Remote working doesn’t have to feel remote

Remote Working Doesn’t Have To Feel Remote

Remote Working is quickly becoming the norm.  As we move forward into the emerging world of the agile or augmented office that space where we will see more balance between being in the office and working from home we need to give careful consideration to how we will lead effectively in the new world.

When we moved into remote working many people, saw their initial productivity increase as they were able to get through work without the usual interruptions but almost all at some point faced a feeling of disconnection with their team, their leader and their organisation. We know that attracting and retaining top talent is critical to the success of our organisations and so our ability to engage enthuse and empower our teams remotely or not becomes our most vital skill.

so let’s take these in turn

Engage as social animals we need and crave social interaction. One of the critical challenges around working remotely is that social interaction is often lost to us. Creating a virtual water cooler can become so crucial to your success finding a space and opportunity for your people to connect about the social parts of them and their lives are vital to driving a culture of inclusiveness and connectivity.

Enthuse, when there is more remoteness to the team, there is a higher demand for the leader to communicate more to create a compelling story. Ensuring everybody knows the part they need to play in that to enthuse them about the future about the work they are doing, the element they represent, the importance of them and their role in achieving the broader business objectives.

Empower one of the biggest mistakes I see organisations make when dealing with people working remotely is they fail to demonstrate trust. Looking around instead for ways in which they can manage the productivity, that they can control the process rather than empower their people. Those who instead trust that they will get the work done and work with them on the outputs rather than managing the inputs see the greatest success.

These are all simple to implement they’re all within our gift, but they take conscious effort. It involves deciding to make them essential. Still, if you have an engaged infused and empowered team, the results will be exponential there is research that shows that motivated people work 20% harder. The danger we could all fall into is out of sight out of mind, don’t let your most significant asset not be your most considerable focus. Instead, ask yourself each day, what have I done today to Engage, Enthuse and Empower my people?