15 Cs of a flexible workplace (Part II)
October 2, 2013 1:20 PM
Clarity
There must be clarity at every level of the organization about flexibility so inconsistencies, confusion, and ultimately, widespread dissatisfaction, can be avoided. On teams, clarity around everyones roles and responsibilities, shared goals, current priorities, expectations, and deadlines are crucial to success. And all individuals should be very clear on their specific responsibilities for content, schedule, and quality of output.
Consequences
Leaders must take total responsibility for themselves and for leading others and be able to fairly differentiate between when inadequate performance merits tough consequences, versus when its fitting to celebrate a goodhearted failure as an opportunity to learn, improve, and grow.
Community
Even when people dont work in the same physical location, its still important to connect with others and build relationships inside and outside immediate teams. This will create cohesion and increase the sense of ownership and empowerment.
Coaching
An effective leader invests in people and develops the next generation of leaders through coaching, mentoring, inspiring, and empowering them. Conversation also involves giving feedback good and constructive promptly and transparently. Managers of remote workers must also be adept listeners, able to identify verbal as well as tacit clues in order to be on top of possible problems as well as to pick out best practices and successes to share.
Context
Virtual communications lack contextual clues and cues, so people will often make up detrimental assumptions and stories. Leaders must openly share information and background to ensure people understand the context around their decisions, actions, and communications. Getting to know each other helps eliminate some of those natural misunderstandings, so with new remote colleagues, consider sharing information about yourselves or giving a video tour of your respective office spaces.
Concerns
Among the most common challenges with a highly distributed workforce are ensuring that:
- Remote staff is using the organizations required data backup procedures and knowledge/document management system.
- There is sufficient IT support.
- Remote workers have ergonomic home office setups.
- People are collaborating as necessary for success.
Course correct
As with anything, we must course correct early and often when somethings not working. Dont let things escalate to the point that Yahoo did, whereby they had to throw out the baby with the bath water by ending all work-from-home arrangements. Course correction should be relatively straightforward when results are gauged against the evaluation criteria set out in the strategic planning phase.
