Remote control of the regional team. Remote Team Leadership

If managing remote employees is your task, you have distributed teams and you want to successfully develop your business with them, you need additional knowledge and skills in remote management.

During the training, you will learn how to select the right people to your vacancies and develop them effectively. You will learn how to properly plan, formulate and assign tasks to virtual teams. You will learn how to motivate remote employees, find the necessary and enough level control for them and understand what attention and with what frequency the staff needs.

The target audience:

Heads of organizations, heads of functional departments, heads and project managers who wish to improve their skills and master modern methods managing remote employees.

During the training you will learn:

• What are the main problems you can meet when working with a distributed team.
• What prevents remote employees from being motivated and included in the work.
• The role of technical means in remote management.
• How to select the right staff for remote work.
• How to motivate employees remotely.
• How to properly build the work process to get the maximum result.
• What control is necessary and sufficient.
• How to inspire and lead people virtually.
• How to develop the necessary competencies of employees.

Training program

Day 1
1. We collect problems with remote management that participants have.

2. We analyze the difficulties of remote employees:

• why they don't hear us;
• what prevents them from "doing the right thing, the first time."

3. We make a list of necessary technical means and means of communication:

• the role of technical means in the success of remote control;
• use of the best world practices.

4. We select staff for remote work:

• what are employee competencies;
• competence development levels.

  Practice:

  • compiling a list of required competencies;
  • assessment of the importance of each competency;
  • selection of resumes according to the necessary competencies;
  • conducting an interview in the "aquarium".

5. We build the workflow:

• 5.1 Planning:

  • features of remote planning.

    Practice (work in minigroups):

    • scheduling tasks for a remote team for a month.

• 5.2 Setting goals:

  • how to formulate tasks correctly;
  • how to put them correctly to the performer.

    Practice:

    • formulating and setting a task for a remote employee.

6. How to motivate remote employees:

• Why is employee loyalty important?
• how to develop a sense of belonging;
• how to properly recognize the results of work. The art of feedback.

  Practice (work in pairs):

  • developing a sense of employee involvement;
  • differentiating feedback.

Day 2
1. Control. Necessary and sufficient:

• four levels of team development;
• what leadership style to apply at what stage;
• effective reporting.

  Practice:

  • determining the level of development of the remote team;
  • compiling a list of control methods. Necessary and sufficient;
  • development of an effective report structure.

2. Conflict management:

• conflict of concepts;
• reality conflict.

  Practice:

  • expansion of one's own vision;
  • separating facts from interpretations;
  • projection mechanism.

3. How to be a virtual leader:

• how to inspire a team;
• features of remote leadership.

  Practice:

  • inspiring leadership. How to lead employees?

4. Necessary and sufficient attention to employees:

• determining the necessary and sufficient frequency of meetings;
• how to organize meetings;
• holding meetings (bridge with the past, essence, bridge to the future-expectations).

  Practice:

  • holding and reviewing a regular meeting.

5. Development of the necessary competencies:

• whether it is necessary to develop remote employees;
• modern teaching methods;
• coaching support as a method of solving problems, getting rid of restrictions and fears.
  

  Practice:

  • mini-coaching session in the "aquarium";
  • coaching practice.

09:30 – 10:00 - REGISTRATION
10:00 – 11:20 - First block of the program
11:20 – 11:35 - Coffee break
11:35 – 13:00 - The second block of the program
13:00 – 14:00 - Lunch
14:00 – 15:45 - Third block of the program
15:45 – 16:00 - Coffee break
16:00 – 17:30 - Fourth block of the program

Feedback about the training

Karpukhin Vadim, PJSC "AK BARS" BANK, Head of Department, Kazan

The remote management training was helpful for me as a manager starting to work with a team of remote employees. After this course, I somewhat adjusted the management methods that I wanted to use in my work by analogy with a local team, and added some methods and recommendations to my arsenal. Svetlana Gonchar constantly
keeps the audience in good shape with a professional presentation of theoretical material, examples from his personal practice and a combination of theory with exciting practical exercises.


Romantsova Olga Anatolyevna, Starateli LLC, DIY Networks Manager, Moscow

The purpose of the lessons: participants gaining knowledge and skills in remote personnel management.

The target audience: The training is intended for employees and managers whose competencies include communication and management of employees located outside the office and / or at a considerable distance.

Training program

Introduction:

• The influence of employees on the efficiency of the company.
• The difference between a manager and an executor.
• Management decisions. Criteria for the effectiveness of managerial decisions.
• Leader functions.
• Leadership styles.

Features of work at a distance:

• Who can work remotely: employee competency profile for remote work.
• Features of the search for remote employees, discussion of conditions.
• Criteria for the effectiveness of the work of employees at a distance.
• Features of labor relations at a distance.

Setting goals for employees at a distance:

• Why is it important to set goals for employees?
• Rules for remote goal setting.
• Monitoring the achievement of goals.
• The main mistakes when setting goals at a distance.

Monitoring the activities of employees at a distance:

• Types of control.
• Features of remote control.
• Hidden visits: technique, mistakes, areas of use.
• Features and possibilities of delegation at a distance.
• Feedback on the results of monitoring the employee's activities.

Communication with employees at a distance:

• The importance of communication with employees at a distance.
• Types of communications and features of use.
• Technique for tele- and videoconferencing.
• Features of correspondence with employees at a distance.
• Errors in communication with employees at a distance.

Employee motivation at a distance:

• Motivational field of the employee. The difference between the leading motivation of an employee at a distance.
• Methods of influencing an employee at a distance.
• Demotivating factors for an employee at a distance.

Feedback:

• Purpose of feedback.
• Rules for giving feedback to an employee.
• Criteria for the effectiveness of the feedback received.

Training results:

• Formation of the plan further work and individual development participants.

Issued documents: certificate of the established sample on advanced training.

• Translation

If you start hiring people from all over the world, then it can unrecognizably change your startup - if only you treat your employees well.

Great employees working remotely are now secret weapon many successful startups. Instead of relying on the people who live close to the office (and often in the most expensive market), they hire the best talent from around the world to help them move forward with their mission.

Some companies prefer to have the entire staff of employees work remotely, which also has its own difficulties. In others, along with team members who are in the office, there are also employees working remotely. Managing a remote and in-house team can be a daunting task.

Online communication

Jessica Oralkan, Collecteurs

Daily calls

In order to fix everything, we began to practice daily phone calls, but this was not enough. Now we call each other daily, and all calls are reported and sent to the team. This helps us avoid wasting time and money due to misunderstandings, and it also promotes camaraderie that strengthens teamwork and common goal. It's an old school method, but it works great."

Andrew Thomas, SkyBell Video Doorbell

Daily meetings

Kim Walsh-Phillips, Elite Digital Group

Don't overdo the controls

Blair Thomas, EMerchantBroker

One chat for everyone

Matt Doyle, Excel Builders

Everyone should know about time zones

Micah Johnson, GoFanbase

Let remote employees have fun with everyone

Martina Welke, Zealyst

Use one platform

Chris Cancialosi, GothamCulture

Create an internal blog

Mattan Griffel, One Month

Keep employees up to date

Katherine Berry, Allocadia

Invest in travel

Fan Bi, Blank Label.

Remote communications are not always easy. Do you recognize yourself in the examples below?

At 10 p.m., a corporate lawyer receives the original text from a colleague and a few hours later wonders (not for the first time), why are there no contract terms for work-related documents?

After a long and delicious lunch with a client, an advertising company representative opens a letter from his boss, which contains a reminder to submit his expenses in a timely manner. Annoyed by this micromanagement (meticulous style of management), he responds immediately, throwing his uncensored thoughts in a reply letter.

In a weekly online group conference, a remote team member gets confused as to whether her colleague is really not hearing him (mute), the moment she just delays answering a question, or if she just gets distracted and then excuses herself.

The digital age has changed the format of communication

When our potential interlocutors, on the other side of the phone, turn off sound alerts, it's safe to say that we live in a difficult time. The digital age has created a revolution in communication, it is equivalent to the revolution associated with the invention of the printing press. These changes, as we often say, are a pain point. And this affects how we hear correctly, and what we hear, because the mess of information thrown at us can often lead to very serious misunderstandings and confusion.

People who work in remote teams face these challenges all the time. According to the latest survey by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 22% of Americans work from home, while 50% work remotely as part of a team. This increasing shift requires new skills to behave in interaction.

The problem of remote commands

Why do remote teams require new collaboration skills? What is missing in our text messages, emails, online conferences and other digital communications? Answer: language of the body.

Even if we are next to each other, the tone of the text or the formality of the email remains free to interpret, to the point where even our closest friends can become confused and misinterpret the message.

These misinterpretations create anxiety that can be costly, affecting morale, engagement rates, productivity, and innovation. Remote communication distorts the naturalness of our conversations. And the delay between messages hides emotional reactions. Have you ever experienced that immediately after writing and sending an email, you felt uneasy about how it would be perceived by the person on the other side of the screen? What if your boss sees a letter from you late and decides that this is an invasion of her personal time?

While we may have begun to get used to this kind of “asynchronous” correspondence, they can still cause misunderstandings in social communications. Without an instant response, we can get distracted, think about the wrong things, or even be disappointed in our interlocutor.

Efficient collaboration between remote teams

To maintain a high level of communication, remote teams must find new and better ways interactions.

First, consider that there are three types of distance in remote interaction:

• physical (place and time)
• operational (team size, throughput and skill levels)
• affinity (values, trust and interdependence)

The best way for managers to improve team performance is to focus on increasing proximity, that is, reducing the distance between teams. Try to change the correspondence to video calls, this is the best remedy to increase mutual understanding between employees and create empathy than email or even voice messages. And create virtual team rituals that give people the opportunity to regularly interact and share experiences. For example, meetups.

When remote teams communicate well and use their strengths, they can gain an advantage over teams from other departments. Here are some best practices:

Sometimes, we use few words in messages.

Brevity can cause the rest of the team to spend more time interpreting your message (and by the way, they will still misinterpret the message). Do not think that others understand your short phrases and abbreviations, do not think that others can read your mind and guess what is left unsaid. Take the time to be extremely clear in your messages. In fact, it is not possible to become 100% clear. you can never be too clear, but it is too easy to be less clear.

Don't bombard your team with messages

How do you track a task? e-mail, messages or phone? Do you ask the interlocutor whether he received your previous message? Abuse of this can become a form of digital dominance, a relentless and merciless annoyance. Your messages require time for the recipient to think. If you ask three questions in a row at once, you are unlikely to get a good answer to all at once, rather you will annoy the interlocutor if he receives them one after one.

Establish communication norms

Remote teams need to create new norms that ensure clarity in communication. Companies like Merck have created acronyms for their digital communications, such as "Four Hours of Answer (4HR)" and "No Need to Answer (NNTR)", which bring predictability and certainty to virtual conversations.

Individual teams can also set their own standards, such as using Slack, Google Docs, Telegram or Whatsapp, for example. As well as norms can also be at the individual level, such as preferred response time, writing style and tone.

For example, some people prefer short and quick messages while others prefer long and detailed responses; people also differ in their preference for and tolerance for humor and informality.

While we often tend to view human predictability as some kind of flaw in people, few qualities are more in demand at work than predictability, especially in virtual collaboration.

We are all unique, but our predictable behavior helps others understand what we are doing and in turn helps others understand us better. Everyone benefits from this. You can make this easier for others by establishing clear personal etiquette and sticking to it at all times.

Hidden opportunities in correspondence

Being on the other side of the screen, you can create new opportunities for team members, creating the right atmosphere for those who tend to be non-verbal.

Research shows that introverts are less withdrawn online than they are offline. However, you need to beware of unconscious errors, where punctuation, grammar, and word choice can show a bias towards people.

The lack of body language in remote text conversations does not mean that we do not convey more through text than we think.

AT digital world there's still a lot of meta-linking where a person pays attention to what's between the lines. For example, using exclamation points or a negative emoji after referring to someone's gender, nationality, or religion. This makes such a strong impression that a negative emoji can be perceived as a real disgusting face.

Deliberate creation of a holiday

Birthday cakes are still important for remote teams. Creating virtual rituals for celebrations and socializing can strengthen relationships and lay a solid foundation for future collaborations. Thanks to this, you kind of reduce the distance between remote workers.

One company celebrated the birth of each new talent by creating a personalized emoji for them. And so for every employee who was there for six months. You can come up with something of your own, no matter how you do it, it is much more important that it be.

As more and more communications take place in the digital environment every year, people will continue to experience new forms of misunderstanding and strife. When new technologies come out, they don't take this into account (although developers will no doubt try to bridge this gap). Instead, we need to adapt to the new rules, accumulating communication skills that reflect our digital age.

Actively developing companies with an extensive branch network sooner or later face the problem of remote control by region. Geographically scattered divisions that are not united in common links of one chain cause many problems for managers.

What hinders effective branch management?

• Insufficient access to information about what is happening in the remote unit
• High independence in operational decision-making. This is a consequence of insufficient awareness: it is easier and faster to react to a non-standard situation on the spot on your own than to use standard scheme interactions with remote management
• Difficulty in personnel control and building business processes

What will help the manager to control the work of the branch?

• Well-established, automated and operating system accounting and reporting
• All possible means links to facilitate communication with a remote unit
• Planning, forecasting, monitoring the state of affairs in companies operating in a similar way
• A simple system of motivation for the result
• Competent risk management, their timely forecasting

What is the head office for a branch?
An even more distant universe, to get into which is a privilege and a test at the same time.

Let's stop at linear functional system remote management of the regional team. It is based on a hierarchical principle: the headquarters is responsible for strategy and tactics, and employees located in the regions are responsible for field, operational work.

Such a system works well if the main factors are met:

• high professional level employees
• clear standardization of management processes and distribution of functionality in the field,
• efficient and high-quality decision-making,
• the possibility of attracting specialists high level for individual functions.

These moments should be clearly spelled out and fixed by the relevant regulations in order to avoid duplication of functions among specialists. The development of regulations and their precise implementation with such a management system is one of the important tools. This helps to avoid the loss of information and not to lose the quality of work for employees who are far from the representatives of the central office.

Headquarters managers make decisions, develop strategy and, due to their professional competence, can influence line managers in the field without being directly involved in operational tasks.

Each division has its own goals, but the region has a general plan that takes into account local goals as components of a common one.

KPI system
The management team responsible for tactics and strategy and the regional manager working with field staff have common KPIs. For field employees at the regional level, KPI is calculated separately by function, and general KPIs work, tied to the specifics of the work of a particular region.

For example, when introducing a new product, each employee at his level has a set of tasks assigned to him. The regional head is responsible for the specific result of the product implementation in the region subordinate to him. Trainer - for teaching sellers of the whole region about the characteristics of the product and methods of its promotion, merchandiser - for the competent display of goods at the points, document management department - for the general documentary support of the process. There is a system of building work in the city and region. The time for the introduction of a new product in city and regional divisions will also differ. All this should be taken into account when calculating key performance indicators.

Planning
Planning plays an important role in managing a developed branch network. Goal planning is yearly, quarterly and monthly. A well-built reporting system helps to track the real state of affairs and their compliance with the strategic objectives and goals fixed in the plans.

Setting goals and control
Tasks in the region are set weekly. Task management systems are used, technical means in the form of audio or video conferences. The work of the departments is built in accordance with the established regulations, which means that there is general system and operational problems occurring on the ground in different regions may have common causes.

Audio-video conferences
If it is possible to choose between an audio or video conference, the priority is the video option, this makes it possible not only to read the text, but also to see facial expressions, gestures, speakers, and therefore have more information.

When preparing for a video conference, the task of the organizer is to provide all participants with the same documents, respectively, the files are sent in advance, people are given time to familiarize themselves. And then all conference participants have the opportunity to simultaneously see the same document, which is being discussed.

The maximum duration of the event is 1 hour. If the videoconference lasts longer, people get tired, concentration decreases, and hence the effectiveness of the event. At such a reporting meeting, the reality of the figures is not discussed, they have already been accepted as a fact, agreed by all authorities “behind the scenes”. Only documented results are discussed. For example, according to the sales plan of the macro-region as a whole.

The event begins with a speech by the head of the macroregion and overview of what is happening. Since the time of the event is limited, each performance has a strict time limit. The rule of three applies. First, the representatives of the three most successful selling regions speak and talk about the events that have helped to achieve such high results. And the leaders of the three regions with the lowest results report the same way. They share problems, voice how they see solutions and terms for correcting the situation. The time for these performances also has a strict framework - both the “excellent students” and the “losers” have five minutes to report. The rest of the meeting time is spent on summing up and setting tasks for the macroregion for new period time until the next event.

Formation and selection of a team
How more strength and time invested in human resources, the more efficient the team is. Primary selection on the ground is carried out by HR and regional leaders, but the head responsible for regional tasks should know for himself who works in his team, the final decision on each of the candidates for a vacant position should remain with him.

When conducting audits, it is important to communicate with field staff, this will help to understand their true roles and the effectiveness of their work in the field.

Regular visits to regions
The control of the work of the branch is carried out at different levels, but the main tool for managerial interaction with people is personal, face-to-face communication.

There is a need for a clear schedule for the travel of central office staff to each region. Based on the results of visiting the branch, a report is drawn up on all areas of the branch's activities, on all the pluses and successes, minuses and difficulties. Based on this analytics, strategic and operational management decisions.

Both scheduled and unscheduled field trips of the head of the macro-region for meetings with partners, personal communication with regional leaders, field employees and conducting a general audit of the region are required.

What gives such a system of remote management of branches
Minimization of risks, the ability to understand the reasons for the work of a loss-making division and turn the lagging region into a sales leader.

As an example
For a long time, one of the regions, as part of a large macro-region, was considered unprofitable. The reasons were not clear, since the reporting was carried out correctly and the people on the ground did not change.

During one of the planned inspections of a troubled branch, the manager, after talking with employees and the head himself, found out that the head of the branch does not divide his field specialists according to functionality. All his field employees are involved in all processes, no one takes responsibility for anything specific.

As a result, mistakes and shortcomings are not revealed, and the bonus part is not distributed transparently, according to the developed KPI for the region, and according to the personal sympathies of the head.

Branch manager changed. Following him, the team was updated, assigning each function to a separate responsible person. Quite a lot of time passed, almost a year, until the machine worked as expected, and the region turned from unprofitable and lagging behind into a profitable division.

Remote management of a regional team is an interesting task for a leader, requiring excellent management skills, efficiency and the ability to think strategically.

Summarizing all of the above, it is worth once again paying attention to basic tools effective management regional team:

• An individual approach to the selection of personnel from the head responsible for the overall results.
• A transparent, simple system for setting goals and objectives.
• Financial motivation tied to the final result.
• Quantitative rather than qualitative evaluation of results.
• Regular remote monitoring (audio-video conferences, well-functioning reporting system).
• Regular face-to-face monitoring (a clear schedule for the weekly presence of representatives of the headquarters for each region).
• Systematic analysis of work based on reports in all areas following the results of each visit to the branch.