Introduction
Remote work became widespread in the time of the COVID-19 outbreak and presented many prospects and challenges. Fortunately, the Internet and technologies allow working remotely almost in all job sectors. On the one hand, remote work provides more autonomy for workers and saves money without paying for the office’s maintenance. On the other hand, it is difficult and unfamiliar to maintain all work processes, communications, and employees’ monitoring while working remotely. The Ozfone company adopted the hybrid work approach: the core of this approach is allowing employees to work both from home or in the office. In my opinion, despite all challenges, remote work opens new possibilities and, if adjusted well, can actually be beneficial for the company: to adjust the remote work process is the task of a manager.
Implementations and Sustainability Issues and Their Overcoming
The hybrid work approach is dedicated to increasing productivity while maintaining high job satisfaction among workers. Ozfone adopted it after the COVID-19 outbreak to ensure the fulfillment of quarantine norms. As most of the work is done on computers, it is easy to transfer them to homes: employees can perform their work even on their own computers because almost all of them have PCs or laptops. In addition, it has benefits in general: for example, it allows cost saving, as there are fewer expenses on office maintenance. According to the research of Monteiro, Straume & Valente, the productivity from allowing remote work is increasing in a case when the company’s workforce is well-educated and well-motivated (2021). As I can conclude from all that information, Ozfone and other companies must contribute to the development of their employees.
Sustainable management should be used for the hybrid work approach. It means that management should be flexible and ready to react to any challenges from the environment. The concept of sustainable management is in this flexibility, social responsibility, and well-established communications between the company’s management and stakeholders: employees, investors, and other parties who directly influence the company and are influenced by it (Silva, Magano, Moskalenko, Nogueira, Dinis & Sousa, 2020). One can distinguish three dimensions of work in the scope of sustainable management: social, environmental, and economic. The social dimension is about people: it considers the communications and psychological states of all people connected with the company. The environmental dimension is about maintaining waste recycling and preventing pollution. The economic dimension is about benefits: both the company and each its stakeholder should benefit from its activity. In my opinion, those dimensions should be understood by each good manager and used in work.
To implement and maintain the hybrid work approach, managers should consider the stakeholders’ interests. For the Ozfone it is, primarily, its employees, investors, and the Australian government. Employees should be happy while working from home, and, at the same time, they should be unobtrusively monitored to ensure that they do their work well and comply with rules (Errichiello & Pianese, 2016). Investors should understand that their money will be working for them, and they will not suffer any losses if the company wants them to invest. To ensure them, the company can present its new work processes with remote employees, who still do their work efficiently and, thus, the company continues to have profits. The company’s activity should be legal and transparent, without any issues with the government: then, it will support the company during the hardships and not be against it. Thus, maintaining good relations with stakeholders is vital for the company’s life.
To support employees working from home, managers should ensure two points: first, that workers are happy and satisfied, and second, that workers do their work well and on time. To ensure their work efficiency, they should use control systems: for example, encouraging employees to evaluate the performance of their peers based on the amount of work they do (Errichiello & Pianese, 2016). Another example is specific artificial intelligence-driven software designed to analyze the employee’s performance (Leonardi, 2020). According to researches, employees’ work productivity rises when they know that they are unobtrusively monitored (Jensen, Lyons, Chebelyon, Bras & Gomes, 2020). However, obtrusive monitoring, such as forcing to use of wearable devices for those purposes, drops productivity and initiates mistrust (Miele & Tirabeni, 2020). Those researches helped me consider that a good manager should use mild but clear and transparent monitoring and notify employees about it.
Employees’ happiness and satisfaction are crucial for their work productivity and are essential elements of sustainable management. According to the study of Sull, Sull & Bersin, to provide them, several methods may be efficiently used (2020). First is the clear, consistent, and easy-to-understand communication between employees and managers; communication between employees should be easy to navigate, too. The second is emotional support: one of remote work’s main challenges is social isolation, which causes suffering and reduces work productivity (Larson, Vroman, & Makarius, 2020). Third, it is crucial to maintain the employees’ productivity: it may be helpful to organize calls and meetings regularly. According to the research of Parker, Knight, & Keller, there are issues with mistrust between managers and employees: the research was conducted in the United States, but the problem is actual worldwide (2020). Establishing trustful relationships via clear and sincere communication is crucial for effective remote work. As I have learned from those studies, good communication is a key for ensuring employees’ trust and efficiency.
My Personal Change Philosophy
Organizational change is an important part of the work of any manager. Management should be flexible and ready to change at any moment: the environment is unstable, and the organization should adapt quickly (Palmer, I. Dunford, R. & Buchanan, 2017). It is especially actual in remote work: workers have many distractions and a lack of usual supervision (Larson et al., 2020). I think it is essential for a manager to ensure that no such problems will drop the work productivity. I learned that a good manager should be both a good friend and an authority for employees.
My change philosophy is now based on the idea that the communications between different parts of the company are the most important part of the working process. My primary responsibility as a manager is maintaining all work processes stable and developing. The Ozfone case study and studies I have found helped me understand that communications are the primary key to maintaining this, as people are the most important part of those work processes. Thus, I would ensure that all communications channels are set up properly: for example, all workers can access their workspace from their home computers and contact support if necessary. I think that support is crucial for remote work, as it allows employees to be sure that all their confusions can be easily solved. To monitor the employees’ productivity, I would like to learn more about special tools for monitoring.
One of the learning insights that I have found especially valuable is understanding two consequences of the hybrid work approach and how they can be integrated together. First is the money saving, reached by the remote work implementation. As there is much less need in offices, which maintenance costs at least $1200 per square meter, that money can be relocated elsewhere. Second, the workers are working from home, and that saved money could be used to promote the initiatives among them to improve the company. Those initiatives are, for example, IT projects created and developed by workers. Projects which are helpful for the company can be selected, and the workers who developed them can be rewarded. Such an establishment will promote the employee’s creativity, let them develop the important project by themselves, rather than doing routine work, and give them more freedom in their work process. In addition, the extra money that they can earn will stimulate them to work better. Thus, it will be helpful both for the company and its employees, and I would propose to use this scheme in my work.
Another essential insight for me is the Team 25 approach of the company Coates, presented in the guest lecture in Week 12. Its importance for me is that it presents a clear framework for creating, managing, and implementing the change in the business. The four principles at the core of this framework are listening, energizing, simplifying, and personalizing: they all aim to initiate communications and develop changes that will be useful for everyone connected with the company. Its first stages are creating a sense of urgency and, using it, initiating the communication to develop a vision and strategies for implementing necessary changes. After that, barriers that can prevent changes are identified and removed; then, changes are implemented step-by-step. I think that this framework is a helpful instrument for implementing efficient changes in practice.
Still, I think that it is enough left to learn about management. I should learn better how to communicate with stakeholders; for that, I should understand their needs and ways of thinking. I believe that learning human psychology will be necessary for my further work: I can see how I can organize my work, but I will not be able to implement my plans and ideas without knowledge of psychology. The problem with trust is widespread in companies, and I should be able to solve them (Parker et al., 2020). As a manager, I should ensure that other stakeholders, such as investors, are interested in participating in the company; it can lose money in other cases.
In addition, as I learned from the researches, there are tools designed to analyze and measure employees’ productivity based on their outputs (Leonardi, 2020). As a manager, I would like to study those tools and become familiar with them. They will be essential to monitor productivity and to see the ways for increasing it. Thus, I think I should use them whenever possible and negotiate with my company’s authorities about implementing those tools.
Conclusion
My fundamental principles and value for management change are based on sustainable management: I plan to build my management practice based on it. Sustainable management provides necessary tools for organizing work processes with the necessary flexibility in a constantly changing environment. The COVID-19 outbreak has stimulated the increased usage of technologies for remote work and the progress in it. A good organization of the remote work, such as ensuring effective communications with employees and using advantages of their location in their homes, will lead to increased work efficiency.
References
Errichiello, L., & Pianese, T. (2016). Organizational control in the context of remote work arrangements: A conceptual framework. Performance Measurement and Management Control: Contemporary Issues, 273–305.
Jensen, N., Lyons, E., Chebelyon, E., Bras, R. L., & Gomes, C. (2020). Conspicuous monitoring and remote work. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 176, 489–511.
Larson, B. Z., Vroman, S. R., & Makarius, E. E. (2020). A guide to managing your (newly) remote workers. Harvard Business Review.
Leonardi, P. M. (2020). COVID‐19 and the New Technologies of Organizing: Digital Exhaust, Digital Footprints, and Artificial Intelligence in the Wake of Remote Work. Journal of Management Studies, 58(1), 249–253.
Miele, F., & Tirabeni, L. (2020). Digital technologies and power dynamics in the organization: A conceptual review of remote working and wearable technologies at work. Sociology Compass, 14(6).
Monteiro, N. P., Straume, O. R., & Valente, M. (2021). When does remote electronic access (not) boost productivity? Longitudinal evidence from Portugal. Information Economics and Policy, 56, 100923.
Parker, S. K., Knight, C., & Keller, A. (2020). Remote managers are having trust issues. Harvard Business Review. Silva, C., Magano, J., Moskalenko, A., Nogueira, T., Dinis, M. A. P., & Pedrosa E Sousa, H. F. (2020). Sustainable management systems standards (SMSS): Structures, roles, and practices in corporate sustainability. Sustainability, 12(15), 5892.
Palmer, I. Dunford, R. & Buchanan, D. (2017). Managing Organizational Change: A Multiple Perspectives Approach, McGraw Hill: New York (3rd ed)
Sull, D., Sull, C., & Bersin, J. (2020). Five ways leaders can support remote work. MIT Sloan Management Review.