I recently saw a post online about a CEO in Utah who left a message in the break room of his offices for his staff to see saying that he doesn't care if the staff need to leave early, run errands after lunch, attend a doctor's appointment or stay home to care for their sick child. He said that he employed them to do a job and he trusted them to get it done.
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The way it was worded resulted in the expected backlash from across the internet, with people decrying this callous approach to leadership and his staff.
However, it turns out, the way the message had been interpreted wasn't what he'd meant at all.
What this Utah CEO had actually meant was that the output mattered more than the hours. He acknowledged that people have a life outside of work and that sometimes that encroached on work availability, but if you still got your work done, then it didn't matter to him.
He claimed that the workplace is different now. That COVID-19 forced employers to change the way they managed their employees and valued work product and this has made way for better work/life balance for everyone.
In many cases, I rather think he may be correct. A quick glance at the major job boards online shows that many government jobs now offer hybrid and options for remote working, which now opens up opportunities for regionally based Australians who would traditionally have to move to the city to take up many of these roles in the past. That's quite exciting.
For many organisations, the barriers to remote work involved a lack of infrastructure, no working procedures for remote supervision or reporting, and a general lack of trust in the workforce to be doing the work they are meant to be doing when not under the watchful eye of a hovering manager.
However, COVID-19 forced these barriers to be broken down as the only option for continued work involved confronting these concerns, developing and implementing the infrastructure and letting go of micro-management tactics.
Letting go of the micro-managing process has been a challenging prospect for many a manager and has required some mindset shifts with regards to how they see - and oversee - their staff. As this US CEO mentions, trust is key and this can be a big step for many managers who have been "burned" in the past.
However, he reminds us that while managing a team can feel like parenting, it's not. Managers don't have parental authority over their staff, and in fact treating them like children (as so often seems to happen) causes way more problems than it solves, not to mention provides a worrying insight into how many people view parenting (but that's a subject for another column).
MORE ZOE WUNDENBERG:
Treating staff like the adults they are by trusting them to do the job that they have been hired to do is vital to a healthy, productive and happy workplace. If you treat them like errant children, they will likely begin to act like errant children as they reciprocate the lack of respect shown to them, resulting in a toxic workplace that will ultimately become untenable.
This is perhaps why team design and recruitment is such a vital part of the process. Management doesn't start with the staff in the office, it starts with the recruitment practices for the future staff that are yet to join your team. Having a strategy to hire the right people for the job with the mindset that the skills can be taught if required (with a few exceptions such as surgeons, structural engineers, etc) is a great way of prioritising your team culture, which will ultimately lead to better business outcomes.
Of course, even when the skills themselves are just as important as the cultural fit, you can still hire based on team dynamics to ensure the best possible outcome for the whole team. It always starts before the hire, so make sure you are hiring people you can trust to do the job and you won't go wrong.
- Zoë Wundenberg is a careers consultant and un/employment advocate at impressability.com.au, and a regular columnist for ACM.