Author: Carol Farrish

For remote work to be successful for employers and employees, there must be excellent communication, clear policies, and effective tools to measure productivity. Lower productivity could be the result of remote work abuse or a misunderstanding of employer expectations. Articles about remote work often cast employers or employees as angels or demons. Bosses are characterized as evil micromanagers forcing workers to return to work to keep their eye on them while super-productive employees are ripped from their home offices. Or, enlightened bosses willing to meet employee requests for flexibility are rewarded with lazy workers who abuse the system. Maybe it’s…

Managers often underestimate the effectiveness of remote work as they can’t see them to eyeball their effectiveness. The only way to develop genuine productivity numbers is by implementing a plan for productivity management, communicating it to employees, and accurately measuring the results. How productive are employees who work outside the office? Study after study shows that many workers are more productive when they work offsite, yet managers doubt the statistics. They judge remote and hybrid workers as less productive than onsite staff and hold back on promoting them. The only way to develop genuine productivity numbers is by implementing a plan for productivity…

Remote workers and other Internet users face a barrage of posts and stories that raise their consciousness or pull on their heartstrings. Many are moved to post a reaction even when their commitment to the cause is superficial. This digital support for causes or slacktivism can be detrimental to individuals while being helpful to the cause. Wildfires in California. War in Ukraine. Bombing in Gaza. School shootings in Louisiana, Tennessee, and many states throughout the country. Headlines about tragic events, significant environmental, political, and social concerns, and stories of animal abuse and difficult personal circumstances flood email and social media…

As companies incorporate hybrid work into their workflow, the question for many companies is what days to choose and how to choose them. The best hybrid work days selected depend on company and team needs, but employee input is needed to make the hybrid approach work. Once COVID shutdowns ended, many employees were loath to go back to the old days of 5 or more weekly commutes with proscribed 9-5 hour schedules. As some companies issue more rigid return to office (RTO) mandates, others are agreeing to hybrid work that allows employees to work out of the office some days while…

Leaders who trust their team to deliver on a project instill a sense of confidence in workers that empowers them as they do the best job possible. This type of trust-based leadership is important in remote workers, but sadly, many bosses resort to micromanagement rather than trust. Bosses delegate work to employees hired for their skills and experience, yet often do not trust that they will do the task right. In a traditional work setup, where bosses work in close proximity to their employees, they can monitor overall progress and individual performance. Even in a highly micromanaged office, some employees…

Since COVID, perceptions of what work is, should be, and could be, have changed drastically. Many trendy terms like “quiet quitting” have become part of the vocabulary of work, at least temporarily, to describe the range of employee and employer feelings about work has changed. Quiet quitting! Bare minimum Monday! Resentism! The debate over continuing remote work once it was safe to return to work after the pandemic has been rich with phrases to describe trends of worker reaction. Raconteur, the insightful UK business website, usefully categorizes the latest jargon comprising the vocabulary of work. Some, like “quiet quitting,” may remain…

Will the office survive? Cisco, which produces many high-tech products to facilitate remote work, determined ways to adapt the office to meet current and future needs so that it does. At Cisco, transforming the office into experience centers has made people want to come to work. Tech giant Cisco, a multinational with over 266 corporate offices in 87 countries, has innovated its way to dominance in networking hardware, software, telecommunications equipment, and other high-technology services and products in its 40-year history. Fortune, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor rank at the top of the best companies to work for lists. Since 2021, Cisco has allowed most employees…

As companies try to find the right incentives to bring workers back to the office, they may try pizza parties and other one-time events. The most successful efforts are on-target, tangible, and ongoing. Compensation for travel, child care stipends, and flexible hybrid work are among the most successful incentives. If pizza parties are an adequate reward for hard work or extraordinary accomplishment, why aren’t they a bigger part of CEO compensation? You may have seen the above statement as a funny meme on social media, but it raises some important questions about workplace compensation. Companies try to encourage people to…

RTO mandates may get people back to work, but not always happily. Some employers have relied on the stick approach to encourage compliance, while others offered carrots or incentives to bring remote workers back to the office. What’s needed is a new style of leadership that shows trust and confidence in the staff. Work is work, and before the pandemic, most people expected that they would need to commute to the office to do their jobs. When a public health crisis caused many people with white-collar jobs to work at home, workers and management alike reassessed whether work had to…

Zoom, the company that kept companies working remotely during COVID, had instituted a return-to-office policy that ends complete remote work for many employees while requiring that employees who can must come to the at least two days a week. Policies for hybrid work at Zoom may be an excellent example of how to do it. The return to office movement is filled with ironies. One of the biggest is that Zoom, the platform that grew exponentially during the pandemic, is now calling employees back to the office. As it turns out, the Zoom approach to calling employees back could serve as…