Remote working: the five stages to becoming an expert at virtual leadership

Remote working is on the rise. A recent Buffer survey on remote work found that 99% of the interviewees would like, at least once in their career, to be able to work off-site. In fact, according to a Forbes article, since 2007, there has been a 159% rise in remote working in the US and by 2020 it is estimated that 50% of the UK workforce will work remotely.

The growth of remote working leads inevitably to an important question: how do you lead remote teams effectively?

This is a question we’ve spent the last five years working on. As an organisation Hoxby is set up to operate entirely remotely. We’ve done this since we were founded in 2015 and over the years we’ve found the right (and the wrong) ways to get the best from remote teams.

We’ve got around 1,000 Hoxbies based in over 40 countries. And virtual leadership is an incredibly important element of our success. Our methods and model have been created through both trial and error and rigorous research, and now we’re able to share them with you.

A strategic tool for leading successful remote teams

We’ve developed a tool to help you implement your own virtual leadership strategy, whatever your remote working set up or industry. This tool breaks down successful virtual leadership into five simple steps, applicable to any organisation, enabling you to establish where your energy and resources are best focused.

Virtual leadership stage one: context

What is the nature of the remote working challenge you’re facing?

To define the nature of the challenges you face, you need to consider practical working arrangements as well as the wider context within which they will be operating.

There are two key questions to address when considering remote working arrangements:

1. How many people will be working remotely?
2. Will these arrangements be in place for the short, medium or long term?

Here are some examples:

Then, looking at the wider context, the main factors likely to influence your approach are:

1. Your industry – what are the industry norms? What are your practical constraints? (Examples of constraints include confidentiality, task suitability, information exchange processes, client/customer needs.)
2. The size of your organisation and its teams– the approach taken by a large global company will differ from that taken by a growing local start up.
3. Resources – what budget, technology and time is available?
4. The geographic location of employees– time zones, language barriers and cultural differences all need to be factored in.
5. The economic context – is it a period of strong growth or recession? Somewhere in between? Consider the impact on employees, suppliers, customers.
6. The personal situations of those involved – for example, could anxiety, illness, bereavement or lack of sleep be issues?

Virtual leadership stage two: demands

What is it that a virtual leader needs to do to be successful in this context?

It is much harder to get a sense of what your organisation needs when you can’t walk into a room and ‘read it’. Or detect a shift in someone’s demeanour when you bump into them at the coffee machine. Virtual leaders are working with limited information compared to those leading fully co-located teams.

Therefore, the most effective way to establish the demands that need to be fulfilled is to ask your key stakeholders what the three most important things are to them:

• that leaders need to do right now?
• that leaders need to do in the longer term?
• that leaders need to avoid doing?
• that are now expected, which haven’t been expected before?

Once you have the answers to these questions, they need to be collated and ranked. Ask which themes show up again and again? Which are having the most positive or negative impact?

Virtual leadership stage three: capabilities

What capabilities are needed to meet the demands?

When we use the term ‘capability’ in this context, we mean the right combination of:

• knowledge
• skills
• motivation/values
• personality traits

These four components are key. For example, say that when answering the demand questions above, a team has requested more social interaction in a remote context.

The team leader in this instance is aware that technology can provide a solution (knowledge), but doesn’t have the relevant skills to implement it. They also haven’t prioritised this issue on their long to do list (motivation) and they’re sceptical about the benefits (personality trait). As such, this leader wouldn’t have the capability to meet this demand from their team unless skills, motivation and attributes are addressed.

Once you have defined the capabilities you need, it’s a good idea to spend some time working out which ones you already have – and which you don’t. This should very quickly highlight any gaps you need to fill in order to deliver great virtual leadership.

There are a variety of approaches to this ‘training needs analysis’ – taking perspectives from HR business partners, using existing data from the performance review cycle, comprehensive analysis tools such as 360 degree feedback or psychological profiling.

Virtual leadership stage four: prioritise

Identifying where to start

Once you’ve assessed your organisation’s capabilities and any gaps in those capabilities, you need to prioritise. This can, of course, be very challenging. It’s not unusual to have a number of competing and equally important demands. And it’s important to consider what you need short term versus what will impact your long term strategy.

There are a few overriding principles to bear in mind.

• Knowledge is the easiest thing to develop quickly, enabling quick wins.
• Behavioural/psychological skills take longer to build but are strategically important.
• Understanding the core motivations and values that your virtual leaders need to model to be successful is instrumental in developing your culture.

Perhaps the most important question to ask in determining what to prioritise is this – what would be the impact on the organisation if this capability was notdeveloped?

Virtual leadership stage five: develop

What interventions will help build capability?

You’re now ready to put your virtual leadership strategy into action by addressing the gaps in your capabilities and rolling out your strategy. But what might this actually look like in action?

From our five years’ experience working this way, we’ve found that the best virtual leaders are able to inspire and lead a team in a context where:

• behaviour is harder to observe
• nonverbal cues can be easily lost
• technology interrupts communication flow
• written communication can lead to misinterpretation
• there are fewer informal interactions

The importance of trust

In this context, trust is key and has been described in academic research as the ‘glue that holds virtual teams together’. Its impact on team performance, whether virtual or otherwise, is significant.

Teams high in trust are more proactive, optimistic and adaptive. Low trust teams are poorer at making decisions and sharing information, misunderstandings are more frequent and engagement is lower.

A multitude of factors affect trust levels within teams. Interventions aimed at developing trust are therefore complex and can be both challenging and time consuming. This is particularly the case in virtual environments where many of the usual cues we use to build trust are constrained.

That said, with the appropriate leadership style and communication practices, there is a lot that can be done to support the development and preservation of trust in virtual teams indirectly.

Below are some of the strategies implemented by our virtual leaders that have proved successful at Hoxby.

Technology: we use Slack for written communication, Google Docs for sharing documents and collaborating, Google Meet for video conferencing, Calendly for diary management. Hoxbies are provided with clear guidelines on how the technology should be used.

Transparency: email is banned for internal communications. Hoxby communication is done in an open forum on Slack.

Support: Hoxby has dedicated support channels so it’s quick and easy to ask questions and no one has to guess what’s expected of them. No question is considered stupid and we all pitch in to help each other.

Informal communication: we have a virtual ‘watercooler’ Slack channel where people can hang out for non-work chat, as well as a number of other channels for discussing shared interests. There are numerous ad hoc and planned coffee and lunchtime video hangouts for general catch ups or to discuss non-work issues. The leaders also make time every week to engage with their teams – responding with emojis, a comment or a photo – it doesn’t take much to make it clear they’re showing an interest.

Hoxby Heroes: virtual celebrations and high fives for those who have delivered refreshing work, supported a team mate, made someone’s week a little brighter, suggested an improvement and/or shown passion for what they do, nominated by the community.

Hoxby Homes: Hoxbies are encouraged to meet up in person with their local associates. Attendees share a group selfie with the rest of the community on Slack. Our leaders share a selfie at every meet up and client meeting.

In summary

Simply put, two main factors emerge from both our experiences and the research that predict virtual team effectiveness and are therefore most likely to represent the best ROI:

1. Developing the knowledge and skills relating to the practicalities of working remotely is vital.
2. Creating the optimum virtual working culture means developing trust through effective communication.

Futureproofing your organisation

The world of work is changing. Fast. We provide strategic workshops and deliver consultancy projects on subjects like remote working, virtual leadership skills, remote working technology and much more.

By channelling what we’ve learned through the unique Hoxby model, we can ensure you’re more agile, inclusive and flexible. Take a look at our futureproofing brochure (pdf) for more details.