Remote Work: an opportunity for self-management

Some members of the Ateliê de Software team meeting remotely

An opportunity for companies to bet on autonomy and collaboration at work.

The change in the nature of work over the last hundred years has been remarkable. We started from heavy manual labor, which had to be done on a company’s premises, and arrived at the present day, when we live in an era where knowledge work predominates and we can create value for our clients working from anywhere in the world.

Visme — Remote Work Tools, Orana Velarde

Even so, most companies adopt a traditional management model built on the assumption that only a few people are capable of determining what should be done, and that other people, responsible only for executing, won’t be capable of coordinating their own work. As a result, they tend to value their processes and tools far more than people and their relationships in the workplace.

Because of the quarantine imposed by the spread of COVID-19, everyone is now working from home. Until a few days ago, this seemed impossible for many companies. Today it’s reality and a matter of survival. However, the traditional management style still views this practice with a great deal of suspicion, because it believes employees will slack off and won’t dedicate themselves to the work. It starts from the premise that people won’t be able to organize their own work and won’t work properly unless they’re “under the boss’s eye.”

That’s why, in this officeless period, the term self-management is gaining prominence in organizations once again. A utopia for certain managers, but a necessity for companies that want to increase the agility of their business, the ability to organize one’s own work and also to act with maturity, are characteristics that any professional can develop. All it takes is opportunities.

Working from home, far from the command and control of a manager-supervisor, we need to be aware of our own capabilities and limitations, and also to know the capabilities and limitations of our colleagues and the impact of our actions on the work. All of this, combined with information about the context (strategic and financial information, information about production processes and the vision of the business), gives a professional opportunities to develop their autonomy in the way they act.

After all, self-management is the ability to act with autonomy and collaboration within a working relationship. It’s the possibility of deciding on the use of resources (financial and material) and of coordinating human effort (manual skills and intellectual and emotional competencies) to achieve a goal by working as a team.

So remote work can be a great opportunity to stimulate the development of your team’s capacity for self-management. It can also be a watershed moment in your company’s management style: you’ll discover that people are more important than the company’s processes, and that they have the ability not only to overcome them, but also to make decisions and think about what should be done (perhaps even better than the way managers do it).