Remote work is here to stay. Twenty five percent of all professional jobs in North America will be remote by the end of 2022, reported Forbes in February of 2022. 77% of remote workers say they're more productive when working from home and 85% of managers believe that having teams with remote workers will become the new norm.
I was offered a remote job yesterday. I’m not taking it, but you get the point - they are out there!
That’s all well and good, but if you’re a leader of a team, department or organization what does this mean to you? Are you anxious with the new role and how to manage the team? The three biggest challenges associated with remote work are unplugging after work (22%), loneliness (19%), and communication and collaboration (17%). How as a leader are you still going to guide, inspire and empower your workforce in this new era of work?
Let’s start at the top.
1). Vision
Regardless of where you work, vision is always the key to a productive workforce and a great company. Vision provides the context within which people at all levels can make decisions. A vision is a picture or description of the future the organization wants to create. It shows where the organization wants to go, how it will get there, and what it will be like when it gets there. It helps to set the boundaries for change.
Like most great organizations, having a vision may be a no-brainer. However, it becomes all that more crucial in a remote workplace. Jim Collins in “BE 2.0” provides some insight: “The problem, of course, is how to unleash individual creativity and, at the same time, move in a unified direction. Vision is the link. If all people in the company have a guiding star on which to sight (a common vision), they can be dispersed in hundreds of independent little boats, rowing in the same direction.
We recently had a flood in our office. We had just come back from a hiatus from the office due to Covid and the pandemic and within a few months, in the cold winters of Vermont, a pipe burst and flooded portions of our office. In any event, 5 months later and we “might” get back in by the end of July. That being said, I think about our small team and how we have had to manage being a remote workplace. My staff knows the vision of the organization and because of that there is very little need for oversight. They know their role and value in our pursuit of our vision and are set free to actualize that vision whether we’re in an office or not.
2). Trust
Having employees out of the office takes a huge amount of trust. Steven Covey, renowned trust author and expert describes trust as the act of building credibility. Covey identifies four “cores” that are key to building credibility: integrity, intent, capabilities, and results.
Covey then separates these 4 cores into two categories: character and competency. Character is made up of the moral qualities and values distinctive to an individual. Competency is the ability to do something successfully or efficiently. Integrity and intent are character cores - they are based on moral qualities and your values and the company's values. Capabilities and results are competency cores - based on how smart you can do your job, you should have the capabilities and produce results. That makes sense right? If I know you are of good character and I know you can do the job correctly, my trust of you and of you goes up.
In 2018 I presented on trust at Zendesk’s Relate Live conference. What I suggested as a concept is that trust is really about repetitive performance in competency and character. If there is a lack of trust one or both are missing from the relationship. Performances of competency (smarts) and character (values) must be performed again and again and again in front of the boss in order to gain trust.
Trust is like a bank account. When we start any new relationship (whether that be with a colleague, company or companion) our account is basically empty. Neither one of the “parties” have made any deposits into it. Trust is low. We may still be polite and accepting of certain behaviors (mainly to meet societal norms), but we’re not about to spill out our deepest, darkest secrets to those people we just met! As we spend time with each other we either put more deposits into that account or we take out. Of course if we’re starting with nothing and we keep taking from the account, it doesn’t take long for trust to be broken and the other party to abandon our proverbial relationship because we have trust bankruptcy!
However, if we continue to show elements of character and competency through integrity, intent, capabilities and results, we in turn will build up our trust bank account. In order to build trust we must show up, on time, ready to go again and again and again. We must have repetitive performance in competency and character.
So, as a remote leader, how can you encourage trust? Is it weekly meetings at the same time each week to gather the team together? Is it personalized texts throughout the week encouraging your team? Is it flowers on birthdays and anniversaries? Is it a genuine invite to your team to join you at happy hour? Visa versa, a team can build trust with you by checking in, giving reports and updates. I have found adaptive, flexible coaching (on the phone, in a Zoom, at the bar) is crucial to build trust and make deposits into the account.
3). Motivation
As your team works out of the office, motivation will ebb and wane at times. Remember those three biggest challenges of remote working up top - all of them are really about staying motivated. As leaders, during this volatile uncertain and complex time in the workforce, we must focus on intrinsic motivation in order to keep and encourage our staff.
Here is a quick formula I’ve talked about before to measure and improve your staff’s motivation. Think about how you might apply it in a remote setting. CAMP is an acronym for employee motivation. Think of each letter and description through the lens of “if this doesn’t exist or is in short supply, do my people tend to not be motivated.”
C stands for Competency: how well does the staff person know what they are doing in their various roles? This is all about how smart one feels in their current job. If someone feels like they are smart, intelligent, well-equipped to handle their job they tend to be more motivated. Building the C in your remote work employees can look like providing additional education opportunities and webinars, trips to conferences, cross-functional teams (finance meeting with marketing meeting with IT to get a better sense of the whole organization), executive coaching and creating a leadership growth lattice.
A stands for Autonomy: A staff person’s motivation is also based on their ability to make decisions. Equally, they have to know that you, the boss, trusts them to make those decisions. This is about gradual independence (think a teenager learning how to drive) in order to have the staff person feel like they have the freedom (and therefore motivation) to make educated decisions. Building the A in your remote employees can look like providing them the freedom to work from home, have flexible hours, facilitating the online meeting (instead of you) and being available incase they get stumped for a quick call.
M stands for Meaningfulness: Employees who are proud of their organizations are more likely to engage. Meaningfulness is two-fold. A motivated person must know the meaning they provide to the organization and equally, they must feel that their organization benefits the world around them. Building the M in your remote employees can look like hosting strategic retreats that gather the remote team, personalized videos or calls discussing the mission and vision of the organization, encouraging employees to sit on nonprofit boards outside of work, and providing mentorship with senior leadership.
P stands for progress: People get energized by accomplishing things that move their job, organization, career, and life forward. Sometimes it may be little baby steps of progress (allowed to run a meeting, being named to a committee, a text from the boss on a Friday night saying, “Great job!”) and other times it may be a large like a title change or a promotion.
4). Communication
Finally, communication is key and incorporates all of the above. Communication is crucial for your vision, critical for trust, and an important vehicle to practice CAMP. When communicating with a remote worker, it's also important to be clear. Due to the fact that there is not as much in office communication, nonverbals, and free flowing conversations, our more formal communication has to be direct.
Start by using the 5 Ps: Purpose, Picture, Plan, Performance Measure and Part. When these are all put together into 5 sentences they can frame your elevator speech to communicate your needs as the leader:
Purpose: Creating the “why” or purpose for why we’re doing what we’re doing even if it's a little task is a critical first step. It might sound like this: “To stay competitive we need to consolidate our services into one department and still support our customer’s expectations.”
Picture: People remember visuals more than they do words. So our next step is to create a metaphor or example that sticks with the person after we’re gone. “Initially, it will be like seeing the prices rise in the grocery store and still trying to feed your family well.”
Plan: People generally can only remember clusters of three or four concepts at a time. So, we need to keep our plan simple and memorable. “Our first step will be to analyze the problem, then create some options and finally, decide on the best option and see if it will work.”
Performance Measure: It’s important that our communication lets people know what success will look like. “If we can do step one and two and get something going in 60 days, we’ll be on our way to success.”
Part: Here is the most critical piece of the communication: we need to give the person a specific task that they can do that will help move us along. “So John, I’m wondering if you would be willing to be on the team that analyzes where the failure costs are occurring in our current process. You know the process well and probably know where it’s broken. Would you be willing to do that?”
When it comes to remote work or some variation of it (hybrid work), the only negotiable is the speed at which we are willing to change our workplaces, not the change itself. Hopefully these 4 elements will give you a head start in adapting your workplace. Don’t wait to go completely remote, these tools work well with traditional workplaces too!