Managing Remote Teams takes some Effort. How not to suck at it?

After the pandemic forced more than 10 million Indians to Work from Home, many first-timers now prefer this lifestyle. It’s tough to miss long traffic jams, chatty coworkers, and office politics. On the other hand, many companies have also realized that productive work can be managed in WFH mode too. WFH also gives a host of other benefits such as reduced fixed costs, extended talent pools, increased motivation and more.

As reported by Time of India, Marico, is planning to have 30% employees work from home even post COVID. Advertising firm Wunderman Thompson is looking at a 50:50 solution, so that only 50% staff is at office on any given day. Indian IT companies are obviously at the forefront of this move with making permanent changes to their work structures.

In fact, my bet is that if organizations don't provide a remote work option post COVID, they may risk losing their best employees. It may even inspire many workers to ditch the 9-5 grind & become a freelancer.

However, there is a significant hurdle to cross if we want to make the Remote Working shift permanently. That is with regards to Talent Management within the company. Once we have a WFH structure in place, the management cannot have the same degree of control over their employees like in a centralized physical location.

To circumvent this, many companies are using unethical means of installing surveillance & recording software onto their employees’ laptops. Time tracking apps such as ActivTrak, Time Doctor, and Hubstaff all are seeing increased interest in their products. This may not be a long lasting tactic as it seriously degrades employee morale & loyalty.

So how can Leadership ensure that the organization can manage their virtual teams effectively? How can one ensure a decentralized team can be built for efficiency and also lead to growth for the company?

1) Focus on output, rather than time spent by employee.

This should be well understood by all managers. The era of Time Clocking is behind us, and it should be have been redundant by now. Leadership have to make truce with the fact that we are not paying for an employee’s time, instead we pay for the value each employee delivers. This mindset change is essential if we have to navigate through the terrain of Remote Workforce.

2) Put extra attention into onboarding new Employees.

On Boarding is crucial for every team. When new employees feel welcome and get access to all of the tools & information they need, they become engaged and efficient. However, the challenge in this case, with remote workers is twofold. Firstly, the new employees aren’t surrounded by experienced colleagues who can "show them the ropes". Secondly, they don’t have access to the company’s work culture as easily as someone entering a physical office. With remote employees, onboarding must be well-structured and a digital walkthrough must be provided for proper orientation. It’s also a good idea to assign a mentor for the first few weeks to help a new remote employee integrate smoothly.

3) Agree on time boundaries and respect time zones.

This may not have been a challenge for many companies as yet, although global MNCs did struggle with this. Instead of letting the time differences cripple us, we can leverage the same for greater productivity. Within the same city also different people work at different time intervals. The trick is to carefully plan & align work between different team members. Imagine you have 3 team members, one who likes rising early and to start working by 7am, the other two members like starting work only after 9am. Now let’s imagine that out of these two team members, one of them likes to take a break in afternoon and return back to work by 4pm and work till late evenings. So the way to structure it for highest effectiveness would be to fix the time interval that each wants to work in. Clear out the time overlap between all team members, so as to slot all video collaboration and meetings only within that slot. Beyond this divide the workflow in such a manner that now as a Team, they can work from 7am to 7pm in the evening. So now the company gets 12 hours of combined work done instead of parallel 7 hours. This might sound flimsy, but many digitally driven companies are scaling fast with such disruptive thinking.

4) Restore Social Connections between Team Members.

Meetings are inherently social – and this aspect of meetings is often undervalued. Social connection is a vital part of work-life for all employees. Healthy social connections also deliver benefits for the business or larger organization, in part by fostering employee engagement and loyalty. The desire to feel a sense of belonging is innate to humans, and a sense of belonging at work can boost our happiness and our willingness to contribute to the organization’s success.

Unfortunately, the social aspect of office work has been severely tested by the coronavirus pandemic and resulting lockdown in many businesses. But there is good news.

Academic research indicates that video conferencing can be an effective replacement for those informal conversations and restore the sense of belonging and connection that people miss during social distancing. There is further evidence that video conferencing not only improves overall meeting effectiveness but could have positive downstream effects such as improving productivity and employee engagement.

Hence, this is a good time to consider adding webcams and headsets to the standard set of tools issued to employees. These collaboration tools are purpose-built for video meetings and increase both the effectiveness of meetings and positive perceptions of attendees.

• Headsets such as Logitech Zones improve sound not only for people wearing them but also for others in the meeting. Make sure everyone can hear and be heard.
• High-quality webcams like Logitech C930e with HD resolution and light-adjusting capabilities can help users feel more confident about how they appear on camera, which in turn increases their comfort level.

5) Create a multi-channel meeting environment.

Meetings and staying connected are essential in managing remote teams. Communication channels must be clear and easily accessible. Why multi-channel? Because even in the office, people often use many devices, not to mention when they work remotely or on the go. Desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile phone, even a smart watch can all serve as office equipment. Remote Employees expect to have a consistent digital experience. Managers should be facilitators and equip their teams with meeting tools that answer their needs.

Next, let us look into how Leadership Roles can be subdivided to effectively manage smaller teams working together as a big unit.

Leadership, at its core is not about bossing people around. Instead it is about unleashing the potential of other team members. Remote Work Culture makes it all the more necessary for the leadership to make other members shine in their own leadership story.

The old style of Centralized Decision making will need a lot of structural changes, and a re-designing the organization structure must be taken up. There is a need to decentralize decision-making, so that decision rights are as close as possible to the people who deal with customers, competitors, front-line employees, and other stakeholders. By doing so you can avoid the delays associated with information and approvals traveling up and down the management hierarchy.

The idea of Decentralizing leadership is not new; it has been implemented in the sphere of political framework since a long time, sometimes successfully and many times not so much. However, until now there were costs in terms of time, money, and resources associated with decentralized decision making, which made it improbable for an enterprise structure. However, with the technologies we have right now it is very much possible to have a decentralized leadership style often across geographies.

I am not presenting a new path-breaking framework – but it pays to get back to often forgotten first principles.

As per Harvard Business Review, there are four qualities which most executives want their organizations to have: responsiveness, reliability, efficiency, and consistency. Let us see how each of these qualities can be implemented in a decentralized framework.

1) Responsiveness via Immediate Action. Responsiveness is all about taking the right action quickly in response to opportunities and challenges. When we sub-divide the functional core of any business into different teams with their respective leaders, then it speeds up the response to every opportunity or challenge. Only the challenges which cannot be addressed at the unit level bubble up to the centralized management. Thus it cuts down on a lot of bureaucracy in the process. So it makes sense to give authorization to multiple people, heading different teams to speed up responsiveness, and it helps in delegation also.

2) Reliability through compliance. For some tasks, it is desirable or necessary to have common rules across the operating units: policies, standards, methods, procedures, or protocols. Think of HR policies, product design standards, quality compliance, fraud reporting procedures, financial reporting systems, etc.. These rules are meant to align the operating units with the company’s overall objectives, and make the business more predictable. However, until now these things were hard to decentralize, but not anymore. With the tools we have with us today, all the protocols can be well defined in a centralized location on the cloud with software tools like Microsoft SharePoint, etc. and whenever any employee requires accessing and adhering with these policies, they can do so in an on-the-go mechanism. Moreover, once the employee submits their work, each team member can also vote the quality of the work delivered as per these policies at their own level to form a consensus over the adherence of these standards. Of Course there may be issues that need to be addressed at a higher level which should become the exception than the norm in a digital first world.

3) Efficiency via proper tools. Having the same small team do more of the same task leads to continuity, standardization, specialization, leverage, and productivity. This is wonderfully addressed by dividing a big team into smaller teams each of which focus on a few tasks repetitively. This can be addressed very well if we have remote teams and team members, each of which are focused on smaller units of task. Add to that the time saved in commutation by team members, and also the flexibility in work timings and we have a perfect combination for efficient task management at local levels. With the right tools like Microsoft Teams, which provides the ability to have multiple sub-teams and each with a variety of local features like dedicated channels etc. dividing leadership activities into smaller units becomes very agile and easy. Another significant contributor to efficiency is avoiding duplication of work. Different operating units often have a common need for which the solutions can be (nearly) identical (e.g, an instrument to monitor plant performance, a CRM tool, etc.) As a consequence, it is rather wasteful for each of the units to develop these solutions in parallel. In a digital first company, there will be a centralized repository on the cloud for such documents/code/solutions that can be accessed and if need be updated too for the perusal of every team member across the organization. All this combine in a decentralized organization to make decisions more quickly than one with a centralized structure. A manager can often make a decision without having to wait for it to go up a chain of command, allowing the organization to react quickly to situations where fast action can mean the difference between gaining and losing a customer.

4) Consistency via empowerment. When you empower employees nearly uniformly, by providing more autonomy to make their own decisions, it gives them a sense of importance and makes them feel as if they have more input in the direction of the organization. It also allows them to make better use of the knowledge and experience they have gained and implement some of their own ideas. Empowered employees can consistently outperform with their self initiative than an organization where the boss is always looking over their shoulders. In fact, this is the way forward if you have to make do with a remote team structure. It is essential to let go of old structures, which will become a bottleneck in a digital first world with remote teams.

With the advent of collaboration "Super-Tools" like Microsoft Teams, and complementary Hardware add-ons like Logitech Video Conferenicng, there is no limit to how they can be leveraged for constructing a decentralized team with more responsible leaders across the board. Then we have technologies like Virtual Desktop Integration, which further eases the deployment of Remote Teams.

Instead of looking forward to a "New Normal" post COVID, I believe we should start expecting a "Better Normal".