Expert Advice on Managing Your Remote Workers

The movement toward remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic may not have had as big an effect on the controlled-environment industry as others, since your production can hardly do their job from home. However, for many greenhouse businesses, your office staff, from accounting to human resources to even the executive management team, has likely gone through the process of working either full time or part time from home.

As the coronavirus pandemic wears on into its seventh month, a dichotomy has emerged among these employees: those that enjoy the flexibility remote work affords — think laundry in between meetings — and those feeling stifled by constantly juggling home and family responsibilities with professional ones.

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“One interesting thing we were looking at is the concept of people who are integrators, and people who are separators,” Ali Rayl, Vice President of Customer Experience at Slack, said at a recent Fortune virtual event on the topic of business resiliency. “For integrators, it’s fine having this fluid life situation where they blend together. For separators, this is an extraordinary difficult environment to live in.”

Companies are searching for ways to support the latter group — short of welcoming them back to the office, which for many companies remain closed.

“So much of this is realizing where we are, accepting where we are, and not anchoring our judgments of ourselves to what we were able to accomplish a year ago, but what does it look like today,” Rayl said.

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That’s especially important as the pandemic wears on into the school year, and the reality sets in that employees will be dealing with these issues for a while yet — and that some of the changes may be permanent.

Leaders and managers need to set the tone, executives advise, by both giving employees the room and flexibility they need, as well as making employees feel seen, even when physically they’re not.

“One thing we’re seeing is that people are working longer and harder because they feel less visible,” Rayl said.

Continue reading here (https://fortune.com/2020/09/16/wfh-remote-work-from-home-manaers-integrators-separators/)

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