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Technology is changing our world and our workplace. Immediate access to all kinds of information and instantaneous communication by way of email, cell phones, and video conferencing make it possible for employees to seamlessly work away from the office setting. With more and more teams becoming geographically dispersed, telecommuting is developing into a viable, practical option.
"Managing remote employees is becoming more the norm than the exception at Sun," says Sanjay Sarathy, Director, Program Office, Software Developer Marketing & Management, Sun Microsystems. "On my team alone, we have employees spread across three campuses, with another 3-4 employees who are part of the Work From Home [WFH] Program."
The question is: How will you manage?
Managing remote teams requires excellent management skills, dedication to building and maintaining a team, and self-sacrifice.
How Do You Measure Up?
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Temperament and personality |
Self-sufficient
Self-motivated
Self-disciplined
Strong work ethic
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Needs direction
Motivated by peer approval
Structure-oriented
Party animal
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Life experiences |
Self-aware
Self-possessed
Mature
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Still wondering
Needs reassurance
New to the work world
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Exposure |
Comfortable within your company and with co-workers |
New to your company (less than 6 months) |
Job type |
Encapsulated projects
Presence can be virtual (phone or email)
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Meeting-intensive team projects
Physical presence required at a particular place
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The Common Challenges
No matter what your industry, company, or role, managing remotely presents common challenges to those who take part in it.
"The biggest challenge is to ensure that all team members feel a part of a single organization focused on a common set of goals, not just within my team, but within the overall developer marketing organization," says Sarathy.
The following is an excerpt of the best practices, tips, and advice collected through numerous interviews with remote managers at Sun Microsystems. The results are organized around the common challenges that all managers face, but with a special emphasis on those that are especially relevant to the remote manager.
Setting Clear Goals and Direction: Changes in Goals, Course Corrections, and Conflicting Priorities and Timelines
| 1. | Always hold the kick-off team meeting face-to-face! |
| 2. | Share the team's vision and gain the commitment of all team members during the kick-off meeting. |
| 3. | Set a specific deadline to develop the team's final goals. Take time to develop
the goals thoroughly, and not just finalize them at the end of a staff meeting.
Document any goal decisions in your meeting notes. Align your team goals with the corporate direction. |
| 4. | Develop a methodology for gathering and analyzing data so team members
understand how the goals were achieved and agree as to whether the desired outcome
was achieved. |
| 5. | Meet quarterly to review goal progress and remaining actions. Situations change quickly; therefore, it is important
to review and update goals regularly. |
Establishing Operating Agreements on Communication and Collaboration
| 1. | Establish a "Members Only" password web site with a page for everyone's contact information (phone, cell, pager numbers). Distribute pocket-sized paper copies of the contact information web page at least twice a year. |
| 2. | Hold monthly conference calls with the entire team. |
| 3. | Conduct quarterly meetings face-to-face with team if possible (especially crucial when the team is first forming). |
| 4. | Arrange for direct reports to travel to each other's areas if possible. |
| 5. | Use webcast or video conferencing for team meetings. |
| 6. | Keep an hour free immediately following conference calls with your team, should any of your employees want to follow up on something that was discussed. |
| 7. | Make a special effort to enable people from other cultures to communicate. Remember: A Western opinion tends to be expressed more strongly. Ask people from other cultures what they think. Allow everyone to be heard. |
| 8. | Suggest to direct reports who have difficulty communicating in English during a conference call that they send their comments in an email after the call. |
| 9. | Agree as a team to define a written plan for communication and collaboration,and performance tracking and assessment of progress towards goals. |
| 10. | Rotate the drivers and facilitators for the conference calls or face-to-face meetings. Record notes and send them to the team. |
| 11. | Agree on response times to messages. Examples: Return all phone calls within 24 hours, return all emails within 24 hours, and mark or tag urgent emails and voice mails. |
| 12. | Consider using cell phones and pagers with nationwide USA access. These devices cost more but allow team members to keep in touch without having remember each other's travel schedules. |
Building and Maintaining Remote Relationships
| 1. | Devote quarterly face-to-face team meetings just for team-building activities. Send informational content through email or email attachments. Don't use up the time in the meetings. |
| 2. | Learn how to celebrate "virtually." Use video conferencing for team building; choose a "theme" such as having everyone dress in Hawaiian shirts. Try a virtual "happy hour"--a phone or video conference where no work is allowed--just conversation. |
| 3. | Get to know employees or potential team members before you form a team. It helps to understand what the interpersonal and team dynamics might be when you put together a team. |
| 4. | Have your team members take the Myers-Briggs test (or similar personality test) and brainstorm ideas on how to communicate better with each other. |
| 5. | Invite special guests (such as second-level managers) to attend face-to-face team meetings. |
| 6. | Have the whole team welcome new members. If appropriate, provide a local mentor. |
| 7. | Schedule a get-together in one location (if fiscally possible) for the whole team at least once a year to take advantage of team-building classes that the group can attend. Or set up a training session just for your team. |
| 8. | Launch your regular team conference calls with some lighthearted banter. This depends on the manager's style, but it usually works well. |
| 9. | Be sensitive of the various time zones when holding a meeting. Don't always hold a meeting when the same person has to attend late at night. Rotate the calls during different times. |
| 10. | Ask for advice from your direct reports who are in different geographic areas to learn about their cultures and customs. |
| 11. | Use team conference calls to discuss problems and ask the entire team for suggestions. This helps to build team spirit and allows team members to get to know each other. |
| 12. | Set up councils (for example, an engineering council or managers' council) to talk about issues and make decisions. Allow members to work out the issues they need to decide upon as a group. Instruct the councils to share their decisions about operational issues with you. |
| 13. | Establish practice forums (for example, an engineering forum). You'll find that these groups will become empowered and share ideas. This not only helps to build relationships between your professional and technical staffs, but `it also helps with developing junior staff members. |
| 14. | Share results from your management performance feedback tool, and ask for advice and input from your direct reports. |
| 15. | Be very direct, either verbally or electronically, when managing conflict. If two groups of people are on either side of an issue, make sure they speak with each other on the phone. Participants can't rely on physical clues because they can't see them. Therefore, they have to ask a lot of questions to make sure they understand the full scope of the problem. |
Assessing Work Remotely, Measuring Progress Against Goals
| 1. | Ask the team to create a performance scorecard that can be used to measure goal performance. |
| 2. | Constantly ask the team if your requests are too aggressive and then allow for an open dialogue about how to accomplish tasks and projects in a timely fashion. Always keep an open dialogue. |
| 3. | Use a project-planning tool. It will help with managing a project within a dispersed team. Everyone will have visibility around project milestones, required actions, deliverables, and dependencies. |
Rewarding, Motivating, Coaching, and Career Development
| 1. | Rotate direct reports into other jobs within the team so that they are constantly learning new skills and developing themselves. |
| 2. | Become familiar with HR global processes and always look for ways to help your direct reports. |
| 3. | Share good news and recognition from upper management with the entire team and other stakeholders. Celebrate successes. Send gift certificates to remote employees to show your appreciation. |
A Rewarding Experience
For Sarathy, the rewards outweigh the challenges.
"The opportunity of having my remote team members in India share their experiences with the team members in the United States allows the entire team a chance to share different perspectives on what they're hearing and learning from developers."
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