Many retail organizations have experienced a love-hate relationship with remote work.

A leading researcher on employee wellness, Saint Mary’s University professor Dr. Arla Day, says it’s understandable to feel that tension. However, examining the needs of remote workers can help us improve employee wellness, increase employee engagement, and support productivity.

Productivity Isn’t the Lead Issue

No one likes to be shoved into a relationship without a choice, and that’s exactly what happened with retail and technology during the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether or not remote work had been on the horizon for 2020, it suddenly forced itself onto the agenda. Equipping employees to work at home was no longer a speculative question of “Should we do it?” The urgent question became “How do we do it, and do it as speedily as possible?”

When you’re in a crisis, you concentrate on practical matters first. So immediate concerns about moving workers online tended to focus on pragmatic issues, starting with software requirements. (Remember when logging on to a Zoom or Teams call felt like a strange new ritual, not your daily routine?)

Then came questions about the customer experience, data security, and above all, employee accountability. Almost as soon as remote work became the new normal, employee productivity became the new watchword. Retailers started to worry that the perks of working from home would compromise outcomes. Would the lure of the living room sofa and Netflix be too powerful for employees to resist? Without a supervisor looking over their shoulder, would workers find devious ways to fake doing their tasks? Such uncertainty raised a slew of surveillance-related questions, such as:

• How can we tell when remote workers are truly working?
• How can we prevent them from getting distracted?
• How can we monitor and measure their productivity?

This line of investigation somewhat ignores the real issues, including what Dr. Day calls the “paradox” of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) such as email, video conferencing, and direct messaging. While technologies that enable remote work can deliver significant benefits to employees, they can also add to employee stress. Realistically, you can’t really expect to the productivity of remote workers until you consider the many factors affecting employee well-being.

As a retail leader supervising a remote team or teams, the number one question on your mind might be “How productive are my online workers?” But a more strategic approach is to first ask “How do the conditions for online work foster a healthy and productive workplace?”

Recognizing the “iParadox Triad”

Dr. Day’s interest in the impact of ICT on employee wellness pre-dates the pandemic by 10 years. And in 2019, she and two colleagues published a research article that examined how employee needs and motivations intersect with ICT to create three interrelated paradoxes. For retail leaders, the iParadox framework can serve as a kind of map to cultivating a healthy and productive work culture in the post-pandemic world.

The autonomy paradox acknowledges that ICT both increases and decreases employees’ sense of control over their work. On the one hand, remote workers often enjoy flexible schedules and control over their physical workspace. On the other hand, they may feel pressure to stay “always on,” glued to their phone or laptop and ready to “hop onto a video call” at a moment’s notice.

The social relatedness paradox recognizes that ICTs can help build rapport and relationships among distributed teams. But they can also be overwhelming and create friction. For example, audio issues during a video call can make communication challenging, the tone of an email can be misinterpreted, and too much connectivity can lead to an overflowing email inbox.

The competence paradox describes how ICTs both drive and deter efficiency. Although new forms of communication can accelerate workflows, they also can cause frequent interruptions and delays due to technology misfiring. With vast amounts of information at their fingertips, employees can get bogged down searching through it for content relevant to their tasks.

How can your organization amplify the positive side of each of the key employee needs identified through the iParadox framework while mitigating the downside? According to Dr. Day’s research, employers who want remote workers to become more productive should first lay a solid foundation for worker well-being.

Reframing Productivity in Terms of Employee Wellness

Once you reframe debates over remote work in terms of employee wellness, new possibilities emerge for improving employee engagement, retention, and performance.

Dr. Day warns against assuming the worst of remote workers. She calls that negative bias “the fallacy of the five percent.” Most employees, she maintains, want to be effective, efficient workers. When you design working conditions for the slim minority with a poor work ethic, you create a culture of distrust and surveillance—and that has a dampening effect on productivity.

It’s not the technology itself that creates or solves productivity problems. It’s the way you implement it. For example, Dr. Day has developed a scale for measuring “ICT stressors,” and she’s found that monitoring remote workers correlates with higher stress and strain. On the flip side, when remote workers feel supported in their roles, they’re more likely to deliver higher outcomes.

What can you do to reduce the stress caused by remote work and cultivate a healthy virtual workplace? Here are five suggestions from Dr. Day to help you emphasize the benefits of the iParadox Triad (autonomy, social relatedness, and competence):

• Recruit the right people. Your selection process is critical to promoting a healthy work culture where people show up keen to contribute. Hire people with values that align with your organization and its mission.
• Give workers the flexibility to disconnect. Talk to them to identify when they want to unplug from their email and phone and what works with their job tasks. For some employees, that might mean disconnecting every day at 5 p.m. while others might prefer to shut off for a period during the day—perhaps when their kids get home from school—and then reconnect for a short while during the evening.
• Ask people what they need. It’s a simple question, but one that often gets overlooked. Dr. Day recommends, “ask and figure out what people are doing, what job demands they face, and what resources they need.” Individual requirements could include physical resources, training, or smoother work processes to follow.
• Foster positive peer pressure. Make it standard practice for team members to support one another, both practically and emotionally. Encourage team mates to check in with one another regularly so they can understand what’s going on behind the screen and help where appropriate.
• Provide explicit performance indicators. Manage by outcomes rather than by hours on the job. By collaborating with employees to develop specific, measurable goals and job tasks, you can clarify expectations, motivate your team, and support accountability.

As Dr. Day says, “If you can’t tell whether employees are actually doing what they are paid to do, you may not actually know what they are supposed to be doing. That is a much bigger problem!”

Dr. Day has been studying the concept and impact of workplace well-being for three decades. She’s found that one critical factor emerges consistently, online and offline, as the answer to creating a healthy, productive workplace: respect. 

As retail work breaks out of physical workspaces, the most pressing challenge leaders face may not be how to decide on the best app to use but rather how best to build and sustain personal relationships. Whether they’re on site or online, employees want to feel valued. No matter what new ICTs emerge, authentic, caring leadership will always be the most powerful tool for keeping employees engaged and inspiring them to go that extra mile for your customers.