Many remote workers feel overlooked, finds a survey – but some people work better at home, so give them kudos, says David Cheng of ANU
The pandemic is behind us but remote work is entrenched. And while employees who work from home might be doing a great job, many of them may get a sense they are being overlooked for promotion.
According to a study of 1,000 workers in the US and UK, 27% who have flexible arrangements believe they have been overlooked for advancement. The effect is more keenly felt by older employees, with 42% of 35-44-year-olds feeling they have been passed over compared to 37% of workers aged 25 to 34.
Flexible work has become the norm, and 43% cite work-life balance as crucial to their workplace experience, according to the Work Remastered 2024 study by United Culture.
Disaffected staff are expensive to replace, so how should employers make sure hybrid and remote workers are not forgotten, especially if they’re top performers?
“Our promotion systems, our HR systems, are not designed properly,” said David Cheng, an associate professor in leadership and management at the ANU Research School of Management.
It’s all very well to measure performance using KPIs and “how many widgets someone churns out” a day, Cheng said, but it leaves out subjective criteria such as their temperament, collegial tendencies and enthusiasm for teamwork.
“Those things are very hard to actively measure, and so by default we go to things like, ‘Well, I see you a lot and I talk to you, therefore you must be a great team-player.’”
Cheng points the finger at job descriptions, which generally will not list subjective performance measures.
“People are paid to do tasks – that’s how we performance-review people,” he said. “Things like teamwork and creativity are not necessarily in [job descriptions].”
When promotions are considered, HR should list the specifics of the next role up and consider whether it could be done offsite and how performance could be measured.
“The easiest way of doing this is maybe going back to look at how some jobs were carried out during COVID,” he said. “The world didn’t fall apart; most people were generally happy and teamwork did work.”
Look at how KPIs were measured then, he said, and consider whether the same could apply for a promoted and remote role.
Cheng is a strong proponent of in-person work communication, followed by Zoom or Teams calls and then email. However, someone may be better at Zoom or on the phone than they are in-person.
“We shouldn’t be penalising people for being off-site,” he said, if they are good at communicating using remote technology.
Some people are better at working at home. A promotion that is properly crafted will be well-suited to such workers, he said. Passing them over in favour of talent who report to the office may mean potentially excluding a lot of valuable people.
There are people who don’t want to return to the office. When it comes to promotions, they may feel they’ve been overlooked.
“They didn’t sign up for teamwork, even though managers argue that teamwork is important,” Cheng told HRD.
Managing a hybrid workforce is very hard, almost requiring skills in mind-reading and omniscience.
“There is an element of trying to go to easier ways of measuring whether a person is performing, rather than thinking about what performance really is, and what are they actually doing or not doing,” he said.
There are good reasons creativity may not be desirable in bankers or accountants, for example, so HR should take great care when crafting job descriptions.
“It’s worth thinking about: What actually is the job? What does that require? How do you really measure this?” he said.
Corporate and collegial culture can slip away when workers are tapping away alone at home, but there are ways of nurturing a sense of unity.
“It could mean actively getting people to talk to each other, or the manager actively talking to people for 10 minutes a day,” Cheng said. “A manager could have one-on-one conversations with each person.”
