Management & Working Remotely

1,559 words

David Burkus
Leading from Anywhere: The Essential Guide to Managing Remote Teams
New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2021

The teleworking revolution is here, and it has the chance to change everything. I personally did a great deal of teleworking during the pandemic, and I worked harder, got more done, saved money and time, and paid off my debts. Teleworking likewise gives people the chance to live where they want to live. Many distressed small towns can be revived with a well-paid teleworking work force.

One requires a knack for leading while teleworking, however. Leadership is a difficult thing to do. Business thinker David Burkus writes a great deal about building and leading effective teams, and his books are worth reading. In Leading from Anywhere, Burkus focuses on how to lead a teleworking team. He starts with the idea one needs to respect all the employees. In a simple sense, this is correct, but one needs to realize that “respect” is a slippery term. I’ve found that those who demand “respect” the loudest are often the most disrespectful toward others or dysfunctional in some way. Likewise, the people who talk the loudest about “integrity” are quite often crooks.

The goal of any remote workforce team is to accomplish their firm’s goals. To achieve that, leaders must make tough decisions, have frank conversations, and occasionally fire employees. This might be interpreted as a lack of “respect.” A leader must be always his best professional self so that when an employee needs to be fired, he can do so without being criticized for his on-the-job behavior.

I’m of the mind that no leader is really in charge of anything until he’s fired somebody. This isn’t to say that one should fire a person on the first day just to do it, but firing troublesome people is a big help and ultimately necessary. There are three reasons to fire an employee:

1. Mutiny, or the failure of an employee to follow the leader’s vision.
2. Misconduct.
3. The failure of a worker to master his job.

There are also those who shouldn’t be hired in the first place. If one has had a series of bad experiences with people of a particular background, don’t hire them. I call these people Ripley’s Androids, so named for the treacherous robot in the Alien movie. It is best not to say who your Ripley’s Androids are, since you could find an exception — but follow your gut instinct when hiring. Don’t hire someone you are uncomfortable with or have a bad feeling about.

Few managerial books explain how to fire unsatisfactory people, and Leading from Anywhere doesn’t say much about it other than to point out that a checklist for out-processing employees needs to take everything into account. For example, one disgruntled employee turned in his computer and phone, and then drove his company car to an economy lot at an airport and flew away just to make things hard for his employers. Nobody had told him to turn in the car.

The concept of teleworking was first articulated by a NASA engineer named Jack Nilles in the 1970s. The technology did exist then, but few people had personal computers, so remote work on a large scale was impossible. The COVID-19 pandemic occurred after computers were widely available, so it became the catalyst for a massive teleworking undertaking organized on the fly. This mass experiment in teleworking created a new set of challenges for managers.

The first question is whether a firm should adopt teleworking or not. The short answer is that, if possible, the employee himself should be free to decide. The main issue is distractions. There are as many distractions at the office as there are at home; in fact, there are often more at the former. Doughnuts can appear in the conference room and your employees all end up in there while discussing Monday Night Football. But there are distractions at home, too. Each worker needs to decide under which scenario the most distractions occur and make the decision about teleworking accordingly.

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Should one be a manager in a firm that has many teleworkers, one must hire workers who have the basic skills the firm needs as well as those needed for telework. The critical one is the ability to communicate with teammates remotely: e-mails, collaborative software, phones, and so on.

The way to assess communication skills is through virtual interviews. Skip the in-person panels and drop gimmicky hiring rituals such as asking the applicant riddles. Instead, focus on a cover letter and the content of the resume, and see how the applicant handles remote conversations. Another thing to look at is the potential employee’s ability to self-start. Does the applicant have the initiative to fix problems without being told to do so?

Once the employees are hired, it is necessary to create a functioning team who are bonded by friendship as well as professionalism. Burkus suggests making time for fika, a Swedish word for drinking coffee with other people. In doing so, one gets a break from work and can socialize. Schedule a fika during ordinary work hours and encourage the workers to get to know each other. Another way to create teams is to have shared meals. Schedule a time to eat while teleworking.

Another idea is to hold a work sprint. Get a team together, turn the mute buttons off, keep the video cameras on, and have everyone work on the project with a set goal to complete. The idea is to have two people share a virtual environment who can help and motivate each other.

Managers should also hold office hours in which any employee can talk to them, and hold on-site conferences where employees can get together in person. This strengthens personal bonds tremendously.

Remote workers can live anywhere, so the team will likely be in different time zones. It is therefore critical to schedule meetings at times everyone agrees on. But one also needs to recognize that the person who is in a time zone that is far away from the others will always be inconvenienced. Occasionally schedule meetings when they are convenient for that person.

Another way to improve remote working is to carry out asynchronous communication; i.e., when a response to a query is not expected immediately. This usually means communicating through e-mail. Asynchronous communications should be written clearly and concisely, and should be positive. E-mails can sometimes sound angry or rude even when they are not intended to, so be aware of that. Once a remote worker told me that she was very frustrated by another employee’s tone in her e-mails. Both of them were nice and professional in their dealings with me, so I realized that signals were being misread. The two had never met, so I made it a point to arrange a meeting at an in-person conference, and there were no accusations afterwards.

As far as synchronous communication, studies show that having the camera off in a virtual meeting is the best way to go. Verbal communication is extremely effective, but one might want to have a professional photo displayed to represent oneself on whatever communications software one is using.

In a teleworking environment, meetings become a major event, although they are a tricky business. in some cases, a meeting can be handled by a quick e-mail; in others, the opposite is true. Ideally, there are two types of meetings. The first is to go over routine business and bind the team together. The next is to go over complex problems that can lead to work sprints or activities that create productive gains.

For complex situations, start with a meeting that defines the problem, then have a meeting to discuss ideas to solve it, and finally end with a meeting to make a final decision on what to do. Meetings should also be arranged in order to hold breakout sessions between technical experts who can evaluate the ideas presented in the larger meetings, or between managers of different departments to eliminate friction.

In virtual work settings, performance is measured by genuine accomplishments rather than mere presence. Goals need to be clearly established and fully understood. Good managers need to separate people problems from process problems. Feedback should be clear, positive, and constructive.

Because teleworkers are carrying out day-to-day operations from home, it can become difficult to separate work life from home life. Burnout is a major threat. It turns out that the commute from the office to home has a calming effect, but this wasn’t widely noticed until the pandemic was in full swing. Burkus has several suggestions for getting out of work mode. The most practical is to have one phone for work and another for private life. When the (virtual) whistle blows, put down the work phone and pick up the life phone.

Burkas also goes over practical advice on how to pay people who are living in places that have different costs of living, how a town can entice people to move in by supporting teleworking, and how to establish cyber security, among other practical things.

Teleworking is certainly here to stay. Long-distance communication is the norm. Mastering the ability to work from home can bring enormous professional rewards, while mastering the ability to lead remote teams is even more rewarding. White advocates should master this and all other professional tasks.