Management Perspectives

COVID-19 impacted all parts of life and has left a lasting impact on organisation and work culture. The traditional working model is losing ground and is struggling to transform and manage their distributed workforce. This changing work terrain calls for a changed transformational leadership model that is servant-based. You are a servant leader when you focus on the needs of others before you consider your own. For a distributed workforce this would be the best way to go about to make sure that its workers are motivated enough to contribute to the best of their ability without direct continuous monitored control.

Servant leadership is one of the core principles in scrum and agile management methodologies in software development. It is also being practised in some of the topranking companies and research confirms that with this model, employees go beyond the call of duty for the organisation. For servant leadership model to work in a distributed workforce, each leader in the leadership ladder has to transform to a servant leader, ready to share power and put the needs of the employees first.

A work culture based on complete trust and transparency has to establish. This will lead to growing employee commitment and engagement which will directly contribute to the productivity and growth of the organisation. In a distributed workforce it is very important to estimate work and delegate responsibility efficiently. This calls for strategic planners and visionaries on top tiers to plan, estimate, and delegate. Effective planning and management of all available resources lead to increased productivity. The planning and estimation work should never trickle down to the actual workforce.

Digital advancement makes it much easier to hold the distributed workforce together in a virtual workspace than ever before. Still when moving to a distributed workforce, the responsibility shifts from employer to employee to set up the physical workspace out of the office. For effectiveness and productivity, the organisation should strive to provide employees the training and monetary support to set up that work infrastructure out of office.

It is also important to have checks and balances in place to help maintain equal workspace quality throughout the distributed workforce. Employees should be provided with adequate guidance and training to deal with the new workspace challenges and update new security practices. A strong ‘digital security fortress’ has to be built for the new age digital workspace. A huge investment has to go into making this digital workspace safe and accountable. The leadership should continuously communicate that it understands all the situations that their team members are dealing with.

Employees should feel that their voices are heard and their beliefs, values, and feelings are respected. They should feel the company trusts them. Employees should have the space to grow, not only in the professional areas but also in personal ones. Organisations should explicitly encourage and organise programs for Employees to maintain a good personal and professional life balance. Employee should feel the organisation is interested in their overall wellbeing.

A distributed workforce model also requires strategic planning to keep workers feeling responsible and bonded to the organisation as they are physically distanced from the traditional organisation infrastructure. Gifts and souvenirs from the company will help employees identify themselves as part of the company. An incentive based reward system has to be in place rather than just using authority to push work. Efforts have to be invested in collecting employee satisfaction data and revamping and fine tuning the system.

Employees have to be engaged in programs to align themselves to the values and vision of the organisation. They require additional training on communication as it is the key that connects the workspace. A digital communications etiquette and rule has to establish for proper effective and fast communication, even when virtually connected employees should be periodically provided the opportunity to socialise and bond.

It is also great if the organisation aligns to global wellbeing goals and programs so that each employee feels they are contributing to a bigger cause and being part of something bigger than just a team. As the current organisations structures are revamping to the new distributed workforce model it is important that the leadership is also retrained to regain better control of the workforce.