Five best practices to work well with your team when you don’t see them face-to-face all the time.
For many, this is your first foray into being a remote work leader. There was no plan and you scrambled home as the seriousness of COVID-19 grew. These truly aren’t normal work-from-home conditions and you should be cautious when you compare it apples-to-apples to your normal in-office working.
However, this WFH experiment may have surprised you. Maybe you are more productive than when you’re in a traditional office environment. Or, maybe you just cannot wait to get back and actually SEE people face-to-face. Drop by a coworkers office, give a high-five, and not feel like you’re a prisoner in your own home.
Regardless of where you stand, there will be more and more work relationships in the future that we maintain remotely. Before we started Limetree, I worked in an office with my immediate team, but communicated with team members and clients all over the world from Poland to the Philippines. It’s a good skill to sharpen—the ability to work with folks all over the world—ones who you may never meet in person.
The Remote Work Leader
As a leader or manager, you may feel uneasy about not being able to physically see your team. Your old habits and processes may be out the window and you are still grappling with how to lead your team when you can’t see them face-to-face every day.
Leading and motivating a team can be challenging. And the difficulty only increases when you’re working remotely. When you don’t see your team face-to-face all the time, the room for miscommunication, misinterpretation, and misalignment only increases. You can’t read body language. You can’t drop by a staff member’s office to “check-in”.
The good news is that many organizations are already working remotely (by choice!) and there are best practices for leading a team outside of an office environment. I’ve worked remotely on-and-off for over 8 years. Here are my top 5 tips:
1) Learn to let go
Remember that you hired your team for a reason. Learning to trust them even when you’re not in the same physical proximity will go a long way. Letting go of your own control issues might be the biggest challenge in leading a remote team, especially if you started out with a more “traditional team”.
No one likes to be micro-managed, but teams still need direction and leadership. Ensure that you’ve provided your team with the right tools and mindset of communicating efficiently while in the process of managing themselves.
2) Over-communicate
Speaking of communication, remote teams require an extra level of effort in this department. I’ve worked on remote teams where the lines of communication were unclear and the leadership team was unresponsive. Talk about a buzz kill! Know that your staff want to work hard and do a great job, but if you don’t communicate effectively, their motivation can quickly wane.
For us at Limetree Labs, we have a daily morning stand-up. Every day at 8:30 am, we have a quick meeting to communicate what we’re working on for the day and any road-blocks we may have. This is a quick, synchronous way to connect as a team and quickly resolve any issues that come up. Now that we’re working remotely, we meet on Microsoft Teams.
During the day, we communicate as a group and in private messages in Microsoft Teams as well. Depending on the size of your team, you may need to create different channels to keep your communication organized by department or topic.
I highly recommend using video calls at least once a week. Its nice to get those non-verbal cues and can make everyone feel more connected.
3) Manage expectations
As much as your team members need to be able to manage themselves, one of your main duties as a leader is still to set clear expectations and goals, and define how communication about delivering these goals should take place.
Clear lines of accountability can be established by creating and following great processes. Set the expectation and review progress and metrics regularly. If goals aren’t being met, lend a hand and help where needed to get your team back on track.
For the Limetree team, we meet once a week to review metrics for each team. This keeps our goals front-of-mind and creates an environment of accountability for all of us.
4) Avoid burnout
In this work-from-anywhere culture, the risk is always being “on”. When your laptop is in your living room and your smartphone is in-hand, you or your staff may be tempted to keep working outside of work hours. While we often praise this in our American culture, it can be detrimental to the mental health of your team.
In the end, working too much only leads to poor performance and low efficiency. Better to have several hours of focused work than to be only half-engaged for a 10 hour day. Be sure to check in on your team and be aware of the signs of burnout.
5) Have a little fun
Just like you, your team has interests and a life outside of work. Connect on a more casual level and learn more about your team members. All of your communication doesn’t have to be hyper work-focused. The effort you put into getting to know your team on a more personal level will go far.
Last week, we set-up a game of Drawful 2 over Zoom with our Limetree Labs team. Sure, it’s kind of silly, but we got some laughs and let off a little steam from a busy week. You’ll know what feels appropriate for your team whether that’s a Happy Hour over Zoom or a Work From Home set-up show-and-tell.
I hope you enjoyed these tips on how to be an effective remote work leader. In short, I encourage you to trust your team and care for your team. Everything else will work out if you start from there.
