Leaders and Remote Teams

The Distinction Podcasts are all about about bridging the gap between academic research and leadership practice.  Dani Bacon and Garin Rouch, are your hosts and have read an extensive amount of academic papers and identified the 5 keys areas that high quality research shows you should focus on as a leader of a remote team. 

There is so much quality research that managers could benefit from implementing into their daily routines and approach. We want to bridge the gap between research & management practice. We'll also be producing infographics to accompany the sessions so follow us on Linked and Twitter. . We want to equip managers and the HR practitioners who support them with strategies and tactics you can implement immediately to optimise performance (and bust a few management myths along the way!). 

In this podcast we cover:

• The challenges of remote working 
• Hedonic Adaptation and how it impacts remote work
• Why you should set expectations for your team
• Why leaders should be available and responsive
• What leadership research is saying about the quality of communication and remote work
• Why Leaders should be transparent 
• The importance of a leader as a network broker 
• How to adapt how you manage the performance of remote teams 

Thanks for listening!

Distinction is an evidence-based Organisation Development & Design Consultancy designed to support modern, progressive organisations to bring out the best in their people and their teams through training, consulting, and coaching.

Our professional and highly skilled consultants focus on delivering engaging, results-focused and flexible solutions that help our clients achieve their business objectives.

Find out more at https://distinction.live/how-we-can-help/

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Transcript

Garin Rouch  0:12  

Hi, and welcome to our first webcast.   Dani and I, over the next four sessions, will be looking at leadership and remote working.  The webcasts that we're running are to try and bridge the gap between academic research and management practice. 

There's a lot of myths that have emerged around leadership practice. There's an enormous amount of really good high quality academic research that leaders could be using in their day-to-day practice. And that HR people could be advising their managers to implement on a day-to-day basis as well. So, what we want to do is design these highly practical sessions. 

We've done the hard work of sifting through the academic research. And in each one of these sessions, we're going to be identifying the top five actions that leaders can take to address the specific issue that we're looking at. So, in this session, we're going to be looking at what leaders can specifically do to support their people at this really important time. 

In the second session, we'll be looking at teams, and what leaders can do to actually optimise their performance. And in the third session, we'll be looking at decision making, which has a huge body of research behind it.  It's about how can leaders actually use this decision-making research to make sure that the quality and acceptance of the decisions that they're making are much higher. And then the fourth and final session is the really pertinent topic of wellbeing. So how can leaders leverage the extensive research that's been done to support the well-being of their people, and in the process, actually enhance performance as well? 

Dani, and I are really, really looking forward to working with you over the next few sessions.  Just some background to me. My name is Garin. I'm an organisation development consultant. I've been running my own practice for 10 years, and I've been an OD consultant for a total of 15 years altogether. And Dani do you want to introduce yourself.

Dani Bacon  2:02  

So until earlier this year, I was Director of People and Business services at Investors in People.  I've now set up my own consultancy business to help organisations take a more strategic approach to all things people and make their organisations more effective and human.

Garin Rouch  2:15  

So of all the subjects we could have looked at with academic research, why did we look at remote working? Well, first of all it's kind of here to stay. And the second thing is that remote working the academic research shows negatively impacts team effectiveness. There's a number of big meta studies that have been done that have found that remote working affects things like team dynamics, the frequency of communication, can be the cause of interpersonal conflict, reduces the amount of trust and social interaction on teams as well. So it really does show that remote work needs a lot of work from leaders to actually help them become more effective as well. But what's really interesting is the research on an individual basis is actually painting quite different picture.  Dani why don't you share some of the insights that you've been finding.

Dani Bacon  2:59  

Yes, absolutely.  So, there's been several bits of research done over the last few months. And all of them agree that people feel more productive at home.  I think the stats say about 80%, or more of people feel as effective or at least as effective working from home as they were in the office before COVID.  There are a few exceptions, women with childcare responsibilities and low earners, and people not in roles that are conducive to working from home. But the research also shows that people are just happier working from home. And that's pretty much all people across all age groups. Older people tend to be happier and self-employed there's not much difference in their happiness levels. But then a lot of those working from home before. 

One of the big factors is how connected people feel to their organisations and colleagues. So, the one of reasons for this positive sentiment around working for home is a better work life balance. And interestingly, people aren't using that time purely for leisure.  They're using it for leisure, they're using it for learning and also using it to do more work. 

They like the flexibility, the obvious ones around childcare and caring, but also meeting business needs. So, people are starting work early in the day to work in one time zone, taking a break of the middle of the day to do their own thing and then coming back online in the evening to work with a different time zone. People think their stress levels are lower. And for some people, there's a belief that they're on a more even playing field in terms of opportunities, promotions and jobs, that geographies become less of a less of a factor.

The other interesting thing the research has shown is a causal relationship between productivity and mental health when working from home, and we'll talk about wellbeing in session number four. But basically, it shows that a decline in mental health can affect productivity. But a decline in productivity can also affect mental health. There's a real vested interest in making sure everybody can work productively, and effectively, not only for their organisations, but for their own wellbeing.

Garin Rouch  4:48  

And I guess obviously, as more people become vaccinated and more people return to work, there will still be that real kind of hybrid mode. Those that are actually working purely remotely, some that are working hybrid and some of those who completely work in the office as well. So, it's going to require a more sophisticated kind of sophisticated approach to leadership, isn't it?

Dani Bacon  5:08  

Yes, absolutely. I think that the research says most people want to come back to the office two days out of five.  There's very few people that want to be back in the office five days out of five. So, as managers and leaders, we're going to have to get used to that more complex way of working.

Garin Rouch  5:21  

And so we wanted to identify, what are the top 10 challenges that the researchers are actually identifying?  I'm going to take you through the first five that I've seen.  Within teams, one of the challenges the leaders will be finding is just reduced connection and engagement for employees.  That's going to lead to reduce sense of commitment to each other, and the organization as well.  So you may find that teams are finding it more difficult to collaborate and less likely to cooperate as well as a result of that. And also it's going to be more difficult to actually establish and build trust in teams as well. There'll be people joining organisations that have never actually met their colleagues in person. So as a manager one of the key things that they have to build in their teams is trust and loyalty, that's going to be even harder to actually do. So how do you go about doing that. 

And the fourth one we wanted to look at, as well as the challenges is the concerns around the fairness and level playing field between office and remote staff.  Research often finds that remote staff feel they're missing out on what's actually happening in the office, office based staff often feel that they're picking up the slack from he remote workers and also the performance evaluation.  Not the appropriateness of the appraisal, but just evaluating the performance of remote workers is much harder.  They actually find that there's a harsher judgment on the performance of remote workers than people that are present. And finally, one of the other key challenges that leaders are facing is the quality of decision making. And also the pace of decision making as well.  What are the five that you found?

Dani Bacon 7:02  

So the first one is around access into access to information.  There's just more information that people need, and it's more distributed in the virtual world. So that can be problematic. 

The next one is a lack of clarity about culture and behavioural norms. A lot of people are joining organisations having never been in the office and met their colleagues face to face. So how do they pick up on what the culture is? 

The third one is that conflicts more likely, and much harder to spot.  If you're in a face to face meeting, and people are unhappy, you can sense that, you can tell and you can go and have a chat with somebody afterwards and do something about it, but much harder to spot that on a face to face call, though, I did spot that Microsoft has a lot of lodged a patent to record and score meetings in terms of body language. So quite well, that's going to look like I don't know, but maybe we'll have a computer telling us who's happy and who's not. I don't know, it's a scary thought. 

The fourth one's around matching the capacity and capability of the organization in terms of wellbeing and matching that to the needs and expectations of employees.  

And then lastly, it's loss of a sense of control over what your what your team is doing. remotely. If they are next to you then there's almost the illusion that you can you know what's going on.  Virtually that's harder. 

Garin Rouch  8:12  

When we were discussing the content and all the studies to go into this, there's one thing that you raised was something called, was it hedonic adaptation? That, in particular, it seems like something that's really interesting for managers to keep in mind, and also for HR practitioners,

Dani Bacon  8:27  

Absolutely, on all sorts of scales.  It's the idea that we adjust to great things over time,  we get used to them. So even really exciting things like a lottery win, disappointingly, over time, we will kind of assimilate and get used to the idea of having millions of pounds sat in the bank, and it becomes less exciting, and more ordinary.  So with remote working, yes, at the moment, lots of people are happier at home but over time, they're going to forget the horrible commute and the expensive season ticket and all of that stuff.  Overtime, they'll forget that, and they'll just get used to working from home that will become the new norm. So organisations and leaders are going to have to up the game in terms of keeping their staff engaged and happy

Garin Rouch  9:05  

Before we start to share the top five with you, which is the specific areas to be thinking about as a manager, it's important to share our methodology as well. So Dani and I have done a fairly exhaustive search and reading of different studies, and this is everything from, literature reviews to rapid evidence assessments to trying to choose sort of the highest graded papers in terms of quantitative and qualitative research as well. 

And as a result, things that we thought might make the cut in the top five didn't make the cut. So, for example, there's limited evidence that leadership styles actually affect the effectiveness of virtual teams, there's just not enough evidence yet to support it. There's some research starting to find that transactional leadership impacts virtual teams in a certain way and transformational leadership affects leading teams in a certain way, and that there's something around humble leaders are maybe a more suited leadership style for this particular period. So the five that made the cut are things to really just bear in mind.  If you don't do anything else then think about these particular top five areas. So Dani, do you want to just kick off our top five?

Dani Bacon  10:15  

So, first of our top five was setting expectations.  Looking at the research, we found that a shared understanding of virtual teams can have a really significant impact on the ability of that virtual team to work effectively.  It's the case for all teams but it's even more important for a virtual team. 

It helps if people have a shared understanding of the team's goals and everything else. It helps them anticipate and predict the behaviours of their team members, helps them understand what's going on. And they can work more autonomously, that having to constantly check in with each other to know what's next, where are we going. 

That shared understanding is about a variety of things. It's not just about the goals the team's trying to achieve, or the tasks it needs to deliver on. It's about the work and team processes, how people are going to work together  and about the members themselves and the roles they're carrying out. So who does what? 

As a leader, you need to you need to frame the context for your team, like a e-orientation. So remind the team of the purpose, share profiles and information about team members so they can get to know each other, be clear on what the expected behaviours are, clarify roles and responsibilities, clarify the task and outcomes and timescales. And also there's also value in asking your team to share their feedback and expectations on how they're going to work together, and how you're going to collaborate.

Garin Rouch  11:27  

It's amazing as a consultant, how many times you ask managers or ask different members of teams, and they don't actually know what other members of the team actually do. Or someone's role was this, but it's actually evolved into that where people just don't understand and so they don't understand the interdependencies. 

Dani Bacon  11:44  

Particularly when we're in a really fast moving, changing environment, people's roles change all the time so the more you can do to explain that the better. 

I think the other the other thing, and we'll talk more about this in the next session around teams, but that's about creating space, and facilitating ways for people to get to know each other.  Social cohesion is really key to effective virtual teams and trust.  So the more you can do to kind of build social cohesion within your team, the better. But as we say we've got ideas on that next time that we'll share with you. 

And then lastly, the research also found that availability and responsiveness is really, really important in virtual teams. So having a team member be responsive and available to talk to you is the thing that really helps build trust, particularly early trust in, in teams. So as a leader, it's about formalizing communication norms, being clear on what tools you're going to use, and why you're going to use them and how quickly somebody should respond to emails and instant messaging do you don’t has misunderstandings about how those tools are being used.

Garin Rouch  12:46  

Well just pick up a couple of points there as well. So trust is absolutely essential to the performance of teams, isn't it? And I guess some of the things that we're both picking up in meetings with organisations is we're starting to hear lots of employees sort of, say, describing other employees saying, well, “I just don't really know what to do all day”. And that sort of absence of Trust has a huge impact, doesn't it?

Dani Bacon  13:05  

I mean, sometimes you get a manager who says they don't know what the team does. 

Garin Rouch  13:10  

I guess the other thing as well, it's like those norms and expectations, isn't there? We talked about that kind of deep work, didn't we? Which is the ability to actually really focus on work. People just need that time, don't they? Because that's something you've been thinking about?

Dani Bacon  13:26  

Yes, absolutely. I think as a leader you have to make it okay for people to block out a couple of hours in their diary to really concentrate on something that that needs thought that you can't do in the five minutes in between one zoom call and another.  Unless you set that expectation with your team, people aren't going to do that, they're not going to know it's okay to block their diaries out and ignore slack messages for a couple of hours to let them get on with the important work.

Garin Rouch  13:49  

And I think I think also there's quite a lot of psychological safety that's missing at the moment, people are seeing colleagues or people that work there a long time being made redundant, or feeling they need to be seen to be working and being almost overly responsive as well, that's getting in the way of actually doing the deep work, which is actually getting the work done at a high level, isn't it?

Dani Bacon  14:10  

And I think in the wellbeing session, we can talk about presenteeism and the kind of pressures that place is on people as well that constantly being on and available.

Garin Rouch  14:19  

That's a really strong start. So number two is all about the quality of communication from leaders.  The research really highlights a differentiator for high performing and engaged teams during COVID has been basically the quality and perceived transparency of communication from leaders.  It's probably an indication of our times that studies have found that out of government, official news outlets and social media, employers are actually the most trusted source of information. So that's an incredible gift to employers, and it's really important to maintain that as well, but it's easily lost, isn't it?

Dani Bacon  15:01  

It's a big responsibility as well, for an employer to be the most trusted source of information, particularly in the era we're in now.

Garin Rouch  15:08  

Yes, so how do you actually do quality of communication. It's very easy to say, give quality communication, it's another thing to do quality communication. And one element of it is transparency, which we'll just talk about in a little bit more detail in a second. But it's the ability to actually read the people that you're communicating to.  It's actually finding moments of human connection, so not overly relying on written communication. So it's highly likely if you've got a team of six, for example, that you will have a blend of people maybe with a preference for introversion, and a preference for extroversion. People with a preference for introversion will often prefer to receive information in writing, which is great, but it's really important that we don't overly rely on written communication,  that we're getting really good messaging out there consistently. Actually engaging with people in voice, either over video or over phone, as well.

And it's really important to understand the emotional temperature in the team as well. Now, it seems they’ve been flat out , they've done five years of transformation in five months, and this is still ongoing, all this uncertainty, teams are tired.  It's really important that you meet teams where they are with your communication, acknowledge how hard they've worked, the pressures they're under.

Trust does go up when people hear your voice, and the jury with the research is out on video.  If a person looks uncomfortable when communicating on camera, then trust can go down.  Practice makes perfect but it's still okay to pick the phone up. And it's really important to show and make time to show compassion and care. Now, as we said, not everyone finds communicating very easy. And there's an incredible statistic about the number of reluctant managers in this country. So it may be that the technicians that have been promoted into the role of manager that may be unprepared. What is that statistic around how many reluctant managers there are?

Dani Bacon  17:05  

Four out of five accidental managers in the country, which is quite staggering, really. So that's managers who've not had any training on, on how to manage or how to lead, or any expectations set by their organization about what was expected of them as a manager.

Garin Rouch  17:19  

That can sometimes be a scary place to be with such a big responsibility. So your organization may have training programs, there's a whole wealth of information.  Some good books -  things like ‘Soft skills for hard people’. Clear leadership by Gervase Bushe is always a good reference point, we'll put some references in the comments on if you're watching this on YouTube. But feel free in the comments to add some recommendations that you might add as well. 

And the other important thing to remember as well is things like empathy. So try emotional empathy. So know to mirror and feel what others are actually experiencing right now. And things like cognitive empathy, so actually take the other person's perspective when you're communicating, a lot of leadership communications actually just transmitting, and always be asking good questions and listening as well. 

What was the third point?

Dani Bacon  18:08  

The third point is about default transparency. So we said that access to information is just much harder in a virtual environment, you've got more information to be shared, it's more distributed, and the risk is people are going be left out of the loop. And that just causes confusion, frustration, and ultimately poor-quality decision making for your organization and duplication of effort. 

The research strongly points to transparency being a key lever for effective virtual teams. So that's about making everything open and available to everyone unless there's a really specific reason why you're not doing that. And that's kind of the flip, kind of reverse really of the way people kind of tend to operate. That's quite a mindset shift for a lot of organisations and leaders. So it's down to the leader really to role model, it’s about being really clear on expectations around information, sharing, what needs to be shared, how you're going to share it, and when, it's about establishing procedures for that, and norms for communication.

It's about as a leader, it's about taking ownership for making sure that happens.  So recognising rewarding when it does happen, monitoring and intervening when you see it's gone off track or something's not being shared in the way you're hoping, giving people the support and training, they need to make that shift to a different way of working and facilitating sharing information of data about day to day activities and being really transparent with each other about when things have gone off course. Because there's nothing that's going to erode trust more that if you say you're going to do something by Tuesday, and then Wednesday rolls around, you still haven't done it, then Thursday.  If we can just tell people earlier than that, that builds trust. 

So the other thing in this arena is what's called asynchronous working.  So the idea that you start to capture everything, rather than doing all by face to face or via zoom, you start using platforms to capture information in written form.   You're codifying workplace knowledge essentially in creating some sort of knowledge bank of what you're working on.

So there's certainly some of the remote only companies like Basecamp gets talked about a lot and Git lab and Automattic the company behind WordPress, they've adopted that approach. And I think one of them at least says if it's not written down, it doesn't exist. So that's quite an extreme version of things. But as you move to more virtual working, I think it's worth looking at

Garin Rouch  20:18  

I guess what research is actually proposing to managers is quite a sea change, isn't it? Because if we're talking about being transparent with information, there's a lot of information on managers desk right now that maybe they'd be worried about scaring staff or overwhelming them or making them feel insecure. So the academic research actually flipping that. And so it's okay to disclose more of that. Is that right?

Dani Bacon 20:40  

Yes, that's exactly what it's saying.  I think it's also important to realize that is this default to transparency is not just about sharing task information. It's about sharing social information and contextual information about the environment and the culture. And as a leader, it's about thinking and working out loud. So being really explicit about the message you're trying to get across to your individuals or your team, go overboard in explaining the rationale because things are so easily misinterpreted, when you're working virtually. And there's less informal opportunities to check up. So if you hear something in a meeting, and you're not entirely sure what's meant you've got that chance, as you leave the meeting, to say “you said that, what did you mean?” That doesn't happen when you're in a virtual environment. So if you leave people with gaps in their knowledge, they're going to fill them in, on their own. We're programmed as humans to make sense of things. So it's better as a leader to explain and give people the information to fill in the gaps rather than leave them to their own devices to come up with horror stories.

Garin Rouch  21:34  

I love that thought of working out loud. It helps take people on the journey when you're making decisions, doesn't it? Kind of like what is in your mind? Or what are your considerations when making key decisions? And it increases things so that people don't necessarily feel decisions being done to them? They're actually going with them, aren't they?

Dani Bacon  21:56  

Yes, absolutely. And even if it's difficult news that you've got to share, the more open and transparent you can be, then the better people react, people don't like uncertainty. So give them as much certainty as you can, even if it's not great news.

Garin Rouch  22:08  

If anyone ever wants to take the reading any further, some really good stuff by Barry Oshry, that looks at the importance of actually sharing your information and carving out responsibility and sharing that with your staff to empower them as well.

Dani Bacon  22:20  

And then just last point, on default transparency, it picks up the cultural behavioural norms again so the cultural and behavioural norms are less visible in a virtual world. So as a leader, you, you really have to step up and take responsibility for explaining the culture and the norms, making them explicit, name it when you see it operating a practice, codify it, get it written down, and tell stories that reinforce that culture so you can keep it alive, even if you're not physically all together.

Garin Rouch  22:45  

So number four, and something I'm madly committed to encourage all organisations and all leaders to, to really embrace is leader as network broker.  It's quite a fancy term, but it's very simple. And it's just organisations by their very nature, we like to divide people according to their special specialism. So we have sales professionals here, finance professionals here, marketing professionals here, we kind of group them. And that makes complete sense as well. But what that means is often teams are very good at communicating within themselves. But when it comes to actually, inter team communication, that's where things start to fall down. 

So siloed teams are endemic across all most organisations. And remote working just is just rocket fuel to this. And a lot of the organisations that we're working with, come September when, after the massive adrenaline rush of just trying to and cope and operationalize all the changes were like, our teams have really drifted apart. And the academic research really shows that the role of leader actually connecting different departments to that can have a huge impact on performance. 

So let's get tactical. Now, some of the things that leaders can do to actually optimize their organisations is to reactivate those dormant ties, those relationships that have kind of just gone their separate ways, just because we've been so busy today. It's about refreshing them. 

And it's also about reviewing your relationship. So what are the quality of the ratios, give them a score of zero to 10 and ask them, what's the score that you would give our relationship out of 10 right now, and then look for specific examples. And that can help you focus your energies about which relationships to build on.

And also, it's not necessarily in your exact domain of control, it's actually seeing things fall between the gaps between other teams as well. So connecting, encouraging and facilitating them to connect with each other. So reaching outside your immediate circle. And we're always saying that one of the most important skills for contemporary leaders in organisations in 2020 is the power of facilitation. And that means the ability to actually facilitate meetings and communication between different parts of the organizations, with your counterpart managers, and what that means, basically is if you have a good relationship with your counterpart manager over here, your team, when they work together, it will make their lives so much easier. 

There's so many organisations where the teams don't get on, they go up to the manager, the manager then talks to the other manager, and their manager then tells their team and back and forth, and it's so inefficient, you can just basically circumvent all of that by building relationships. 

And also, it's ensuring that meetings aren't issue related so many meetings are just like, let's deal with the topics of today. The meetings that are really high value are the ones where we’re talking about, what is the next three months and six months? What does your pipeline of work look like? What am I working on, that's going to impact you, and vice versa. So no surprises. And also we're thinking together, because it's that rather than sort of saying, this is what we're doing, and this is what we need you to do. We're actually thinking, what can we do to actually share our knowledge to make sure we're coming up with the best solutions. 

And the other tactic I'm always encouraging managers to do and I know, you'll be the same as well Dani,  is inviting yourself into the team meeting of other teams, just, elbow your way in if you have to, just turning up showing your face, engaging with them, answering their questions, telling them what you're up to,  understanding how their actions impact your team and vice versa, and really explore the issues, that is just a great thing. 

And also encouraging your team to do the same thing as well. And often when we're managing things like technical specialists that kind of communication piece doesn't always come most naturally. So it's important to actually coach your people to engage more effectively, and actually to join those initial meetings just to get them going and get the relationship built, and then start to step out as well.

Dani Bacon  26:43  

And I think it's surprising how quickly that that pays dividends, they don't have to be long meetings. And you can see just really brief conversations, how quickly that builds up understanding and, and, yes, better team working. So you don't think it needs to be a kind of half day workshop that's kind of massively planned out, it can be small moments that really have an impact.

Garin Rouch  27:03  

Yes, short, sharp interactions, really punchy, get you place on the agenda, see the agenda, tell the manager what you want to talk about, and then just do it, don't kill them with PowerPoint, whatever you do.

And the other thing that we wanted to really encourage is, don't let your team talk negatively about other teams. It is probably one of the most basic human instincts. It comes from the Savanna,  with Stone Age man, seeing other tribes, and it's endemic, again, in organisations. If you let your teams talk negatively about other teams what happens is it starts to create a space between them. 

And it can be something that teams do very naturally, because they're just trying to cope. And it's very seductive to be involved in those conversations as well. But as soon as you start to do it, then you endorse what they're talking about. And it builds up the barriers between them as well. S

o we're always saying to challenge them, your team members to actually step into the shoes of the other team, why are they doing what they're doing, what's motivating what's, what are their priorities,  are they the same priorities? Are they conflicting? What can you do? And there's a whole range of other things, but always intervene when you see breakdowns and communications and misunderstandings as well. Great. So that takes us on to number five, definitely not last but not least, over to you, Dani, for that,

Dani Bacon  28:25  

And number five is around managing performance. So managing remote teams is a real shift in management style. And as we said, it calls for a more sophisticated approach. You can't see what people are doing. So in terms of what they're doing, how they're doing, how they're feeling about stuff, you're relying on inference, you're trying to pick up signs, to work out what's going on for somebody, and what's really happening. I've managed remote teams for the last 10 years and been part of them for probably 15 or 20 years. And I think a big part of success, the successful teams is how well you know your individual team members. 

You can't possibly help to support people to be their best if you don't know what's going on for them. You don't how they work, how they tick. So that's the first thing. 

And I think in a virtual environment, particularly when you're new to it, there's this real temptation to increase monitoring, to see what people are up to. I was reading again, I think this report came up yesterday, one in seven workers are reporting their monitoring by their employers increased over the pandemic period. 

But successful teams are all about trusting people to deliver. So that's basically what you've got to do. You've just got to find other ways of seeing what's going on. So do make sure you have in regular check ins, but not micromanaging. Work out what the cadence is that that works best for you and your team members and the team as a whole. 

And then when you're thinking about how to assess or evaluate performance, even if it's not in a kind of formal ratings way, consider including elements of how well the people are contributing to the effectiveness of the virtual team and make that part of what you discuss, and cover and involve the team in deciding what factors and things you should look at as part of how well your team and in Individuals are performing.

But I guess what we do know from the research is that any assessment of performance, however formal or informal, it's how people perceive it, they need to feel is fair. And that's super important as we know that virtual workers can be judged more harshly. 

It's also how workers react to those performance discussions. So, again, you haven't got that informal opportunity after performance discussion to catch up with somebody later in the day in the corridor. So do make time to pick up and say, we had a discussion this morning, how's that landed for you? Is there anything you want to talk about? 

And then just a bit about bias. So bias in performance processes and performance discussions isn't a new thing. But we know there's a tendency for remote workers to be judged more harshly. And that's a fairly natural human tendency.  I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, that we're programmed to make sense of situations when there are gaps in our knowledge. So if we're not seeing what somebody's doing day in, day out, we kind of fill in fill in the gaps with our own with our own stories. 

So I think there's a couple of things to be aware of that the research throws up about performance ratings.  One study found that ratings of our own performance in a virtual setting, we tend to be a bit more optimistic and positive than perhaps reality would, would suggest. And that is probably because we're getting less feedback to us about what's really going on. So, we're not getting the feedback we would do in a physical environment. So we're making it up.  It's really important that we find a way to give people a flow of information about how they;re doing from a variety of sources to help them build that balanced picture. And also make to make time for the team to reflect on how the team is performing, and focus on how they're going to learn and improve.

Garin Rouch  31:39  

And I guess the other thing as well, is it about in terms of positive reinforcement, isn't it? It's because you are working remotely, and these kind of sort of quoting, this is sort of classic, Ken Blanchard, which is going back years and years now, isn't it, but it's actually catching your people in the in the act of doing the right thing, and giving that feedback, but you have to go and look for it. And because working remotely, it just won't present itself with it. So it's being really clear on the kind of good performance that you're looking for. And then finding specific examples, and feeding back to them, but also feeding back to the team as well. So they can all see that's exactly the kind of behaviours you're trying to encourage.

Dani Bacon  32:16  

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

Garin Rouch  32:18  

So that is our top five. So just a quick recap of the top five. So number one is setting expectations. Number two is quality of communication. Number three is defaulting to transparency. Number four is the leader as network broker. And number five is the importance of performance evaluation.

So I guess what we wanted to do is,  there's that kind of link again, between academic insight and management practice, and we're trying to bridge that gap. So we're just going to give you three things to take away.  If you're going to do anything, as a result of when you turn this video off, go back to your desk, the three things that you prioritize, what's the first one for people to take away?

Dani Bacon  33:01  

The first one is ask your team. Are they clear on your expectations of them? And have you asked them what they expect from you as their leader?

Garin Rouch  33:10  

100%. And managers don't ask that in normal times today, let alone so it's so important. 

And the second one is, what connections do you need to broker now? So look across the organization chart at what networks that you work in. Where do you need to focus your attention, if you're going make sure one relationship works well, and you're going to bring your resources to bear to enhance that relationship? What can actually you're going to work on?

Dani Bacon  33:34  

And then last of all our number three is, are you having effective and regular one to ones and check ins with your team members? Are you giving them the feedback and the information they need to do great work and improve? And have you taken a wider approach than just focusing on task? Are you looking more holistically at the support and wellbeing and development that they need?

Garin Rouch  33:52  

Brilliant. So that's the end of our first session, as we ‘ve got three more to go, we really welcome your feedback and comments. We’re going to be trying to share a number of the references that we've covered in order to produce this. We also really welcome your ideas about what would go in your top five. And also if you want to keep track of these as they come out. And if you're watching on YouTube, just hit the subscribe button and tap the bell. And you'll get a notification when the next one comes out as well. But I'm really, really glad that you stayed in to watch with this, and we look forward to the next one. 

Thanks, everyone.