Advising clients who run a company with several team members, this topic does yield some creative approaches.  

Get To Know Each Team Member 

First, I encourage business owners to consider what “life and work” is like from your team members’ perspectives, especially while we’re still fighting this pandemic. Get to know each team member individually. A monthly “breakfast with the boss” over zoom is easy enough to schedule. No work status, just a catchup on how your family is doing, hobbies, etc. Your team members need your caring and empathetic support as well as your paycheck. When you understand each person’s situation and perspective, it becomes clear how to manage that person’s work remotely.  

Build a Strong Sense of Community 

The next step is to foster a sense of community, which is more critical when each person is remote than if we were all a cubicle away. Have team gatherings that ditch the stress-filled and boring corporate meetings of yesterday. What I do not support is a “mandatory daily 8am meeting” which can put stress on young parents or caregivers of elderly parents. It would be more beneficial to have a weekly lunch zoom where you eat “together” and discuss what’s happening with clients and with the company’s goals. Another idea is to have a Friday afternoon “cocktail hour” at 4pm. Combining both ideas, a mid-week lunch catch-up and an end of week-in-review session will do more to review and strengthen goals, find ways for the company to improve, encourage open communication and frank discussions. 

Respect The Rhythm 

Weekly activity logs for your folks to fill out can be recommended as a means for them to track their own productivity, rather than the boss “spying” on them. In 2021, we should not all be expected to clock in at 8am and clock out at a specific hour. Everyone’s natural rhythm is different. There are team members who are dynamic in the early morning and other team members who pick up their pace in the afternoon. Some employees do brilliant work after 9pm; so forcing everyone to follow the same set of hours will yield uneven results all around. Respecting each person’s natural productivity rhythm will yield better work over all.  

Be Generous With Positivity 

Lastly, find ways to encourage pride in each person’s work. Acknowledging all the positive actions simply yields a great desire to perform even better. This is something we learned as children – when our parents were happy with what we did, we want to do more to please them. It still works in an employment environment. Better attention to detail and pride in the finished product comes from positive behavior rewards rather than micromanaging and punishing. 

Remote teams are fast growing as a concept and is likely here to stay, post-pandemic. If it works to the betterment of the company, the management and the employees, then a return to arcane ways would be unproductive.