Answer to Question #265855 in Management for riya

Question

Is perception management applicable in current times when we are working from home virtually and not interacting personally with our coworkers and managers? Rationalize your opinion with steps and measures that help you manage the process.

Answer 1

Discussion

Perception management is defined as actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator's objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations. Perception management helps to prevent the complex emotional characteristics of communication from changing the original interpretation of the message. Perception management also serves to change the original interpretation of the message in order to prevent complex emotional characteristics in communication.

Due to the COVID-19 crisis, managers and employees in many organizations suddenly are forced to work from home. Although working from is not a new phenomenon, it is new in its current scale and scope because of COVID-19. Although the number of people working from home has continued to increase, there are still a lot of negative perceptions of working from home. Most importantly, companies find it difficult to build a culture that is accepting of this new change. First, employees state that it is hard to keep track of who is working from home, especially when the transition is adopted more informally. There aren’t many times when an employee or their manager states when the transition to working from home will happen as said transition just kind of happens. Because of this, some employees feel that they are left in the dark and that there is no communication from management on the changes that impact them daily. Below is a discussion with steps and measures that can help manage the perception process;

In order to change the perception of working from home and to maintain the company culture, the company and its workers must really assess if they are ready for people to work from home. Current processes and policies, especially one’s around performance evaluation, should be re-evaluated to ensure that they are fair for both types of workers. Technology, like servers, laptops and VPNs, needs to be implemented to ensure employees can be effective when working from home. However, employees must be prepared to work from home, setting up work routines, boundaries with managers and making an effort to remain socially engaged. Using communication tools, like Teams or Webex to maintain the current culture, is important to continue to build trust and collaboration among teams. By using said tools, employees can avoid feeling isolated and can make themselves available to their co-workers.

To get managers on board, trial runs should always be done. Employees should not go from working five days a week in the office to five days a week from home but should transition and check in with their manager on how they can improve the current communication. The key in this case is trust. If a manager trusts their employee and the employee is performing well, the door should be open for an attempt on working from home. However, companies should still provide shared offices for employees to come in for important meetings or collaborations as needed to continue creating the sense of community at work. That way, the employee and their counterparts don’t lose the human interaction that they currently have and instead create a sense of community when they meet in person.

 

Reference

Mamun, A. M. A. (2021). Employee Perception on How Much Supportive the Employers Are To Manage Work-From-Home during COVID-19 Pandemic-An Empirical Study from A Developing Country. Saudi J. Humanities Soc Sci, 6(6), 199-202.