Managing at distance as a manager-coach

Even before the pandemic we launched our worldwide people ambition including a workstream to bring the right to work from home for up to two days a week to all our operating entities worldwide, even when local legislation hadn’t yet envisaged it as commonplace. We have for many years been progressing with our digital work-practice roadmap, upgrading our ability to work remotely and we have progressed with the digitalization of training and development. With the covid-19 pandemic many manager-coaches have been faced in recent months with managing their teams at distance for the first time, and learning and development teams have been suddenly accelerating their digitalization strategies and converting classroom training to online delivery. It has been an exciting time for developing talent at distance, and as many a meme on social media has already stated, the pandemic has done more for digital work practice than any CIO or CDO has managed to do in the classic sense of change management or digital transformation strategy.

Needless to say, as offices fell empty for months due to the pandemic, all major consulting firms and many business schools have penned numerous articles and papers on the virtues of the “new normal” and forecast massive disruption to the office routines, saying things will not go back to how they were pre-covid. Remote working has been heralded for its environmental advantages with a reduced reliance on individual or public transports. Yet, it is probably too early to say yet how this will play out longer term. As we head into winter we’ll see the cost (financial and environmental) of heating multiple individual residences during the workday that would have been previously unoccupied. And what about the long-term economic viability of suburban train links and even intercity trains? Will public transport become more expensive and less frequent because of decreased usage? I’m not going to weigh in to the wider socio-economic debate around remote working, but clearly it isn’t as simple as black and white. Such a disruption to decades of workplace practices is not likely to be sustained post-pandemic without adapting our ways of work, considerable analysis of the impacts business by business, and at a larger scale sociological and macro-economical implications.

Despite being an ardent supporter of  digital work-practice, as an HR professional I remind myself that digital is not the overall end-goal : digital is purely a means to an end to modernize the employee experience through the use of digital tools to adapt to new ways of working, learning and developing in a professional context to increase our collective efficiency and productivity. Let’s not forget that for many, the ability to work remotely at least partially a couple of days a week has also become a key factor in managing our work life balance and plays a role in employer branding and attractivity. We also can’t dismiss, on the other hand, that many managers have a preference for having their team around them, be able to follow the team’s activity through a face to face working relationship. Our covid-19 experience of massive home-working is extraordinary (in the literal sense). For some, it has been a forced and a challenging experience. For others remote working was a revelation, highlighting the virtues and proving work can be done together without the need to be in the same physical space. One thing to bear in mind is that remote working during a pandemic lockdown doesn’t reflect the normality of everyday flexible remote work life. 

Whilst some businesses have already declared a shift to “full remote”, most will continue going forward with a mix of on site and remote working. I’d like to leave the wider philosophical debate aside, and consider how (and even whether) the manager-coach is impacted by having members of their team working remotely. 

Control and oversight, Productivity and Efficiency

One of often argued factors that managers rely on in their resistance to remote working arrangements is their perceived difficulty in controlling and overseeing the work in the team, and a fear that efficiency may drop as a result of remote working. 

Of course, this is often based on a lack of trust and fundamentals of management that are probably not being correctly handled in the first place. A manager who feels the need for physical presence with a member of staff, or to oversee their work in a way so direct that it cannot be done at distance probably isn’t at ease with the different management styles leveraging the employee’s skills and aptitudes. If the employee is competent and motivated, it should be possible to empower and delegate. Delegation requires the manager to set clear objectives, put in place the framework and resources for the activity and enable to employee to work autonomously but with feedback and support along the way as required, with an objective and fact-based assessment of the outcome. This is all possible through regular dialogue, doesn’t require physical contact, and can therefore be done online or at distance.   

In terms of productivity and efficiency, the general consensus from conversations with many colleagues since our return to on-site working since the end of the lockdown is that we worked extremely well remotely. We worked hard, produced and delivered, kept in touch with each other, had good relations with our manager and with our team, and the experience was in the main one which was positive overall. 

When it comes to the missions of the manager-coach such as staffing the team and onboarding employees, providing support on a day to day basis, visio conferencing works wonders. When I was in London I had an HR Business Partner role that covered London and Singapore. Rather than travel on a 13h flight we used telepresence to interview Asia pacific based candidates from London. Sure it meant some early mornings in the office but in terms of efficiency it was great and saved our managers lots of time and the cost of long haul business travel. In more recent times I tend to conduct initial interviews by visio, and then invite for a face to face as a second round. If we can make hiring decisions in this way, we can certainly manage to liaise with our team and provide support when they are at distance. 

Manager-coach of each member of the team

As I have outlined in a previous article, in order to accompany and support the development of the individuals in their team the manager-coach should have a trusting relationship with them. This includes intimacy, and building strong bonds and interpersonal relations. My personal conviction is that on an individual basis, having members of the team working remotely should not detract from the ability to build this professional intimacy and interpersonal human bond. Indeed, the mere fact of being at distance means setting time aside in the diary, setting up dedicated one to one time and organizing the relationship deliberately and purposefully. 

I can’t think of a managerial situation that actually requires physical contact between the manager and the individual in their team. What matters is not the physical or geographic proximity, but the emotional intimacy. This can be verbal, through what is said and actively listened to, or non-verbal which can be detected to a great extent via a good video conference tool. Sure, eye contact via the screen is not exactly the same. Sure, you have to be more attuned to body language to pick up the non-verbal signals, but it is nevertheless possible. 

I am perhaps a little “atypical” in my conviction on the ability to build and maintain an intimate, trusting relationship at distance. Drawing on experiences in my personal life, however, in the early years with my wife we spent some years as a distance relationship as we both finished our studies, me having returned to the UK to finalise my law degree and bar exams, and her staying in France to finish her masters. I lived away from home as soon as I went to university and my parents moved overseas over a decade ago, and we have relied on video and phone calls for my entire adult life. This personal experience clearly influences my convictions on remote working relationships. All I can share with you is that the remote nature of my personal relationships has never detracted from our intimacy and trust, which in personal and family relationships goes deeper and above and beyond what can be expected of a manager-coach and a member of their team. Similarly in my previous team each and every member of my team had at least one day a week working at home, and I never felt it detracted in any way from my managerial relationship with them.

Manager-coach of the team as a whole

Where personally I think the challenges are harder when it comes to managing a team at distance, is in our roles as manager-coach of the team as a whole. In my view this is accentuated when the team is partially at distance and partially on site as has been the case with the gradual return to on site work as lockdown restrictions were lifted. It is necessary to collectively agree on the team’s working pattern, rituals and routines, and plan meetings and team events accordingly.

Sharing time together as a team, socializing, celebrating successes together, brainstorm and be creative is harder online. Many of our social and celebration rituals revolve around informal times, and often involve food and drink (lunches, croissants, coffee etc). These experiences are harder to replicate authentically online: whilst many of us tried virtual social hours, virtual coffee breaks and the like during the pandemic lockdown when we were all in the same conditions, these became harder and felt less natural when part of the team returned to the office. Many a lockdown virtual ritual has been abandoned since our return on site. How to ensure inclusion of those that remain at distance? How to maintain the same energy through the screen as you get in person? 

As a team, getting together virtually to celebrate a success isn’t quite the same thing as celebrating in person. I have run dozens of trainings over the years, and I always love the palpable energy in the room. As a trainer or facilitator you can feel it. You know when you have the group’s attention and engagement, and you can sense when you don’t. I always found facilitating webinar sessions a strange experience as they lacked the social cues that you get face to face. Similarly when I was asked, during lockdown, to present the Group’s HR Strategy to our new joiners in one of our Integration Days seminars, my presentation was the same as usual, but I certainly didn’t feel the same “vibe” through the screen with 150+ names in a list and some webcams. Whilst comfortable with presenting online I nevertheless preferred a seminar venue with 150 happy and applauding faces around tables in front of me, and I’m pretty sure the delegates would also say they missed the social connection and informal networking opportunities too. The same can be said for many of our blended learning and development programs that we have worked to fully digitalise during recent months. The evaluations of the full-online versions are good, learning objectives are met. You can get the message across efficiently, and with less “down time” due to travel and hanging about in the wings, but the interpersonal collective experience just isn’t the same. Only time will tell as we assess the “cold” evaluations some months from now as to whether there is any detrimental effect on impact of their learning and development experience, or not. 

As a manager, one of the things I love with my teams is being creative together, getting some post-its out, using the paperboards and sharpies, and ideating together as a team. Sure, there’s plenty of tools to help to do so at distance (and yes, before I’m contacted by sales people from various different software vendors, we have a suite of digital options already), but on a human level for me it isn’t the same online with coloured pixel squares being repositioned on a screen or creating a wordcloud. 

The closest I have come to replicating real life team relations through a online relationship was in 2016-2017 when I undertook the groundbreaking 100% online Stanford LEAD Corporate Innovation program. LEAD was an amazing learning journey leveraging cutting edge digital learning tools including avatars and a virtual campus (as pictured).

The program fostered great peer learning, teambuilding and networking. As well as all the video based content and faculty-led live virtual classroom sessions, as study teams we spent hours every week, after work, on video calls collaborating on our assignments together. Over the course of the year we made very strong bonds between us. When I finally met my team members in person after graduating from the program, either thanks to travelling internationally for work, or attending the Me2We onsite alumni events on campus in Stanford, it felt like I had known my team for years and we had forged a close relationship through our intense learning journey together. Again though, the question I ask myself now looking back with the benefit of hindsight and the lockdown experience, is whether these relationships would have been so strong if half of us had been physically together and half of us remote. Would we have worked together in the same way? 

I wonder if there are any academic research papers studying the physiological or neurological effects of collaborating physically together, as opposed to remotely. Is there any empirical evidence of the “energy” I feel in the room? What is the impact of this on our collective efficiency, relationships, productivity, or creativity? How is this impacted by collaborating remotely rather than face to face? I also wonder how much of this is individual to each of us. Perhaps some people don’t feel the same thing I do. I haven’t found much other than anecdotal examples and consultants’ philosophies on the virtues of remote working, and would welcome the debate and sharing of any solid ideas on this. Feel free to dive in in the comments below.

Covid-19 isn’t the first global pandemic, and won’t be the last. The difference this time around is the digital revolution gives us tools to think about how we work, and working from home has become the buzz topic. One thing for sure is that when it comes to a large and complex businesses, the availability of robust and reliable cloud based digital work practice tools were essential to our business continuity this year.

Widespread remote working has challenged many historic assumptions and practices, but long term changes are unlikely to be just a knee jerk reaction, and require a concerted reflection. It is crucial also to keep the organizational culture in mind, the values of the company, and its social DNA. For industrial businesses and many other business sectors, full online for all staff is just not possible. Not everyone is desk based. Plant workers, frontline customer-facing jobs, and many other examples besides cannot be envisaged remotely. It is important to avoid a “them and us” division in an organization. As a species we humans are social creatures. We have thrived socially together for millennia. Let’s not waste a good crisis to innovate our working practices and improve employee wellbeing, and better support our teams as manager-coach. At the same time, let’s be careful and deliberate in the decisions we make going forward, and keep in mind that people are our greatest asset, and that our manager-coach play a key role to listening to them and organizing the activity appropriately, and this will definitely to some extent include a form of remote work going forward.

Alan Lambert is an International HR leader currently working at the Corporate HR Strategy division of a global energy major