Welcome to video number four in our eight
video sequence about remote work, an exploration of the psychology of remote
work and how to do remote work really well.
These are the topics that we've covered so
far, and this one in particular is about what makes someone suited to remote work.
Classic psychology question
this, it's the individual difference question.
Why is a certain person likely to succeed
in remote work whereas somebody else doesn't?
The first question we've got to ask is,
is this person ready to work remotely? Now, what we mean by that is that if somebody
starts in an organisation and they are brand new, this model, by the way,
is called Situational Leadership, the old Hersey and Blanchard model,
which says that as people join an organisation,
they need much more intensive supervision early on in the period of their tenure
than they do later on, when it's more a matter of delegating
to them rather than directing and guiding them. One of the questions that I'm asked
all the time by clients is, is there a good time to send somebody remote?
Well, clearly, if somebody knows the job, if they're skilled up,
if they're experienced, they're far more likely to be able to take
that job and do it well remotely than, let's say, if they're on their first day.
So it's easier if somebody's already
been inducted to be able to cause them to be able to do the job well remotely.
Now, I'm going to talk a little bit later in this sequence of videos about inducting
people to work remotely, something that almost no organisation is
doing right now, but I'll bet a few years down the track people will do this.
You get inducted into the organisation,
but then you need to be inducted into methods of working remotely.
So I think that's going to become a very
important aspect of leadership of remote employees in the future.
Let's look at some characteristics
that have been shown to be important in working remotely.
Cognitive ability, intelligence.
So we know that people who are smarter
tend to be able to adapt and learn more quickly.
Cognitive ability is a good predictor of the speed of learning.
So in general, if you've got challenges
of new technology, challenges of new ways of working, people who have higher
cognitive ability are more likely to be able to adjust more quickly to that than
people with lower levels of cognitive ability.
Then there are some personality characteristics which have a big impact
on people's likelihood of working successfully remotely.
This is the SACS 6.
This is a HEXACO model of personality, a six-factor model of personality.
This instrument is all work-worded.
All the questions are to do with work,
and this has been normed against the HEXACO-PI-R, which is the instrument
that was created by Kibeom Lee and Mike Ashton out of Canada.
A number of these things reflect on whether a person is likely to be suited
for remote work, but I'll pick out a couple of ones that are really important.
One is the degree to which this person is
emotionally stable or emotionally unstable.
Now, you've all known people who are
emotionally stable and emotionally unstable.
A person who's emotionally stable tends to be resilient and able to cope.
A person who is emotionally unstable is somebody who will tend to become stressed
and upset when they experience things that they consider to be difficult.
And so this is a predictor of a person's likelihood of successful remote work,
particularly in combination with their score on extroversion.
This is extroversion here.
So if you have a person who is highly
extroverted and emotionally unstable, in many ways
I think that's about the worst combination you can possibly have for remote work.
Emotionally unstable means that this person needs a lot of care and attention
and recognition and support from leadership and from colleagues.
The extroversion component means that they like to get that in a social setting.
Now the opposite is, let's say, somebody who is an extremely emotionally
stable introvert, and the introversion bit means I don't care about being by my own.
I'm quite comfortable to be on my own.
The emotionally stable bit means that the person doesn't need much support or help.
And of course, the additional benefit
for the stable introvert is that they don't have to expose themselves to all
the stress of things like travelling to and from work,
commuting, jammed into trains with lots of people, those sorts of things.
So the unstable extrovert is the big risk.
The stable introvert is the person who will love working from home.
When we talk about emotionality, we're touching on a thing called
resilience, and a resilient person tends to be emotionally stable.
But another component of resilience is this here conscientiousness.
So a person who is naturally conscientious tends to be more successful in working
remotely, largely because a person who is emotionally stable and conscientious well,
that's two of the key components of resilience.
So if the person hasn't done it before, they're much more likely to be able
to cope well if they are resilient in this way.
Another thing about it is that we spoke in a previous video in this sequence about
what makes a person productive when they're working from home.
A person who's highly conscientious, their performance is likely not to vary
much between working from home or working in the office.
In other words, they don't tend to need scrutiny to motivate them to work hard
and to focus on the job at hand, and also they tend to be organised.
So conscientiousness can be a good predictor of whether a person's likely
to succeed and be productive working remotely.
Then we have openness to experience
and openness to experience is the personality characteristic of tending
to be welcoming of new ideas and new ways of doing things.
If a person is working remotely
for the first time, the speed at which they will become
comfortable with it is affected by their score on a measure of openness
to experience. And the reason for that is that people who are high in openness
to experience, they tend to welcome new things, whereas a person who is low,
they may well be stressed or may be uncomfortable with new things
and in particular, if they're emotionally unstable.
So you can imagine a person who is emotionally unstable,
who is a strong extrovert and who is low on openness to experience.
If they haven't worked remotely in the past, then being sent to work
remotely may well be a very stressful experience for them.
They're losing their social contact,
and also they're naturally kind of stressable
if you want to put it that way. Let's turn our attention to values,
and remote working. Values tend to be largely learned in the course of life
and can change quite markedly in the course of life.
This is a measure of the SACS Work Value scale.
Now, the difference between cognitive
ability and personality in comparison with values,
cognitive ability and personality tend to be very stable over the course of life,
and they have a strong genetic streak to them.
Values, on the other hand,
tend to be acquired in the course of life, and they are, in effect, goals.
These are the things that I believe are important, and in fact,
a researcher by the name of Sagiv from Israel defined values as trans-situational goals.
They're goals that are pervasive and apply in a range of different settings.
If you look at the diagram about goals, you'll see that a number of these things
tend not to have that much impact on the concept of remote work.
So you see that this candidate is very strong in a commitment to social justice
and very strong in a commitment to environmental sustainability.
So that's not much of a clue as to whether
they would be suited to remote work or not.
But if we look at the top here, you have this value of autonomy.
And if a person believes that it's
important to be autonomous, that may well suggest that they're a
better values match for working remotely than, let's say, if they were really low
in autonomy. The value of autonomy says, I believe that it's important for me
to make my own decisions and to be independent in the way that I do that.
So at SACS we tied a bunch of this research together to create an instrument
which would measure whether people are suited to working remotely,
and this instrument here focuses
on the key things that are important for working remotely.
A combination of cognitive ability, personality values, and competencies,
and this makes it easier to predict whether a person is suited to remote work.
And some organisations use this when
recruiting people who are going to have to work remotely.
But some also use it when somebody who's working with the organisation already is
considering going to work remotely, either from their own volition or maybe
the organisation needs them to work remotely.
Running them through this instrument just
gives an indication about the kinds of risks that might occur if that happens.
So that's the question of whether somebody is suited to remote work.
And I guess in summary,
what we would say is that if you're lucky enough to be an emotionally stable
introvert who is conscientious and hardworking, then you're likely to be
the sort of person who's well suited to going to work remotely.
If you're an emotionally unstable extrovert where you need a lot of contact
and in particular, if you're not particularly conscientious
driven, naturally hardworking, then maybe there's a risk
for the organisation and a productivity sense to send you working remote.
Next in the sequence will be the communication challenge of remote work.
As I like to say about remote work, you lose the water cooler or coffee room
conversations, that spontaneous stuff that just happens.
So what can we do to ensure that communication remains effective
and robust when people are not in the same geographical location as we are?