As a leader what are you expected to do to establish good remote work culture within your teams & organization?
It seems there are more than 10,000 books available on Amazon on remote working. No wonder why remote working is considered difficult. Here are some of the things leaders can do to create a good remote work culture.
1/ Ensure that your staff has the right infrastructure, which includes but is not limited to laptops, network connectivity, and software to dial into audio and video conference calls, remote access to everything that they need to carry out their day to day work, etc.
2/ Develop routines and help teams to have a disciplined way of managing the day. For example, in our company, all teams will have a brief stand-up meeting at the beginning of the day and end their day with an evening daily scrum meeting. Have a rhythm. Things will be much more fluid in remote working, and managers should trust that employees will do their best to get their work done.
3/ Make sure that team members constantly feel like they know what’s going on. You need to communicate what’s happening at the organizational level because they feel like they’ve been extracted from the mothership when working from home. They wonder what’s happening at the company, with clients, and with common objectives. The communication around those is extremely important. So you should email more, share more.
4/ Ensure that no staff member will feel like they have less access to you than others. At home, people’s imaginations begin to go wild. So you have to be available to everyone equally. Finally, when you run your group meetings, aim for inclusion, and balance the airtime, everyone feels seen and heard.
5/ You need to be much more visible right now — through video conferencing or taped recordings — to give people confidence, calm them down, and be healers- or hope-givers-in-chief.