Remote Team Management: Valuing Performance over Presence
Remote work? Check. Remote management, though? Less common and potentially less understood. This is due, in part, to the reticence of companies to give management the same flexibility as specialists and knowledge workers.
Remote managers must create Spans of Care, encourage informal banter with consistent 1–on-1 opportunities, and ‘bookend’ coordination of team projects.
The skills and techniques of remote management are different from office management, as office managers often value physical proximity as a proxy for team effectiveness, while remote managers value performance over a visible presence.
Remote work continues to be a hot, trending topic. In 1995, only 9% of workers had tried ‘telecommuting’ (as remote work was called back then). According to a 2017 Gallup study¹, 43% of Americans reported spending at least some of their time working remotely as individual contributors.
“Office managers often value physical proximity as a proxy for team effectiveness, while remote managers value performance over a visible presence.”- Anthony Coppedge
Remote Managers favor ‘Spans of Care’ over Hierarchal Roles
While office workers rely on synchronous interactions to establish a cadence for collaboration, remote workers dance to a rhythm of asynchronous communication. One is linear, one is non-linear, but this doesn’t automatically make remote work more difficult, just different. Remote managers learn to vary the types of communication and set slightly different expectations for managing remote teams to achieve consistent, quality results from teams.
All managers lead individuals and teams towards achieving results, but the way they do so is what separates mediocre or even bad managers from great managers. Intel’s former CEO, Andy Grove (1936–2016) said that management and leadership are both required to get consistent results. He likened quality management and leadership in business to a solid backhand and a solid forehand in the game of Tennis. Following this leadership advice, both remote and office managers must become comfortable with specific encouragement and helpful criticism.
However, remote managers cannot rely exclusively on the methods of office managers with co-located teams, where practices such as ‘management by walking around’ or hallway conversations are a normal part of interacting with team members. Instead, savvy remote managers take the advice of Grove but also change the rules of the game to communicate in different ways and at times which follow the work cadence of remote workers as a deliberate shift away from office routines.
A ‘Span of Care’ focuses on serving team members with empathy to complement the results-driven aspects of remote work. — Anthony Coppedge
When a remote manager views their team members as more than worker-bees, the opportunity to transcend hierarchy and roles can morph into a more holistic management viewpoint; a ‘Span of Care’ focuses on serving team members with empathy to complement the results-driven aspects of remote work.
Kim Scott, author of the bestselling book ‘Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity,’² says quality managers must be able to lead with empathy and specificity. “Challenging others and encouraging them to challenge you helps build trusting relationships because it shows 1) you care enough to point out both the things that aren’t going well and those that are and that 2) you are willing to admit when you’re wrong and that you are committed to fixing mistakes that you or others have made. But because challenging often involves disagreeing or saying no, this approach embraces conflict rather than avoiding it.” In her summation of this truth Scott says, “Your ability to build trusting, human connections with the people who report directly to you will determine the quality of everything that follows.”
Unlike a traditional command-and-control hierarchical model, Spans of Care signal a personal investment in the well-being, productivity, and growth of team members. For example, managers of remote teams demonstrate flexibility by asking remote team members how they want to schedule 1-on-1’s consistently. After all, the purpose of a 1-on-1 with a direct report is for them to be heard and to own the agenda. In a Span of Care management framework, the 1-on-1 would focus on how the employee views themselves as part of the larger team and encourages sharing about their personal well-being, their challenges, and the opportunities for growth and advancement. This is in contrast to typical 1-on-1 meetings where the focus is exclusively on work productivity, without significant consideration of the employees perspective.
While all team members appreciate being valued for more than the work they deliver, remote workers are more likely to appreciate a Span of Care approach from their remote managers due to the physical isolation of remote work. Psychologically, the value of a more empathetic management framework builds trust, confidence, and even happiness for team members.
Remote Work Requires Informal Conversation & Clear Feedback
Because remote workers do not have the physical proximity to enjoy meals or informal conversation afforded to office workers, remote managers need to build the habit of inviting team members, peers, project stakeholders, and even their own bosses to a virtual coffee or lunch over Slack or a video chat.
Remote breaks like this are not unlike going to lunch in a co-located work environment, where the informal nature of organic conversation helps workers get to know each other.
Google conducted 200+ interviews with their employees and looked at more than 250 attributes of 180+ active Google teams.³ What they learned were five key dynamics that set successful teams apart from other teams at Google:
- Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
- Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high-quality work on time?
- Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?
- Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
- Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?
The study done at Google highlights the importance of building a healthy team culture.
While the top priority for any highly capable team is clear communication, in remote work, communication is not just a priority, it’s a cultural norm which requires cultivation and instills confidence through clear expectations for remote team members.
Remote Managers Need to ‘Bookend’ Time Around Teams
Remote managers often lead teams to deliver a product or service. As such, the role needs to include a breadth of awareness and communication, which goes ‘before’ the team and ‘after’ the team.
In other words, if the team is responsible for delivering on Project X, and there’s a design or engineering team who is leading the pre-work for Project X, the remote manager would benefit from spending time interacting and understanding the larger project scope as it relates to their own team(s). Further, remote managers will want to know which people and teams in their organization will be working on the next steps of Project X after their team delivers.
No team is an island unto itself, so remote managers benefit from ‘bookending’ coordination with other teams. This leads to increased trust across the organization and provides remote teams with timely information to address changes to their asynchronous work for greater efficiency and better project outcomes.
The effective remote manager intentionally chooses to apply the best principles of office management and create new patterns of empathetic leadership, asynchronous communication, and informal banter to manage in different ways and at times which follow the work cadence of remote workers as a deliberate shift away from office routines.
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[1]: Gallup | 2017 State of the American Workplace | https://news.gallup.com/reports/199961/7.aspx
[2]: Scott, Kim. Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity | St. Martin’s Press https://www.radicalcandor.com/the-book/
[3]: Google re:work blog | 2015 The five keys to a successful Google team https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/
