Trust Is Even More Important When You’re Working Remotely
Leadership Tip of the Week # 120
adapted from HBR
Leaders who suddenly have found themselves managing a fully remote team may be wondering how to measure employee productivity and quality of work from a distance.
The key ingredient is trust.
You may not be able to see what people are doing, but you can still equip them with the information they need, assign them tasks, and check on them like you always have.
- give them the right equipment
- give them rituals for the day
- find new ways to keep the coffee machine conversations
- be open in conversations ( the easy and the difficult ones)
Since you can’t monitor process in the same way, your review will have to be based on outcomes.
Of course, there’s no reason to believe that, in this new environment, people won’t do the work they’ve been assigned. Remote work has been around for a very long time, and today we have been learning to use that technology to not only do our own work but also to successfully collaborate.
So as a manager, your main job is to heed Ernest Hemingway’s advice: “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
This tip is adapted from “15 Questions About Remote Work, Answered,” by Tsedal Neeley
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