Leading teams remotely - developing leaders for the Future of Work
For the past few months I have been working with leaders at Salford council who are rolling out an ambitious Future of Work programme. The council will be encouraging teams to work in much more flexible ways, with the option to work from any location across the borough, or to work remotely. To support this, Salford are investing in the facilitates and technology required... but also in the leadership skills and team behaviours that will enable this new way of working.
In the wake of the emerging coronavirus situation, the work that they are doing to enable this has now proven to be very prescient.
Getting remote working right does depend a lot on enterprise systems and technology - do you have appropriate infrastructure and tools in place? Can you access everything remotely with ease? Do you have the bandwidth for more people to do so? Do you have good team communication channels?
In this sense, some organisations will be in a better place than others, as they will have already invested in cloud based tools and systems.
But, the truth is that the technology is only one aspect of what makes remote working work. As important (if not more) is team culture and leadership: Is there trust? Can you work cohesively and communicate clearly? Have you agreed on your remote working expectations and behaviours - beyond what tools or channels you are going to use?
With Salford, we focused on 4 key areas of development that supports remote teams and helps guide the leaders who will lead them.
Trust & Psychological Safety
Is there trust within the team? Do managers trust their reports to do their work to their best effort? Do teams trust their leaders? Research has show that the biggest differentiator of good leaders is that they lead with trust. And high trust organisations, where employees trust their leaders, are shown to perform better.
Psychological safety is the greater differentiator of high performing teams. This is when people feel safe enough to be open with one another, to show vulnerability, to take risks or make mistakes. Amy Edmundson speaks prolifically about the importance of building psychological safety in the workplace and the advantages of doing so.
Open, effective communications
Teams who know how to communicate, and who do so openly and collaboratively, are better poised to move to productive remote working. Remote, dispersed teams rely much more heavily on regular, effective, clear communications. Teams who are already accustomed to good communication behaviours find it easier to transfer these ways of working to remote channels. Can people write well? Can they express themselves clearly and succinctly? Do you have visual tools you use to make it easy to absorb information? Think about how you currently communicate: checking in regularly, talking about challenges, tracking progress, reflecting on success and failures, nurturing team cohesion (trust & psychological safety!) and consider these as the superpowers you should build on.
Managing outcomes rather than time
If teams are no longer co-located, there can be a big shift in how people thinks about their productivity. A busy week in the office can mean a lot of meetings that take up time, but do not really generate outcomes. Unfortunately many workers are not clear on what they should be getting done each week, and when they are then working in isolation, it becomes difficult to plan their weeks and at times this can feel overwhelming.
For remote working, leaders and teams who are able to set clear KPIs and goals broken down into smaller time lines (weeks, biweekly, sprints or similar) alleviate this. And teams who can prioritise and break work into tasks, that can be reviewed frequently (e.g. beginning and end of each week), will find working remotely easier to manage. Ideally your project, scrum or delivery managers can be your remote team conductors.
Agreeing on the team’s remote working behaviours
Finally, everyone needs to be on the same page in terms of what is expected of them when working remotely.
As part of the work we have been doing with the council, we have tasked every team leader to work with their teams to decide what are the behaviours, routines and communications they want to see in their remote working. Whilst there are many good practice ideas of what works, it should be up to the team to co-design their own ‘team charter’.
To support these leaders, we designed a quick guide to facilitate a remote charter design.
Now that more and more businesses are considering mandating working from home in response to coronavirus, we hope that this process will be helpful to others.
If you have any comments we would love to hear them! And if you are interested in discussing this, or if you think you need facilitation or support with this process, do get touch! talk@thearc.group.
