Remote work is on the rise, and many companies are realizing the benefits of avoiding rush-hour traffic and reduced operating costs to run an office. However, those employees formerly on the frontline are used to being managed in-person. And a remote set up can throw them off track by changing the routine as they know it.
With the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, many frontlines and non-essential businesses that can run fully online have given their staff the option to work from home on a semi-permanent or flex-time basis. And with it have come constraints of managing work and ensuring tasks are on-track for completion.
Now that micromanagement is being chased out of the corporate setup, alternatives to managing a now-virtual team are being explored. After all, teams don’t evolve overnight into self-organized units. They require guidance and relevant involvement from stakeholders vested in looking after the health and performance of both the business and the people it employs.
The usual steps in the work cycle are to identify priorities, draw up deadlines, and delegate them to competent people. But what happens when you find out that one or more departments are competing to get their work seen first? If everything is a priority, timelines conflict and concerned members get stretched thinly trying to do it all. Worse, they no longer remain able to recollect and mark their progress if there are too many action items that require their attention.
This scenario’s adverse impacts amplify when the team is virtual. One, you can’t organize an impromptu huddle to get a clear idea of what everyone is on. And two, if anyone’s experiencing technical glitches midway during the day, you won’t know it till a few hours have passed, and a few false assumptions have been made! The first step to resolving mismanagement is to try to understand how it's a problem to your team, as well as to the business. Here are a few signs that your team would need someone to a remote project manager who can take the appropriate course-corrections;
Priorities are divided across tasks. These are inserted into work breakdown packages with the budget, equipment, and people needed for it. But if priorities change midway or an older one is replaced by a new (sometimes unrelated) priority, it impacts the deadline associated with the main task. Timelines either get shortened or become unrealistic in the face of new requirements.
Course-correction
A remote project manager can size up the leanness of the team as well as work requirements. This not only helps determine each member’s threshold to adaptability but also adjusts the deadline against a realistic scale.
A dependency can exist between two or more tasks. Confusion over who is taking what up, and where the dependencies lie arises when there is no visibility into what everyone as a whole is doing.
Course-correction
The remote project manager can use remote team management tools to check in on task statuses, pending decisions on action items, and review workflows that they are tagged in.
Two or more members on a team are double-booked or locked in on the same work which requires fewer people. New work cannot be assigned because the calendar has been blocked with busywork.
Course-correction
First and foremost, a remote project manager should use timezone applications to be informed of time differences automatically. They can accordingly sync their team’s calendar by location, which in turn indicates work hours for which a member is expected to be online, responsive, and available for comment.
Meetings that proceed without a preset agenda usually feature everyone pulled in impromptu. Doing so wastes the time of people not directly concerned or relevant to the meeting where they could have otherwise been doing something constructive.
Course-correction
A good project manageris like a sports coach. They know their members’ forte and contribution to the field. This information is crucial to setting an agenda for discussions by member relevance, work priority, and status updates needed from person to person. Daily check-ins and one on ones can be accordingly organized and confined to only those members whose inputs are necessary for the next step.
The line between work and personal life blurs when remote work carries on for long as it has in the present situation. Many workers find themselves overworked and fatigued from their inability to unplug. If the overload presses on, employees lose motivation and interest in the work, consequently resulting in a dip in performance. Eventually, high-performers leave and the slack falls on the rest of the team who default to a state of overwork when there is more work to go around and the team is short of hands.
Course-correction
Steer away from the expectation that now that your team is remote, they can log in earlier and log out late. A work-life balance is essential to the longevity of productive employees even if they have nowhere to commute to. Set time aside to draft a work policy that is more intentional about building a remote work culture and weave your people’s interests, processes and tools into it so that they look forward to work, as opposed to having a skewed perception of it.
The takeaway
Communicationshould be a more deliberate step than a secondary consideration when teams are working remotely. It goes beyond using asynchronous or synchronous channels to replicate the in-person interactions. It is about helping workers feel connected to the company, to their work, and to each other. Over the course of time, these remedial actions will enable teams to take ownership of tasks and their professional growth, all the while learning to collaborate better on the ones that need more than one stream of input!
