Know Your Team’s Work
Remote Manager, Issue 2
This installment of The Remote Manager investigates some practical strategies to support your efforts to know your team’s work so that you can serve them better. It builds on the mindset introduced in the Introductory issue of this series. Here’s a quick recap:
A recent SHRM article claimed that employees “want their managers to micro-understand their work” (What Great Remote Managers Do Differently). I love the term micro-understanding because it perfectly captures the single greatest shift for management in remote work: the value of deeply understanding your team’s work.
Managers have always had a vested interest in understanding their team’s work so that they could evaluate performance, set expectations, and manage outcomes. Traditional management developed in an environment where most of the necessary understanding could be gleaned based on proximity. Remote management takes away the crutch of proximity and requires the remote manager to be intentional in getting to know their team’s work. Today’s remote manager has an opportunity to practice what great managers have always known — there is power in knowing your team’s work.
Keep Work Visible
One of the most powerful ways to know your team’s work is by making that work visible to not only yourself, but to the rest of the team, as well as any stakeholders outside of your team with dependent work. There are many ways to keep activities visible. Ultimately you will need to experiment and find option(s) that perform best for your team, your operating environment, and the type of work you do. Don’t expect a single magic bullet. Most remote teams benefit from a well planned and executed set of interlocking solutions. Here are some ideas that might be part of a solution: a well-maintained shared task board, quick daily priority shares by each team member, and a well-defined process to identify and escalate problems with clear triggers.
The system that you develop to keep work visible should be:
- Simple — keep your solution as simple as possible. It must be easy to maintain by those it is meant to serve. If the solution is not simple for the end user, it will not be maintained and will end up creating more problems than it resolves.
- Intuitive — the solution needs to make sense to those doing the work and to those using it to understand the work being done. The learning curve can not exceed the perceived value of the solution, otherwise it will not be sustainable.
- Accessible — all components of the solution need to be available to everyone in the team. Segmenting access will introduce obscurity that contradicts the intent of making work visible.
- Consistent — commit to using the solution in the same way and on the same cadence once it is agreed upon. During experimentation, time box changes and be clear about when and how changes will occur to prevent change fatigue and mental disengagement.
Keeping work visible benefits all stakeholders by building critical bidirectional accountability and surfacing issues more quickly. The team is insulated from surprise requests — tasks, deadlines, or requirements that they did not know they were responsible for. The remote manager has a source of truth they can rely on to know what work is being done and the progress of that work at any given moment. Employees are not interrupted by anxious managers who want status updates. Or badgered by unreasonable quality checks by managers who don’t understand the workflow. Communication to organizational and external stakeholders is meaningful, accurate, and non-disruptive. With activities clear and the responsible parties identified, it is much easier to identify if tasks are out of sync with strategic goals. It is easier to see if the efforts expended are reasonable for the experience level of the assigned owner or other demands competing for their attention. Keeping work visible makes it much easier to limit work in progress.
Limit Work in Progress
One of the common challenges of remote work is the growing list of work in progress. There is no messy desk or harried employee running from meeting to meeting to indicate that someone has too much on their plate. Work in Progress (WIP) are tasks that have started and are not completed. They may be new tasks or tasks that have been lingering. Too much WIP is a mental drain and results in context switching which often results in lower quality outputs. Limiting WIP leads to higher motivation, less interruption, and better quality. Limiting WIP also means more of the right things get done to make progress towards important outcomes.
Keeping work visible will help with limiting work in progress. Understanding your team’s actual capacity and the cognitive load of all open tasks are critical to determining how much work is appropriate for your team. Creating healthy working relationships with your people will enable the trust necessary for open dialogues around how much work is too much work. Likewise creating healthy working relationships with other stakeholders will support the necessary transparency for setting boundaries on new work or shifting priorities to cancel open tasks.
Assist in Prioritizing
One of the challenges many remote teams, whether fully remote or hybrid, is the narrowed scope of awareness. Teams often find it harder to see where their work fits into the bigger picture when their work occurs off site. Lacking the bigger picture, they have a hard time effectively determining how to approach their work. They may be doing the right thing in the wrong way. Or they may be doing the wrong thing entirely.
To assist in prioritizing you will need to set time aside to regularly discuss the why (purpose, vision, and goal) with them as a group and as individuals. These sessions will support you as you coach them through prioritizing or reprioritizing as conditions change. These sessions also give your team enough information that they can make informed decisions, or asked informed questions in the face of missing information. Most importantly, these sessions will help you understand your team’s work in a more strategic way, as they vary their approach based on the desired outcomes or vision that you share.
Conclusion
Knowing your team’s work is a powerful antidote to the micromanagement that is all too common for both remote and traditional teams. Knowing your team’s work supports the servant leadership that drives great results for your team. It also supports the kind of deep awareness that is needed to align your team’s work to the strategic outcomes being pursued by your organization.
Micro-understanding is a powerful strategy for the remote manager. It is the pixie dust that will transform a good manager into an exceptional manager.
Jennifer Columbe is the lead Operations Guru at Blue House Solutions. She blends her experience in operations, project management, product development to help business leaders build processes that work for their people.
She writes and speaks about issues impacting operations and building people centric businesses.
Reach out if you want to chat about how ideas in this article can work for your business.
