How to set your virtual team up for success
Guest Post by Martine Paulin
When something is new, we often approach it carefully, tentative. But sometimes, we don’t have a choice except to jump in with both feet.
For many, working remotely was imposed by the current pandemic, and not something that they chose. If that is the case for you, you might be doing your best but struggling to adjust. Being at home working during a global public health emergency is not an easy situation for anyone. Suddenly working from home can cause personal stress, as well as issues within your team and your work. If you pause for a minute can you imagine another outcome? What if you could have prepared for this new way of working? What actions would you have taken?
Six years ago, as a new supervisor, I had my first experience with telework. I wasn’t working remotely myself, but I was managing a team with one remote employee. It did not go smoothly.
I recognize now that expectations, roles and responsibilities were unclear. We often forgot to include the person in day-to-day business, and we weren’t sharing information in a timely manner. It felt hard to reach the person working remotely, and frequent schedule changes made collaboration very difficult. The result was miscommunication and a lack of trust on all sides. I blamed remote work, and thought it was a bad fit for a high pressure communications’ shop. I was inclined to agree with those who said telework was for overtime on evenings and weekends.
Fast forward two years, when I joined a department that has employees dispersed across the country. Although people had the tools they needed to work virtually from anywhere, bringing teams together in office spaces was a priority. But office space was in short supply. People would claim desks before they were even vacant! Office space was one of the most contentious topics of discussion at the management table. Meanwhile, I needed to build a team…and had two desks I could allocate. Necessity meant I had to think differently if I wanted to recruit and deliver on our mandate.
So I reconsidered working remotely.
With support from my director, we decided that my team and I would share our limited office space and work from other locations until desks freed up. I would recruit and build a distributed team. All team members, including myself, would work remotely most of the time, and the majority of our interactions would be by email, phone or videoconference.
I started thinking about what I could do as a manager to set the team up for success.
- Found best practices I could apply to create and support an engaged distributed team.
- Reflected on my previous experience, and established clear processes for how we would work together, regardless of where we were sitting.
- Created a flexible schedule to coordinate the use of our limited office space and developed telework guidelines and agreements for everyone.
- Established clear roles and responsibilities for everyone, wrote them down and updated them to reflect our ever-changing work.
- Developed and shared performance objectives with indicators to build transparency and accountability, and to ensure everyone — myself included — was mindful about how we collaborated, communicated and respected each other in our interactions.
- Developed mitigation strategies in case issues came up (e.g. tech/connectivity, labour relations, performance, ergonomics, change in leadership, etc.) which really helped to get support and buy-in from senior management, who at the time were not very supportive of remote work.
As the team grew, we had regular discussions about expectations (mine and theirs) and how we could better work together. We made adjustments to ensure everyone was on the same page, and contributing to their best capacity. One of the most important things we did together was decide on which communication tools we would use for what:
- Our weekly team meeting would be held in person (if possible)
- Video chats would be used for meetings with colleagues and clients
- Instant messaging was for day-to-day communications between us
- Email was used to recap and formalize decisions or direction and to organize meetings
- A closed social media group for our team for emergency communications only
- We also made a point of getting together in person for lunch once in a while
This made it easier for everyone to collaborate and work as a team. It also significantly reduced miscommunications and assumptions. Sometimes it was hard. As the team grew, we discussed what was working well, what wasn’t and adapted along the way.
Remote work is our current reality and the likely way forward for many GC employees. Whether you choose it or not, now is a great time to pause to have conversations about how it is going, and to identify changes that might be needed to improve team communication, productivity and morale. It is never too late to set your distributed team up for success!
