This blog post is part of my Personal Coronavirus Challenge where I write about remote working and facilitation every day for as long as the imposed quarantine lasts with the intent to get into the habit of writing regularly and (hopefully) getting better at it.

Do you have more meetings with your manager since you started working from home? Have you been told to communicate more? Is your manager suddenly more present on your team slack channel? Do you have to send status reports more regularly? If you answer one or more of these questions with yes, you seem to be dealing with a micromanager. And this is the last you should be dealing with.

Are you a manager and have the feeling the communication got worse with your team? Do you feel the urge to schedule more meetings with your team? Do you sit in front of the slack channel waiting for someone to reply to the question you just posted a few seconds ago? Sorry mate, you seem to be micromanaging. And you have to stop!

Corporate Rebels put it succinctly in their recent blog post;  The one thing an organization, and therefore their managers, need to do is to trust their employees and stop treating them like kids. Instead, support them in whatever it is they need, get out of the way and let them focus on the work as best as they can during these disruptive times.

Stop micromanaging and start trusting.