Engage Your Virtual Team in 8 Simple Ways
Leading and engaging a team of work-from-home staff could be challenging and sometimes tricky. It requires a different set of skills and tools, compared with managing people face to face.
Working from home and managing a virtual team were once strangers to me, so I consider winning a ‘ONE TEAM’ award from Isentia a milestone in my career. My team won the Isentia Galaxy Award for FY 2015. This is a prestigious award that ‘recognizes and rewards teams that work successfully together to achieve outstanding results for the business, region or function’.
So, what does it take to make a virtual team succeed?
Let me share with you some of the strategies that work for us:
1. Trust your team.
For a virtual team that works on tight deadlines every day, trust is essential. Even without seeing your colleagues, you need to trust that they are working on their tasks and that they could finish on time without sacrificing quality.
Communicate openly. Share your stories to get everyone comfortable sharing their stories, as well. Lead by example. Without trust, nothing can be accomplished.
Tip:
To build trust, you need to show that you sincerely care for the team, and that you’re not only after the completion of tasks.
2. Be transparent.
In an office setup, you see what your team is currently working on, and it could be easy to know the progress of each project.In a virtual setup, however, you can be clueless.
Transparency in a virtual team requires creativity and resourcefulness. We use various tools to promote transparency in our team, including Skype and G-Docs.
Skype, our virtual office. Every morning, our sub-team leads post all the ‘works in progress’ (WIP) and our expected tasks for the day. This makes it easy for us to see who’s working on what and if we still have capacity for ad hoc tasks.
At the end of each day, before we log out, we update each other of our progress. Have we completed the tasks? Or how many pages do we still need to work on?
We also hold brief calls daily to discuss urgent concerns or any issue with the reports we handle.
Google Docs, our ‘virtual assistant’. We have a shared team calendar that includes all the daily, weekly and monthly deadlines of each team member. We also calendar our leaves, meetings, trainings, as well as our holiday and weekend duties.
Tip:
Make sure that your team is comfortable with the tools and methods you use to promote transparency.
For example, you may do a video call every day to check on each other’s progress, but if your colleagues are not comfortable using a video camera every day, then find another way to do the progress checks. An audio call or Skype chat might be better.
3. Celebrate small wins.
It’s important to appreciate every small step that eventually leads to big wins. You don’t have to win awards to celebrate. Successfully completing a project is enough to celebrate with your team. Every job well done is worth celebrating.
Tip:
At times, a simple ‘Congratulations!’ and some ‘party’ emoticons on Skype could already boost the team’s confidence and could start a conversation about how you successfully completed a project.
It always feels great to talk about how you managed to complete special projects despite all the limitations.
4. Leverage each member’s strengths.
If you want a project to succeed, you have to assign the right task to the right person in the team. For example, although our senior training specialist could handle an entire webinar production while the rest of us were working on other projects, we agreed to produce the client webinar as a team.
We assigned a researcher, scriptwriter, editor and webinar facilitator. This way, we get to leverage the members’ key skills and let the senior training specialist focus on facilitating the live webinar. This project turned out to be a success, and because everyone had a contribution to the project, the whole team was very happy!
Tip:
Find each member’s key strengths, so that you can effectively delegate the mini-tasks required to accomplish a big project.
5. Promote lifelong learning.
I believe in lifelong learning, and I communicate this constantly to my colleagues. To help promote lifelong learning, we have what we call our Professional Development Day or ‘PD Day’. Once a month, each of us spends one day doing what we think could help us grow professionally. We enroll in relevant MOOCs, complete useful courses from Lynda.com, and read books or articles. Then, during our monthly face-to-face meetings, we share with the team our key learning from our individual ‘PD Day’.
Isentia has introduced Degreed to all employees, and we’re happy that we now have a way to track and measure our learning progress while we earn points for every article, video, course or learning material we consume.
Tip:
If you want to encourage learning within your team, you need to ‘walk the talk’. You have to be an active learner, as well.
6. Cultivate a culture of teamwork.
Teamwork is a culture, a way of life. Building teamwork takes conscious effort and a lot of time. But if you succeed, everyone in the team will greatly benefit. There’s no shortcut to building teamwork, but the most important part of doing so is to establish clear communication.
Let every member know that each one’s contribution has a significant impact on the day-to-day operation of the business and success of the team. With teamwork, every member knows when to ask for help and when to offer help.
Because we have daily deadlines, it’s hard to say that all of us will be in great shape all the time. But that’s fine. As long as we know when to raise the red flag, the deliverables are safe in our team.
In one of my previous posts, I talked about how our teamwork never fails despite a strong typhoon that gets in the way.
Tip:
Communicate team goals clearly and track the progress of each project. Most importantly, don’t forget to say ‘thank you’ or ‘please’ as you ask the team about their progress.
Be generous with feedback — good feedback and even the not-so-good ones. These are the basic things you can do to create that culture of ‘oneness’.
7. Empower your team.
Sometimes, our projects do overlap. I make this a chance not only to delegate wisely, but to empower each member of the team. I let each team member own a project. We assign a leader who drives the project, tracks the progress and pushes all members to completing their shares.
Tip:
When you let your team members own a project, they feel empowered and they get motivated to always do their best.
As a bonus, you’ll get to discover who among your colleagues have that leadership potential and great time management skills!
8. Find winning opportunities.
Everyone wants to contribute something significant to the company. As a leader, you have to find ‘winning opportunities’ for your team. Nominate your team members in contests. Encourage them to join company-wide activities.
Tip:
You don’t need to win all the time. Your nomination and encouragement are enough to make them feel that you believe in them and that you value their contributions.
As a team, we create opportunities to have non-work-related activities, aside from our monthly meetings. It’s important to have fun and enjoy each other’s company when you meet face to face.
If you’re also part of a virtual team, please comment below to share your own tips. I’d be glad to hear your thoughts on this.
Thank you for reading!
