Remote work, at least part of the time, is the new normal, and legal and compliance leaders must develop principles to guide their teams in a post-COVID (or living-with-COVID) world. These principles will attract and engage the top talent and create or maintain an inclusive, high-performance culture and workplace where all employees, regardless of location, can feel valued, respected, and be productive.
1. Overcommunicate, focusing on effective team communication
Managers of remote teams need to ensure everything runs smoothly and everyone is on the same page. Working and leading remotely means leaders must deal with different time zones, varying internet availability, and language and cultural differences, to name a few issues (which managers of geographically distributed teams have always had to deal with). To overcome some of these hurdles, it helps to clarify how and when team members are to communicate. If you just had a call and agreed on a course of action, send a follow-up message summarizing what the team just decided; people understand things differently – what may sound apparent to one person is not so clear to another. Holding regular “all hands” meetings reinforces the strategic context of everyone’s work, so they are reminded of how and where they fit into the bigger picture. However, let your team manage their own time and don’t micromanage them, as this can undermine trust. While it may be harder to do in a remote environment (where you can’t see how people are working), empowering smart people to know the best way to approach a problem is critical.
2. Set clear expectations
Fuzzy goals and objectives often result in the wrong deliverables. If you aren’t clear on what needs to be done, it won’t miraculously become apparent in the minds of your team members either. Unclear goals are even more problematic in remote team environments, where confusing or fuzzy goals and objectives can go unnoticed for much longer. When you’re clear about what the team needs to achieve and, more importantly, why it’s important, they’ll be better able to provide the right deliverables. Clarify your expected outcomes – goals, deadlines, etc. – at the outset of a project before you begin asking for results.
3. Develop trust
Trust is a crucial ingredient for remote team success and is fundamental to high-performing teams. Hence, you want to encourage, create, schedule, and make opportunities for your team members to grow together and build trust. Imprecise workflows, ineffective tools, miscommunication, and micromanaging are common leadership mistakes that undermine trust, and this is all the more true when not all team members are together.
Being transparent, particularly with a remote team, is crucial for building trust. If you are open and honest, your team is more likely to trust you and bring you their concerns before they become critical. Be honest about both the successes and the failures; share your learnings with the team and let them know how you plan to move forward to meet certain expectations.
4. Help your team stay engaged
Remote employees can feel isolated and disengaged. Almost 70% of even co-located teams have reported feeling either not engaged or actively disengaged, and engagement on virtual teams poses even more challenges. A key element of leadership is motivating and inspiring your team. Don’t take for granted that your team members know that you appreciate their efforts and diligence. Make sure they know by telling them often. This is even more necessary when leading virtual teams because the distance can make your team members feel isolated and potentially unappreciated.
And remember that you’re not just leading a team, you’re leading individuals working as a team. To manage remote teams, you need to focus on both the entire team and its individual members so they can feel personally connected to you. So be empathetic, and never let your employees forget that you look at them as human beings first and are invested in their lives. Each individual is different, and all team members have their own career goals, personal goals, motivations, desires, expectations, and strengths. Make time to build and strengthen the relationships on your team. Just because you can’t walk down the hall to say “hi” doesn’t mean you stop saying “hi.” Your team members want a sense of belonging. So, invest your time in each person to create a highly engaged team.
5. Develop team members
Just because your team is working remotely doesn’t mean they don’t need personal development. It’s easy to forget about that in a virtual environment, but continually developing your team members’ skills and focusing on their career paths needs to be a priority. Some people on your team might need more attention to close specific skill gaps. By knowing your team members’ skills and development goals, you’ll be able to identify training needs and opportunities on your team, even in a remote environment.
6. Create a supportive team culture
Creating and sustaining a healthy team culture is always important, especially in a remote work environment. Leaders need to create a remote team culture that will keep their team members highly productive, motivated, and engaged. How you manage your people, conflicts, issues, and the other essential things is all a part of your team’s organizational culture. You don’t need everyone physically together to do that. Instead, the best cultures derive from actions people take, so talk about culture with your team and make your team culture a part of your regular conversations by discussing why you do what you do and how you do it. And finally, asking or expecting your team members to be available constantly because they’re remote is unsustainable and bad for their morale and a team’s culture. As much as possible, encourage your remote team members to keep regular hours that you all agree to. This is particularly important, but much more difficult, when you’re managing a global, geographically distributed team across multiple time zones, especially when they’re working from home and may be juggling family matters at the same time.
7. Celebrate team wins and recognize milestones
Remote work can be lonely, but you can create opportunities to know your team better and help them feel connected. Celebrating even the smallest wins adds a lot of positivity and boosts morale. Showing your team that you value their efforts through small celebrations or a few words of gratitude can be very motivational and engaging. In addition, by celebrating personal milestones like birthdays and work anniversaries, your team will feel connected.
Keeping your team engaged with fun activities like small challenges, competitions, games, etc. is always a great idea. For example, ask your team members to share recipes from their respective cultures to help them know each other better.
8. Promote accountability
Building a culture of accountability is essential for remote teams (and co-located ones as well, of course). Accountability is not simply about taking the blame when something goes wrong; it’s about delivering on commitments, being responsible for achieving outcomes and goals – not just a set of tasks – and taking initiative with thoughtful, strategic follow-through. To do this, it’s essential to clearly define success for your remote team members with their roles and contributions, so they know how their success will be measured based on defined key performance indicators (KPIs) or other measures.
9. Set up recurring one-on-ones
Holding regular meetings with your team members – one-on-ones and group meetings – is critical to making sure they’re not facing any issues, especially in a remote environment. Again, be careful not to micromanage, as that reduces productivity and kills motivation. Focus on output and give your team the freedom they need to perform. Ensuring that your one-on-ones are recurring at a suitable interval and cover both goals and personal development is key to effective remote management and drives engagement that will reward and develop a remote team.
10. Use technology to your advantage
Set up the proper processes and use the right tools to help manage projects involving multiple team members to create task and project status visibility, so leaders know their team has a good handle on everything.
“Zoom fatigue” is real but do get on those video calls. It’s worth it because looking people in the eye and being together visually drives peer accountability. It is much harder to let someone down if you see them on a screen. That said, be understanding when people occasionally need to keep their cameras off – a full day of video calls is exhausting.
When managing your remote legal and compliance teams, remember that flexibility is essential. Leadership must model the behavior and set the example for their team members. With the right management, productivity and engagement can flourish in a remote environment.
BarkerGilmore’s team of Strategic Advisors and Coaches can help optimize your leadership team and their capabilities. Contact us for a consultation.
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