Leadership in remote work

Overall, remote work has had a positive impact on most employees, but as an accountable manager, you can also find yourself struggling from time to time. For me the biggest factors which can sometimes be tricky: 

Visibility: In a remote setup, it’s harder to sense tension between team members or if someone is struggling for some reason. In an office environment, you can sense this more easily. Remotely, a lot can be out of your sight. 

Communication: Only 10% of perceived communication is the words we speak. The majority of communication are non-verbal signs, like body language. In a remote setting, a lot of communication is missed or misinterpreted and it requires a lot of adaptations (e.g. over communication or more precisely written summaries.

Smooth collaboration: Intensive collaboration sessions like workshops are not easy to replicate remotely. There are some great virtual meetup tools or collaboration tools like Miro, but it’s still not the same. Whenever more than two people need to collaborate closely in real time, you have to accept that there are some limitations in remote meetings.

But this is where the limitations stop for me. I’ve heard managers talk about how remote work impacts engagement and productivity. I see it differently. 

Engagement: I often hear that employees are less engaged and less committed to work hard or push their limits when working remotely. For me, the question of engagement has nothing to do with the office setting. It’s a question of good or bad people management. 

I see leaders asking their employees to return to office as a mandate, and I can confidently say it’s counterproductive. If you’re a good leader, you can enable your team to thrive irrespective of their preferences or ways of working. If the only way you get your employees to work hard is to closely observe and micro manage them in an office setting, you are probably not suited to lead a team. 

Regardless of the office setting, the key elements for high engagement are: overcommunication, setting clear goals and expectations and giving people a strong sense of why their job is important for the overall success of the company. 

People in leadership roles today don’t always know how to do that. And that’s the real cause for the lack of engagement in teams. Bringing people back into the office to amp up engagement is a flawed move. Looking over the shoulders of your employees and telling them what to do is not the solution and will lead good people to leave and the not-so-good ones to quietly quit.

Productivity: I don’t see any productivity loss in a remote setting; quite the opposite in fact. 

Employees are way more productive, more in control of their schedules, and set up their working spaces so they are not constantly distracted by what’s happening around them. 

For work that needs silence and focus, there can’t be a better setup than remote work. Collaboration can be more difficult, but if you overcome the communication challenges, there’s not much productivity loss either. 

Support your employees with the right tools (like Miro), adapted processes (like quick stand-ups or efficient alignments) to cope with the additional difficulties of a remote setting. Remember that work-life balance has a significant long term impact on productivity and this can be managed much better in a remote setting. 

Overall, I think that remote work provides additional challenges for leaders, but also great advantages. If you are a good team leader and know how to use a certain tool box, you will succeed in an office as well as a remote setting. But if you are missing certain managerial skills, you will struggle in a remote setting, and will point fingers at the setup and pin the blame on it for the lack of productivity.