The way Ernie Feirer sees it, today’s workforce requires a complete shift in management style. “When I think about managing people in this new paradigm, I can’t really observe people like I used to,” said Feirer, vice president and head of U.S. business for insurance data platform provider Planck.

“I don’t remember the last time where I had a conversation with somebody in the company cafeteria.”

Feirer, whose company employs people in all parts of the U.S. and Israel, said that remote work has changed the conversation, both in what’s being talked about and how employees and managers are communicating. It has also changed how his own company manages employee engagement.

“Our manager of employee engagement keeps all the remote people happy. A company has to support and invest in that.”

“It’s really important to be more intentional, to still have those personal interactions.”

Ernie Feirer, Planck

For much of the corporate world, remote work is a reality that could well have a long-term impact. According to a 2021 Global Workplace Analytics report, 70 percent of the workforce will work remotely at least five days a month by 2025. It’s a move that’s already underway: Gallup data shows that 45 percent of full-time employees were working partially or fully remote in September 2021. And more than 74 percent of CFOs and finance leaders in an early 2020 Gartner survey said that at least 5 percent of their on-site workforce would be moved to permanent remote positions post-pandemic, illustrating a seismic shift in how organizations are viewing and responding to remote work models.

What also needs to shift is how to manage employees in both remote and in-office settings. For Feirer, that means a more concentrated focus on reaching out to employees individually. He said what one can learn about an employee and about what is going on in the company could be missing if managers don’t make the effort to engage remote workers. “It’s really important to be more intentional, to still have those personal interactions.”

What Employees Need

According to Peter Grant, co-founder of InsurTech Foresight Commercial Insurance, these personal interactions are necessary for managers—and also for employees who may be feeling disconnected. Having so many remote workers brings “huge personal, psychological and interpersonal challenges for both managers and employees.”

“If management isn’t seriously thinking about the repercussions of this massive upheaval, they’re going to be on the wrong end of the negative impacts of it,” said Grant, who is also chief executive officer of Safesite, a risk management platform aimed at reducing middle-market workplace accidents.

“If management isn’t seriously thinking about the repercussions of this massive upheaval, they’re going to be on the wrong end of the negative impacts of it.”

Peter Grant, Foresight Commercial

Those negative impacts include isolation. There are plenty of positives—for example, more than half of employees (57 percent) feel they are more productive when they work from home, a point employers have witnessed (72 percent of companies with remote work policies, according to an Indeed survey). But not feeling like part of the team can stymie even the most talented workers.

So, too, can lack of career progression. When employees go home to work, there is a real danger in losing ground when it comes to promotion. To alleviate that fear, organizations are already starting to shift the conversation.

Tracey Malcolm, global future of work and risk leader for WTW (formerly named Willis Towers Watson) said her clients are trying to help talent see the benefits of their organization. “You’re seeing this shift in thinking, for example, from career management to career experience, from performance management to performance achievement.”

There is another shift occurring, as well. Laura Rock, chief human resources officer for Zurich North America, said that everything about employee engagement changed as the pandemic bore down. “What we found out quickly was the toll that the pandemic was having on our employees, with kids at home and trying to balance everything. As with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we like to think we’re at the high end, but the pandemic took us down to the very bottom level, and really needing to be concerned about people’s fears, physical safety and mental well-being.”

Remote Management Needs

That’s when the focus shifted, Rock said, to supporting employees’ mental health in a remote environment. Her company implemented a director of well-being position to support the needs of the new hybrid workforce. “We’ve introduced the phrase ‘Work is something that you do; it’s not somewhere you go.’ We’re trying to stay away from the word ‘remote.'”

“As with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we like to think we’re at the high end, but the pandemic took us down to the very bottom level, and really needing to be concerned about people’s fears, physical safety and mental well-being.”

Laura Rock, Zurich North America

The reason: Rock said work has always had an element of travel to customers, in offices or from home. “Physicality of it should no longer matter.”

What should matter is how to include employees and, as Rock puts it, equalize the experience so that each employee feels included. That’s where her company has adopted the five C’s: “Coaching, community, celebration, camaraderie and collaboration.”

Grant, who leads a completely remote workforce, says that setting up a culture that feels interactive and egalitarian requires rethinking management as we know it. His company has not established a remote work leader position as of this writing. However, it is something on their radar.

“We are consistently reviewing the need for a dedicated remote employee experience role,” said Grant. “We are unique in that in our eight-year history, we have been remote-first businesses from Day 1. Both Safesite and Foresight, he said, were fully remote from their inception. “We are conditioned to hiring, coaching and developing leaders and managers who embrace and thrive in this workplace dynamic. We are constantly reviewing this evolving dynamic—and as we continue to scale, a dedicated role is likely to be recruited.”

Regarding the responsibilities of someone in a head of remote work position, he said the person in this role should strive to understand the deeper impact of remote work on the employees and organization: “Everything from salaries to taxation, to business economics through to management processes, whether it’s productivity monitoring, whether it’s personal, individual health monitoring, mental health monitoring, down to things as practical as daily workflow and management or setting up systems and processes that allow employees to function as efficiently as they possibly can within a remote workforce.”

Malcolm said that requires understanding where organizations are having difficulty around remote work. The WTW Employee Experience Survey of 1,650 organizations revealed five areas of concern for employers trying to adapt to the new work model. “They’re struggling with the integration and adaption around new technology and data strategy,” she said. “They’re struggling around diversity, equity and inclusion, and also organizational agility and leader and manager competencies.”

Is Head of Remote Work Essential?

What Should a Head of Remote Work Do?

Peter Grant, Co-Founder of Foresight Commercial and CEO of Safesite, believes there’s a long list of items for a head of Remote Work to cover:

• Salaries
• Taxation
• Business economics
• Management processes
• Productivity monitoring
• Individual health monitoring
• Daily workflow and management
• Setting up systems and processes that allow remote employees to function

Wrapping the resources and effort around solving these dilemmas is where the case for the head of remote work is best made. A relatively new position (the first known head of remote work was appointed in 2019), the remote leader establishes how the cultural and behavioral shifts of the organization will be managed and devises solutions to blend together both in-office and remote teams.

“If it’s one person,” said Grant, “they should have a broad skillset.” He said that the head of remote work would need to understand how remote work has an “impact on people’s visibility within an organization, their learning and development.”

“But also, it’s a morale issue,” he added.

The most challenging aspect, he said, is the mental health and well-being of the employee. A remote work manager “needs to have at least some awareness and keep an eye out for any issues that arise or have channels set up where individuals can reach out if they think that they need support,” he said, offering a “a direct line to a mental health expert that can sort of help them with those challenges” as an example.

Those mental and emotional challenges boiled over in the latter months of 2020, all of 2021 and into 2022, when millions of employees voluntarily resigned from work. In the U.S. alone in just October, November and December of 2021, nearly 13.0 million workers quit their jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The pandemic had workers re-evaluating their careers, working conditions and goals. The trend is probably not over: A PwC survey from August 2021 found that 65 percent of employees were looking for new jobs, and 88 percent of employers reported higher turnover than usual in their companies.

With or without a head of remote work, companies need to do more than take notice of the trend. They should be addressing it, said Malcolm, whose job it is to advise clients on remote work and related issues. WTW itself does not have a lead of remote work currently, but the company has formed a “New Ways of Working” Committee comprised of business leaders helping to shape its own hybrid work approach across regions and business segments.

“The risk organizations have is not taking a more strategic and thoughtful approach around determining what are the opportunities and challenges around the more flexible work stance and giving managers some support.”

Tracey Malcolm, WTW

“The risk organizations have is not taking a more strategic and thoughtful approach around determining what are the opportunities and challenges around the more flexible work stance and giving managers some support,” she said. A head of remote work, she said, can lead management in understanding what work and job design can look like in a hybrid work environment.

While Rock said her organization’s director of well-being does set the tone and direction, “with 8,500 employees and 1,300 managers, we still have to rely heavily on this work getting delivered by our managers.”

Doing so, said Feirer, can deliver an unexpected ROI. “In a world where people are moving between jobs very rapidly…you’re going to lose talented people.” Having someone directing the remote work teams and their integration into the culture can stanch the bleed of talent. “It’s the maintenance in the establishment of the culture of the company. It’s creating cohesion when there aren’t as many opportunities to create cohesive teams.”

That cohesion, Rock said, has some very basic foundations. For companies that do not have a dedicated head of remote work in place, “it all comes down to having a robust listening strategy. As long as you are having the conversations” and having managers share their best practices, those companies will be the ones to win at talent acquisition and create better cultures that keep employees productive and engaged, she said.