Motivate Remote Employees by Making Work More Like Play

When you are managing a team of remote employees, it can be more challenging to keep them motivated, engaged and focused. You need to know they are self-driven to do their best, even when you can’t be there to see them. It’s a known fact that, employees who like their job and enjoy going to work, are more dedicated and self motivated. One way you can ensure that your employees enjoy their job is to make their work more like play. That doesn’t mean you should send your employees off to go ski the slopes or play a softball game, instead of working for the day. But there are some key concepts we can apply, from how we play, that can make work more enjoyable for our employees.

What is it that makes work just that - other than the obvious - that we get paid to do it? If you play the guitar for fun, what makes that different from a professional guitar player in a band? If you like to play tennis with friends, would you feel the same way about it if you had to do it every day for a living? These key differences are things we can look to integrate into the work lives of our employees, to create enjoyment and self-motivation in their job.

• When you play, you have choices on when, where and who to play with. We get to make the choices on how long we want to play, who we are going to play with and the location we want to play at. Give your employees the ability to make these choices themselves. Allow them to pick teammates to work on a project with. Let them select locations and times for meetings or projects when possible. Give them the flexibility to plan their day, week and priorities in what they want to accomplish and when.
• Playing is relaxing. It allows you to unwind, there is no pressure from others, and you can be yourself. Be careful not to micro-manage your employees. If you suffocate them, they will never take it upon themselves to work without your supervision. If you ever have employees say “I didn’t do xyz because you didn’t tell me to do it,” that’s a good indicator that your employees are over supervised. If you over supervise them, they will only do things when you specifically tell them to do it and how since this is the pattern that has been set for them. They will not take any initiative outside of what you tell them. Avoiding a micro-managing style entails managing to the goal rather than the task. Do you really care if your employee starts at 8AM each day, if they reach the highest numbers in the team? By allowing them the freedom to make decisions and tasks within pre-set goals you have given them, you allow them to be themselves and work in a way where they can produce the best results. Give them the bumper guards you want them to use to stay within the bowling lane, and the vision of the 12 pins, but let them decide if they are going to use the curve shot or fast ball to knock down all the pins.
• Play involves social interaction with peers. We like to play with friends because we get to spend social time with them, share experiences, and create new ones. This is an especially important concept with remote employees since they can often feel isolated. Find opportunities for them to work together, collaborate, and generate ideas. Set aside time during group interactions to allow for “virtual water cooler chat” where employees can share information that may not be work related. You can help this along by using icebreakers or other team building “fun” activities to kick off meetings or phone calls. Encouraging your employees to find things in common, and reasons to bond. It will make them a stronger team and their work more enjoyable. Research has found that if an employee has a good friend at work, it greatly decreases their likely hood of leaving the company, and increases their motivation.
• Playing allows you to be creative. Many types of play allow you to be creative such as drawing or trying a new golf swing. You can provide your employees with creative opportunities by allowing them to come up with creative solutions to issues as a group or individual. Elect a committee of employees to find new ways to tackle competitors for the group. Have a team come up with a new process. Allowing them to stretch their minds will keep them driven and engaged.
• No one is telling you what to do when you are playing. When you are playing, no one tells you what to do – and if they did, you could decide not to play. Ask your employees to do things rather than tell them. You will get the same response, but the fact that you asked them shows a form of respect, and in turn, they will be more receptive to doing it.
• You have the ability to use your talents when you play. We play at things that we think we have some skill and talent in. It’s one of the reasons we enjoy it. Find opportunities to utilize your employees’ talents and recognize them. Have them create best practices to share with the team in areas where they excel. Nominate employees to be Subject Matter Experts on various topics. Give them opportunities to attend and participate in seminars and trainings where they can grow their talents.
• Playing gives us the thrill of winning and accomplishment. We play because we like to win and feel a sense of accomplishment. Whether it’s winning a game or accomplishing a puzzle, these make us feel good. Find every opportunity to celebrate with your employees. Highlight successes during any group meeting or call. Give them positive feedback whenever you see them succeed.

By incorporating these aspects of play into your employees work environment, you can make their work more fun, keep them self-directed and create a strong, positive team of remote employees.

Creating Accountability with a Distributed Workforce

When the term Micro-Manager is mentioned, it incites painful ideas of a manager that is smothering, controlling and demotivating. But the conundrum for most managers of field teams or distributed workforces is how to ensure that the job is getting done without over managing. Because a team of employees, spread across multiple locations, is not as easy to monitor with drop-in daily observations, like a centrally located team, many managers can overcompensate by trying to over control those things that they cannot see. Manager’s want their teams to reach all set goals, but without smothering them.
The key to ensuring management’s happiness with a team’s performance levels as well as the team’s happiness with their ability to spread their wings, is a combination of clearly outlining goals, creating responsibility, and generating individual accountability.

Setting the vision & creating expectations
A good vision creates inspiration and motivation for a team which creates the catalyst to drive a team’s performance. When setting a vision, keep it at top level goals, not the specific tasks it takes to reach them (this is covered next). Because a remote team is more at risk for feeling disconnected from the company , they can tend to focus more time and energy on things that they perceive to be important but that might not really be of the most importance to the team or company. So setting a vision, and keeping a remote team focused on it, is critical to the team and company’s success.

Once the vision is set and communicated, expectations need to be created to define how the remote team will reach that vision. Every employee wants to do a good job, but they need to know what that looks like to obtain it. Creating the expectations, lets each employee know what they need to do to be successful, and what the end picture will look like.

Creating Responsibility
If you give someone the responsibility, they will more likely than not live up to it. However, if you don’t trust them with the responsibility, then they will never have a chance to reach it. Take a simple scenario observed at a corporate meeting where all sales people across the country met semi-annually to discuss the new product line and strategy. At this meeting, for the first 2 days, after every 10 minute break, the regional managers would go out to find their employees and alert them that the break was over and they needed to get back into the meeting room. As a result, over 75% of the sales reps never returned on time to the meeting and waited for their manager to alert them to return. They were conditioned that the manager would let them know, so they didn’t need to take the responsibility to look at their watches to see when 10 minutes was up. This approach removed the responsibility from the sales reps and placed it on the regional managers.

On the 3rd and 4th days, the regional managers took a different approach; they didn’t alert anyone when breaks were over and just started the meeting on time – even if everyone was not in the room. Those that arrived late (after the allotted 10 minutes for the break) had to disrupt the meeting to get to their seat. Those that arrived late more than once over the 2 days, were pulled aside on the next break for a discussion with the manager on the importance of being on time. By the end of the 4th day and the last (5th day) of the meeting, not one employee returned late to the meeting after break times. With the regional managers shifting the responsibility to the sales reps, it freed up their (the managers) time and made the sales reps responsible for their own actions. The key to this was setting the expectation and holding them accountable if they didn’t reach it.

This is a good example of a micro vs non-micro management approach. Releasing yourself from these micro management tasks frees up your time to focus on more important things. Increasing team member responsibility creates less management needs.

Accountability – Micro-monitoring vs micro-managing
Setting clear goals is like a virtual manager that keeps everyone focused without having to constantly look over their shoulder. However if you set these goals but don’t implement some sort of accountability and tracking system, YOU will ultimately have to be that system. This means a very time consuming, management intensive process of nagging employees, to inquire on how they are doing toward their goals, and micro-managing to ensure goals are met. The more you can empower your employees to track their own progress (with a simple delivery method to you), the better results you will get:
They will manage themselves
They will be more self motivated to reach their goals
You will empower them to be responsible for themselves which will demonstrate your respect and trust for them
You can free up your time to work with them on more productive items such as their talent development

Shared accountability creates a feeling of partnership with each team member. It also enables people to learn from both their successes and mistakes. So rather than micro-managing a team, a manager can enable them to micro-monitor their own individual performance.

To do this successfully, managers need to implement a tool that helps employees track their own progress. This tool should also be something that they can deliver to you with minimal effort. It should not be too time consuming and should be easy to decipher for both you and your employee. An Excel spreadsheet or Word table are good vehicles, or possibly an automated intranet system if that is available to the company. These should be completed and submitted weekly and monthly to keep everyone on track. Here are some things to consider when deciding what goals you would like them to track:

1. 
   Specific – Clearly outline the details of each goal so they know what to strive for.
2. Measurable – they must be measurable. What will the successful completion of the goal look like? If it is subjective “Need to get better client service ratings”, there is room for argument on if they have succeeded on the goal. Is a .01% better rating successful? It could be argued that it is a better rating than 0. Instead set a metric such as “Need to have at least 85% excellent client ratings.
3. Attainable – on the flip side, if goals are too hard, where more than likely most people won’t reach them, then people won’t feel motivated to reach them. Ie. “Increase your business by 100% this year.”
4. Results Oriented - if a goal is something that everyone does anyway “put details of each transaction in the system every day”, then it isn’t very motivating and becomes more of a busy work task in tracking it. These are processes in how things should be done in the business, but not a performance goal. These types of things should just be noted in an overall team process handbook, or in training. Make sure goals are geared to motivate people to stretch.
5. Time Based – This can be another subjective area. It need to be clear and concise on when each metric should be obtained. “You need to have at least 85% excellent client ratings by the last day of the month.” Everyone is better motivated when they can keep a deadline date or timeframe in sight.
   
   Once the goals are set, and a self-monitoring matrix system is put in place to track goals, set time frames on when each employee should deliver their tracked goals to you electronically. Then spend a portion of your regular communication with them reviewing the overview of the goals. Don’t fall into the trap of going through each individual item with them. Look at the matrix obtainments from a balcony view, to discuss trends or patterns with them. This will allow you to look at how their performance is doing overall, and coach them on their overall progress.
   
   What can be monitored – how can we monitor it?
   What must be managed – how can we manage it?
   It is important as a manager to identify what can be monitored by the individual team members, and then create a tracking matrix that they use to deliver their progress. This will set their responsibility and create the accountability system. Start by identifying tasks and goals that they can track themselves, to enable them to micro-monitor themselves and free you up from micro-management. Secondly, it is important to identify what items must be managed because they cannot be self-monitored by an employee performance tracking system. Because enabling micro-monitoring through your employees will free up your management time, use it to focus on more of the talents that are critical to the team, but harder to track quantitatively. Look for qualitative things that are important to the business, to focus your management and coaching efforts with each employee on, such as: team work, creative ideas and innovations, strategic thinking, positive attitude, etc. . . .

Telecommuting Policy for Remote Employees

Empowering employees to excel is the key to successful Telecommuting Policy. Conversely, being over-controlling will yield under-performance and resentment. Remote managers are not supervisors – you can’t watch over someone you can’t see. You can’t know that everyone arrived by 8, or is sitting at their desk, by walking down the hall to check on them.

The key to managing remote employees is to be a leader, coach and motivator for your team, which requires generating a high level of respect and trust with them. To ensure developing successful telecommuting policy, provide:

• Clear visions and measurable expectations.


• Team micro-monitoring – an accountability tracking system so that employees can work with minimal supervision.


• A higher level of communication than with a single location team.


• A team community – encourage the team to work together – and lean on each other – which will help in times of crisis or difficult periods.


• Tools to expedite team member competence.


• Proactive rather than reactive coaching.

Stay on track in managing remote employees by consistently reviewing the following checklist of what employees want from a distance manager:

• Coordination rather than control.


• People won’t take responsibility when there is too much control.


• Accessibility. – Carry a cell, return calls ASAP, reply to emails within 24 hours, and let employees know when to expect responses.


• Information without overload. - Communicate completely without “over-meeting.”.


• Feedback instead of advice.


• Fairness over favoritism – don’t play favorites.


• Decisiveness but not intrusive supervision.


• Honesty – encourage trust and build an environment of openness which will drive better results from your employees.


• Concern for development – People want to know that their manager genuinely cares about their development and success.


• Community building – Spend time to create a community among team members so they get to know each other and are part of more than just the current task.


• Respect – respect can be demonstrated by soliciting ideas from your team, entrusting them with the responsibilities to do their jobs correctly and not belittling them.