Working from Home: An Unexpected Gift to Improve Our Lives

Recently, I had the honour of being interviewed by Ryan Jon on Ticker TV on how to lead remote teams.

Working from home has been an amazing gift to both employees and organisations.  In the past, leaders have been resistant to people working from home because visibility has been an issue.   But we can’t do that anymore.

In this forced experiment:

✔️ Leaders have had to take their leadership skills to the next level, at a much faster pace, than if COVID hadn’t occurred.

✔️ Leaders have had to trust people to work when they can’t see them. Teams that have done well in this environment know they have the full support of their boss who knows how to build trust.

✔️Mental health issues are being acknowledged.  Again, organisations that are doing well have leaders that are addressing wellbeing concerns.

Dealing with the pandemic might have been difficult initially, but for many of us, it has helped us:

✔️ Understand how we like to work, in order to be our most productive.  This impacts what we need to be happy in our personal lives, as well.

✔️ Appreciate the importance of relationships and being with people in-person (or not!)

✔️ Better understand our leadership style and what works and what doesn’t.  For direct reports, it’s helped them crystallise what leadership styles they work best with.

✔️ Realise that we can change quite quickly, when we have no other choice.

Of course, the most important thing is that it has forced us to live and work differently.  In doing so, it has given us lots of new insights into how we work.  Best of all, a lot of a leaders who were against working from home have discovered that people are actually more productive when they work remotely.  

Now, the challenge is taking the time to reflect on what’s worked and what hasn’t.  So that we can rethink how to create a fairer, more compassionate, creative and energetic workplace with leaders who model these behaviours.  The good news is that we have the opportunity to speed up this process, which might have taken decades, if the pandemic hadn’t nudged us along.  If you want some help to speed up the process, feel free to reach out to me at support@trustologie.com.au.

What gifts have you discovered in your working/leadership style since working from home?