The Fear Hierarchy of Remote Work and Why Transparency Matters

When employees went home to work at the start of the pandemic, a new sense of fear and anxiety around work began to emerge at every level of business.

• For owners, the concern is that business growth trajectory and innovation will begin to stagnate. There’s a loss-of-control feeling.
• For managers, it’s a worry that goals and KPIs aren’t being met. They can’t see what their people are working on at any given time and it’s hard to measure and monitor work productivity, output and engagement.
• For employees, it’s a fear their managers think they’re slacking off—even if they're putting in more hours than before.

Ultimately, each one of these anxieties and concerns is rooted in the same core problem: a lack of transparency in the remote work environment.

We just don’t know what everyone’s doing—and naturally, our brains start to fill in the gaps.

Transparency: The office vs the remote work environment

In an office setting, you see people sitting at their desks tapping away at their computers, taking and making calls, and collaborating with colleagues. There’s a clear and compelling sense that work is being accomplished.

But when the work goes remote, that sense gets shaken.

In fact, it’s not just remote work environments where transparency's an issue—it’s digital work environments in general, and this problem actually pre-dates the pandemic.

When people are working away in apps and platforms in the cloud, producing knowledge work through their various processes and workflows, it can feel like everyone’s working in silos.

But when the work environment is remote, the lack of transparency is particularly felt.

Let’s break it down.

Owners and business leaders

There’s a clear divide between business leaders right now.

• Some are leaning into remote work models and thinking about them as a more permanent solution (ex. Twitter, Spotify and Shopify), while
• others are feeling a desperate need to herd employees back into office chairs ASAP.

In the latter of the two groups above, there are concerns about remote employee productivity over the long term and thus business performance over the long term. But according to studies, these concerns may be unfounded.

More than 800,000 employees at Fortune 500 companies found most people reported stable or even increased productivity levels when employees started working from home, according to a two-year study by Great Place to Work®.

And in fact, the ability to sustain long-term employee productivity—regardless of where the employees are working from—largely comes down to strong leadership and culture.

But still, concerns over remote work productivity trickle down to managers.

Managers

Business managers need to be able to prove their teams’ progress and success to their own superiors. Which is why, when they struggle to see what their employees are doing, they understandably begin to feel a little tense.

According to research findings published in a Harvard Business Review article on the trust issues of remote managers:

• 38% of managers felt remote workers usually perform worse, while another 22% said they were unsure of the performance of their remote employees.
• Additionally, 41% felt skeptical about whether remote workers could stay motivated over time, and 17% felt unsure.

There’s also a fear around remote talent retention that’s hitting home for business leaders and managers alike.

"As individuals disassociate themselves with their organizations from a cultural standpoint, it becomes increasingly easy for them to make decisions to leave and go elsewhere,” said Prudential Financial vice chair Rob Falzon in an interview with the Wall Street Journal .

According to consumer financial services company Bankrate’s August 2021 jobseeker survey, 55% of Americans were anticipating looking for a new job within the following year.

This reality becomes even more of a concern for companies when it’s difficult to ascertain just how engaged their employees really are.

Employees

“I’m working too hard/too many hours because I’m worried my employer might think I’m slacking off as a remote worker.”

This was the primary cause of work anxiety reported by respondents in a Breeze study on remote work.

A combined 66% said their productivity or efficiency at work has been impacted by their anxiety. And of those who participated in the survey, 57% have sought professional and/or medical help to deal with the issue.

There’s also a lot of pressure to remain connected and reachable at all times in a remote work environment—whether that pressure is self-imposed or otherwise. So, while remote work has the great potential to exponentially improve work-life balance, an inability to disconnect can result in additional stress and burden on employee mental health.

From the top down, the feelings of fear and anxiety are very real. But what can we do about them?

It’s time to worry less about inputs and more about outputs

To work together effectively—and to lessen those feelings of fear and anxiety—remote employees feel the continual need to track tasks and progress on project management platforms and schedule meeting after meeting to give each other status updates, to bounce ideas and to create that sense of openness and transparency.

But all of this just ends up being a (very distracting) micromanagement of work inputs.

In the previously mentioned Harvard Business Review article, authors Sharon K. Parker, Caroline Knight and Anita Keller stated the following:

So let’s do that.

How true team transparency improves the remote work environment

The first step is to devote less time to all those manual actions and input tasks that give a sense of transparency, and just create and support environments with real transparency.

In the process of developing Produce8, we’ve put a lot of time into figuring out the best way to accomplish this. And we believe the answer lies in opening up our remote work environments to one another more fully.

We’ve created a way to share each team members’ real-time actions and events across all the apps in their team’s tech stack into one central location.

• Essentially, this automates all that manual task-tracking and progress-updating and gives real-time visibility into the work being accomplished across a team at any given time.
• It also dramatically reduces the continual call for meetings because everyone—from the top of a team down—already knows where the team and the work stands.

Team members can go ahead and allocate time more efficiently to their actual work and to creating that end output that matters.

As data accumulates in a transparent work environment, the team’s habits and working patterns quickly become clear, creating opportunities for individual and team adjustments as well as clear guidelines around when people should be left to deep work and when collaboration can be woven in.

Ultimately, seeing the full value of each team members’ contributions creates proof of productivity and work output, reducing individual anxiety. And seeing open environments that clearly show ongoing team outputs and metric achievements gives managers everything they need to feel at ease and report their achievements upward. It also offers better insight into employee engagement so that managers can take action when they notice certain people are struggling.

Finally, owners and business leaders can feel confident in the ongoing productivity and forward momentum of their businesses—because the proof is in the data.