In this first episode of season two, Jenni looks at the impact of remote work on building and maintaining relationships, and how that may feel whether you’re leading a team or trying to engage with people across an organisation. She also identifies key chaotic symptoms that can emerge when you’re remote and offers six tried-and-tested suggestions to help you go from chaos to calm.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
How RASCI can help you gain clarity and calm
The DISC Strengths™ Temperament Assessment
Myers Briggs Personality Assessment
Remote Work by Chris Dyer & Kim Shepherd
Webinar: Five myths about hybrid working
Spotting burnout: seven ways to solve your stress cycle
Books recommended by Jenni Field
The Long-Distance Leader by Kevin Eikenberry & Wayne Turmel
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast:
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Now, this is the first episode of season two, and today I’m going to be talking about a topic that’s been on the agenda for leaders and organisations for the last few years, and that’s the topic of leading remotely. Now, it’s something I’ve been reading about, speaking about, talking about for the last few years, and my conclusion from all of these conversations is that it all comes back to relationships. Now, whether or not that’s a comfortable word for you in business is another conversation, but relationships in the workplace is a phrase that we don’t often use.
But actually, for organisations to be efficient, to be engaging for people, we have to talk about the relationships we have with one another, and for relationships to be successful, we need good communication.
So, whether you’re leading a team that’s remote, or you’re joining a new company while remote, or you’re trying to engage with people across the organisation and you’re all working in different places, relationships is that common thread that we need to master. And it’s an element of the workplace that we don’t probably spend enough time on when it comes to trying to make changes. So, in the next 15 minutes we’re going to talk about the impact of remote work on building and maintaining relationships. We’re going to talk about how that might feel if you’re leading a team, but also if you’re trying to engage with people across the organisation.
And I’ll go through some of the chaotic symptoms that we can often see when you’re remote.
I’ll then share six things for you to think about to help you go from chaos to calm. And we’ll explore in the show notes some links for you to go away and have a look at some further reading or further resources for you to have a look at.
So what are the symptoms we see when we’re leading remotely that are a potential issue leading to chaos?
Now, there are different levels to this. There’s the individual feelings people have, and then there’s also the cultural impact of remote work. So, if we start with the individual perspective, so maybe one-to-one relationships between managers and their team, we can see things like managers perceiving their team as lazy, that often comes up. We can see micromanagement, and I’m going to talk a lot about micromanagement in the course of the next sort of 10 to 15 minutes. We can also see constant interruptions through instant messaging and phone calls, and we can also see people working to their own agenda and not those that they’re particularly engaging with.
So, that’s some of the one-to-one relationships that we’re sort of seeing some of that chaos that might come from that, where people are just working in a non-efficient way.
Now, from a cultural perspective, we can see things like lack of structure to meetings, lack of structure to conversations. We can see a lack of clarity in roles and responsibilities, people feeling a bit lost about what they’re doing. And we can also see people feeling lost in terms of that why. You know, what is it that we’re really trying to achieve? What’s the outcome we’re looking for? Why am I doing this? And all of that is just really compounded by the fact that we are working remotely.
So, a lot of these areas have been discussed quite a lot in the last few years, and a lot of the conversations around these topics lead us back to empathy, the need for leaders to have more empathy, the need for empathy to be there at the forefront of skills and characteristics of leadership. But in my opinion, we need to delve a bit deeper. And this layer underneath empathy and what’s really going on for leaders is something I’m going to be exploring more and more in 2022, but that’s not for today. Today we’re here to talk about leading remotely and also the six tips really that you can think about if you’re looking to engage your stakeholders who are remote, whether that’s your team, whether that’s people around you, whatever it might be.
What are the six things you might want to consider to help you be less chaotic and shift into a more calm organisation?
1. Ask Why
The first is to be clear about why you need to have a conversation, why you’re asking for something, why you need the other person’s time. Lots of whys in there, but time is our most precious commodity, and giving that to someone else is often taken for granted. We often think that time is something other people can control, and when we’re running productivity workshops, we spend a lot of time talking to people about putting boundaries in place, about taking the time to contract how things are going to work. And if I think about my experience in working with leaders, working with teams, whether that was before setting up Redefining Communications, time was always something I was always quite precious about, and I would always be very clear about why I needed to be at a meeting.
I wouldn’t go to a meeting unless it was clear about why I was going. What do you want me to do in that? What’s the outcome you’re looking for? So protect your time, but also make sure that you’re being very clear about why you’re asking people.
So if you’re leading a team, but this is also very relevant if you’re new to an organisation or you’re trying to engage with people that are remote or deskless workers, they will often think that the request might be bigger than it is. We often do that. We often overestimate the time things will take.
So make sure that you’re being very clear about, you know, why you’re asking, but also how long it’s going to take. I just need five minutes of your time, and the outcome of this call isn’t going to result in any extra work for you. Now that sounds very formal so there’s probably different language you would use. But, be very clear about what it is that you’re going to be doing, why, and what the outcome is going to be. Just helps make sure that people know what you’re doing. Now, if you’re new to an organisation and you’re doing this, you might want to take the opportunity to really think about your different stakeholders in the organisation. Maybe map out your stakeholders so you know who you need to talk to and about what, so that you’re not wasting your own time as much as anybody else’s.
2. Roles and Responsibilities
Now, the second is if you’re leading remotely and your team are remote is to think about the fact that your team are your team because of the skills that they bring to the table. Now, we have to be clear on roles and responsibilities. This enables better decision making, and there’s a tool called a RASCII that I’ve talked about recently and I’ve popped a link in the show notes to the blog that I’ve written about the RASCII tool that enables better decision making and better clarity on roles and responsibilities.
It’s all about making sure that we’re clear who’s responsible, that’s the R of the RASCII, who’s accountable, who’s supporting it, who you need to consult, and who you need to inform. There’s more detail in the blog post that I won’t go into here, but it’s a helpful tool to help you be clear about who is responsible for different things. And if you’re struggling with your team, it’s a really useful way to make sure that people know where they are accountable and where they are supporting and the different roles that they play.
But alongside that, we need to understand the strengths of our team and the weaknesses of our team and how we can make sure that we’re pairing people together, putting them on projects that are the best projects for them. So how does everyone complement each other?
And we can do that by doing work like DISC as a framework or Myers-Briggs. And again, I’ve popped some links in the show notes to those as well. So, make sure you’re clear about what the team needs to perform at their best, but also understanding our strengths and weaknesses is so important to have a really high performing team.
3. Allow Time For Relationship Building
The third is to give yourself time to build relationships. Now, I’ve touched on time already in terms of being clear about why you’re doing things. The fact that time is our most precious commodity, but you also have to give yourself time to build relationships. You know, in organisations, we go from very quick to want to get to action. We want immediacy. The culture we live in, certainly in the western world, is very much around this immediacy and this need to kind of get things going straight away.
And if we’re not taking the time to build relationships to get some alignment in the organisation it’s going to be very difficult for us to really do anything you know building relationships is all about creating trust it’s being able to demonstrate integrity and that does take time and in a remote environment it’s really important to do because people can often forget that we need that time to do that you’ve got to build some of those relationships. So, if you’re new to an organisation, having 15 minutes with people to say hello to understand more about what they’re doing can really help you know relationships are really about each party bringing something to the table.
So, we have to find out what those things are. So if you are new to an organisation, you’re new to leading a team, you’re trying to engage with people across the organisation that’s remote. You might not be new, but you might be struggling to reach people.
Then it’s all about having that time to understand how you can help them. You know, that’s ultimately what you’re trying to understand: what can I bring to this relationship? How can I help you? And if you come at it from that viewpoint, you’re probably going to get much better results in terms of developing and building that relationship, especially when you’re remote.
4. Prioritising Your Own Agenda
The fourth point is around thinking about your own agenda. So I talked about micromanagement and how that can link to working to your own agenda, and the micromanagement issue comes very much from this need to control.
So, when we think that things are outside of our control and working remotely, we can often feel that we can often go to a place of wanting to control everything, so we will want to make sure that we know exactly what everybody’s doing all of the time because that’s the best way for me to make sure that we’re going to do what we need to do. That’s where micromanagement comes from. It comes from a place of wanting to make sure that I’ve got some control over something if the rest of my world is out of control.
Now, that’s not necessarily pandemic related. This can happen regardless. We often have other things going on in our life that we might be out of control in, and therefore we’ll look to the places where we can do it. So if you’re in an experience where you find yourself micromanaging, then just check in with yourself about why. You know, what is it that you want to have, that constant confirmation? How does that help you achieve what you need to achieve? So just that self-awareness is really important.
And if you’re being micromanaged then, just ask your manager what you can do to help them feel more comfortable. You know, it could be that they need an update once a week. It could be that you just need to have a quick conversation on a Friday morning before the weekend. It could be anything like that, but the important thing is to have that conversation about how you are working together because if you’re not having that conversation, that’s where things will start to really break down and you’ll just be frustrated on either side of that relationship. You’ll make up stories about why people are being micromanaged. Why are they asking me for this information? They don’t trust me. It will just start to really spiral. So have that conversation as soon as you can because it will really help you get out of that horrible spiral of feeling like people aren’t trusting each other or anything like that.
5. Be Action Orientated
The fifth point is about being action orientated. So managing a team or looking to engage remote stakeholders all requires action, and this links a bit to the third point around having time to build relationships.
There should be outcomes and actions as a result of conversations you’re having. This doesn’t mean that you’ve got to suddenly go away and do big projects or there’s always work to do. You know, the last thing you want is someone to be thinking, “God, I’m not going to talk to Jenni because every time I talk to her there’s always work to do.” That’s not what I mean. What I mean is that there should be sort of outcomes to those conversations. You know, the outcome might be that you’ve just got a better relationship.
But it also might give you a chance to do what you say you’re going to do.
And if you’re leading a team, quite often you’re there to solve problems and make decisions. So if you’re having a conversation with someone in your team and it’s more of a coaching conversation, you’ll be solving their problems for them and working with them to help solve them. So there should always be an outcome to some degree of any conversation that you’re having. It’s not about having big projects and long lists of work to do, and I promise if you have a conversation with me I won’t give you a long list of things to do. That’s not what I mean by being action orientated.
6. Taking Time To Engage
The sixth point is really probably the most important point when it comes to remote work, and that’s about being aware of the time it takes and the effort it takes to really sustain and maintain a great culture.
Now, we’ve sort of glossed over this over the last few years where people have in some places really enjoyed working remotely, in other places it’s been a real struggle from a cultural perspective. But what we haven’t really talked about, and the bit that’s sort of swept under the rug, is the effort it takes to really engage, inspire and lead in a remote environment. And I say this having read, researched and had conversations with people about remote work.
Now, I read a book called Remote Work by Chris Dyer and Kim Shepherd, and I’ve met Chris several times online and co-hosted an event with him about hybrid working. And Chris is incredibly passionate about remote work. It’s how he’s run his business for a number of years. But there’s a couple of quotes in this book which really stood out for me as being a bit of that reality check of working remotely, and I think 2022 is going to be a big year for us to think about how we work in an office, in locations, at home, how work changes, there’s lots of things on the business agenda for 2022.
But there’s two quotes here that I want to share with you. The first is that a remote model requires a level of discipline that is almost military.
Now, that sounds, you know, probably slightly terrifying for some people, but that’s an important thing to think about when we’re looking at structured meetings. You know, it’s important to know why you’re being asked to go for a meeting. Why are you inviting me? What’s the outcome you’re looking for? What role do I play in that meeting? There has to be a discipline to how the organisation works, and I’ve talked a lot about the rhythm of the organisation. Getting that a bit tighter is really important when you’re working remotely.
The second quote they share is where they say:
“To do this remote work well, you have to be always on, always working to keep culture fresh and sticky. That is, you keep it so interesting and engaging that no one will want to leave. We both found that being the CEO of a remote company is exhausting.”
That’s something to reflect on, because exhaustion is something people have talked about a lot. I’ve certainly talked a lot about burnout and how to avoid that. But there is this awareness and this reality check that actually keeping things interesting and engaging is exhausting for the leader of an organisation.
We have to be mindful of the extra work and effort that’s needed when we’re working in a fully remote environment. It is more effort. Now, you might not be leading a team, but the effort involved in keeping levels of engagement with your stakeholders, with the people you want to build relationships with, all of that is so important. So it’s a big one to consider, and it’s especially a big one as we look forward into this year and the changes that are coming.
Thank you for listening!
Now, I’ve popped some links in the show notes to the books that I’ve mentioned and I’ve got a whole little bookshop going on, a little page on bookshop.org for you, which has got all the books that I talk about a lot. So I’ve popped that in the show notes for ease. There’s another book in there called The Long Distance Leader, which is also worth a look.
In my next episode I’m going to be talking about organisational purpose the loss of it the impact of it and how to get it back is a topic that keeps coming back to the fore in the last few years
I think it’s a topic that will continue to be important, so I want to explore that with you a little bit in the next episode.
So, thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn. So, please connect, ask questions, share your thoughts with me, and as always, details are in the show notes on how you can stay in touch.
