Are you an experienced work from home guru, or just starting out? Managing a virtual team from home is completely different than a traditional office space. Read on to find out how you can lead a productive team from home – keep up your team’s progress, check in on milestones, and keep up the teamwork in your pajamas!
A hilarious article by CNN reports that sales of business attire for your top half is increasing, but bottoms are decreasing. The trend to work from home is on the rise in the face of a global pandemic. Now that so many are working from home, will there be a push when this is all over to continue?
The “butt-in-seat” work culture where presence seems to matter more than productivity is decreasing. Many employers and employees find it beneficial to work virtually. According to a study by Standford, productivity goes up and it is reported that distractions that are inherent in traditional workplaces are not an issue. No one is going to swing by your office for a quick chat on their way to and from the bathroom or the photocopier.
What is the resistance to working from home?
If you’re like me, you have some members on your team that need some additional support to complete tasks. You may also worry that some staff may be more focused on who is getting voted off the island from their couch, than working on spreadsheets from a designated work space.
What are the challenges of managing a virtual team from home?
As a leader, when managing your work from home staff members, it’s difficult to maintain a similar level of influence on them. Leadership styles that you adopt when face to face with staff, will have a lower impact.
How well would democratic leadership go when you are weighing the input of each decision maker? Think of the volume of emails that would occur! Continue to read on to find out how to minimize pointless emails.
Common leadership questions when leading a virtual team are:
How do we ensure that our virtual team is productive and collaborative with each other?
How do you ensure accountability on your team to complete milestones?
How to ensure productivity? Communication, communication, communication!
Your communication and facilitation skills when managing your virtual teams from home is essential. You can put together the most amazing group of staff with the best credentials, and it can all fall flat if you are not communicating and working towards the same goal.
Misunderstanding assignments, deadlines, needs of the clients, etc. are some examples of what can go wrong when working remotely. Lack of clarity of an assignment can leave team members not engaged, because they are hesitant to put the wrong thing forward. The root cause of these issues is ineffective communication.
What communication should look like from leadership when holding your virtual team accountable
Since you do not have the benefit of body language, you have to rely on your words. To improve this, it is a huge help to do video conferencing to be able to see facial expressions. You become more familiar with each other, so emails can be more effective because you are less likely to misconstrue the tone of the email.
Why is this so important? Have you ever received an email from a long time coworker that seems a bit curt? Absolutely you have – a robot doesn’t write our emails so things may come off the wrong way from time to time.
If you know someone is friendly via video-conference, you are more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt via text only communication. This will help your team be more cohesive.
I enjoy “meeting” contacts at other organizations via phone. This way they are a voice, not just an email signature. A mixed method approach of video conferencing to increase cohesion and emails to get things done is a way to ensure your team is communicating as a virtual team the best that they can.
Communication through virtual meetings
A team that works remotely needs to get things done! Although most work from home positions offer flexibility, deliverables are still due.
One of the cornerstone items to achieving this productivity is to have effective virtual meetings. Read the list of essential ways to run a professional virtual meeting. You will run in to problems with virtual meetings, here are the solutions to the most common virtual meeting issues (beyond the, “can you hear me?” technical challenges).
How to keep your team engaged when working virtually
There is the perception that people can multitask when working from home. This is not the case. No one is as effective if they are trying to focus on multiple things at once. Trying to reply to emails while attending a virtual meeting means that you are not fully engaged in either activity – and the quality suffers.
Often times, staff members that work from home are asked to complete an affidavit that they have a designated place to work and that they have reliable childcare.
Imagine that – working in a place of poor internet connection or children asking for a snack every 20 minutes is not effective for work completion and focus. Clearly, this is a heavily sarcastic statement.
It’s all about accountability
Your leadership style will have to adjust itself to a more facilitating leadership style. The key elements of this leadership style is their coordination efforts for solving problems, and being inclusive to get the team through the problem together.
This style is people-centered and is results and decision making driven. This leadership style is effective when leading a virtual team because a high level of communication and coordination is required to complete tasks as a team.
A team must be held accountable for their deliverables and contributions to the team. They are expected to speak up during virtual meetings and can be called on for their expertise.
Be careful though, with this facilitation style, there is the opportunity to create workflow issues as the team gets used to waiting for your approval. Read how to determine the signs of inadvertently creating workflow bottlenecks.
The good news is that you will settle in to a rhythm with your virtual team. As a leader, you will need to pay attention to the type and level of communication that is occurring up, down, and across the different team members.
Adjust your leadership style accordingly and be there to help your team adapt to a new way of doing business.
