Leading Remote, Blended & Virtual Teams: Best Practices
Many folks are never ever going back to the office. 1 in 5 Americans worked remotely in October, a rate twice that of February 2020, before the COVID19 pandemic seeming changed everything.
While there’s inevitable differences in remote work rates across industries (it remains stubbornly difficult to drive a truck from home with today’s technology), clearly this profound shift to remote and virtual teams is permanent to at least some degree.
If you think the tides are turning and you can just wait out the “WFH Fad” the research and statistics so far suggest you’re sadly mistaken. In fact, more people are remote-working in 2023 than in 2022.
October 2022: 17% of American workforce teleworked
October 2023: 19% of American workforce teleworked
Okay, so who cares? 80% of folks are not working remotely. True – and so long as you have all the talent you need, now and for your future you can stop reading now.
Consider which talent cohort is more likely to command a remote working arrangement:
the least skilled, knowledgeable, and experienced workers, or
the most skilled, knowledgeable, and experienced.
Do you want your team to be made up of the folks who had options, or do you want to be left scratching through piles of resumes after your competitors have already had their pick?
Remote, blended, and virtual teams present unique challenges and opportunities for the modern leader. I’ve curated some best practices in managing remote workers, folks working from home and hybrid workers. Below you’ll find some practical and evidence-based approaches to maximize your success as a leader… and in doing so position your firm to attract and retain the best talent.
Let’s break down the problem of managing remotely into five constituent issues:
leadership,
communication,
collaboration,
goals, and
trust & cohesion.
While these are all inter-related, let’s address them one-by-one.
Transformational Leadership.
Transformational leadership is a framework that defines a leader's ability to inspire and motivate team members to exceed their own limitations. A transformational leader is someone who can elevate a team’s performance in good times and bad, and who leaves the team and its members better off than before they joined the team. A transformational leader lifts up the team’s maturity, ideals and achievement.
Idealized Influence:
This refers to leaders who act as strong role models, earning admiration, trust, and respect.
Role modeling: Exhibiting exemplary behavior.
Trust Building: Gaining trust through consistency and ethical actions.
Respect: Commanding and giving respect.
Inspirational Motivation:
Leaders who communicate high expectations and inspire colleagues to commit and engage with the vision.
Vision Communication: Articulating a compelling vision of the future.
Encouragement: Motivating and inspiring confidence.
Enthusiasm: Demonstrating passion for goals.
Intellectual Stimulation:
Encouraging innovation and creativity, challenging the status quo.
Innovation Encouragement: Promoting new ideas and creative problem-solving.
Critical Thinking: Stimulating colleagues to challenge their own beliefs and values.
Problem-Solving: Encouraging and facilitating complex problem-solving techniques.
Individualized Consideration:
Treating each colleague as an individual and providing personalized guidance and support.
Mentoring: Offering direct, personalized guidance.
Empathy: Demonstrating understanding and concern for individual needs.
Facilitating Growth: Encouraging personal and professional growth.
This is not some new-fangled leadership model, transformational leadership was coined by sociologist James V Downton in 1973. The model is more than 50 years old! There’s simply no acceptable excuse for leaders who can’t get this right.
Interestingly, more recent research has found that transformational leadership has a stronger effect in teams that only use digital communication methods. Leaders who increase their transformational leadership behaviours in remote-only teams drive higher levels of team performance than transformational leaders of hybrid or traditional teams, or leaders who do not display these behaviours of any team structure. This finding has been borne out across multiple studies both before and after the COVID19 pandemic.
Let’s take a closer look at how, exactly, you can use transformational leadership skills to solve the four other problems posed by leading remote and hybrid teams.
Communication – enabling the efficient and accurate exchange of information.
The tyranny of distance and the out of sight – out of mind effect can cause issues for lower-skilled remote and hybrid teams. It is true to say that the watercooler moments don’t happen organically in these teams, and skilled leaders need to manage for these moments more mindfully.
Daily Stand-ups
One simple solution for maintaining cohesion and alignment in remote teams is to implement daily huddles/standups – and to integrate video conferencing tools. Here’s my go-to formula for huddle/stand-up success:
Purpose, Outcome, and Process:
Purpose: Huddles or Stand-up meetings are quick gatherings beneficial for every team. They are designed for team members to share their updates and discuss any blockers in their tasks.
Outcome: These meetings help in building cohesion & alignment, removing blockers, ensuring daily progress, and providing clear indicators of how projects are progressing.
Process: Team members answer three main questions: what they accomplished yesterday, what they will work on today, and if there are any blockers. Bonus points to include an icebreaker, shout out role-models of desired behaviour, key successes etc – but these must not detract from your purpose.
Quick Tips:
Consistency: Hold the meetings at the same time and place every day to ensure attendance and coherence.
Participation: Ensure all team members are present and participate – including a reliable option for your remote team.
Leadership: Establish a clear leader to moderate the meeting and keep it focused. Bonus points to rotate this responsibility (after you have established the habit).
Duration: Keep the meetings no longer than 15 minutes.
Stand Up: it’s much easier to keep to your target duration if all participants (who are able) are standing.
Purpose Clarification: Ensure everyone knows the meeting's purpose, outcome & process.
Table Side Conversations: Avoid problem-solving during the meeting; note issues and discuss them afterward.
If your meeting does not match this formula, it is not a huddle/standup!
Overall, the effectiveness of stand-up meetings lies in their brevity, focus, and the active participation of all team members.
Collaboration – pulling in the same direction.
Virtual teams live and die on their collaboration. Effective teams find a balance of both synchronous (real-time communication) and asynchronous tools (task tracking and project management) to facilitate smooth remote & hybrid operations.
In fact, much of a knowledge worker’s productivity is spent managing interruptions. More than a quarter of all productivity is destroyed in this way, a finding which has been steady since at least 1998. Imagine what you could do with another 25% - 30% resources?
Have you recorded screen captures of your SOPs? Do you need to ask a colleague on the status of a project? The best teams know where to go to find information so that they’re not interrupting their colleagues and destroying value.
In fact, most of your work should be done asynchronously from the rest of your team. If this is not possible, it’s worth analyzing the root cause – it probably lies in a lack of trust.
Goals – a clarity of shared goals & understanding task interdependence.
A lack of shared goals and failing to understand task interdependence each drives difficulties in communication and collaboration, negatively impacting the team's ability to work effectively together.
If individuals within your teams’ goals are at odds, or seem to be at odds, team performance can suffer significantly, and a weakened Relationship Between Knowledge Sharing and Team Effectiveness will develop. In unbalanced or hybrid virtual teams, the lack of shared goals and task interdependence makes trust more critical in weak structural situations.
This is especially true in matrix organizations, or cross-functional teams, where increased Task Conflict can arise from these issues. Cultural diversity, functional diversity, and lack of immediacy in feedback contribute to task conflict in virtual teams who lack shared goals and task interdependence.
Savvy leaders have some simple solutions:
Establishing Clear Shared Goals: Develop and communicate clear, shared goals for the team. Use structured goal-setting sessions and regular updates on progress, both in your team huddle/stand-up, regular one-on-one meetings, and in your task tracking solution of choice.
Train Your Team on What Task Interdependence Means: Organize training sessions or workshops to enhance team members' understanding of how their tasks are interdependent and contribute to the overall team objectives.
Building Shared Mental Models: Foster the development of shared mental models through regular team meetings and collaborative decision-making processes.
Strengthening Trust and Communication: Implement trust-building activities and ensure open, transparent communication to mitigate the challenges of virtual collaboration.
Managing Diversity and Feedback: Address the diversity in the team by acknowledging and utilizing the strengths of different cultural and functional backgrounds. Also, establish a robust feedback mechanism to ensure timely and constructive feedback.
Depending on the circumstances, the leader can adopt either a “doctor-patient” relationship, where they deliver the diagnosis and remedy to the team, or act as a process facilitator and act only to help the team come up with their own models. While a process facilitator tends to lead to stronger and longer-lasting effects, the doctor-patient model can work in highly dysfunctional or under skilled teams.
Trust & Cohesion: holding it all together,
Holding each of the other elements together is the culture of trust that you’re building. Without trust, teamwork and productivity die. Time, energy and effort will be consumed with workplace politics; productivity destroyed by mistrust and misaligned effort.
Testing this hypothesis, I looked at the returns vs market of two very similar firms, and the rate at which their employees complained about workplace politics.
Company A:
2.8% rate of politics complaints
+82% 5-year stock price return
Company B:
1.4% rate of politics complaints
+164% 5-year stock price return
As a kicker, Company B returns nearly 50% higher dividends as a ratio than Company A to its investors.
While both companies outperformed the S&P 500 +70% return, there is a direct inverse relationship between office politics and economic value added. An admittedly small sample size, this is enough to grok the issue – and few among us would have the temerity to argue that low-trust environments add more value.
To build a high-trust environment, there’s a few simple steps leaders can take.
First, flawlessly execute on ordinary, regular communication – daily stand-ups, one-on-ones with every team member etc. These habits form the baseline of the trust environment, and are self-supporting feedback mechanisms.
Give your team as much flexibility as you can while still delivering on the job. This level of flexibility is probably higher than you realise, and I encourage a stepwise approach to get there. Flexibility is a key expectation – in-office, remote or hybrid.
Be results-oriented. Focus on what individuals and teams deliver, as compared to the duration they’re available. If you require “the bare minimum” from your team, that’s what you will get.
Awareness communications – role model and encourage your team to greet everyone and leave loudly. (You do greet your team every time you see them, right?)
Reduce the hierarchy in your structure. Encourage different viewpoints, celebrate dissent and avoid insisting your team copy you on emails. (“CC:” is just a “To:” field hiding behind avoidance).
Communicate more frequently than you think you need to. A more effective approach is smaller communications more often. For some teams, this might look like two 30 minute meetings a month instead of one 90 minute meeting. The longer between each communication, the greater the number of topics each person will have, and the more effort each topic will require.
Make use of synchronous and asynchronous collaborative software tools like Miro, Loom and others to help others see what you’re seeing.
Leaders of the best teams today are consistently role-modelling transformational leadership, continuously improving their communication, relentlessly pursuing inter- & intra-team collaboration, fostering a deep understanding of shared, interdependent goals and building cohesive, high-trust teams.
We’re helping organizations build, understand, and use transformational leadership to create high performance teams and thrive. A client we worked with over summer said, of the leadership elements of the strategy I prepared:
“The most beneficial insight was his approach to our leadership framework. Andrew introduced various coaching, feedback and communication models. All that I believe will serve the business well from a management perspective. But Andrew didn’t leave it here, he went even further and listed out potential and future addressable items to be aware of leaving nothing on the table for surprise. Absolutely amazing work and if any entrepreneur or business owner is looking for someone who truly brings his own experience and know-how to his work, Andrew will surely not disappoint."
Is a lack of skills, or the fear of the unknown holding your team back from offering more flexibility? Are you missing out on the best talent who are “only looking for remote”? Let’s chat – we can help.