Managing Performance - Keeping a Remote Team on the Right Track

How do you keep a remote team on the right track and in-line with the company and team needs? How do you ensure they understand how to perform and know how they are performing?


You can keep your team focused toward reaching the same goals and achieving them, by following a 5 tiered hierarchal structure that moves from vision setting to performance ranking.

1. Vision – Would you rather be inspired to reach toward a clear purpose, or would you rather have someone pushing you from behind telling you to move faster and work harder? Your vision is that bright purpose that you want to be the inspiration for your employees to strive toward. You might use your company vision as a catalyst for your own team, but rather than trying to make it a fancy marketing type statement, just make it a sentence or two on what you are really trying to accomplish as a team.

When asked, most employees could not recite their company’s vision or mission statement. Most companies spend countless dollars and hours coming up with a company vision or mission statement, but do a poor job ensuring that it is a driving force in the company or that the employees even know it. Once you create your team vision it needs to be reinforced whenever possible. Emphasize it in conversations and meetings with employees, to ensure they know the team’s purpose and the meaning is not lost.

2. Expectations – The second step is to let your employees know how they can help reach that vision. A vision can be esoteric and it is easy for employees to self-interpret how to reach it. If you tell your team to “think strategically,” that can mean very different things to different people. Expectations are the ways your team can reach that vision such as: “identify company competitive advantages and create plans to market them.” Make sure you clearly define what the team is expected to do to reach that vision.

3. Goal Setting – Once expectations are set, create specific goals for each employee that can be tracked on a weekly basis, that helps reach these expectations. If the expectation is to “increase company sales,” how does that breakdown for the employee? Do they need to make X number of sales calls a week? Do they need to find a new way to position a product each week? These goals should be SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, results oriented, timeframe) that they report their progress toward, each week to you. Numeric goals such as sales KPIs are always easy to set, but setting goals for more intangibles such as “strategic thinking” or “team player,” can be tougher. To do this, think about what the behavior of a strategic thinker or team player would look like, and find a way to set goals around this. If a team player is someone who helps others on the team, then set a goal for you employee to list 2 things each week that they helped teammates on. This will get them in the pattern of this behavior.

4. Performance Reviews – almost all managers dread performance reviews. That’s because they are done incorrectly. The best performance reviews are: 1) done quarterly, 2) initiated by the employee, 3) don’t include numeric rating systems, 4) are really a goal setting conversation between the manager and employee. Too often performance reviews are an annual event where the manager tries to think up clever phrases to support the number they gave the employee under each category: communication, motivation, etc. . . Instead have the employee list what they would like to focus on and accomplish over the next 90 days, as well as a review of how they did with their past quarter goals. Then discuss these with the employee giving them feedback and guidance in the discussion. By making these a working planning session, you will get better content and a more collaborative relationship, and the employee will have a much stronger understanding of where they should be going, and how they are doing. No one has ever gotten a good understanding of how they could “communicate better” (or how they were successfully communicating) because they got a “3” on a review.

5. Performance Grid Plotting – So if we don’t rate employees with a numeric system on their reviews, how do we understand how they rate in the overall scheme of the company? The most accurate way to understand how employees are doing as part of the whole, is to plot them on a grid (that measures both performance and potential), on where you think they would fall. From top performance/potential, to lowest. Then get together with other managers (ideally 1-2 times per year), and discuss why you would rate each person as such. This gets all managers on the same page as to what they think constitutes a top player vs a bottom achiever, and often times, managers may shift where they think their employees fall, during these meetings. This rating grid should never be shown to employees. Instead it is a management tool to help each manager know where they need to focus, with each of their employees.

Using this progressive tiered plan will keep the messaging and goals clear, as well has ensure a consistent way to track and measure performance.

Jenny Douras © All rights reserved

Technology Tools for HR and the Remote Workforce

Quickly disappearing are the days in companies where all employees are based in one office. Remote and virtual workforces are growing with the need to improve speed to service, lower travel cost, and improved customer service. Research has suggested that now approximately 75% of US companies have employees that work virtual or remote. This can prove to be a new challenge for the HR role in administering to this dispersed group of employees. There are many technology tools now available to help in the HR function with remote workforces.

Document Management and Workflow systems
There are many document management systems that can make storing, finding, accessing and securing documents better than ever. With the amount of documents produced in corporations, it can be a productivity drain to find and utilize needed info. Document Management systems use a concept called metadata that tags documents with properties for easy organization and retrieval. These systems also allow for more granular security, providing better privacy for HR employee files.

Workflow automation tools are also increasingly popular to help companies streamline processes through technology. Systems can take an employee through the on-boarding process from job application submittal to training and review, or other processes such as expenses, vacation requests or 360 reviews.

One technology tool that incorporates both document management and workflow options is SharePoint. This tool can provide document management benefits such as auto versioning, searching, and metadata views and organization. It can automate processes such as document approval, or alert users of changes to calendars, employee document folders or company announcements. It also has tools that can allow you to convert your employee handbook into an electronic wiki, or provide employees with online tools to access benefit vendors or forms.

Communicating with Remote Workforces through Webinars
There are now many different webinar services to choose from that allow you to communicate with a remote workforce to give presentations, have visual meetings, and share computer applications. Some of the most popular services are: Citrix Go to Webinar, Adobe Connect, Microsoft Live Meeting, WebEx, and even the local Denver based company: Ready Talk. The best system for you depends on your needs. They all offer a different array of features including: Ability to view participants with web cams, surveys & polling, remote desktop take over, either uploading PPT presentations to the web service or displaying them on the fly, downloadable files, multiple meeting rooms, etc.

E-learning Tools
There are many technology tools that can help you create e-learning or blended learning scenarios to help with the onboarding and training of remote workforces. Often the amount of features available in the different tools is synonymous with the needed learning curve of the product. Some tools allow for easy conversion of PowerPoint presentations into videos, such as Lectora’s Snap or Adobe Presenter. Others allow you to capture animation on your computer as you click through items, and allow for narration, branching logic and other more advanced development features. Some products along these lines are: Adobe Captivate, TechSmith’s Camtasia, or Articulate. The more advanced products require some programming skills but will allow you to build interactive elements and custom animation using programs such as Adobe Flash.

All of these different technologies can help the HR function in working with a remote workforce. Finding the right product for your company depends on the specific features you need. However, just understanding some of the options out there, and how they can benefit the HR function, will provide the first steps toward finding the right tools.


Jenny Douras © All rights reserved

Micro-Managing your Remote Team – how to avoid this common pitfall

One of the biggest fears when managing a team of remote employees is that they won’t be working and getting the job done when you can’t see them. How do you know that they are spending their time wisely and doing things the correct way? Unfortunately, this fear can lead to micro-managing of employees, which can lead to the direct results you are trying to avoid.

When employees feel they are micro-managed, they feel overly controlled and become demotivated. This leads to a team that will not think outside of the box, or push themselves harder than they have to. They assume “why bother” - since everything is so tightly defined for them – there is little room for creativity and they will need to ask you for approval during each step, since they are not confident in proceeding without explicit direction.

So how can you ensure that you have a motivated and productive team that is getting the job done correctly, without micro-managing them? The key is in giving them the responsibility to manage themselves and providing the vision and guidance when needed, rather than explicit instructions that are task focused.

Think of your team’s goals as a bowling alley. You want to clearly outline what the goal is - knock down all 10 pins in 2 or less shots, by rolling the ball. And you also want to define the boundaries for them to work within - like setting up the bumper guards in the lane. However, after that, you want to leave it to them to decide how to get the ball down the lane to accomplish the goal. Do they roll it fast or slow, do they use curve balls or straight shots, do they bank it off of the bumper guards several times – these decisions should be left in their hands.

By allowing your team to make all of these other decisions, they will learn what parameters they need to work within, and their goals to focus on. In turn, they will be able to make their own decisions within these limits and will only need to seek your advice when they have something that is outside of these parameters. This ensures that your team will not be paralyzed without your every authorization or decree, and will be motivated to seek new creative ways to enhance the team’s success.

The last step is to have them hold themselves accountable to their goals and have them report their success, or lack of, to you each week. By clearly setting goals and providing a weekly status report to you, they will hold themselves accountable for their goal attainment. No one wants to come to their manager and tell them they did a bad job. Everyone wants to be able to take pride in their achievements. By having them keep their goal attainment status on the top of every weekly conversation with you, they will be self-motivated to reach those goals.

Jenny Douras © All rights reserved