Does Leading Remote Work, Require Intentional Management?

Remote working has suddenly become the norm for people worldwide during COVID-19. While many companies were trying to initiate this concept since long, but COVID has actually forcefully framed it into a real picture.

Lately, many people have come to realize in recent weeks that remote work does involve quite a bit more than just a simple change in location. Remote work actually requires a significant shift in views and experience of the traditional ways of working, thinking, and even leading.

It likely comes as meager solace to realize that the set up remote teams who progressed to far off workplaces pre-pandemic, experienced a significant number of similar agonies and difficulties as those compelled to telecommute absent much by way of arranging or arrangement. The upside is that newly remote teams can learn quite a lot from seasoned remote-work pioneers.

Rebecca Downes from Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of New Zealand; carried a detailed research on how the intentional mangemtn works with remote teams and collectively submitted a full fledged thesis upon the same. She was interested in how managers gain confidence their team is not only working, but working on the right thing—that they are engaged and productive. “Management literature for a long time has assumed you can eyeball people. And that’s different when you don’t see each other in the office day to day,” she says. “Good remote managers understand the context of work is different. One thing that came up repeatedly in the research is the need to be intentional, and be thoughtful and deliberate in engaging with your team and generating the connection, maintaining open lines of communication. Managers needed to develop connections with individual workers. This can mean meeting every week with their remote workers one-on-one, which takes a lot of emotional energy to keep up. It is a big commitment, and you can’t manage as big a team remotely because you can’t skimp on that connection.”

Actually the skills which have been developed as a manager working in physical proximity to people didn’t seem to translate into remote working. Also, there has been something wonderfully ironic about sitting at home in lockdown, researching upon various changes and subjects while everybody in the country who could was frantically trying to switch to working remotely.

Based on previous research, Rebecca expects to see more focus on clear outcomes as a way of managing remote work. “But my own experience, as well as my research, showed that managers were more effective when focusing on building relationships rather than relying primarily on setting outcomes.”

As well as building relationships with staff, managers were also responsible for fostering positive relationships between team members. Most of the 32 managers that Rebecca  interviewed had channels for non-work related conversations—spaces to share pet photos, talk about day-to-day life, and so on.  “Managers also created tools and processes to allow people to acknowledge their peers and express gratitude. Something we miss working remotely is that day-to-day feedback that reassures us that we’re doing a good job, that we’re valued and we fit in, so creating processes like this using existing technology was really important,” says Rebecca.  “When managing a blended team, managers also made sure that everything was written down so that it is equally available whether you are working in the office or from home. A conversation in the corridor wasn’t counted as work until it had been written down so everybody could see what was being actioned.”

Before COVID-19, says Rebecca, remote working was a relatively under-researched area—but now, research into work and productivity is underway on a huge scale, particularly in the United States. “Nobody saw this coming. We’re now seeing research into innovation and creativity, and the side-effects of working remotely, with some good data coming out of these studies already,” says Rebecca. “Before COVID-19, I think a lot of organisations hesitated to allow remote work, because of unknowns—particularly in the management space. Now it is seen as a way of supporting flexibility, as well as equalising opportunity for employees with limited mobility for whom being based in an office can be a barrier to working.”

Hence, leading a remote team (or being part of a remote team) is not easy despite the many tools at your disposal. You’ve got to make sure you don’t overlook the other important pieces to getting it right. You can have the most amazing tools on the planet. Still, it won’t get you anywhere without first being intentional about building trust, establishing effective communication, and paving the way for alignment.