In addition, many people find working remotely extremely taxing. There are more meetings, more time on Zoom, and greater demands for managers to check in with their teams. Workloads have also expanded, with more emails (+5%), more emails sent outside business hours (+8%), and many more meetings (+13%), all combining to extend the workday by an average of 48 minutes.6 Jill Hooley, professor of psychology at Harvard and lead author of the classic textbook Abnormal Psychology, has studied managing depression in the workplace and the impact of remote work. “You hardly need me to tell you that we are dealing with very challenging times,” she told us. “Even the most successful business leaders may have family members or colleagues who have lost their jobs or who are dealing with other threats to their economic security.” She added that there are also the stresses that come from loss: “the loss of loved ones for some people, loss of our regular routines and favorite activities for everyone, as well as the stress that comes from loss of normalcy.”
The Third Perspective: Somewhere in the Middle
Yet for many others, the move to remote work has been somewhere in the middle. Kathleen Hogan, of Microsoft, shared that “working remotely has ushered in the best of times and the worst of times.” There have been some real positives, such as productivity. At a personal level, Kathleen has not had to commute to the company's Redmond, Washington, headquarters and has had much more time to work – and to be around her college-aged son, who has been attending classes remotely. She added that for many of the company's leaders, such as those who work with enterprise customers and governments around the world, the velocity of business has accelerated dramatically, enabled by the fact that the norm of traveling to visit customers has been replaced by video meetings. One of the top officers of Microsoft said, “I've met with five governments today,” doing in days what typically took weeks. Similarly, Kathleen conducts best-practices sessions with peer CHROs, which she used to do in person. Those meetings would normally have taken so much time to schedule and now it's much faster to get them set and executed. “Last week I spoke with a half a dozen CHROs about what they're experiencing,” she said. At an organizational level, remote work at Microsoft has led to a level of flexibility she and other company leaders never thought was possible. “It's allowed us to tap into diverse talent, access and hire more people from different geographies, and be incredibly productive along the way,” she said.
At the same time, Kathleen shares the sentiment expressed by almost all the other leaders we spoke with: There is no substitute for being in person. “A big aspect of being with other people is the serendipity that often presents itself in life.” She worries about that loss both individually and organizationally. Employees seem to agree that there is something to be said for the hybrid approach. “While we continue to learn, our current research shows roughly 80% of our employees want to go back to the office, but with greater flexibility, while roughly 20% say they want to work from home all the time. Some thought the 80/20 rule would be in favor of people wanting to work from home given COVID and we are seeing the opposite.”
We interviewed Jamie Iannone, CEO of eBay, who agrees. There have been some massive advantages to remote work, but some serious disadvantages as well. One surprising benefit for Jamie was the way it accelerated his onboarding process when he joined the company in April 2020, after having been the successful candidate in a CEO search that was conducted predominantly virtually. “It's remarkable how efficient and effective we can be,” he said. “When I started, I wanted to visit all of our offices around the world. In normal times that would have been a multi-week process. Now it was achieved in a matter of days. And it was easy to customize my communications to the audience. I just changed my virtual background to that of our German office, UK office, Amsterdam office, and everywhere else I visited.”
Yet despite articulating many of the benefits, Jamie concluded that working remotely has been a slight net negative. He knows that connecting with people is a huge part of leadership and he misses managing by walking around, having the three-minute conversations in the halls, elevators, or cafeteria. For him, working remotely while coming into the company from outside – Jamie had been COO of Walmart's gigantic e-commerce business – has created challenges building new relationships. “It's relatively easy and efficient to translate a 3D relationship into 2D, but it's hard just to start and build a meaningful relationship in 2D.”
Our Perspective: Working and Leading at a Distance Is Here to Stay
Let us share our point of view directly at this point. We believe that a minority of companies will attempt to go all the way back to how things were and revert to the formal in-the-office-everyday model they had pre-COVID-19. Similarly, we also believe that only a minority will shift toward full work-from-home or the even more permissive work-from-anywhere (WFA) model that lets people relocate and telecommute from less expensive or more idyllic environments. Yes, a few large tech companies have announced this shift. However, we believe most companies and organizations will wind up with some version of a hybrid model. On average, professionals will still have an office, visit clients, and conduct some business face to face, but they're almost certain to spend fewer hours in this mode than they did prior to 2020. As a result, everyone will be required to try to improve their remote leadership and working skills. Whether you're based in a high-rise or an office park 10 days a year or 100 days a year, you will need to get better at doing all the things your role requires on those days that you or your teams are working from the home office. The number of hours a year you are likely to spend leading virtually is probably going to spike in a permanent and meaningful way.
Learning to lead virtually isn't the only priority. To succeed, leaders must understand how to thrive as individuals working at a distance. This will require creating new systems and routines for you as an individual to address the things that are gone because of the lack of the structure of the office. You'll need to figure out how to be productive and deliver results while staying healthy, engaged, and sane.
The Big Questions
Moving forward, leaders and organizations are all confronting a series of important issues:
How to optimize the impact of virtual leadership
How to help employees have the most positive experiences so that their organizations can deliver the most positive results on a sustainable basis
How to hire, train, coach, and promote employees virtually on an ongoing basis that lets them integrate into the fabric of the organization and thrive
How to shift business models and organizational structures as the world continues to evolve
How to think about the return to the office and the future of work in a post-COVID-19 world
How to evolve corporate cultures from a distance
And how, on an individual basis, to retain the energy, vitality, and enthusiasm that are needed in organizations and the world more than ever
Until now, there has not been a research-based, practical resource available to address these questions and guide leaders who must engage and lead from a distance. The objective of this book is to fill that gap and provide a hands-on, effective toolkit for organizations and leaders of remote employees and virtual teams. While this book can certainly be read from cover to cover, we recommend that you also use it as a chapter-by-chapter reference, making it your go-to guide for virtual leadership.
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