How to manage remote teams effectively
Introduction
Remote work has arrived and it's not going away. In 2020, COVID-19 closed businesses and forced millions into lockdown. Thankfully, with the advantages of online collaboration tools and communication devices, many workers were able to work remotely. In doing so, they kept large sectors of the economy afloat.
Remote work has been growing in popularity for over a decade. In 2019, for example, the Australian Bureau Statistics estimated that over a third of Australian workers were already regularly working from home. During COVID-19 restrictions, that number jumped to over 9 in 10, and while the rate will drop as workers return to the office, increased remote participation is here to stay.
In a report conducted by Building 20, 73% of business executives either agreed or strongly agreed that their organisation will allow employees to work remotely more in the future. Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke summed up the prevailing sentiment of Silicon Valley in a Tweet:
“As of today, Shopify is a digital by default company. We will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality. And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over.”
This period of remote work has helped managers to see that distributed teams can work effectively and productively. When managed well, remote workers can be even more productive than in the office while at the same time enjoying autonomy, independence, and trust. The average office worker will save an hour each day by not commuting. That's about 240 hours per year, or ten days a year no longer spent in traffic.
But managing remote teams is not without its challenges. One reason that remote work participation wasn't higher before the coronavirus pandemic was that managers and workers alike worried that, without immediate oversight, productivity and efficiency would go down while procrastination and distractions would go up. Because managing remote teams is a skill, that's a real possibility. When teams go remote, managers lose a number of tools to ensure the team remains on track, accountable and happy.
That's why Building 20 has put together this guide. Here, we'll teach you how to take your team remote; build a productive culture; and provide your team with what they need to thrive outside the office.
Why go remote?
COVID-19 restrictions were all the reason most teams needed to work from home. So the question now is: why stay remote as restrictions on office working are slowly lifted?
We're all familiar with the personal advantages of working from home: freedom, autonomy, and no commute. But what advantages do remote teams give managers? As it turns out, building a remote team can give you an edge over your competitors and increase your efficiency. Let's dive in.
Swimming in a bigger talent pool
The most valuable resource of the modern company is the knowledge and talent of its employees. Talent is where modern companies find their competitive advantage, which is why they spend so much trying to acquire it -- research suggests it costs $18,982 to hire one employee (ranging from $34,440 for execs to $9772 for entry-level positions).
That's also the reason companies are in cities: they go where the people are. In a city, companies can maximise the number of clients, partners, and prospective employees around them. The bigger the city, the bigger the talent pool.
Or so it once was. These days, companies that limit their talent pool to physical proximity do so at their peril. Remote working doesn't just mean working from home — it means working from anywhere. And for companies, that means hiring the best talent wherever they find it.
Workplaces confined to a physical office give the advantage to their remote-friendly competitors when they ignore the best talent around the world. Think about it — an office in Sydney is within commuting distance of hundreds of thousands of workers. But a remote team is accessible to every worker in the world. Don't handicap yourself unnecessarily. If human capital is your most valuable resource (and it is), that's like driving with the handbrake on.
Cost savings
If the fear of losing the talent race isn't enough reason to go remote, consider this: your office space is costing you dearly. Just how much an office costs per worker will vary from organisation to organisation, but the underlying principle will remain the same: you're paying rent. This unessential and sizeable overhead creates drag on any business. That's money that could be spent elsewhere.
Your organisation doesn't have to go fully remote to save money on office space. Every remote worker is an employee you don't have to seat, and some teams may opt to reduce office work to one or two days a week. As we'll discuss in this article, a mixture of in-person and remote work might suit some teams best. But no matter the organisation, firms that insist their employees be present for work must bear the financial burden. Every hour of remote work frees up resources for the rest of the organisation.
Consider the case of IBM. IBM began institutionalising telework in 1995, reducing their office space by a total of 78 million square feet by 2009. ROI was achieved within the first year — IBM spent $41.5 million once-off to transition 10,000 employees and in doing so saved themselves $75 million per year going forward. The company then sold 58 million square feet of the office space they saved (for a profit of $1.9 billion!).
Improve the employee value proposition
The future is remote. The authors of Remote predict that:
"The luxury and privilege of the next twenty years will be to leave the city. Not as its leashed servant in a suburb, but to wherever one wants.”
Not only will offering remote work give you access to a bigger talent pool, it will make people want to work for you, too. In fact, now that workers know they can work happily from home, you can be sure that new hires will begin to ask for it.
Building 20 calculated that by working from home Australian office workers on average save 65 minutes per day on their commute. That’s equivalent to 10.9 days per year.
The commute to work is generally not considered work time. Instead, it eats into employee leisure time. Verbooy et al. (2018) estimated that employees would trade an hour of leisure time for $26.72. Using this figure, we estimate that removing the commute totally is worth $6948 per year in gained leisure time per employee.
During the mid-20th century, a combination of affordable cars and government planning saw an explosion in suburban life surrounding cities. Middle-class workers wanted space and privacy as well as their city jobs. The car-based commute was born.
Then, in the 21st century, that trend was reversed as consumers began to recognise the harms of commuting to their wellbeing and happiness. Now, jobseekers realise they can have all three: the job, the home, and no commute.
To reap the full benefits of remote working, managers need to be able to articulate the various benefits for the organisation, employees and themselves. Selling the narrative is an important part of the process The next step is getting the timing right.
When to go remote
For managers who have decided remote work is right for their team, the question is not if but when.
Moving to remote work is easy to delay because it means disrupting the status quo and reforming a new set of norms and expectations, which can be particularly challenging for established teams with established cultures. For that reason, the best time to transition to a remote-friendly workplace is as soon as possible. Ideally, you create a new set of norms before an alternative has been cemented.
We tend to think of change as a one-step process, but Lewin's famous model of change occurs in three stages: Unfreeze, Change, and Freeze. These stages recognise that behaviours and processes have their own inertia. They must be addressed and disrupted before they can be altered, and they need to be cemented before being made permanent.
In the first stage, your task is to help your team understand the value of doing away with compulsory office work. Help them to see both the advantage of remote work and the disadvantages of the office. In this phase, you want to disrupt the habits and expectations that support the status quo so that your team is prepared and ready to try a new way of operating.
Once you have established buy-in with your team, you can move phase two: the Change phase. During this phase, begin the actual implementation of the new practices. It might make sense to do this implementation in pieces — you want to manage the rate of change so that people have time to adjust and experiment. This period might require hands-on effort from your management team, so be ready.
In the final stage, you want to freeze the new behaviours by anchoring them in your organisation. That means incentivising the factors that support the new status quo and disincentivising a return to the old normal. Don't forget to celebrate the change once it's in place — this helps your team feel that the process has come to a close, and gives them satisfaction for having participated.
If you’re still considering the transition back to the office as COVID-19 restrictions are lifted, you’re in luck. Everything is fluid (that is, unfrozen), so it’s the perfect time to make changes before the new ways of working freeze.
Sniffing out the landmines before they explode
For some organisations, it might be possible to move everyone through Lewin's change management model at the same time. But more likely than not, you'll want to experiment a bit before you implement company-wide change.
If your team is used to office work, here are the 5 steps to freedom:
First, try working with contractors using an online platform like UpWork or Freelancer. This will give your managers practice and familiarity managing projects from afar.
Next, direct your managers and team leads to begin remote working themselves. That way, they'll experience firsthand any issues their teams might have, before they happen.
When you're ready, pilot the change cycle with the team most likely to succeed. Collect some data, like the number of distractions in their workday, to demonstrate the positive improvement.
When it works, you'll have created a team of change champions. With your managers and champions on board, begin an organisation-wide roll out. As you move through the Unfreeze stage with your organisation, get the pitch right by identifying the advantages of remote work (no commute).
Identify team members who might struggle and remember to support them. Make the change stick by celebrating the end of the transition with your whole organisation, and give ongoing support and training.
What are the risks?
It would seem like remote work is the obvious choice over office work. So why hasn’t it happened sooner? Culture, technology and workspace are three of the key issues that managers need to wrangle.
Building 20 research revealed that with fewer face-to-face interactions, the most common challenge of remote work is communication with co-workers (33%), followed by social isolation/loneliness (32%) and having to deal with too many distractions at home (32%). Respondents were also struggling to disconnect from work (30%) and staying motivated (30%).
Culture
Culture matters — workers who feel part of a positive community are more likely to be motivated, engaged, and productive. On the other hand, toxic cultures are toxic to productivity, as well as your team.
Worry about team culture is by far the biggest perceived roadblock to expanding remote work when COVID-19 restrictions are lifted (49%), almost twice that of the second biggest roadblock, technology (25%).
So how do you get the culture right when you move to a remote-friendly workplace? Let’s focus on trust and fun.
Your goal in any workplace, whether remote or not, should be to build a team built around trust. In The Neuroscience of Trust, published in the Harvard Business Review, Paul Zak describes the intimate relationship between workplace trust and workplace productivity. His research found positive correlations between trust and performance, loyalty, and engagement. In one study:
"Respondents whose companies were in the top quartile [for trust] indicated they had 106% more energy and were 76% more engaged at work than respondents whose firms were in the bottom quartile. They also reported being 50% more productive."
When transitioning to remote work, it can be tempting to increase the number of meetings, check-ins, and updates that you require from your team. As a manager, your usual methods of oversight have been taken away and you're nervous that without physical presence your staff might procrastinate all day. But try to resist that urge.There's no one-size-fits-all answer to the number of interactions you should have with your team every day, but remember this: the more trusted they feel, the better they will perform.
To get a sense of what not to do, check out this article in the New York Times: How My Boss Monitors Me While I Work From Home. In it, journalist Adam Satariano trialled employee-monitoring software created by the company Hubstaff. Here's what he has to say:
“Every few minutes, it snapped a screenshot of the websites I browsed, the documents I was writing and the social media sites I visited. From my phone, it mapped where I went, including a two-hour bike ride that I took around Battersea Park with my kids in the middle of one workday. (Whoops.)
To complete the experiment, I gave my editor, Pui-Wing Tam, the keys to the Hubstaff program so she could track me. After three weeks of digital monitoring, the future of work surveillance seemed to both of us to be overly intrusive. As she put it, ‘Ick.’”
Practices like these are likely to have the inverse intended effect. Rather than held accountable, surveilled staff feel demotivated and dispirited. That quickly puts them in the bottom quadrant of Zak's trust spectrum, costing your team up to 50% more productivity per person.
And don’t forget fun. Fun is the glue that holds many employees glued to their team. They like their colleagues and enjoy spending time with them. Studies show that fun creates happier employees who feel more satisfied. And happy employees perform better. Fun at work is linked to:
Enhanced motivation
Increased productivity
Reduced stress
Higher job satisfaction
Improved task performance
Having fun is one way of effectively managing and improving employees’ emotions. It’s also proven to improve teamwork, build trusting relationships and increase employee retention.
But fun needs to be nurtured and choreographed by managers. And this isn’t an easy thing to get right over Zoom. Virtual wine tasting and art classes boomed during COVID-19 but what they really showed us is that fun is best practiced face-to-face.
Put some budget aside to get the team together at least twice a year and don’t skimp. You’ve saved a lot of money on office space.
Space matters
Employees need a designated work space to make the most of remote working. Building 20 research found that employees with a dedicated remote work space were 25% more likely to strongly agree/agree that they prefer remote working to working at the office (57% to 32%, respectively).
A dedicated remote work space also markedly increases employees’ self-reported productivity. 51% of respondents with a dedicated space say they’re more productive now than compared to before COVID-19 restrictions were implemented, 27% higher than respondents who don’t have a dedicated workspace.
A key and often neglected component of the remote work transition is equipment. Think hard about what tools are essential for your workers, and which of those your company, rather than your workers, should supply.
The most common work-from-home tools are the laptop and the phone. Employees’ situations aren’t all the same and you’ll need to acknowledge this when you help them set-up a productive set-up at home. For example, people with kids might need bunks of fold-out beds, others might need to drown out street noise with noise-cancelling headphones.
Here are 5 questions to get you started when helping employees design their remote workspace.
Is your workspace separate from your living space? Working from home blurs the line between work and life. Make the line as obvious as possible.
Is the lighting good? You want lots of natural light. Bright cool lights for deep work, dim lighting for creative work.
Is it noisy? If yes, move or invest in some noise-cancelling headphones.
Is it colourful? There’s a lot of research on the impact of colours on our cognitive process. Red, for example, can reduce analytical thinking, while green sparks creativity. Too much white can lead to boredom.
Are there any plants? Greenery has been shown to improve productivity by 15%.
Time zones
If you cast the talent net across the world then timing can get messy. For example, I’m based in Melbourne but our designer is 6 hours behind in Madrid. If you’re not strategic about communications effectively you’ll be in trouble (and this is without covering the fun created by language and cultural barriers).
But if you overcome the timezone logistics, you’ll create a 24-hour business without much effort. For example, I’ll send through a deck to our designer at COB in Melbourne and by the time I log in the next morning, the work is awaiting. It’s like having a time machine.
Fewer creative collisions
Some of the best ideas happen by accident. Steve Jobs knew the value of random collisions between people at the right time, so much so he designed the Pixar campus to maximise collisions. In his biography, Jobs notes:
“If a building doesn’t encourage [collaboration], you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity. So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.”
So how can you create virtual collisions?
Be creative and harness the power of tech. For example, try FocusMate, a virtual coworking platform where people discuss what they’re working on before jumping into uninterrupted work. These brief interactions at the start of the focus work are all it takes to get virtual collisions happening.
What you’ll need
Here are some of the better options that small and medium enterprises can implement to provide the architecture required to allow their teams to work remotely.
Document sharing and knowledge management
Informal comms
Motivation
Collaboration
Conference calls
Co-working spaces
Security
Here’s a useful security checklist from Remote (pp. 55-57):
1. All computers must use hard drive encryption, like the built-in FireVault feature in Apple's OS X operating system. This ensures that lost laptop is merely an inconvenience and an insurance claim, not a company-wide emergency and a scramble to change passwords and worry about what documents might be leaked.
2. Disable automatic login, require a password when waking from sleep, and set the computer to automatically lock after ten inactive minutes.
3. Turn on encryption for all sites you visit, especially critical services like Gmail. These days all sites use something called https or SSL. Look for the little lock icon in front of the internet address.
4. Make sure all smartphones and tablets use lock codes and can be wiped remotely. On the iPhone you can do this through the Find My iPhone application.
5. Use a unique generated long-form password for each site you visit kept by password management software such as 1Password.
6. Turn on two-factor authentication when using Gmail so you can't login without having access to your cell phone for a login code (this means that someone who gets hold of your login and password also needs to get hold of your phone to login). And keep in mind: if your email security fails, all other online services will fail too, since an intruder can use the password reset from any other site to have a new password sent to the email account they now have access to.
Conclusion
There’s lots for managers to consider when moving to remote work. This survival guide will provide some guidance, but you need to proceed with the right level of excitement, caution, and innovation. The future of work is not office-based or remote, it’s a combination of both. If you can get the balance right early, you can turn remote work into a competitive advantage.
If you want a hand nailing the transition to remote work, get in touch with Building 20 today. We specialise in helping teams transition to remote work. Find out more here.