Best Practices for Leading Remote Teams: Part 1

This two-part series is designed to provide leaders and managers a series of strategies to aid their abrupt transition to working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. This piece includes ideas to structure communication and roles and responsibilities while working remotely. Best practices from this first part of the series include:

• Turn on the webcam in team meetings to increase your influence.
• Clearly outline a vision and articulate expectations to increase accountability.
• Remember to let go — let your people do their work!

On March 24, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel of experienced work-from-home team leaders from a variety of industries and experiences. (If you would like to view the recorded webinar, click here.)

I lead a team of nine who recently transitioned from primarily in-office work to fully at-home work. From a review of studies, blogs and even reflecting on my own experience leading a virtual team, the following are common challenges to leading remote teams: lack of accountability, inability to build relationships through informal in-person conversations, lack of attention in meetings, loss of boundaries and lack of clarity on goals and objectives.

Broadly construed, these common challenges are seen through the lens of issues with communication and accountability.

To navigate issues in communication experienced in remote teams, both our panel and the leadership literature recommend the following:

• Turn on the webcam in team meetings to increase your influence: A brief article published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (Roghanizad and Bohns, 2017) indicated that individuals grossly overestimate their influence over email. In the first study, requests made face-to-face were 34 times more effective than requests made via email.
• Be a great listener: Clarify and summarize others’ ideas, and listen for underlying concerns and bring them out into the open.
• Don’t settle for silence: Draw input from all participants in meetings. Asking for individual engagement prior to a meeting decreased absenteeism to zero percent (0%) in one study conducted by researchers with participants from the Navy War College.
• Establish your communication channels: Remove ambiguity around communication by articulating the tools that should be used for various team functions across your team — e.g., video chatting, quick chats, calls and work collaboration software services.

To address concerns on team roles, responsibilities and accountabilities, here’s what our panel and the literature had to say:

• Manage expectations: Let team members know what is expected of them with clarity. Designate time to exchange feedback with individual members of your team.
• Outline success: Take time to revisit your team’s mission, goals and key objectives. Revise them as needed to adapt to your new environment. Then, describe what success looks like for each goal, and maintain definite standards of performance. (Harvard)
• Articulate rules of engagement: Ask team members to follow a specific set of rules and regulations — although these may be adapted as your work patterns are adapted.
• Shared responsibility is no responsibility: Assign team members to particular tasks to ensure work gets done.
• Dashboards: For teams who have not shared project management software before, establishing shared ‘green — yellow — red’ project trackers on tools as simple as a Google Sheet will facilitate transparency and accountability without adding to team emails, chat and other communication platforms. Structure a daily or weekly update to keep the information relevant.
• Let go: After you’ve articulated the vision, established your team members’ individual goals and expectations, it’s vital to let go of control. Especially in a virtual environment, you cannot routinely monitor team’s progress — and, arguably, nor should you. Resist the urge to micromanage. Your teams will likely surprise you with their outcomes!

So, if you’re a team lead adjusting to this new remote work environment, you can do it. Clearly outline what success looks like, set communication patterns and then let go. Your teams will thank you!

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References

Dawson, K. (19 November 2019). Two things managers must do. Lead Read Today. https://fisher.osu.edu/blogs/leadreadtoday/blog/two-things-managers-must-do/

Li, M., & Prewett, M. (7 November 2019). On building trust in modern teams: The role of team and task design. Lead Read Today. https://fisher.osu.edu/blogs/leadreadtoday/blog/building-trust-in-modern-teams-2

Lount, B. (2018). Those who trust their leaders follow their leaders: Part two. Lead Read Today. https://fisher.osu.edu/blogs/leadreadtoday/blog/those-who-trust-their-leaders-follow-their-leaders-part-two/

Malhotra, A., Majchrzak, A., & Rosen, B. (2007). Leading virtual teams. Academy of Management Perspectives, 21, 60-70.

Mittleman, D. D., Briggs, R. O., & Nunamaker, J. F. (2000). Best practices in facilitating virtual meetings: Some notes from initial experience. Group Facilitation: A Research and Applications Journal, 2, 5-14.

Rogelberg, S. (2019). The surprising science of meetings: How you can lead your team to peak performance. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Roghanizad, M. & Bohns, V. (2017). Ask in person: You're less persuasive than you think over email. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 69, 223-226. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2016.10.002.

(n.d.) Challenges to managing virtual teams and how to overcome them. https://www.extension.harvard.edu/professional-development/blog/challenges-managing-virtual-teams-and-how-overcome-them