What does it take to lead effectively from a distance?

Managing offsite employees throws up unique challenges

June 22, 2016 04:51 pm | Updated October 18, 2016 03:14 pm IST - Chennai:

Illustration: K.B. Jawaharr

Illustration: K.B. Jawaharr

In the future, when liquid workforces will become less of an exception, managers may have to deal with more offsite employees than they do now. Working with teams that are largely composed of members who are not physically present poses some challenges.

One, monitoring the work of these offsite employees. Two, ensuring members work as a cohesive unit, surmounting the barriers of time and space. Three, motivating these employees.

“The simplest thing a manager can do is have a daily tracker in place, using basic tools such as emails: Through this system, at the end of the day, he is apprised about what tasks were attempted and those that were completed,” says Sorav Jain, digital marketing expert.

When the offsite employee is engaged in a highly creative work — one that involves research or design — he may be given more latitude and probably be asked to present weekly reports of his work. But, life is often more complicated than that, especially when it involves managing many offsite employees who have to work often in coordination to achieve team objectives. In this situation, the manager may have to achieve a synergy by combining the various resources offsite team members bring to the table. How does a manager face this challenge?

“The answer is in the cloud. There is a raft of cloud-based project management tools that facilitate team collaboration. From my experience, Slack is an extremely useful tool in enhancing communication among members of a distributed team and managing projects. Each project can have its own chat room, which means only people related to that project can be in it. All details and communications pertaining to the project are located in a central place. This is better than email communication, where digging up important information can be difficult. Slack works on PCs and mobiles, and has a slick mobile application, which makes it easy to run a team on the go,” says Kiruba Shankar, social media consultant and professor of digital marketing.

Basecamp is among the other project management tools that are said to be used by an impressive number of distributed teams. “Basecamp helps a manager stay on top of every project. It is structured in such a way that he gets a clear idea of what’s in progress, what’s in the pipeline and who’s doing what internally. He can also get daily emails on the status of the tasks. Due to these features, a manager can delegate and review work, schedule meetings and keep all the stakeholders informed and give feedback.

It’s a good place for people to brainstorm ideas with co-workers and store important resources such as logos and documents for future reference,” says Sorav.

The third question is motivation, which leads to another: Is there a substitute for one-on-one interaction?

This is probably the best answer to this: Despite the difficulty of organising physical meetings, managers of offsite teams should try to ensure they happen.

Kiruba presents a case study, which buttresses this viewpoint. “WordPress has employees working out of various parts of the world. The company has adopted this model as this enables it to get the best talent on board. However, the company also understands the value of one-on-one interactions carried out in a geographical setting. So, every year, it organises a get-together for its various employees at a resort.”

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