update: my employee isn’t as productive on her WFH days

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer whose employee wasn’t as productive on her work-from-home days? Here’s the update.

I was really grateful that you answered my question last year.

First off, apologies to all of the commenters who provided input on the post that included my question last summer — I’m in the UK and the time difference meant I couldn’t jump in on the day my question was answered — but I did read all of the comments and was really grateful for all of the input, which really did make for interesting reading.

Something that came through quite strongly in the comments was a sense of “What is the actual issue here?” As I’d noted in my question, Claire was (and continues to be) a good employee — she’s knowledgeable, personable, meets deadlines and gets her work done without issue. Lots of the commenters made the very good point that if that was the case, they weren’t clear as to why I had any issue with her working from home days appearing less productive than her in-office days — and you know what? That was a very fair point!

Alison’s advice was to name what I was seeing and to ask Claire about that, but given that strong thread coming through in the comments, I actually initially decided not to do anything at all, and just to take a bit of a “watching brief,” reminding myself that Claire was meeting her objectives at work and my expectations of her, even if her pattern of productivity did look a bit unbalanced to me.

Come appraisal time, earlier this year, I opened with some gentle questions around how Claire was finding her role in general and asking her to reflect on her role over the last year. Claire shared with me that after she had returned to work after having her second child (nine months to a year of maternity leave is average here in the UK, it is a long break), her husband had been suffering with postnatal depression and she had consequently been struggling with balancing work and a heavy home life burden. She also said, however, that things had significantly improved over the last six months or so, that she was finding balancing things much easier since her husband had recovered and children were getting a little older and more predictable and — crucially — that she had appreciated my patience as her manager. She named herself that her WFH days had been less visibly productive than her in-office days at first, but that she hoped I had noticed that this had since balanced out somewhat (which I indeed had from my time just watching).

I used this opportunity to explain to Claire that whilst I had noticed that pattern with her WFH days, I also recognized that Claire was meeting my expectations, hitting deadlines, and doing her job well. I also noted, taking directly from Alison’s answer, that I understood that the different environment at home might be a place whereby Claire was better able to focus on deep work, write up minutes, catch up on phone calls, etc., and that that was absolutely fine. Claire responded really warmly to this and I was very grateful for that part of the answer in particular.

Claire continues to be an excellent employee and has even asked me recently about increasing her hours by an additional day now things have settled a bit for her and her children are that little bit older. I’m not clear yet whether I’ll be able to make that happen (university budget cuts, anyone?) but I will absolutely be doing my best to — she’s not someone we want to lose, and I’m grateful that I didn’t fudge managing what was a difficult time for her and end up losing her before now.

All in all, I feel like asking the question and receiving both the answer and the comments really gave me pause to think about whether what I thought was a problem really was a problem (which is something I’m stopping and thinking about a bit more these days), and a provided me with a bit of a lesson in giving my employees grace and space. I’m pleased to be able to share a positive update and again thank you, AAM community!

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