6 Leadership Tips for Today’s Digital Age of Remote Employees  

Do you work in the same location as every person on your team? In today’s digital age, I bet the answer is “no” for most of you. With team members and partners so frequently working in different cities, states, and even countries, the art of managing and collaborating with people you can’t “see” and in many cases haven’t ever met in-person, is a key leadership skill. As digital disruption continues to drive innovation, the need for the best ideas and the best people, regardless of location, will only increase how often you lead geographically dispersed teams.

The effectiveness of virtual teams can be increased in a variety of ways. Here are six tips:

Know Your Personal Charter

People who excel as individual contributors often move up to management positions. However, because you were good at “doing” doesn’t necessarily mean you will be instantly good at leading. Often, many of the skills that helped you shine so brightly before are now difficult to apply as you are likely more removed from the actual work that needs to be done.

Having a personal charter—essentially your management ethos—can establish how you lead your team. Leadership shouldn’t be about a job title or whether your desk has the best view; it is about modeling behavior and leading by example.

This can include any number of things. On my teams, it includes open lines of communication across all levels, transparency, and an overall sense of inclusion. I also work hard to address roadblocks my team members are facing, so their path to doing their work is clear. By eliminating any barriers such as organizational and operational blockers, you can enable and empower your teams to do their jobs more successfully.

While it is important for any team to know what to expect from a leader, it is particularly important for those who are not in the same location and haven’t had a chance to develop a more personal relationship with you.

Start With Why

To be most effective, teams need to understand the “why” behind their priorities and work. Having this shared vision is what binds people together and helps everyone pull in the same direction.

I like to start many meetings with a reminder of the overall priorities for the organization or the project at hand. In the hustle and bustle of getting work done, it can be easy to lose focus on the overall objective, so a collective reminder of why we are doing the project and what success will look like can be a helpful reset.

Connect Individual Work to Organizational Goals

Understand your organization’s overarching business objectives and translate them into work for your team. As a leader, your time is naturally limited. Regardless, you should take the time to understand your team’s professional strengths and goals and how they fit with the objectives of your organization.

One best practice is to align your team’s skillset strengths, personal-development aspirations, and domain knowledge to defined business objectives. This allows you to identify for yourself and your team how their work is supporting the business. Through this process, you can translate specific projects and tasks into direct connections with business need and desired outcomes.

For workers outside of the home office who might feel removed from senior leadership, this clear structure is a particularly helpful way to connect their day-to-day work with the big picture. Seeing that connection is invaluable for those who might already feel isolated due to their location.

Continuous Coaching

Have you ever had your review and received negative feedback about something that happened months ago? If so, you know it doesn’t feel good. That is what continuous coaching is about—no surprises. While this is important for everyone you manage, it is particularly important for remote workers.

Continuous coaching means providing feedback in the moment. At the very least, it means regular one-on-one check-ins with your team members. I make these check-ins weekly, sometimes twice a week for remote workers, and I set them for 30 to 60 minutes depending on frequency. What is consistent is that this time is sacred. I make every effort not to move or shorten these meetings. My people know this is when we are 100% focused on each other.

During these meetings, we do cover the nuts and bolts of projects as needed, though it should never just be about the day-to-day. Take time to understand what is going on both inside and outside of work. Learn what drives team members personally and professionally. Simply ask, “How are you?” or “What’s on your mind?” I also strongly encourage you to use video conferencing for remote team members, so you can more accurately gauge body language, facial expressions, and energy.

The key is to maintain a continuous and open dialogue, which helps generate a better and more transparent working relationship.

Stay Connected

There are numerous tools to stay connected with a dispersed team, but staying connected is about more than just the tools. The days of just using a spider phone and sending a dial-in should be over. Leaders need to make a more conscious effort to generate engagement and collaboration with all members of their team.

For example, ensure people in a conference room sit near a speakerphone microphone. During a call, pause after periods of speaking, so people on the phone can jump in. Call on people on the phone to trigger their participation. On my team, we have gone a step further and made sure that everyone has the tools be on video for calls. Actually seeing the other person helps enormously. When necessary, leverage tools like MURAL, which creates a digital workspace for improved remote collaboration. Whatever you do, ensuring successful team communications requires a lot more staging and planning than when you could just gather everyone in a conference room.

Outside of group calls, do a pulse check on your employees. Often, employees can feel less a part of a culture when they are located in a satellite office or working remotely. You can do this by using platforms like GoToMeeting, Slack, or even Skype for Business to touch base and ask for feedback and recommendations.

Never Stop Learning

As a leader you should be a voracious consumer of all things new, both for what’s happening inside and outside your company. You should not only consume; you should also share.

Of course, the “share” button on social media makes this second nature for many people, but sharing content at work as a leader is different. When sharing an insightful trade journal article with your team, be sure to preface it with a few points as to why you are sharing it and the value team members may receive from it.

Beyond sharing trade journal articles, webinars, TED Talks, and other content that can help your team, take the time to understand the different styles of learning on your team. Reach out and learn what he or she may need from you as a leader. Does the person need your support to explore learning opportunities or the company to invest in specific webinars? Once you are able to identify the team member’s needs, encourage him or her to learn more, share learnings across the team and support the person’s goals along his or her development journey.

Despite some headlines to the contrary, companies are moving to a more digital, mobile, and dispersed way of working. Whether it is working from home, the airport, or the other side of the world, it is becoming the norm for employees and managers. If you can successfully lead people as that trend continues, you stand to grow even more as a leader in this increasingly digital age.