Remote and hybrid teams are a pandemic mainstay. For many managers, leading a remote team can be tough, especially for first-time people managers. Harder still is creating that sense of community or cultivating a sense of Belonging. The tips below can help you manage a remote team without losing your team or your mind: employers have to carefully balance their need to attract and retain top talent, while cultivating an inclusive, high-performing culture. It is harder to foster community with remote teams. However, high BQ leaders know it is not impossible. Below are things a high BQ leader is likely to do when leading a remote team.
1. Seek First to understand
what your employees need and why they’re electing to continue working from home. This is a crucial first step especially if you as a manager or employer wants people to return to the office. Are they looking after sick parents or children or other relatives? Is their commute long and expensive? Before either compelling return to the office or establishing work-from-home rules, seek to understand why they’re choosing to continue working from home.
2. Communication is a two-way street.
Once you understand what is driving your employees, be transparent in sharing what’s driving a decision either to return them to work or to require them to continue working from home. Either way, I understand that they’ll be some employees who are not happy with the decision. Research tells us that certain factions of society – for example are workers and single workers without children prefer to return to the workplace while older workers, and workers as a caregiver prefer to work from home. You cannot please everyone but a transparent communication about your decision either way go a long way with establishing employee trust which is essential to manage a remote team.
3. Set clear expectations, timelines and outputs.
When considering whether employees should work from home, a clear explanation of what is expected of every employee while working from home should be set from the onset. Employees should be made aware that if working from home, the same timeline and output is expected of them as when working at the office. Employees are expected to be compliant to company rules and regulations whether working in office or from home.
4. Create a hiqh BQ culture. As you may already know from reading this Blog, the human belonging quotient.
This tool transfers the efforts you had to building a high belonging culture in the workplace to your virtual office. Christian heavy to quote for remote workers it’s not easy but it’s doable. Ensure that employees feel a sense of belonging by among other things, reward and recognition, celebrating their birthday or the festivals important to them, giving them shout outs and critically, continuing to develop them to uphold a speak up culture.
5. Be flexible and accountable to your team – and hold them to the same expectation.
Working from home is not without distractions as we experienced during the pandemic. So, on the one hand, it is important to be flexible whether it is a doorbell that rings in the middle of a meeting unexpectedly or a barking dog in the backyard. However, it is important to hold your team accountable for the work they have to produce and for ensuring that the participation of employees in Virtual meetings is safe productive put them in the entire team. You need to make it clear to your team when a project is due by setting a due date on your project and a reminder on your calendar. You should also give your team an estimate of how long it will take to complete the project. It is important that you are flexible and realistic in your expectations. If a project is going to take you more than two weeks to complete, let your team know and add more time to the project.
6. Organize “in-office days” and regular social touchpoints for the entire team.
The trick within office days is that some employers leave it up to employees to choose which days to come into the office. You’re trying to foster a sense of belonging or create community, how many employees coming on any day of their choosing makes it difficult for them to interact in person as a team or even a cross-functional team. So instead, designate days to have the entire team in office or have social touchpoints at regular intervals but it seems expected to attend. This will allow for the enforcement interaction to offset the distance that normally comes with working from home.
7. Go above and beyond to welcome any new joiners in the company.
It can be especially challenging to join a new team and especially a new organization as a member of a remote team. There is no immediate access to anyone to show you the ropes or answer questions. To make the effort to pay extra attention to new hires on your Remote team. Give them several touchpoints besides yourself to whom they can reach out especially during the onboarding period. Make yourself and other members of the team more accessible so as to make them feel welcome and included.
8. Establish consistency between remote and in office workers.
This is sometimes the trickiest thing to do. Our default maybe to pay attention if we’re in office to those who refuse to be right there with us. To avoid unconscious bias or preference, have very clear, consistent and communicated expectations of both your in-house and remote teams. Be mindful of behaviors or language that may be perceived as treating one group with preference by the other. Let this be a mantra: “Out of sight is not out of mind.”
9. Encourage and model a healthy work-life-balance.
Poor work-life balance negatively impacts employee’s health and happiness. This might lead to employees feeling more stressed and less in control at work and in their personal lives. One of the perks of working remotely is greater flexibility as employees can take advantage of working from home to create flexible working hours for themselves. This however also come with challenges as creating flexible hours can also put pressure on the employee to spend more time online.
10. Be sensitive to and respectful of personal time and boundaries.
With remote work, there is great temptation to call, text or email employees at times when perhaps you never would have when doing the office. Research shows that remote workers tend to be more productive semicolon however, this may also mean the Amor prone to burn out. So, if you are putting additional demands on a remote worker, be mindful not to make them distress, burnout and potentially even resignation.
11. Manage performance and disciplinary issues as if they were on site.
Managing performance or disciplinary misconduct is not something that many just love to do even in the best of times when they have all the support they need. Therefore, it is not unusual 4 managers to be tempted to overlook performance or disciplinary issues instead of handling them head-on. Don’t take the easier route out; instead, enlist the help of HR or your line manager should you need to address an employee with regards to his/her conduct of poor performance. Just remember that what goes unaddressed may become a persistent or long-term problem. Except that then, it may well be worse. Similarly, while it is easy to slip out of role, remember to continue to maintain confidentiality and respect employees’ privacy.
12. Provide a strong rewards and recognition system.
Just like it is easy to ignore performance or disciplinary issues, it is similarly easy to forget to provide your team with much-needed rewards and recognition. Establish a one day a month phone call but also set a date that coincides with an in-person meeting with the whole team or with a virtual all hands meeting. Be mindful that not everyone prefers public accolades. Nevertheless, don’t go alone but invite the team to get shot out to one another. This is a great community builder.
13. Have a virtual open-door policy.
Just because your team is remote, or hybrid does not mean you stop offering them an open-door policy. What is more challenging to do in the virtual context, setting up office hours a note by appointment may well address this need. The most important thing about this is that if your in-house employees can access you at any time, remote employees should not have issues reaching out to you. See number 8 above.
14. Learn from others who have experience managing remoting teams.
This is pretty self-explanatory but it’s one that is easy to forget. While hybrid or remote team became the norm for many managers for the very first time during the pandemic, many sales teams or other staff within that multinational corporations are familiar with these concepts. So, if there are others on your team, network or department that have experience managing remote workers, don’t hesitate to reach out to them for tips on remote team management skills or tips from others on your team who might have had prior knowledge leading remote team
Conclusion: If you’re a remote team, you’ll have to find ways to manage it.