Leadership In Remote Work | What Skills Do You Need To Lead

In more and more organizations, allowing remote working is becoming a common practice. There is even a desire to encourage working remotely in the hope of saving on office space costs. In the most progressive organizations, there is talk of working independently of time and place. There is a willingness to take a step in the direction where the time spent at the workplace is no longer the decisive factor, but the fact that results are generated. Here, new skills for leadership in remote work are needed.

Remote Working Can Make You Feel Even More Distant

If interaction in the work community has not been genuine and sufficient in the past, it can disappear completely with remote working. Workers’ feelings of not being known, not being interested in what they are doing or not being supported are likely to increase during the period of remote working. The same anxiety is certainly true for the manager; can I be confident that the work will get done, quality will not suffer and my employees will stay well? How should I improve my leadership in remote work?

Although interaction is always multi-directional, the main responsibility for maintaining it and developing an organizational culture lies with management. Even good systems or skills will not help if they are not supported by the organizational culture. It is worth documenting principles and engaging people in agreed ways of working, but the strongest impact on leading people is by example.

In this blog post, we want to focus specifically on the topic from a management perspective. In the past, we wrote about the challenges of remote management. Now we want to highlight the issues raised in various studies. The aim of this article is to help you identify the areas that need to be developed in your own organization or in your own leadership in remote work and virtual teams to be succesfull.

Test If You Are A Great Remote Leader

Do you demonstrate and build trust?
Do you share responsibility?
Do you keep in touch with employees on your own initiative and do this regularly?
Do you pay attention to the tone of communication? Do you remember to start emails with a greeting?
Do you reply to messages promptly, at least with an acknowledgement that the message has been received?
Do you listen actively? Do you ask questions?
Do you stick to agreed remote meetings?
Do you organize opportunities for participation?
Do you value collaborative intelligence and harness the innovative power of the network?
Do you encourage experimentation?
Are you aware of risks and proactive, especially in the area of well-being at work?
Do you know your employees on a personal level, below the surface?
Do you understand and value diversity?
Do you coach? Do you support your employee’s growth and development?
Do you set targets and monitor progress together with your employees?
Do you share information to the appropriate extent?
Are you a clear and systematic virtual leader? Do your digital collaboration tools run smoothly?

Benefits Of Remote Work From a Management Perspective

Leading remote and virtual work is no more challenging than managing a same-site team, but it is different. On the other hand, many managers find it more challenging to lead a virtual team. We are not really at all surprised because typically we humans try to operate in the same way even when circumstances change.

If you’re trying to lead a remote team with the same principles you’re used to leading a same-site team, you’re bound to find it challenging. Managers are therefore asked to question their own behaviour and change their management practices to adapt to new circumstances.

In particular, traditional ways of managing, supervising and organizing work are a barrier to better use of virtual work. In many organizations, old management cultures and attitudes still prevail. For example, the value placed on controlled and time-controlled work is holding back the uptake of virtual working.

Studies have shown that remote and virtual working increases employees’’ autonomy. It has also been found to allow better concentration on work tasks. Virtual teamwork has also been found to often be more task-oriented and business-focused.

Interestingly, virtual teams are also more egalitarian, which allows, among other things, better access to the ideas and expertise of their members. At its best and when managed properly, a virtual team is also capable of more effective decision-making.

Challenges For Management

A more challenging aspect of managing virtual work is building a functioning team. If it is remote management and people are in the same place part of the time, it is much easier to build a team. However, in the case of a multi-site team, building a good team spirit and team identity requires more effort and planning.

People have an innate need to feel a sense of belonging. If team members do not feel a sense of belonging, the result is less communication and team cohesion, and lower employee morale and organizational commitment. However, the feeling of isolation is not only due to physical distance, but the psychological feeling of closeness is more essential than the physical one for belonging.

Those working virtually or at a distance easily perceive a lack of support from the work community as a problem. This social support is also a challenge for managers. Social support includes emotional support, appreciation, caring, trust, listening, giving feedback, advice and guidance. Social support is an important work resource, as it prevents feelings of job fatigue, stress and dissatisfaction in uncertain situations.

Building trust is also a challenge from a managerial perspective: trust can be superficial and elusive; and giving employees sufficient attention, motivation, involvement and coaching.

Information Management Is Emphasized in Leading Remote Work

The vast majority of remote working is self-directed information work and in many ways the employee has become the manager of their own work. In order for workers to become self-directed, it is even more important that work and decisions can be made on the basis of reliable and up-to-date information.

This raises questions such as:

Is there a shared vision of strategy, work objectives and quality within the organization?
How should they be communicated and dealt with in the work community?
Is relevant information collected to support decision-making? For example, is customer feedback collected on a regular basis?
Does the employee keep track of what is going on? Is information about changes in customer satisfaction, for example, passed on to those who can influence it?
How do you ensure that everyone has access to relevant information? Are process descriptions, work instructions and other documents also available remotely?
Do information systems allow for self and community management by employees? For example, organizing their own shifts within the team?
How do you ensure that individuals learn and transfer their skills into the organization’s knowledge and competence capital?
Does everyone know how to use the information systems?
Is information security in place?

Pay Attention To These In Your Management

Reject ineffective policies
Inspire people to work for a common cause
Lead people instead of things
Focus on connecting people
Questioning assumptions and beliefs
Break old rules

Reject Ineffective Policies And Inspire People To Work For a Common Cause

Leading a virtual team is likely to require a critical examination of your own and the team’s performance. Ineffective approaches need to be rejected and the manager needs to find new ways of managing.

In practice, this may mean new ways of motivating people, new ways of communicating the vision and creating a shared culture. Also new ways of thinking about how work should be done and what the organization should look like.

A common purpose motivates. Especially in the case of a virtual team, it promotes interaction and facilitates the creation of a virtual team atmosphere. The manager needs to get the team members excited about the issue and working towards a common cause.

Lead People Instead Of Things And Focus On Connecting People

Leading remote and virtual work is first and foremost about leading people. Focus more on leading people, not things. Increasingly, the responsibility for things and results is shifting to the people themselves.

It is important to recognise that management is about connecting people, not technologies. Suddenly, when managing the collaboration of telecommuters and virtual workers, technology can take over. So remember people first, and don’t get too hung up on a particular technology or pick too many different working tools.

Question Assumptions And Beliefs And Break Old Rules

Leaders need to be reminded to question their own actions. Shaking your assumptions and beliefs is healthy, and you won’t find new ways of doing things without questioning them. In a good spirit, also seek to question your employees’ beliefs. In some organizations, there is still a strong belief that remote workers should not be called during the day because it will distract them.

By discovering policies that don’t work and questioning your own leadership in remote work and team performance, you may also come up against old rules. Dare to throw out old rules and create new ones.

Communication Plays An Important Role

Building trust between staff and management is one of the most important tasks for getting the job done. Open and regular communication with team members is important, as is demonstrating the manager’s trust in team members.

Communication is therefore of paramount importance when managing a virtual team. Successful managers manage to build personal relationships with staff, regardless of distance.

In addition, good virtual team management requires discipline and focus. The management style must be clear and consistent. Follow-up plays an important role in managing virtual work.

Concrete ways to increase and improve communication include telephone and virtual meetings, the use of agendas in meetings, different visualization materials, documents and notes provided before and after meetings, and facilitation and participation techniques used in meetings.

Starting Points For Successful Remote Leadership

There have always been exceptional situations, and they are a good opportunity to stop and think about how things could be done differently from the way they have been done in the past. Would a new way be better than a bag of old ones? In remote leadership, the focus should be on clarity, which consists of the following elements:

Tools

In remote working, it is very important to have the remote management tools in place and clear rules on how to communicate about what is going on. In many organizations, there are plenty of tools: Slack, Whatsapp, email and other instant messaging tools, with the result that messages get lost in the shuffle. Is less more? What is our toolbox for communicating?

Contact

What are the rules of communication? What, when and who do I contact? As a chaperone, what kind of example do I set of what is important? If the organization used to have a tradition of coffee breaks, which everyone thought was important, what is its role now? Can it be replaced by something virtual?

Objectives

Objectives should be clear, but not too strict, imposed from above. Avoiding micro-management and trust are important issues in managing remote teams.

Roles, Responsibilities And Powers

The same requirement for clarity applies to roles, responsibilities and powers. What is someone’s responsibility and what are their powers. These roles are even more important in remote working.

Monitoring And Reporting

What is expected of me, how to get the job done, and how to verify it. Monitoring and reporting gives structure and structure to the work. This is particularly useful for team members who need stronger leadership and support.

Transparency

Openness means that team members can ask questions about issues that are on their minds and share problems and successes. Openness works both ways.

Tips For Successful Leadership in Remote Work

Build an open communication culture, create common processes and guiding models for working together.
Provide regular feedback to those being led.
Take time to communicate the vision and clarify objectives.
Build trust and foster team spirit.
Be aware of and take into account the different needs of different employees.
Adopt a coach-like approach to leadership. Learn to ask good questions instead of giving ready answers.
Share leadership in remote work with your team – for employees, freedom also brings responsibility. Make it clear where employees can make independent decisions.
Adopt an open, positive and solution-oriented attitude.
Be empathetic, firm, decisive and focused on results.
Coordinate the activities of employees and adequately communicate what people are doing among team members.

Facilitate team activities by finding ways to improve communication, humanity and social interaction.

Leadership In Remote Work Requires New Skills

Create remote working structures together with employees. This means thinking together about inclusive, functional meeting practices, how work processes run in the world of remote working, how to communicate and where to store information. It’s also important to go over roles and responsibilities, i.e. who does what and who does what.

Show you care. It is worth arranging regular, one-to-one meetings with members of the work community if possible. Front-line workers may think, “I’m available, but employees may not want to be bothered.”

Be consistent and systematic. Stick to promises and deadlines, because organizational skills are what is expected of a frontline worker when leading remote work.

Take care of your own well-being. This is easier said than done. But you can seek counseling and take care of your recovery. Frontline work is often quite lonely, and in the world of telecommuting, frontline workers can be even more lonely.