site’,” she explains.

In some cases, remote workers want to live abroad, causing fresh challenges. While Ireland has consistency of employment law under EU principals, there are difficulties in relation to tax, social insurance and conditions of employment. If you establish an overseas office it’s straightforward but Connaughton says “it’s tricky if you are employing a single person abroad in relation to things like pensions and tax and, at the end of the day, employers are responsible, not employees.”

Where an organisation sells itself in the labour market on the basis of the flexibility it offers, leaders must live up to that by role-modelling it themselves, she explains. “If they agree that we need two days a week in the office for collaboration and to be available for social conversation, then they can’t stay at home or locked in an office at work,” she adds.

Management has to walk the talk for this to work. Leaders must also actively guard against proximity bias. “There are very real fears around it,” says Connaughton. “It’s about making sure leaders are aware of, and respectful of, those who are not in the office as much as others, whether in relation to pay raises or promotional and development opportunities.”

Leaders need to get across all of this, and fast, cautions Caroline Reidy of the HR Suite, particularly as the government has signalled that it is to fast-track remote working legislation. It gives employees the right to request remote work and will now be included under the Work Life Balance bill, which is due to be delivered before the end of the year.

“It means the right to request remote working will be here quicker than we expected,” says Reidy. “It is very positive because it will bring clarity and there will be a code of practice around it.”

It will also encourage business leaders to face up to change. “A lot of leaders are just doing things the way they have always done them,” says Reidy. “It’s now time to press pause and look at what learning can be taken from the period when we had the emergency move to remote working and think about how to do things now.”

The first step for most organisations will be to set up a working group with stakeholders representing “all the different categories of workers in it, so that it takes all the various challenges facing people into consideration, such as maybe people who travel a lot for work,” she says.

That process will feed into the drafting of policies for remote and hybrid working. “It’s important that there is clarity in relation to the process and how to apply for it,” she explains.

Next up comes training for managers, to help them give feedback and ensure they communicate effectively remotely.

“Overarching all of this is culture, which is what binds things all together,” says Reidy.

“Starting with the working groups, drawing up the policies and then providing the training will help to support the new way of working you introduce. It will make it work. What you don’t want in an organisation is for the approach to hybrid and remote working to come down to a chance factor such as whether someone has a good manager or not.”