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When the global pandemic forced the closure of government offices in the Washington DC metro area in March, many of the employees of tech integrator B&A Inc. found themselves without a permanent place to work. B&A engineers who normally commuted to customer offices had to create full-time workspaces at home almost overnight.
Recognizing the disruption could have a significant impact on its employees and their families, B&A activated its crisis management team, which recalibrated workplace expectations, amended compensation plans and hired a full-time mental health counselor whose sole job is to monitor the emotional well-being of workers. Thanks to its quick response, B&A served customers during the pandemic with little or no disruption.
So have scores of other progressive business leaders. What they wisely realized during the last few months is this: The accidental workforce that many of us inherited deserves a deliberate leadership strategy tailored to these times.
Here’s why.
COVID-19 will unquestionably go down as the single most disruptive workplace occurrence since World War II. Given the magnitude of disruption associated with the virus, business leaders everywhere have an almost unprecedented opportunity to remake the workplace. This goes beyond eliminating bad ideas such as open office floorplans, which employees loathe, or stack-ranking performance management systems, which reduce morale and drive productive workers away.
What I am talking about is seizing the opportunity to transform the workplace into something better than what is was. If you want an organization that is more agile, human and competitive, in other words, then you are going to need a workforce that is more digital, empathetic and productive. This requires new leadership thinking.
Take digital.
Since COVID-19 hit, organizations have accelerated digital transformation projects. A recent Dell study, for example, found that 80% of organizations fast-tracked them in 2020. Nearly as many (79%) said they are also looking at ways to reinvent their business models, the same study found.
To ensure that fast-tracked transformation programs succeed, leaders must embrace new best practices. Otherwise they will simply automate bad processes, resulting in even worse outcomes. To get the information you need to lead properly, you will need to work closely with fellow leaders, including those whom you do not know or those whom — in certain instances — you unfortunately do. Any differences will have to be put aside. You don’t want to be operating on false assumptions and “alternative facts,” after all.
To make sure this happens, you’re going to have to become a more empathetic leader than before. This includes not only how you treat your team members, but your peers, too. Take your CIO.
If your organization’s CIO has been tasked to fast track digital transformation projects, he or she is going to be up to their eyeballs in organizational, technological and personnel changes. This is especially true if your CIO oversees a large data center today. Chances are digital transformation projects underway at your workplace involve moving significant workloads to the cloud, which threatens data center managers who feel like their worlds are shrinking even though their workloads are increasing.
That’s a potent combination that just begs for some empathy. This is where you can help. For every problem you identify, find a solution. Avoid turf battles. And above all else, make sure your team stops clicking on things embedded in emails that test the vanity, greed and morbid curiosity that dwells in all of us.
Finally, you’re going to need to remain the productive leader that you always have been, if not more so. But how in a world turned upside-down?
The answer is with new data, the kind that your new technologies, processes and people are churning out daily. Rethink your leadership dashboard, in other words. And redefine what it means to be productive. Given that study after study says workers are feeling more stress, more isolation and more burnout than before the pandemic, doesn’t it make sense to dispense with things you know people dread?
If it’s not productive, kill the weekly conference call. Same with collaboration tools that seem to track employee whereabouts better than they foster meaningful cooperation. It isn’t helpful that employees who now work, on average, an extra hour per day are doing so for many employers that are increasingly monitoring their behavior with tracking software.
Chances are you have within your power to help make your organization more agile, human and competitive. Start with that extra hour that your team members are whiling away on email, Zoom calls or HR forms. Why not make better use of it by injecting something educational, entertaining or uplifting into the workday? Better yet, find a deliberate way to just give it back.
The accidental workforce deserves no less.
