A Shift to Hybrid Remote In-Person Work Post-Pandemic Will Increase Managers' Employee Engagement

This is the third in a series of posts on employee engagement defined in the Global Measures of Court Performance as the percent of employees who, as measured by a court-wide survey, are passionate about their job, committed to the mission of the court and, as a result, put discretionary effort into their work. In the first post on March 24th, I reviewed the findings in Gallup’s 2019 pioneering book, It’s the Manager, , by Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, and Jim Harter, Chief Scientist. Based on a decade of study of tens of millions of interviews of employees and managers across 160 countries, their study revealed “the most profound, distinct,  and clarifying finding” in Gallup’s 80-year history of studying the workplace: Managers who develop engaged employees did not merely influence the results of their teams, including higher productivity, lower turnover, greater safety, better profitability, and higher quality – they accounted for an astounding 70% of this  success. No other factor even came close.

Before Covid-19 only one in twenty Americans worked remotely from home; by the spring of 2020 that number jumped to twelve out of twenty. The shift to a “hybrid world of work,” working from home at least part of the time seems here to stay. As reported in a special report on the future of work by The Economist (April 10, 2021), while employees are working longer hours, they report higher levels of productivity and happiness. “Covid-19 may be the best thing that ever happened to employee engagement,” contends Josh Bersin, an analyst cited in the WSJ special report.

An intriguing reason for the increase in employee engagement in the remote workplace is the blurring of home and office. Employees want to know that they are not merely automatons in the corporate machine. They want their supervisors to care about them as persons with stresses and joys outside of the office. As Gallup’s Jim Clifton and Jim Harter have noted, it is hard to manufacture caring about someone in an impersonal office environment. But remote work has forced bosses and supervisors to experience their employees in their homes and in their lives outside of the office. Over the course of the last year, like most of us, I have experienced many instances with sights of children, a family dog, or cat, invading the meeting space, or a noisy leaf blower or a doorbell ringing forcing someone in the meeting to excuse herself or himself to close a window or answer the door. These diversions are usually met with understanding and even humor, reminding even the most demanding managers that employees are people first.

British managers responding to a survey cited in an article by Alexandra Samuel in the Wall Street Journal (“Working From Home Has Changed Employees: Bosses Will Need to Adapt,” June 14, 2021) said that their management style has changed during the Covid-19 pandemic. One said that he is “able to support my] team better now that I have an insight into their personal circumstances. I am probably more accommodating than before but [this] has not negatively impacted the team.”

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