In yesterday’s issue of Promotional Consultant Today, we shared key strategies to help telecommuters stay motivated and successful. But what if you manage people who work from home? What are key strategies you can follow to be successful in managing this type of team? Today and tomorrow, Promotional Consultant Today shares these tips from author Jason Evanish.
1. Make time for small talk. Evanish says that when managing remote employees, it’s easy to just talk about what needs to get done and then jump off your call and get back to executing. In some cases, that’s exactly what you should do if you’re on a tight deadline, fighting a fire or just having a quick standup meeting. However, if that’s all you do, you’re really missing out on a critical part of management.
He says you should build rapport with every member of your team, including those you don’t see in person every day. Rapport does not come from doing and talking about work. It comes from getting to know the individual personally. Ask about their interests, their family and where they’re from. Demonstrating you care is important to them and essential for you to truly understand their motivations.
This sense of community is what helps you get through problems. It builds connection and trust that are important for a virtual team.
2. Use video as much as you can. Research shows more than half of human communication is nonverbal. When you don’t get to see someone in the office every day, having any type of visual clue to what someone is thinking is essential. Otherwise you might make assumptions about what they are thinking or how they are reacting. Video provides those visual clues. Tools like Skype and Google Hangout make it easy to incorporate video conferencing into your daily work practice.
3. Have longer one-on-ones and make these meetings a priority. When you don’t have the “run into each other in the hallway” time, it’s important to have dedicated time to discuss work with the individuals on your team. The employees will always have that security in knowing that they have a dedicated time to reach you to get feedback on issues and discuss both short-term and long-term programs and goals.
Evanish suggests dedicating a full hour to one-on-ones every week, and he says never cancel a one-on-one. This is the fastest way to build resentment in your team. Remote employees miss out on a lot of things going on in your office. They miss out on brief announcements and the kinds of information that would naturally spread across an office related to other parts of the company. Having virtual one-on-one meetings with remote team members provides an opportunity to make up for that as well as handle all the little things that build up over the course of a week. With so much to cover, you simply cannot afford to miss one for these team members.
4. Show your appreciation in a fun way. When working remotely, sometimes emails and text messages can be construed in the wrong way. Show appreciation visually through the use of fun, animated gifs and emoticons to convey emotion. If someone did great work or there’s a good team win, find a gif at a site like giphy.com and send it with a message of appreciation: Great job! Or, way to go, team! It breaks up the monotony of standard emails, and shows your enthusiasm in a creative way.
Interested in more ways to manage a remote team? Read PCT again tomorrow.
Source: Jason Evanish is the founder of Lighthouse, an app to help you motivate and retain your team by making it easier to follow best practices and build the habits of a great manager.
