How can you maximize engagement with your team when working remotely? Take a listen to my conversation with host Natalie Benamou, as we discuss how you can improve team engagement when everyone is no longer in the office.
A few points I covered:
Lockdowns & Remote Team Management
When lockdowns forced managers to lead teams online, we all had to learn new skills. For me, I had never managed a remote team before. I prided myself on being a good manager for many years, having feedback over and over again that I was a great manager, people liked working for me, but remote management turned me into a bad one, I just didn’t have the skills needed.
Without the visual cues normally gained by working in an office, I accidentally turned into a micromanager, something I abhorred. In my career as a leader, I depended so much on visual cues in an office that I was lost without those.
I realized, after some talented younger people on my team resigned, that I had to learn new skills and set about educating myself on remote management. I listened to webinars (my favorite was one by Upwork that I got a lot out of) and read the book Working Remotely: Secrets to Success for Employees on Distributed Teams by Teresa Douglas, Holly Gordon, and Mike Webber which gave me a complete guide to working from home and leading a team remotely.
I changed as a result and I became happier and so did my team. It was absolutely worth the investment of time and energy, practicing new techniques and committing to learning and changing.
Moving to a new country during the pandemic
Moving is stressful at the best of times, even if it’s just down the street. So moving from Germany to the US certainly had an extra layer of stress.
When I was promoted to CMO, the role was to be based in Chicago as we wanted to open an office here and I was to lead that. However, when I was promoted in October 2020, Chicago was in strict lockdown. If I had moved, I would have been sitting in an apartment by myself just the same as if I was in Berlin, so I said to our leadership team I’m not moving yet, I’ll wait for things to open up. And in April the next year they did so I started getting ready and moved in July. The city was really opening up and I could go out and meet people and enjoy myself.
I found the stress about the same as moving anywhere with one exception – the slight chance I couldn’t get into the country when the day came due to a sudden rule change, however the chances were low as I am a US citizen (dual citizen with Australia) and the US let citizens fly home through the entire pandemic.
Online Meetings
I don’t expect everyone to participate in large groups. During the pandemic we held company video calls with over 150 people and hardly anyone participated in the beginning. We would have loved it if they did but it just wasn’t the norm. Eventually we figured out we need to pause, ask questions, introduce quizzes and switch up speakers in order to engender more engagement. The struggle with online meetings with the entire company is we’re not TV presenters and an hour and a half of listening can get pretty boring.
I found that if there are more that 6 people in a meeting having everyone participating was really difficult. And if I did have a larger group or just found people weren’t contributing, I’d ask people directly if they had anything to add to what was just said so they’re participating.
Remote vs Office
At the start of the lockdown I was resistant to working from home as I’d found I needed the travel time to and from work to separate work from my personal life. I’ve since learned new skills to handle that and quite like working from home.
Things are changing and we cannot expect people to give up the experience of working from home after it’s been proven to work – after all, businesses still function without all the staff needing to be in the office, we’ve proved that.
Each company needs to work out what is best for their productivity and teams, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, although I do think hybrid working conditions will be seen more and more as time goes on.
I think that if managers and leaders want to force people to come to the office because they’re finding it too hard to lead a team from home, they really need to develop remote leadership skills. Leading teams remotely is a skill and can be learned like any other skill.
