THE TRUE TEST OF VIRTUAL TEAMS

Productivity is up, but how are communication, talent management, and employee engagement going?

It's hard to imagine a time where work has changed so much in so little time. And yet here we are. Remote work has transformed how employees communicate, collaborate, and coordinate. Supervisors have been rethinking how to manage and lead. And employers are challenged to maintain work communities as staff remain apart. Those challenges are most acute in how employees team.

In some sense, the team is synonymous with personal interaction. Early last year, when you thought of work teams, you likely pictured people gathered around a table or in front of a whiteboard collaborating, brainstorming, and innovating solutions together and celebrating hard-won victories over a shared meal. That time is no more.

Or is it? Must employees physically be together to be a team? Do the basic rules that guide team interaction change simply because individuals are physically apart?

I would argue that the shock of such a physical manifestation of change—being apart—prompts many people to imagine that they must rewrite the book on how employees work together and how they team. And yet, I do not believe that is so. The rules that guide human interaction and collaboration remain largely the same; the attributes of good teams are unchanged. How individuals most effectively lead and work on teams still follows the same basic guidelines that conform to how people work, act, and feel.

The only factor that has changed about work teams is physical proximity. But that absence of proximity doesn't mean that the basic human psychology of how people work together has changed. People still need the same things from their leaders and teammates that they always have: vision, goals, purpose, trust, and community. Don't overthink it. The challenge, however, is how to maintain the practices we have always known to be true—but now without being in the same room.

Talent development plays an important role by reminding leaders that good teams—whether virtual, in person, or a mix of both—succeed by completing important work, aligning around a common vision, vigorously challenging team members, and leveraging all team members' skills and abilities. And in the course of accomplishing their goals, leaders still must develop the important and far-reaching benefits of belonging, community, and purpose.

The TD department can bring best practices to teams and leaders that enable them to instantiate best leadership practices in the remote space. Broadly speaking, leaders' and TD professionals' main concerns regarding leading a remote workforce can be grouped into three categories:

• Communication, coordination, and collaboration

• Performance management

• Team engagement

Each of those requires leaders to rethink and reassess how they may go about managing those fundamental gears of team leadership. And the TD function already has the expertise in those areas to help leaders navigate this new world.

Communication, coordination, and collaboration

One common complaint I have heard is that remote work inhibits communication and coordination. However, a small Harvard Business Review study found that among people who know and work with each other, communication increased by 40 percent since the start of the pandemic lockdown. The study reveals that companies may be adapting well to the surge in work from home and remote work. That also corresponds with my clients' observations as well as anecdotal evidence from colleagues in the field.

Technology such as Zoom and other remote meeting solutions have enabled workers to continue to collaborate and communicate effectively. Certainly, remote employees have needed to adjust the cadence and means by which they work together, but some data suggests that organizations may be doing well overall.

TD professionals can and should continue to leverage such technology on a regular cadence to help leaders ensure their teams are aligned on priorities, communicate roadblocks, and collaboratively solve problems. Depending on the scale and scope of the work, team leads can schedule morning huddles, end-of-day check-ins, project status meetings, or weekly video team check-ins. In addition, leaders should increase one-on-one conversations with their team members.

Each meeting should have standard questions that help participants stay focused and on the same page. For example:

• What roadblocks are you encountering?

• Have we made any decisions that we need to communicate to anyone not on the call?

• What actions have we decided on, and who owns each one?

• What is each action's due date?

These regular meetings, married to purposeful alignment questions, are effective in keeping the team communicating and cooperating. Team members will understand what needs to be accomplished, by whom, and by when. TD can actualize such checkins and provide leaders with guidance on the kinds of touchpoints and questions that can help teams focus.

If the alignment ideas sound familiar, it's because they are merely attributes of good team communication. There is nothing necessarily special that managers must do to ensure remote teams are communicating and cooperating. Aligning on priorities, communicating progress, and ensuring that actions have an owner and a due date are basic team and leadership activities.

The fact that teams are now physically distant forces them to purposefully engage in the very kinds of communication and cooperation that they should have been purposeful about doing in the first place. Because of that dynamic, I am often seeing teams become more effective over time rather than less so.

Performance management

In my work with leaders, I have heard a good deal of concern around performance management for remote workers. A common question that sums up their concern is: How do I know they are working?

That has always been the great fear of remote work. Leaders often think that if they are not watching their employees, then they may not do any work. It is difficult to come up with a comprehensive list of reasons that kind of thinking is wrong headed; the list would be too long. But again, what does good performance management look like? It remains the same as it ever was: being clear on expectations and deliverables, removing roadblocks to forward progress, and checking in on that progress.

TD professionals are well positioned to remind leaders of these tried and true practices. Where once leaders could assure themselves that their teams were diligently working by dint of their physical presence at a desk, they all too often neglected basic performance management practices. TD can, and should, design and build frameworks that they can use to ensure that leaders are communicating with and aligning their teams. In practice, that looks like frequent check-ins with employees and teams to:

• Ensure agreement on priorities.

• Set expectations.

• Clarify deliverables and due dates.

• Agree on what good looks like.

• Understand and remove any roadblocks.

• Jointly design the best path forward.

• Mutually monitor progress.

It doesn't matter whether a manager is in the same room or 1,000 miles away, the basic mechanics of leading and managing team performance are the same. Certainly, it requires more effort on the leader's part to carve out the necessary time to engage in those activities. But one unanticipated benefit of the current situation is that supervisors are now forced to engage in the activities that they may have been neglecting previously. To free up their time, team leads must learn to delegate more and give their people more autonomy.

The result is a virtuous cycle where granting greater levels of autonomy and decision making to employees is leading to higher levels of employee and team engagement. That is a good thing. Developing training that addresses trust and delegation benefits both managers and their direct reports. The benefit for employees is that they will have more autonomy and control over their work environment. The benefit for leaders is that they will now be able to focus on being leaders rather than micromanagers and harvest the benefit of enhanced employee engagement that this brings.

The TD team should also consider creating templates and cheat sheets that leaders can use to work with employees to ensure that quality of work over quantity of work is the focus. The templates will provide both parties documentation to track whether the employee is meeting the work standards and deadlines.

Team engagement

Personal interactions and relationships are a critical facet of team community, engagement, and loyalty. Remote work can erode those dynamics and has the potential to diminish the duty people feel to their teammates.

People unaccustomed to remote work can struggle with team engagement and the sense of belonging and community that teams can generate. The development of personal relationships that physical proximity fosters can take a big hit when team members who once saw each other in the office every day are now working from their respective kitchen tables.

The sense that good teams have in not wanting to let their teammates down is built not necessarily on the work itself but rather on the relationships that have developed in the doing of the work. The potential loss of that dynamic is perhaps one of the more troubling aspects of remote teamwork.

Considering that, TD professionals can help leaders create environments that foster personal relationship building such that people generate loyalties to one another and not just to the work. Mentoring and success partnering are great examples of creating situations that lay foundations for developing meaningful personal relationships. They are also places where the TD team can provide significant value. There are numerous ways to do so. For example:

• Pair up experienced people with less- experienced individuals.

• Pair up individuals who have some knowledge or skills with those who do not.

• Create success partner teams that help fellow teammates develop a new skill.

• Use small pilot teams to develop a new product or brainstorm new services and innovate solutions.

The point is to get people together, even if remotely, in more intimate settings so that they can potentially build the kinds of personal relationships that generate interpersonal loyalties. A good leadership practice is to tend to relationship building to generate those loyalties. TD professionals can help by educating leaders on the utility of relationships and by designing mentoring and success partnering programs that drive relationship building.

Address basic needs

TD professionals have an enormous opportunity to engage with leaders to not only recognize and clarify the potential pitfalls of remote work but also to highlight how team members' and teams' basic needs have remain unchanged. Training should emphasize leadership best practices such as frequent and clear communication, aligning on expectations, having clear shared goals, and developing relationships.

TD's role here is primarily to influence leaders to purposefully engage in such activities and to provide resources that enable leaders to do so. Leaders and TD should use the new normal we are now engaged in to leverage the leadership practices we all know to be best practices.