Now that the Covid-19 pandemic is ebbing away, many organizations wonder how far they will allow teams to continue working remotely. While Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has called working from home an “aberration” that will be “corrected as quickly as possible”, the boss of Unilever, Alan Jope, has said his office workers will never return to their desks five days a week.

Those who may dismiss the move towards telecommuting experienced during Covid as a passing trend and want to cancel remote work programs to get everyone back in the office should check the numbers.

According to Global Workplace Analytics[1] repeated pre-Covid crisis surveys show a preference with 80% of the employees to work from home at least some of the time, and 30% are prepared to take a pay cut in exchange for the option. The same organization forecasts that up to 25-30% of US employees will be working remotely part-time by the end of the pandemic.  

The Bureau of LaborStatistics reported in 2019[2] that an estimated 7% of US employees had the option of remote work before the pandemic. A World Economic Forum study[3] showed even higher pre-Covid numbers in some North European countries. In Sweden, 20% of the employees were routinely telecommuting, and 23% of Danes and 21% of Dutch worked from home at least several times a month.

Forbes published in March 2021 [4] that three-quarters of knowledge workers want to divide their quarters between home and office working after the pandemic, with the ideal split 64% from home and 36% from the office. Only 7% want to go back to full-time office work.

The data implies that the pandemic is not the cause of telecommuting but may have accelerated a tendency towards remote work. The same trend has also boosted the rise of fully remote teams, where members might be working closely with people in different countries whom they have rarely or never seen in person.

One of the biggest holdbacks of remote work from an organization's perspective is losing control and the potential erosion of the corporate culture. Also, managers who used to micromanage their teams may experience a sense of insecurity and feel they can't fully trust remote employees to work untethered.

Instead of forcing people back into the office, destroying value, losing high potential employees, and missing out on attracting new talent, I propose that managers should accept a new hybrid normal, change their management style and successfully acquire the tools to manage remote teams.

There is ample evidence to believe that the remote-work-genie is out of the bottle, and it will be tough, if not impossible, to put it back. As a result, instead of resisting, managers should evolve and accept to walk with this new trend.

The good news is that remote management is not unlike leading a team in person once managers learn to navigate the distance barrier and the challenges of coaching, and serving teams, which they do not see in person each day. The literature offers many suggestions to create remote team peak performance using workflows and technologies. In this article, I will zero in on one of the most important and often most underestimated aspects of managing remote teams and which is communication.

Communicate, communicate and communicate more

Why is communication so critical?

The remoteness makes it hard for team members to meet, communicate effectively, understand each other's intentions, and build trust.Even though it may be exciting initially, recent research[5] indicates that remote employees are more likely to feel left out than their on-site coworkers. Specifically, they worry that colleagues say bad things behind their backs, change projects without telling them in advance, lobby against them, and don't fight for their priorities. When working with people mainly known as a voice on a conference line or a face on a video call, it's easier to miscommunicate, and it's much harder to build connection and trust and create the semblance of a tight-knit group operating in close quarters.

Building trust in virtual teams takes more time than in on-site teams because asynchronous communication precludes social information sharing. Frequent communication can mitigate this by ensuring information is distributed in some form, creating more significant opportunities for cooperation, social interaction, and a sense of belonging.

Below I will discuss three main communication tools and their impact level.

• Face-to-face meetings

Nothing beats regular face-to-face meetings, so I start with this. Working remotely should not mean that employees can never meet physically if an opportunity arises.

An example is the tech company Gitlab, one of the world's largest fully-remote companies. To keep teams intact even when they're thousands of miles apart, Gitlab holds annual events where people meet in person and requires all new employees to spend a week at the company headquarters before heading out.

Getting teams together for face-to-face meetings facilitated by team coaches early in the onboarding process will help teams better understand their members' attitudes, feelings, and communication styles. The more remote team members understand each other, the less opportunity for misunderstandings over email or phone.

It is not always possible for some companies to bring all team members together at the same place and time. In that case, the manager should consider traveling to the regions where his employees live and organizing local meetings.

• Understand the team members' communication styles

A second strategy is to create a space for discussion where the members can talk openly about their personalities and communication styles. For example, let's look at an active, extrovert communicator interacting with a passive, introvert communicator. To the passive person, the active communicator can come off as hostile, whereas the extrovert communicator might think that they are acting normally. The extrovert might even interpret the other person's passiveness as an unwillingness to be honest and upfront about their opinions.If these two team members could sit down and discuss their preferred styles, they'll know in the future that these reactions might be misjudgments of the other person's intentions. It is best to have these discussions right from the beginning when the group is coming together for the first time in person. The use of communication style assessment tools such as DISC[5] will help each person reflect on their style to have a more productive, comprehensive, and higher quality group discussion.

• The virtual water cooler

The office water cooler in the hallway or the coffee machine in the kitchenette serves as a place for people to take a break, make small talk, and share ideas. It serves an essential social function. The informal rapport-building team members engage in helps them communicate more effectively in their work settings and facilitates trust and knowledge sharing.

Remote teams have no natural and spontaneous place to gather. For this reason, managers of remote teams need to consider how to use different forms of communication to replace the face-to-face interaction at the water cooler. They should develop a "digital water cooler" that recreates that space in a virtual setting.

One way of doing so is creating activities focused on self-disclosure, for example, having team members share personal values or experiences and posts about their family or sports or movies. These activities can be asynchronous (via discussion boards such as Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp) or synchronous (phone calls or video conferences) and significantly benefit teams and team members. The great thing about these methods is that they build rapport and encourage team members to trust each other and to be more open to sharing information in the future.

Another method is to open the video call for a "virtual coffee" fifteen or thirty minutes before the scheduled meeting. People can check in earlier and have a spontaneous meet & greet before the start of the formal meeting.

‍In conclusion‍

Remote work is here to stay. The sooner managers accept the new hybrid normal and align their leadership style accordingly, the better they will create high-performance remote teams. Particular communication challenges may arise in remote teams navigating differences in norms across workplaces or national cultures. In the absence of face-to-face meetings, team members need to pay special attention to ensuring mutual understanding of intentions and actions.

Face time and water cooler pow-pows might seem like an unnecessary by-product of office life. Still, they're essential to getting the most out of the team, especially when scattered around the country or the globe. The more a manager can recreate that social function on a remote team, the more unified they'll be. Managers of remote teams must be more deliberate about creating an environment of good communication because remote teams have fewer natural opportunities to do this. Managers can create a better rapport and connection through co-active, congruent, transparent, and quality communication. It will enable them to build the trust required to set their remote teams up for effective cooperation, collaboration, and success.

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FOOTNOTE

[1] Global Workplace Analytics: Work-at-Home AfterCovid-19 – Our Forecast

[2] NationalCompensation Survey (NCS) from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics -2019

[3] World Economic Forum: Working from home was a luxury for the relatively affluent before corona not anymore, Mach 2020

[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/nigeldavies/2021/03/15/5-ways-to-support-hybrid-working-in-the-future-workplace/?sh=39774f0373d6

[5] HarvardBusiness Review, Nov 2, 2017

[6] DISC is a personal assessment tool used to improve work productivity, teamwork, leadership, sales, and communication. DISC measures your personality and behavioral style. It does not measure intelligence, aptitude, mental health or values. DISC profiles describe human behavior in various situations, for example how you respond to challenges, how you influence others, your preferred pace and how you respond to rules and procedures. The DISC model discusses four reference points: Dominance–direct, strong-willed and forceful;  Influence–sociable, talkative and lively; Steadiness–gentle, accommodating and soft-hearted; Conscientiousness–private, analytical and logical

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Remote work will prevent high potential employee attrition and facilitate top talent acquisition; it is also good business economics and creates sustainability. Research shows that a typical employer can save about $11,000/year for every person who works remotely half of the time. Employees can save between $2,500 and $4,000 a year (working remotely half the time) and even more if they can move to a less expensive area and work remotely full time. The annual US environmental impact of working remotely half of the time would be the greenhouse gas equivalent of taking the entire NY State workforce of 9.6 million people off the road.

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