Remote control: leading remote teams

Team leading / 01 September 2008

Remote working is on the rise, bringing undoubted benefits for businesses and staff alike. But for the managers of these mobile teams, it poses its own set of problems – how do you maintain good communication and promote team spirit when your staff hardly see each other? Luckily, reports Sue Weekes, with the right training and sensitive use of technology, managers can learn how to get the best from their remote teams.

Life used to be so simple. You got up, went to work and came home again. Nowadays work is no longer a place but an activity, and where you do it could be anywhere from a garden shed to the open road. Many of us are now also empowered to decide when we work, fitting working hours around the demands of our lifestyles.

A raft of factors are driving these changes, including liberating technologies such as broadband, the growing emphasis on work-life balance and the trend towards flexible working. We have also seen a shift from a manufacturing to a service economy, globalisation and the use of the internet as a platform for world trade, spawning more disparate organisations and making location largely irrelevant.

Managers need to adapt to this changing working landscape – and quickly. The Tomorrow’s Leaders survey and report, carried out jointly by ILM, City & Guilds and Henley Management College and published in July, found that more than 80% of organisations already have people working for them flexibly and more than half of managers themselves work from home at least part of the time. Three quarters have employees who also sometimes work at home.

What does this mean for managers? In short, they must learn how to manage people and teams who they are not going to see every day and who could work anywhere from a couple to several thousand miles away. Some 45% of respondents saw no difficulty in managing remote workers, but a sizeable 26% said it did present problems. Of these, teamworking was cited as a concern by 40%, and 44% felt remote workers missed out on social activities.

Skills to lead

The research also revealed a lack of formal training in remote management. Among those already managing remote teams, 40% felt they needed to develop better communication skills. Clearly some formal training is required, but it needs to go deeper. “Development comes from the top down, and senior managers didn’t get where they are by working flexibly or remotely so they are not good role models,” comments Peter Thomson, author of the report and director of the Future Work Forum at Henley Management College. “There are some tools and techniques we can train people in, such as using IT more effectively, time management and aspects of communication,” says Thomson, “but much of it will be to do with the culture of the organisation and interpersonal behaviour.”

As teams form, the building up of the personal relations between team members is crucial to the subsequent performance potential of the team. When teams cannot meet frequently in person, technology can help to bridge the gap.

Ray McGroarty, solutions marketing director, Polycom

He recommends workshops in which managers sit down with employees and come up with a new contract for how they work together. “And this isn’t just on a one-to-one basis,” he says, “but with the whole remote team to discuss things like how they can better meet service level agreements, for example.” He believes there should also be an internal consultancy role for the HR department: “They can advise on the legal aspects, of course, but could offer managers a helpline when it comes to managing employees remotely.”
 
Euan Cowie, lead consultant at learning solutions provider Academee, which has seen increased demand for formal training in managing remote staff, agrees that managers need to sit down with all members of the team to define their working practices. Remote workers tend to become highly self-motivated, he says, so the challenge is to foster a team culture. “Individuals who work remotely build up assumptions about what is going on. They can get uncertain about things and assume, for instance, that other people in the team may be closer to the leader than they are,” says Cowie. He stresses that ongoing communication is the big issue with remote teams. “It really is a case of communication, communication, communication. Managers have got to find a way of filling the informal communications gap. Co-located employees pass a lot of information around informally such as at the coffee machine.”

Learn to trust

The other big issue that needs to be addressed is trust. According to the Tomorrow’s Leaders research, an overwhelming 90% of managers believe they can trust their employees to manage themselves. However, they must ensure that the reality lives up to this belief if remote working is to succeed. Thomson points out that 35% reported that they needed to know when employees were working and 54% said they needed to know where they were working.

The starting point for building this trust is for managers to learn how to judge people’s performance on output and results, moving away from the culture of ‘presenteeism’ that has prevailed in the workplace for so long. “In an office, managers don’t necessarily know what their employees are doing but as long as they are sitting there, not upsetting too many people, they assume they are being productive,” says Thomson. “The person who stays late to finish their work is treated as a hero whereas we should be rewarding the person who gets the job done quickly. A lot of current management practices actually reward low productivity.”

There are signs that organisations are meeting the challenge of remote management head-on. Circle Anglia was formed in 2005 from the merger of the two housing groups, Circle 33 Housing Trust and Anglia Housing Group. The merger meant the organisation had staff in 19 offices and more than 90 sheltered and support schemes, many of which had to be managed remotely. Working with an ILM-accredited centre called Bespoke Training, it developed the ‘managing remote staff’ course. The one-day course allows managers to talk through the current management issues for the teams they are in charge of, explains Norman Greenwald, head of learning and development at Circle Anglia. “They also address their own interpersonal needs within their team setting and consider the needs of the staff they manage,” he says. “They have the opportunity to discuss openly Circle Anglia’s management systems and identify how they can be used for optimal results and identify new methods to improve their effectiveness as managers of remote staff.”

Remote access

As well as formal training, managers should also make use of the raft of tools and technology at their disposal to increase their effectiveness as remote managers. Polycom is a major provider of collaborative tools for voice, video and data and also uses the technology to manage its own remote teams. It has around 2,300 team members, the majority working as dispersed teams, and it conducts hundreds of ad hoc video calls every day.

“Managing remote teams is part of the Polycom culture,” explains Ray McGroarty, solutions marketing director at Polycom EMEA and who is himself part of a remote team. “We endeavour to have our staff close to the customers that they serve and so do not base a large proportion of our staff at HQ locations.”

But he adds that Polycom’s vision is to remove the ‘distance barrier’. “As teams form, the building up of the personal relations between team members is crucial to the subsequent performance potential of the team,” he says. “When teams cannot meet frequently in person, technology can help to bridge the gap. Clearly audio conferencing has a part to play, but in the early stages of team forming, the naturalness of video-conferencing technology these days can be very effective in shortening the time taken to achieve high performance.”

Managers shouldn’t hide behind tools such as e-mail, though, when a matter would be better dealt with over the phone. They should also take the trouble to learn their remote team’s likes and dislikes when it comes to receiving information, says Cowie. Some people are happy with long, descriptive messages, whereas others would rather receive concise, bullet-pointed lists. He cites the case of a UK employee who always expected a lot of detail in his communication with colleagues, but this was misconstrued by his US team members as a sign of mistrust. “Leaders need to understand the preferences of the individual people they are managing,” emphasises Cowie. For those managing teams spread across the globe, he adds, some cultures are better than others at remote working. “Experience suggests that relationship-building cultures such as the Spanish, Portuguese and Mexican are good at remote managing because they tend to spend time building relationships at the start of a project, whereas US and northern European cultures tend to drive straight into the task and miss the specific emotional issues that exist in remote teams.” Britons, he says, lie somewhere in the middle but adapt well to new processes and ways of working.

Computer generation

Managers in the UK have not got long to put their house in order when it comes to managing staff in remote locations effectively. The pressure on companies to reduce their carbon footprint is likely to see more encouraging home and remote working where practical, while the influx of the millennial generation into the workforce looks certain to create an even bigger demand for more flexible working practices from workers themselves.

“We have a generation gap between middle-aged managers and young employees,” says Thomson. “Employees in their 20s grew up with computers in their bedrooms, they text their friends and talk to them on Skype. Today’s generation of managers didn’t have access to the social technology we have today. Younger employees are going to wonder why, for instance companies don’t use Skype, and will put pressure on employers in areas such as this.”