How to Avoid 5 Big Communication Mistakes in Remote Management
The rapid shift during the COVID-19 pandemic to remote work has taxed even the best manager to adjust communication to keep employees engaged, productive, happy, and efficient.
Remote workers require different communication techniques and approaches. Let’s look at some of the common mistakes managers and how to avoid the pitfalls when communicating with remote workers.
1. Under communicating and not building connections with employees
It is still incredibly important to have rapport and connections with your employees. When teams worked physically together, that daily or weekly touching base as you walk down the hall, the brief chat before meetings, or the quick stop in to talk to an employee kept up connections and collaboration. Now with remote working, those touch points are gone.
It takes extra attention to keep those connections and relationships going with remote workers.
Many managers have turned to email as a primary way to communicate with remote workers. However, emails and messaging are the least collaborative and most vulnerable to miscommunication. All those important non-verbal and paralanguage (voice, inflection, body language, etc….) communication cues are missing and emojis aren’t quite the same.
Emails, texts, phone calls, and even video conferencing makes it hard to check in on employees emotional wellbeing.
What to do?
1) Hold lunch time or happy hour remote video meetings where team members chat. This may require some type of “ice breaking” to make sure everyone gets a chance to talk.
2) Have scheduled one-on-one meetings where you give space for the employee to chat about themselves, how they are doing personally and professionally.
3) Gather the team together in person on regularly scheduled times. For some businesses, this may be once a week, for others once a quarter or once a year.
2. Having too many video meetings
Having too many meetings of any type (face-to-face or remote) erodes productivity and is exhausting. Video fatigue is real and should be managed.
When video and meeting exhaustion happens, people will start doing work during meetings, turning off their cameras, or zoning out during the calls which defeats the purpose of having the meeting.
What to do?
1) Have less but productive video meetings. Just like regular meetings, have an agenda, and keep to the agenda.
2) Only invite the people that are necessary for each meeting.
3) Keep everyone on-camera and make sure they are engaged in the conversation and has a chance to talk and express their opinion.
3. Not providing goals and priorities
There is a lot of inherent organizational knowledge that comes with having teams work physically together that is lost with remote teams.
In remote teams it is more critical to provide explicit goals and priorities. Individuals need to understand the organizational goals, their goals, and how they fit into the bigger picture.
Every person in an organization makes decisions. There are daily micro decisions made by employees that add up to the culture and priorities of the organization. How can those employees know the right decisions without knowing the goals and priorities of the organization?
Just having high-level goals also doesn’t work. Each team and person within the team needs to know their own priorities and goals within the overarching organization goals. It is important to tell each team member what is important.
What to do?
1) Create a description of the priorities for the organization. Organizational priorities are critical for decisions to be made top to bottom in the organization. It is imperative to order the priorities and not to have all the priorities as number one.
2) Communicate how each team fits within the organization and how they are important to the goals and priorities of the overall organization.
3) It is empowering for employees to understand their importance and role in meeting the goals. Many organizations skip this step believing employees will automatically know their goals or figure them out. That is not the case. A person’s roles, responsibilities, and how they fit into their team and the broader organization needs to be spelled out, so each person understands how their work benefits the organization.
4) As a corollary to how each person fits into the goals, if you have people in the organization whose job or responsibilities do not fit within the goals and priorities, then why are they in the organization or why are they doing those activities?
4. Not providing consistent and constructive feedback
When employees are physically together, it is easy to give quick feedback like “Good job” or “I have a few minor changes, let’s sit down and go through it” or “Congratulations on that big sale”. With remote working, the constructive feedback takes more work and planning.
What to do?
1) Take time to plan out the staff meeting. Keep a running list of Kudos to say to people in front of their peers.
2) Make sure one-on-one video or face-to-face sessions are held. They don’t have to be long, 30 minutes is usually all that is needed. The one-on-one sessions need to be frequently enough so that constructive feedback can be given in a timely manner. A meeting frequency greater than once a month means employees are not getting timely feedback.
5. Not spending the time to build trust
Trust is the belief that someone is reliable, honest, and can be counted on to do what they say they will do.
Trust is important to build both ways in a work relationship. Employees must know they can be confident in what their manager says and in their decisions. Managers in turn must trust employees to be honest and will do what they say they will do.
What to do?
1) Be honest with your team. Share information with them. Withholding information erodes trust as much as lying.
2) Avoid getting defensive or angry when an employee brings up a problem. They will stop letting you know of problems which harms the business as well as trust.
3) Micromanagement indicates a lack of trust. Instead of telling your team “how” to do their job, promote ownership of tasks. Tell them the goals and what to do but not how to do it. It’s amazing how creative and efficient people can be when allowed to determine their own path to the solution.
4) Develop performance measurements for everyone. Remote work is ideal for providing performance goals and success measurements and letting workers figure out when and how they get them done.
Remote workers may present unique communication challenges, but you can still make your team productive, happy, and successful.
Thanks for reading!
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If you would like to read more of what I have written?
The Superpower of Being an Introverted Boss — Empathic Leadership
Ten Things Employees Need To Trust Their Boss
Good Leaders Switch Between Management Styles
Tina Kuhn is the author of the “The E Suite: Empathic Leadership for the Next Generation of Leaders” and “The Manager’s Communication Tool Kit: Tools and Techniques for Managing Difficult Personalities.”
