How Do You Keep Your Team Members Motivated and Performing at Their Best While Working from Home?

Many leaders seem to have cleared the first hurdles of moving their teams to remote work: setting up technology tools, defining processes and staying permanently logged in to video conferencing accounts. But this is only the first step in creating an effective working environment for remote employees.

The next critical question we need to ask is "How do you motivate people who work from home?"

This question matters even more now, because during crises such as Covid-19, people are focused on tactical work, such as answering the right number of calls or following the approved project plan, instead of solving the bigger and newer problems the business may face.

Yet some manage to stand out more than others in times of crisis, whatever the challenges. They win market share and lifelong customer loyalty. They boost their productivity far more effectively. In other words, they adapt. Although academic research on remote productivity is mixed (some studies say it falls while others predict it will rise), in the end it is how you do it that determines your success.

First, it is important to note that working from home is currently very likely to reduce motivation.

Between 2010 and 2015, more than 20,000 workers around the world, including people working from home, were surveyed. More than 50 large companies were analyzed and numerous experiments were carried out to find out what motivates people.
When the total motivation of people working from home was measured against those working in the office, working from home turned out to be less motivating. Worse still, when people had no choice about where to work, the gaps were much larger. Total motivation was observed to drop by 17 points.

In general, there are 3 factors that lower job performance, and they have probably grown with the impact of Covid-19. As people worry about losing their jobs, not being able to pay their rent and protecting their health, emotional and economic pressure increases. Every day, news bulletins raise questions about how to shop for groceries safely and similar topics. Inertia in the workplace generally depends on whether trying something still seems to make sense.

There are also 3 positive motivators that improve job performance. Unfortunately, the current environment can easily weaken their effect. Play is one of the most important drivers of motivation: although enjoying our work keeps our motivation high, the added difficulty of working remotely can weaken this motivator. For example, people may miss the joy of solving a problem with a colleague or the ease of making decisions when everyone is in the same room. Purpose can also fade when there is no one around to remind the team of its impact on customers and colleagues. Finally, if people cannot reach the colleagues who teach and develop them, potential also declines.
If managers do not act to change this, the shift in people's motivation will unfortunately lead to a drop in adaptability, quality and creativity at precisely the moment when the hoped-for post-Covid-19 recovery will require higher productivity.

What Can Leaders Do?

When one of your employees is diagnosed with cancer, your natural first reaction is to reduce their workload so they can focus on their illness. Of course, there are times when they need to rest 100%. But we also take away the strongest motivators: play and purpose. In fact, work can be a kind of break that takes them away from the worrying news they receive every day. For the same reasons, we often see people around us starting bicycle courier clubs instead of sitting at home, fitness trainers streaming free online classes from rooftops, and academics organizing virtual classes and workshops with their students.
Even when there are very few options in a work-from-home situation, managers should always remember that work can give their teams the support they need. The key to achieving this lies in resisting the tendency to make work tactical through rigid processes, guidelines and procedures. Up to a point, boundaries and guidelines help people move quickly, but too many of them cause a vicious loss of motivation in many people. People then stop solving problems and thinking creatively and tend to do the bare minimum.

If you want your teams to be engaged in their work, you need to make their work engaging.

The most powerful way to do this is to give people the opportunity to experiment with and solve problems that truly matter. These problems will not be the same for every team and organization. Even identifying them at first will not be easy. To help your employees do this, ask them: Where can we deliver great service to our customers? What problems can our team fix? How can we drive growth even in a moment of fear? Why are these questions critical, valuable and interesting?
Many companies around the world have adopted this way of working. A pharmaceutical company's clinical trials team is looking for ways to help hospitals prioritize trials and maintain safety during this crisis. Teams at Flexport are generating ideas on how to ship critical goods around the world, how their customers can keep their supply chains running, and sharing tips to keep their suppliers in business. Productivity at these companies has been observed to rise and improve.
What makes them so successful is that they do not rely only on huge new programs or approaches that need CEO approval. They find ways to make every individual on the team feel that they can contribute to solving any problem the team faces. In your case, this challenge can range from something as small as serving your customers better or adapting to new programs to something as big as moving work you used to do face to face online.
Given today's challenges with Covid-19, we can offer a set of recommendations for remote teams.

-First, what you measure sends the strongest signal about what your employees care about. If you want to show that you care about their motivation, you can use a survey tool of your choice. You can then talk with them about what lowers their motivation and what could be done to raise it on other days.
-For example, you can ask questions such as: How is the current situation affecting you right now? What tips can people share for making their work environment more enjoyable and finding purpose? This lets you listen to your employees and create a safe environment where everyone can speak up.
-Second, make sure your weekly routines are not focused only on tactical work, such as the calls you need to answer or the concrete plans you need to check and carry out. Half of your week should focus on adaptive performance based on experimentation and problem solving, where there is no plan to follow.

To do this, you can follow a rhythm like this:

Monday: Hold a performance review meeting for your team.

• What impact did we have last week, and what did we learn?
• What commitments do we have this week, and who is responsible for each?
• How can we help each other with what we need to do this week?
• Is there an area where we need to experiment to improve our performance this week?
• What kind of experiment are we working on, and who is putting in the effort?

Tuesday – Thursday: Hold at least one one-on-one meeting with each team member. To help motivate your employees, focus on helping them tackle slightly harder problems. You can also organize weekly meetings where your team can share what they learned that week and solve the problems they encountered together.
Friday: Focus on ideas. Gather and present insights from the week's experiments. These can be presentations by project groups in which team members share their metrics and intuitions. It is important to check in on each other's motivation and progress. You can set an example by asking your employees how they feel. You can ask where they are struggling with motivation and where they have been able to grow.
This kind of approach has also succeeded in times of financial crisis. While most financial services teams doubled down on rules and processes, the motivation of thousands of people working in mortgages and home equity rose quickly when they were helped to identify problems they could solve, innovate on and adapt to. They outperformed the status quo by 200% and found creative, win-win solutions for customers at risk of losing their homes.
As we saw in 2008, teams can either experiment and adapt or retreat under pressure. With a remotely managed team instead of a face-to-face one, make it your goal to take actions that raise your productivity and growth to new levels. This will be a challenge that can keep you and your team energized even after the pandemic.

Yasin Kürşad Bahadır

Reference: https://hbr.org/2020/04/how-to-keep-your-team-motivated-remotely

Sources

https://hbr.org/2020/04/how-to-keep-your-team-motivated-remotely
https://hbr.org/2020/03/a-guide-to-managing-your-newly-remote-workers
https://hbr.org/2014/12/getting-virtual-teams-right