Home Working to Beat Coronavirus

As Coronavirus stampedes around the planet it can be hard to know how to react. Events are moving fast and it’s hard to keep up. That’s because humans are terrible at comprehending exponential growth. We evolved to manage linear change. When the rate of growth is exponential, we fail to respond fast enough, and very quickly end up behind the curve.

Coronavirus is increasing at over 20% every day. It’s doubling in cases every 4 days. In each month it’s growing by a factor of 100. I live in Queensland where we have 30 confirmed cases. In a month it will be 3,000 and hospitals will be at breaking point. A month later it will be 300,000 – 10% of the population.

Let’s illustrate this. Imagine we had a single case on Day 1, and a growth rate of 20% per day. This is the growth curve:

You probably don’t realise there’s a problem until about day 20. You start monitoring it. You find that you have a 20% growth rate by about day 30. It all looks quite manageable – you only have 200 cases. You decide to take a judicious watching brief. About day 40 you start some conservative containment measures, that take a while to bed in. You already have 1200 cases. By day 50 you have 7,500 cases and it’s starting to feel a bit out of control. By now, you’re so far behind the curve that there’s no hope of catching up. By day 60 you have 45,000 people affected. After that, the game is over.

But it’s not all doom and gloom! What we need to do is bring down that infection rate. Hand hygiene, isolating potential cases, and social distancing are the key. 

The single best thing you can do as a leader is to create physical distance between your people. Send them home now. All your people who can work from home should be doing so. Leaders have a duty to increase social distance between their people.

How are you going to lead them when you’re not seeing them face to face? Will you be able to maintain efficiency and effectiveness? Yes, you will. It turns out to be simple and straightforward if you avoid a few management anti-patterns.

Start from the position that you trust your people. There’s a logical trap which goes something like this: ‘When I can see my people, they are diligent and productive. Therefore, when I can’t see my people they are goofing off and wasting time.” Do you see where that went wrong? Your people will be just as diligent, and probably more productive, working from home. Trust them.

Manage by output, not by time. Your team are adults. They are perfectly capable of structuring their day. It’s tempting to want to manage their time for them, because that’s easy to do in the office. Don’t fall into this trap. Many organisations have rules about checking in in the mornings with their leader and checking out and back for breaks. It’s a terrible error. It demonstrates that you think of them as untrustworthy children. If you treat them like that, they will miserably meet your expectation and start behaving like children.

Instead of managing their time, lead by output. Work with them to ensure they have a well-defined backlog of bite-size things to deliver.  Encourage them to make value-based commitments. “By lunch I will create this document This afternoon I will reconcile the February expenses.” Everyone should have clear, achievable goals at all times. Your role as leader is to coach them to break their work down effectively.

Expect people to be distracted at times. They will probably end up being more focused and productive than in the office, but the sources of distraction are different. They will need to placate the toddler, clean up after the cat, make some coffee, answer a personal phone call, or simply go outside and enjoy the garden for ten minutes. Encourage this – you want productive, happy team members, not mindless automatons.

Invest effort in maintaining social connectivity and culture. You should talk to every team member 1-1 every day. It might only be a 2-minute chat, but you must make sure you’re touching base. Don’t limit those calls to pure business. Let a little humanity in. Find out how they’re coping with the change, get to know who’s had the virus, who’s sick. Many people are scared, and the best antidote to fear is communication.

Have a daily check-in where people share their achievements, offer help to each other, but most importantly they connect on a human level. Encourage people to share cat pictures and toddler videos. Take time to share personal stories. Work is important, but without social cohesion you don’t have a team.

When things go adrift, don’t rush to blame the home working environment. Instead, take a collaborative, exploratory approach to how you can fix problems together.

The key to effective remote working is trust, and that works in all directions. Demonstrate to your people that you trust them, and they will trust you and each other. With a culture of trust your people will amaze you with their creativity and brilliance.

Now go and tell you people to work from home, starting right now. I trust you.