Managing Remote/Hybrid Workers Effectively
The most important part of managing remote or hybrid workers isn’t that they’re remote or hybrid. It’s that you must manage them strategically.
Managing remote or hybrid workers has little to do with the fact that they are remote or hybrid workers.
Rather, you as a manager must manage them the same way via Zoom, email, instant message, or phone just as you would manage employees face-to-face: through strategic conversations that ensure that the employee’s goals, the team’s goals, the unit’s goals, and the company’s goals are aligned.
Those conversations are almost always easier to have face to face. But regardless of whether or how your conversation is mediated, the actual act of having that conversation should be the same.
I learned this in my first “real” management job, as the regional editor for a team of bureau reporters at a metro daily newspaper in the late 1990s. The technology we used was cumbersome and slow, but it was only slightly more complicated than systems that managers must use today to manage remote or hybrid employees. My reporters and I planned how best to navigate around the choke points in our system so that we could better plan the regional team’s news coverage. As a result, we were more often able to get prestigious front-page treatment for stories by reporters on the regional team — which they needed to get reporting jobs in the main office — and we had better communications between me and the team and among team members.
That’s because what hasn’t changed is the nature of the conversations that managers must have with remote or hybrid employees.
Managers still must ask a lot of open-ended questions. They still must listen carefully to the answers, dig deeper, and challenge the thinking of their direct reports. In my regional-editor role, it was particularly important for me to do that because our regional reporters tended to be our least experienced. I needed to challenge them to think critically about the stories they were working on, their own impressions of what the story was about and why it mattered, and how best to go about reporting stories that were important and meaningful — and therefore more likely to run on the front page.
Those conversations are almost exactly the same whether conducted face-to-face or via Zoom. You do lose some impressions on Zoom that you would normally glean from posture and body language, and you lose them all when you communicate strictly by telephone or instant message. But what a direct report says and how they say it remain critically important. Managers must stay tuned in to that.
Because communication gaps may exist during the day in a remote/hybrid work environment, managers must make clear each employee’s performance objectives and understand how each employee intends to meet those objectives and contribute to the team’s meeting its objectives. Doing so requires that same kind of strategic conversation:
asking open-ended questions
listening carefully to the responses
asking follow-up questions where appropriate
listening for words or phrases the employee uses that cry out for more exploration (e.g., “I think I can get that done by Friday.”)
where appropriate, telling the employee how to approach a situation or how you approached a similar situation in the past in a way that worked out well.
Reporters, even inexperienced ones, typically have a fair bit of freedom to decide what stories they will cover. By having strategic conversations with my reporters, I enabled them to identify and publish stories that met both the newspaper’s strategic goals (which, yes, included publishing stories that readers wanted to read) and their personal growth and development goals.
Managing remote and hybrid workers carries with it a number of pitfalls for managers and direct reports alike, and we’ll cover some of these in future blog posts. For now, the most important thing to remember is to converse strategically, regardless of whether it’s face-to-face or electronically.
