Remote Management 101
I’m not going to argue whether having remote employees in 2019 is a good or possible thing. It is. Gaining access to a national, or international, pool of talent focused on your company’s mission is worth the cost in adaptation. If you question that, you’re in the wrong place and, simply put, you are the problem remote workers have been trying to overcome in your organization.
Remote people management is a step above having remote employees, but necessary for the success of remote employees and the overall organization.
Have you heard the Ginger Rogers Fred Astaire line about, Sure he was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, ...backwards and in high heels. Well, that’s remote people management. If you go online to research how to be a good remote manager or how to be a good remote employee, much of the advice is crap—which only further serves to ramp up the difficulty!
The most common bits of advice are:
1) View production first, and then the human element.
2) Overcommunicate and over-engage and accept that you’re not going to be as involved as someone in the office.
3) Make a dedicated workspace.
It’s tough.
I’ve been remotely managed and managing for 5+ years at this point. I don’t have it all figured out, but I’ve got some ideas. They work for me. They work for my reports. Maybe they’ll work for you.
I am, notably and explicitly, not trying to “recreate” the in-office environment using other tools. This is the single most consistently wrong piece of advice I find online when it comes to managing remote people. Working and managing remotely is fundamentally different in challenge and execution. Treating remote employees like they’re lazy, socially challenged, technology-dependent homunculi who cannot make an effort to interact with their colleagues is the root of, let’s say, 75% of all remote employee issues.
The other 25% of the problem are the remote employees who actually are lazy, socially challenged, technology-dependent homunculi who cannot make an effort to interact with their colleagues—and they would still be a problem in an office setting!
Remote employees have the same needs as in-office employees but those needs cannot be met in the same ways. It requires different thinking on the part of senior leadership and everyday managers who, it turns out, have rarely been fully remote themselves and therefore rarely understand why those in-office solutions fall flat.
Example the First
My company, at one point, had two professional services groups that serviced different clients. It made sense. One team was split between remote, work-from-home (WFH) employees and those that sat in a client’s office. That was my team. The other team sat in one of our company’s offices. We had just wrapped a fiscal year and we had broken our stretch goals and everyone was happy. As a reward, senior leadership announced that we would be able to wear jeans whenever!
My team, full of remote employees, immediately understood what that meant: we got no reward. Most of the team was embedded in a client site and adhered to their dress code—which was certainly not jeans friendly. The few fully remote people, like myself, shrugged and thought, Why would I wear jeans when I can wear shorts?
This was certainly not malicious or even intentional—and this reward was very welcome among the team who sat in office—but it was unintentionally thoughtless because the people who came up with the reward clearly did not consider the remote employees.
We can rabbit hole this, but I will condense a week of fielding pissed of video calls from my teams into this: If none of your leadership team has been or is fully remote, damn well make sure someone thinks about the impact of business and cultural decisions on remote employees because failing to take them into account is a clarion statement of the perceived value and worth of remote employees.
But, let’s get back to management:
The biggest issue remote managers have—aside from normal bad manager issues that every manager can have—is that they are told to recreate a physical environment. That is Old Thinking. Trash it. Build it new.
What do I mean by that?
A couple months ago I was having a whiteboarding meeting with a team to design and diagram a workflow process. There were 5 people on the call. Three, including myself, are remote workers. Two are in an office. Knowing me and my demand for video calls, the two folks in the office grabbed a conference room and pointed a camera at the whiteboard in the conference room and planned to write out what we designed.
I appreciated the thought and effort, but that’s analog thinking in a digital world. I had them go back to their desks so their large monitors would work and we whiteboarded in the meeting space. Everyone can see. Everyone can talk and point out and mark up and draw. We used technology to create a new working model—and we did not use technology to allow us to cling to old working models just a bit longer.
This stuff is basic, but it requires thought and critical analysis. I’m not going to blow your mind here, but I hope it makes you think.
I have five fundamentals with remote managers:
1) Humanize Yourself and Your Reports
Do not be a voice on the end of the phone or a keyboard. It is easy to ignore someone on the phone. It is even easier to ignore someone who is only on email or Slack. It is easy to be an a-hole to people over the phone or, even easier, over email. It is easy for others to forget that you are a person if that is all they see.
Humanizing yourself means a few things—and different things to different people—but I’ll boil it down anthropological terms. Non-verbal, non-explicit communication is the foundation of human interaction. A shoulder shrug is meaningful. A glare or an eye-roll or a quick, hrmm, scrunch up of the face are meaningful. Humans communicate non-verbally and non-explicitly! Email, Skype, Slack, even phone calls, strip us of tone and inflection and non-verbal queues. Get that back. Those non-aural communications are what make you a person, not a service bot.
The key?
Video. Chat.
I get it. It is a pain. It can be awkward at first. Do it anyway. I’m a jerk about people turning on video—calling it out, stopping a meeting until someone does it, etc. Everyone on a call has to turn on video. No one gets to hide and everyone gets treated the same—so, ya know, shower and get dressed. I repeatedly say that my door is always open and I mean it—people will do a 5-min video call with me, or I with them—and it is super effective.
You will learn more about a person in a 15 minute video chat then you will in a 45 minute phone call or a 40 reply email chain. That’s not hyperbole. Oh, you might learn more information about someone on that longer phone call or email chain, but you will have a better sense for who they are as a person after that video chat.
For the longest time I had some built in bookshelves and a free-standing under-counter wine fridge with alcohol on top of it behind me. After we moved that was the only place in the house for the wine fridge. I would constantly get on video calls only to have people ask me about it—what was that a bottle of—oh is that Blanton’s? Is that a copy of Old Man’s War? Yes, it is and yes it is, and they go really well together—what did they drink?
Ten minutes talking about a hobby, side project or de-stressor humanized me, and humanized them, in a way that an email chain will not. After that call I wasn’t Nick the Manager, or, Nick the Head of Group X, I was Nick, who likes Blanton’s and reading.
I would argue this is even more humanizing then stopping by someone’s work office or cube. This is a straight shot into their home and how they live. This is who they are, on display. It can be performative, but, if you can spot a fake in the office/life, you can spot a fake on video chat, too.
2) Culture is Flammable Glue
This is a huge topic, so I will try and focus this section a bit.
Corporations talking about “culture” makes me roll my eyes. The presentation, article or whatever is inevitably given by someone in HR or some higher up—a president or C-suite person—who has no idea what the actual culture of the company is. The guy/gal who makes 10x-200x what the average worker in the company makes has no idea what the culture is because that person is not part of the same culture as their audience!
To paraphrase Wikipedia and make it corporate-ee:
Since humans acquire culture through socialization, people working in different places or different circumstances develop different cultures. Much of anthropological theory has originated in an appreciation of and interest in the tension between the local and the global.
Put another way: different groups in the same company not only can have different cultures—they probably do, and that’s expected. Even different groups in the same office can have different cultures. Ever talked into an IT meeting when you’re in the professional services vertical? It’s different!
Talk about a “global” culture is so much bloviating. It exists in HR material and can be conjured to smooth over tough decisions—“We’re a culture that embraces change” is a great line to trot out during layoffs, but it is doubtful that the audience for that remark believes or accepts it—and they certainly don’t live it. If you work for a company that “embraces change” as part of their culture, and yet resists remote managers or remote workers in general, that culture is a lie.
All the corporate mission statements and family values talk aside, culture is wonderful, horrible, highly combustible, useful glue that can either propel or sink your team.
Culture can keep together a team burning hot or crumble a team achieving milestones. Managers and managers of managers always want to believe they have a great culture. That people want to work here. That they want to work on their team and specifically for them.
There is no one easier to fool than yourself.
Do people dig in and help each other out? Do they do that begrudgingly or willingly? If someone suggest a happy hour, do people jump at this, roll their eyes or quietly come up with an invite/non-invite list? Is the manager invited—and if they are, do they attend?
My biggest indicators of a healthy culture are (1) inclusive humor and (2) people spending time together outside of the office.
When things are tough—for good or bad reasons—good culture is what keeps the team focused and working. It is why someone logs in at night or comes in early. It is why someone can be drowning in their own work and still offer to help someone else. It helps push the team to new heights and it is, at its most cynical, a vehicle for abuse.
Humor and spending time together do not require a physical presence. Yes, they originated that way and yes they are easier that way, but, in the same way that work is digitized and remote in 2019, so is play. In my experience, this is an area where having Millennials is easier than having GenX, GenY or Boomers and the reason is video games.
Many offices have groups that log on and play games together at night. Fortnite is ridiculously popular. Before that, Destiny (and now Destiny 2), Overwatch, Anthem, Call of Duty, etc. The list goes on and on. Shooters and loot grinders not you fancy? Roll20 and other services recreate board games.
My point is that there are options.
This is not to say that everyone should be playing video games, and even in offices where some folks play, many do not. The point is to highlight that there are options for remote togetherness outside of office hours.
Remote workers do not have the benefit of shared physical space to create culture. Where geography previously played a massive role in company culture, Management and Individual Personalities now play the primary roles in defining culture.
Culture is important for in-office employees and it is something from which most remote employees are excluded. Find ways to include them. It is your only choice.
Be mindful and honest about your culture, or it will destroy your team and eat your success.
3) One on One’s
30 minute one-on-one’s every week are critical. It is sacrosanct time. This is their time. You don’t cancel and you don’t move or squeeze. This is, absolutely, a video call.
Please note that I routinely break this rule. I’d love to pull some sort of unreliable narrator twist here, but, really, this is all about Central Truth 2: Be the manager each person needs you to be. Not everyone benefits from a weekly check in. Some need 20 minutes twice a week. Some need 15 minutes 5 days a week. Some need an hour once every two weeks.
Do not, do not, do not go more than 2 weeks without speaking to your reports. Barring vacation, I can think of no good reason to not chat at least every 2 weeks—even with senior, really good, truly great people.
4) Transparency
Metrics and Goals. Transparently set them, transparently measure them, transparently report on them. You cannot coach someone if they don’t know what they’re being coached on. You cannot hold someone accountable if they don’t know they’re falling behind. You cannot promote someone if you don’t know that they’re awesome.
This is a two way street. Central Truth 3 is to be vulnerable. There are things you cannot share—HR and financial and forthcoming changes—but part of transparency is admitting when you were wrong. If you’re going to call someone out on the their issues, be able to take a hard look in the mirror and call yourself out, too.
5) Treat Remote Workers Like They’re in an Office—But Not How You Think
Remote workers are not working from home (WFH) because there is bad weather or because they’re getting a delivery. Their home is their office. Put another way, they work in an office, but that office happens to be in their house. Remote work requires a different mindset of the employee, manager, wider team and organization.
I am a remote worker. This is my job. This is my office. Shower. Get dressed. Log off/ leave at the end of the day. Get out of the house every day. Have separation from work—mentally and physically. It is the key to sanity (for me) and I know that has worked for others. Lacking that separation has caused some folks to lose their mind and decide remote work is not for them. Helping others figure out how to effectively work from home is part of being a good manager.
For managers of remote workers, understand and set those expectations – including and especially logging off. Someone who works from home is not “available” at 10p (local) just because they work from home. They have a family and a life and they watch TV and play video games and go out with friends. Their home life is no more or less important than any other employee’s, though, yes, they likely have heightened at-home capabilities. They also give up some space in their house to dedicate space to a home office. It is a trade. Resist the urge to treat them differently.
Here’s the really tough part: push for organizational recognition that they are on equal footing with in-office employees.
Remote employees below the executive level are often considered to be a set of boxed-in, tier2 employees. They may be high performers. They may travel to the home office on a regular basis. They may be a delight in person. But, they’re remote so they can’t be as effective as someone in the office because <reasons>.
Those reasons can vary, but they usually fall into a couple of categories:
I can’t just go to their cube/office and talk to them, and I don’t like that
They communicate differently/are available at different times than me, and I don’t like that
I have to put on headphones to talk to them (Real life gripe!), and I don’t like that
They just don’t see how things are done here, because they’re not here, and I don’t like that
They can’t learn the way I want to teach, and I don’t like that
TLDR: They make me change how I work and I don’t like that.
Often the person giving these reasons a) are older and b) have never worked remotely. It shows. Remote work requires adaption on the part of in-office employees.
The Remote-is-Second-Class mindset is dangerous for long term success and retention of remote employees—and that time horizon is 12-18 months, not years. People are smart and able to see if they’re being put in a box or if less capable, but in-office, employees get moved ahead of them.
Treat remote employees the same way you would in-office employees and demand others do the same.
That’s a long list. I get it. Remote management is hard, but mostly because it is a mindset shift. Here’s the thing about Ginger Roberts: she didn’t learn Fred Astaire’s steps and then reverse them, she learned her steps. To Ginger, Fred’s steps were the backwards version. Context matters. Mindset matters. Embrace the new mindset and remote management—either as manager or managed—becomes less arcane and more intuitive.
All things being equal, I think we can all agree that Ginger still had it tougher: she was in heels, after all.