I’m currently sitting in Mexico, while my other three colleagues are in Toronto, Petawawa and Austin, Texas. With news of businesses mandating employees work from home, and cancelling all corporate travel - we feel excited that more organizations will be pushed into ‘allowing’ employees to work from home. 

For our remote team, learning to work together, and with our clients, all while being in different cities is a blessing. We each get to maximize our productivity based on the lifestyles we choose to have, and the other demands placed upon our time. We each save hours a day not having to commute to an office, and feel total autonomy in our daily schedule when things need to be adjusted. And better yet, we’ve been able to successfully support other managers and remote teams who are spread across different locations. 

Every aspect of the work we do can be done in person, but often is done fully online. We’ve helped teams measure the engagement of remote workers and brought them together online to debrief and speak with managers about their results. We’ve lead team-building workshops where employees sit across different time zones and locations, with the same effectiveness as our in-person sessions.  We have interviewed and made offers to candidates living abroad and preparing to move to a new city. And every month we bring managers together for a month-long training program, where they participate from their home countries; which have included places as far as Japan and Lebanon. Working online with others is what we do every day.  

Based on our experience working, leading teams and training remotely, here are our top three principles you can apply to your remote work situations:  

Intentionally cultivate personal relationships. When you’re in an office working together, there are countless opportunities to connect for conversations that don’t revolve around work. Going to grab a coffee with a colleague, chatting while you wait for someone to arrive to a meeting, or simply sitting down with someone for lunch don’t happen when the team is remote. However, personal relationships are what build trust and often lead to successful business outcomes. If your team works remotely or is starting to work remotely, you as the manager can do a few things to ensure the personal relationships don’t fall off the radar:

• At the start of online meetings most people will log in right at the start time, which eliminates any small conversations that normally occur when a team is together in person. Managers can log in 5-10 minutes early and greet participants who do the same. Managers can also lead a check-in where everyone on the team is given a couple minutes to share what’s on their mind or any personal updates. Some organizations even schedule specific time with teams for the purposes of connecting on a more personal level where they aren’t allowed to talk about work.

• Check-in and check-out online with employees via Slack, (or whatever communication tool you’re using). A simple good morning from you as the manager affords the employee an opportunity to connect with you if they have any questions for the day. Also, be sure to check-out when the day is over. When employees are working remotely, the hours of work and life can blend together more seamlessly, so it’s nice to sign off for the day so employees don’t think you expect them to be available all evening.

• Work “together” on google hangouts. Sometimes when our teammates feel like we’ve been working in isolation for too long, a couple of us will open a google hangout and work together. This provides space for small chat, questions and helps you feel more connected.

Assign ownership, not tasks. If your team has been working together in one location, it’s easy as a manager to swing by someone’s workspace and assign a new task. Working remotely makes it harder to make last minute changes or task assignments without them feeling disruptive. As a manager, think about assigning people on your team ownership over areas of the business/function rather than tasks they need to accomplish. Assigning ownership means you’ll explain to employees what success looks for a particular part of their role, and not necessarily telling them how to get there. When we assign work, we’ll often use the phrase “success looks like…” and describe the end outcome but let people get there in the manner they wish. 

Set standards for communication, but remain flexible. Our team connects over almost every medium; Slack, texts, email, and both scheduled and impromptu google hangouts. We have one standard weekly meeting for updates, and then book time together as the need arises throughout the week. Some weeks the whole team doesn’t connect at all, and other weeks it feels as though we’re spending our entire days together planning and problem-solving. Working remotely generally leads teams to having ‘fewer’ status meetings, which is likely a blessing in most organizations that lean too heavily on meetings instead of planned organized work and good communication. It’s important when working remotely to have some weekly meeting rhythm that works for your team - we always suggest less is more. And remain flexible to the needs of the team that week. As a manager you’ll need to focus more on what the team and each employee needs to get work done. You’ll have to act as a conduit for communication and encourage your employees reaching out to one another and to those in other departments. Some great questions to facilitate this are; who have you connected with outside our team this week? Which teammates might want to know about this part of your work who aren’t necessarily going to be kept in the loop? Who are the three people that could help you achieve this outcome? Great managers are always asking questions around communication and it's even more important when the team is working remotely. 

Managing people can be a challenge in any environment, especially since very few managers receive any formal training in how to lead others effectively. If you’re used to being on-site with the majority of your team and are transitioning to everyone working more remotely, celebrate this as an opportunity to implement some new manager behaviours that improve the overall engagement of your team.