Gina is the Interim General Counsel and the Director of Human Resources for the Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM).
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An awful lot of us expected a sort of workplace apocalypse when Covid-19 forced us all to shift to working remotely. No one questioned whether abandoning the office was absolutely necessary to protect the safety of our employees. But a lot of people, people smarter than I am, believed it would result in the death of our companies. How in the world would our employees continue to focus on getting stuff done when all the "big picture thinkers" couldn’t be there to control every move like an orchestra conductor conducting musicians?
Yet, maybe surprisingly, corporate America hasn’t exactly shriveled and died during the Covid-19-driven swing to remote work. This is really good, as this pandemic keeps postponing the re-opening of offices. So is remote work going to lead to corporate armageddon? Debating whether remote work is good or bad for every organization might not be the relevant question.
Remote work may be a good thing — for the right workforce, made up of trustworthy employees who share an organization’s values and understand team priorities. Conversely, flexible work arrangements may very well be harmful to an organization, but maybe that’s true when the organization hasn’t hired the right employees. In other words, considering a more permanent adoption of some kind of work-from-home policy should help HR professionals assess their workforce and, by extension, the hiring processes they use.
The debate about flexible work schedules and remote work isn’t new. Back in 2013, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer famously called all employees of the tech company back to the office, saying that “speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.” The reaction to this executive decision was swift — but inconsistent. There were a lot of opinions about whether this conclusion was right or wrong, whether she should be lauded or vilified, but no clearly shared consensus.
The debate continues to this day, no doubt an even more interesting topic given what feels like a never-ending pandemic. A recent Microsoft study seemed to confirm Mayer’s years-old sentiment, saying Covid-19-driven remote work negatively affects the “dynamic” energy of the organization and causes employees to feel more siloed.
Yet, despite story after story about corporate leaders prioritizing bringing employees physically together, we are also bombarded with an equal share of analyses and statistics telling us that flexible work is the future of work, that workers today prize the ability to control from where and when they work. The implication, of course, is that companies can only attract the best talent if they’re willing to let them control where and when they work.
The truth? I don’t think anyone agrees on whether remote work is good or bad, right or wrong.
However, shockingly, our corporate data revealed that remote work arrangements during Covid-19 did not negatively affect our organization. After the first nine months of remote work at our organization starting March 2020, our employees managed to reach or exceed every enterprise metric that our board of directors had set for that year.
This was shocking to me. For years, I had espoused the belief that teams and culture would be harmed if we did not work together. And yet, we worked from home and communicated only over Teams and Zoom — and nothing bad happened to the company. Did our employees have some kind of secret superpower that made them rise to the occasion in this unexpected way? Not really. We had just hired the right team to be working remotely. For us, that meant employees who had the necessary skills to prioritize the organization’s needs appropriately.
I realized that a successful remote work culture means your employees are respectful to the difficulties and challenges each team member faces. Only then can they respond with empathy, offering to help out when and where they can. Supervisors complete this culture by keeping employees engaged.
And that’s when an epiphany knocked me over: What if we’ve been thinking about flexible schedules and implementation of remote work policies completely wrong? What if we step back and ask ourselves some questions:
1. What does it say about my company if my employees cannot successfully work remotely?
2. What kind of employees do I need to hire to make flexible work arrangements viable in our organization?
Of course, not every organization’s work lends itself to flexible work arrangements. Sometimes, for example, a front desk attendant or a mailroom clerk or a factory assembly line worker can only do a job with in-person access to tools or people. Moreover, there is no getting around the fact that the occasional lunch or get-together with employees is as energizing as a big shot of caffeine from the office Keurig and helps sustain fun workplace cultures.
However, considering a flexible work schedule as an assessment of the employees hired is perhaps a reasonable endeavor. Maybe we need to stop blaming remote work for leaching “dynamism” from an organization and siloing employees. Instead, I advocate we take a harder look at whether our supervisors and leaders are hiring the kinds of employees that support working apart from each other.
Forbes Human Resources Council is an invitation-only organization for HR executives across all industries. Do I qualify?
