Trust as the basis for the successful work of the remote team.
Consulting companies that have planned or forced to switch to the remote format, I’ve increasingly noticed that the most popular and difficult to understand issue is trust.
“How can I be sure my employees are working when I can’t see them?”
“How can I be sure they are productive?”
Whether the company is remote or not, when offered a position, an employee is naturally expected to be able to do the job for which he or she was hired. A credit of trust is given by default.
But in a remote environment, further relationships and trust itself are subjected to a stress test, where an important role is played … no, not by the employees themselves, but by their manager and the processes built in the company.
According to research, managers with remote team members need to be more focused, more organized and work harder to build trust than managers of traditional teams.
Recently, a director of a large company in Kyiv complained to me that the other day he decided to gather employees for an urgent unscheduled meeting at Zoom. But almost no one showed up at the meeting. It turned out that some of the employees did not work at this time, because they went shopping, someone was asleep, someone even left to Turkey on vacation. And my friend was sincerely convinced that the problem was in the very essence of the remote work when he could not see what his employees were doing at any given time.
How can a manager see the invisible?
Perhaps my answer will not please you, but “Nohow.” You don’t need to see your employees and subordinates to know if they are working. And that is why all kinds of distant tracking tools are useless, allowing you to take screenshots of the screen, monitor the activity of your people in real-time with the camera on, etc. All this does not create trust, but rather, on the contrary, destroys it.
“Trust is a two-way street.”
This means that not only should you trust your employees, but they should also trust you. By introducing surveillance tools, you create an invisible barrier between you, instead of building a self-directed team with a high level of autonomy and lack of micromanagement.
Lack of trust often comes from fear of losing control. And only when we stop trying to control everything you get more energy, and when we’ve got more energy, we can achieve more.
Recently, George Penn, vice president of Gartner, a company that regularly conducts researches in the field of remote work, has mentioned in an interview for Wired that by August this year, the number of companies that track the productivity of their employees using special applications has increased to 70%. At the same time, what he calls productivity is actually just virtual clocking in and out, Outlook and Calendar usage, as well as time spent online.
But what does the total work hours have to do with the productivity of your remote team? Do you really believe that the more a person spends in front of the monitor, the more productive they are? And Penn himself confirms my doubts, mentioning that “Now, with the pressure to always appear online, some employees are working much longer hours or wasting time on performative productivity: things like excessively chatting on Slack or setting up useless meetings, just to show that they’re there.”
But how, then, to ensure seamless teamwork with a high level of mutual trust?
- Build performance management processes through SMART goal setting, objective measurement metrics, and well-defined competencies that will allow you to measure employees by their achievements, rather than by the number of hours they spend in the office or at the computer.
- Manage employee productivity by setting mutual expectations, creating shared work processes that increase accountability and flexibility, and having manager-to-employee and employee-to-employee feedback.
- Delegate and structure task-assignment processes that increase the ability of employees to deliver results without special direction from you. Promote personal accountability for results.
- Consider how employees can feel the impact of their tasks on the work of the company:
Sense of accomplishment — Knowing an employee has completed something helps create a feeling of autonomy and control over their work. It makes things real and possible, creating the motivation to put in more effort and achieve greater things.
Feeling of contribution to a larger goal — Acknowledging that work is important in creating the bigger picture is important. Regardless of what your employees do, knowing that what they do connects to a company’s end product helps you be more committed and dedicated to their task. - Stick to communication with transparency by default. Most conversations on a remote team should be conducted in public channels so that all team members can see them. This allows each team member to stay in the information cycle and prevents misunderstandings.
In all the companies I know, where remote work has become the basis of their DNA, the emphasis on these points is part of key performance indicators of each of the managers, and the principles of goal setting and transparent communication are the basis of the remote work policy — a kind of Bible for the entire team.
Practice shows that the key to the successful work of a remote team is trust, which is created due to the right organizational context. Because if you focus on setting goals and results, you will realize that managing employee presence doesn’t make sense anymore.
