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Building Trust in Remote Management: Strategies to Empower and Support Remote Teams

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Building trust in remote management is essential to empower and support your remote team. You must trust your employees to complete quality tasks by the deadlines without seeing the work completed. Similarly, your team members must trust that everyone is doing their part to work toward shared goals.

Facilitating trust among your remote team helps your employees feel that everyone receives the necessary communication and that the work is evenly distributed. This trust encourages your team to remain engaged and productive. Trust also increases job satisfaction, team morale, and attraction and retention rates.

Choose among these strategies to build trust and empower and support your remote team.

Set Expectations

Clarify what you expect of each employee and your team. Emphasize work hours, communication, skills, learning and development, and other relevant issues.

For instance, you might expect your employees to work 8 hours daily and attend a weekly team meeting. Clarifying the level of contact gives employees control over their schedules for work-life balance.

Create Goals

Work with your team to develop project goals. Gaining employee buy-in increases the likelihood of reaching these goals.

Ensure the project goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Include the following information:

  • What your team should accomplish
  • How each goal relates to the project
  • Why each goal matters
  • Which resources are needed to attain each goal
  • When each step of a goal should be accomplished
  • How progress and success will be measured
  • Which employee is responsible for each role, responsibility, and task

Provide Collaboration Tools

Facilitate collaboration by giving your team the essential tools to complete their work. These tools support sharing and storing information in a central location for easy access.

Examples of collaboration tools include:

  • Video conferencing software such as Zoom or Skype
  • Chat apps such as Slack or Discord
  • Cloud services and file sharing, such as Google Drive
  • Project management applications such as Hive or Monday.com

Schedule Team Meetings

Hold regular team meetings to help your remote team stay aligned on projects and goals:

  • Focus on what was completed since the last meeting, what is being worked on, and what still needs to be completed.
  • Provide time to address questions, problems, and concerns and provide support.
  • Celebrate your employees’ accomplishments.
  • Provide motivation to continue moving forward.

Prioritize Transparency

Be open and honest with your employees. Being transparent sets a positive foundation for managing your remote team.

For instance, show that you value sharing ideas, information, and perspectives and encourage your team to do the same. Also, hold your employees accountable for their work.

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Active Listening: Communication and Empathy as an IT Leader

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Active listening is an essential skill for an IT leader. Your ability to communicate effectively and show empathy impacts your team’s success.

Focusing on what your employees say and understanding their points of view help you make decisions and resolve issues. These actions build trust, respect, and collaboration among your team.

Practicing communication and empathy with your team increases employee engagement, performance, and productivity. These actions elevate job satisfaction, employee morale, and attraction and retention rates. The results strengthen your bottom line.

Engage in the following behaviors to practice active listening and empathy as an IT leader.

Recognize Verbal and Nonverbal Cues

Pay attention to your employee’s tone, facial expressions, and other body language. These cues provide insight into how your employee may be feeling.

Keep in mind these emotions might not be verbally expressed. Or, your employee could say they are fine when they are not.

Focus on what your employee is and is not saying. Acknowledge what they are saying and how they are feeling. Ask follow-up questions to uncover more information.

For instance, “Thank you for sharing you feel about this situation. Would you share a bit more about your thoughts? I would like to hear more about your perspective.”

Process Verbal and Nonverbal Information

Work to understand the messages you receive from your employee. Also, keep track of the points made during the conversation.

For instance, “Here are some key points and areas of agreement and disagreement from our conversation. Here are more pieces of information to gather and suggested next steps. What do you think?”

Share Appropriate Responses

Use the information you gathered to reply to your employee. Include verbal acknowledgments, clarifying questions, or paraphrasing to show you were actively listening.

For instance, maintain appropriate eye contact, facial expressions, and body language while responding. Also, nod your head and use acknowledging phrases such as “That is a great point.”

Follow Up on the Conversation

Use your behaviors to show you were listening during the discussion. For instance, you might implement constructive feedback your employee provided. Or, you could talk about why you made another decision.

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Building a Resilient IT Workforce: Adapting to Rapid Technological Advancements

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Building a resilient IT workforce helps your company adapt to rapid technological advancements. Because ongoing change impacts your business, you must be able to keep up to maintain your competitive edge.

The ability to maintain an agile, resilient workforce supports effective business operations. Your workforce can prioritize digital solutions that fill your company’s current needs while creating a platform for innovation. Then, your workforce can evolve to fit your changing business needs.

Implement these tips to build a resilient IT workforce to adapt to rapid technological advancements.

Focus on Digital Transformation

Determine which technologies and cybersecurity strategies are required to support a remote or hybrid workforce. Also, decide how you can use technology to promote a human-centered workplace. These approaches impact how your IT team helps support management practices that align with business strategies.

Embrace Cloud Technology

Take advantage of cloud technology to increase the agility of your business platform. This agility lets you add the capabilities and functionality needed to adapt to new technologies. This adaptation lets your company add capabilities to its tech stack to increase its competitive edge.

For instance, you might increase the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to improve efficiencies. You also could increase cybersecurity to improve your competitive edge.

Automate Decision-Making

Use AI and ML to create thresholds that indicate when an automated process requires human input. Increasing automation elevates efficiency in business operations for stronger customer management and product or service innovation.

For instance, you can use customer relationship tools to predict and flag your customers who are likely to stop making purchases. Then, you can take steps to encourage customer loyalty through discounts or related actions.

Drive Innovation

Use cloud capabilities to scale and support research and development. For instance, use AI and data analytics to reinforce discovery, modeling, and prediction for faster prototyping and testing with lower risk. Leveraging shared knowledge and data insights drives workforce and company performance.

Accelerate Your Ecosystem

Move to standardized architectures and cloud solutions that support the cocreation of performance and innovation. Examples include common services, application programming interfaces (APIs), reusability, and extensibility.

For instance, you might decompose your technology stacks for the continuous integration and delivery of new capabilities. Or, you could make it easier to share data and knowledge for greater insight and innovation along your value chain.

Establish Agile Targets

Clarify how your workforce should evolve to support new technologies and operating models. Include the diversity, skills, and experiences you want to attain. Then, provide relevant resources and incentives to reach business goals.

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Yes, Mondays Are That Bad: 3 Ways to Make Them Better

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Monday has a reputation for being the worst day of the week. Many employees view Monday as disrupting the happiness they experience by not working over the weekend.

Zety research shows that 41% of respondents dislike Monday. They report having the heaviest workloads and lots of meetings, experiencing a high-pressure work environment, and being expected to work overtime.

Further, 80% of respondents say that Monday is the most stressful day of the week. As a result, they feel the least motivated and productive at the start of the work week.

Fortunately, you can help change your employees’ beliefs about Monday to set them up for a positive, productive week. The following suggestions can help.

Implement these three ideas to make Mondays better for your employees.

1. Emphasize the Importance of Each Employee’s Role

Remind your employees of how their work impacts the organization. Provide examples of how their contributions and results help reach company goals and contribute to the bigger picture.

Encourage your employees to tie their work to their identity. For instance, an employee who has a strong work ethic can demonstrate it by being productive throughout each day. Or, an employee who excels at motivating others can show it by positively impacting their colleagues and coworkers.

Support your employees in pursuing personal interests. Experiencing happiness in their personal lives impacts how they feel about their professional lives. This is especially important when your employees return to work on Monday.

2. Monitor Employees’ Workloads

Talk with each employee about their workload. Include the hours they invest and the tasks they must accomplish to attain their results.

Encourage each employee to schedule their work throughout the week to even out the demands of each day. Also, support being as productive as possible each day, especially on Fridays, to complete as much work as possible.

Find out whether an employee is unable to accomplish all the work that is assigned to them. Develop ways to adjust the timeline or delegate when needed. Also, establish ways to maintain healthy boundaries going forward. This encourages your employees to go to work on Monday.

3. Support Employee Relationships

Emphasize the importance of your employees’ building relationships with colleagues and coworkers. Encourage them to spend time together outside of work. Forming work relationships provides motivation and support for your employees to start each week with a positive mindset.

Support your employees in recognizing their colleagues’ and coworkers’ accomplishments. This encourages feelings of value, respect, and cohesion. It also makes it easier to come back to work on Monday.

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Gamification’s Importance in the Modern Workplace

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Some of the most popular apps use gamification as motivation to hold users accountable and reach their goals. This may involve receiving badges for reaching milestones that promote progress.

Social sharing often is combined with badging to provide additional motivation to attain goals. Sharing achievements with others creates a sense of status that supports additional movement toward success.

Gamification can be used to motivate employees in the modern workforce. Combining badging and social sharing elevates employee engagement, performance, and productivity. It also increases job satisfaction, employee morale, and retention rates.

Discover gamification’s importance in the modern workplace and how it can benefit your organization.

Include Gamification in Your Learning Management System

Choose a learning management system (LMS) that combines courses with gamification options and integrates with your other employee experience (EX) technology. Ensure the LMS rewards employees for completing a set number of courses with a time-sensitive component. This may involve a badge or a place on the leaderboard.

Rewarding time-sensitive elements encourages employees to complete courses as soon as possible. It also encourages ongoing learning at work.

Implement Internal Recognition for Learning

Encourage managers to assign training courses with gamification elements connected to them. This encourages employees to complete the courses and further develop their careers.

Internally recognize employees who complete their courses. This may include using your intranet to share employee course accomplishments, scores, and rewards.

Seeing their peers’ accomplishments motivates employees to continue learning. Ongoing learning is important for career development in the modern workplace.

Provide External Recognition for Learning

Implement methods to share badges, course completions, and certificates to employees’ social media accounts as part of the gamification process. It is especially important for employees to share their accomplishments on their LinkedIn profiles for other professionals to see.

Offer rewards for employees who share their recognition on social media. This shows you actively invest in your employees. It also helps attract and retain employees in the modern workforce.

Pair Gamification with Real-World Rewards

Let employees use their badges and leaderboard positions to earn points toward attractive rewards. This may include gift cards, the option to work remotely for a day, or additional vacation days. Providing these rewards encourages employees to complete courses and continue learning. Ongoing employee learning benefits your company’s culture and bottom line.

Integrate Gamification with Performance Reviews

Use technology to include course completion, badges, and other rewards in employees’ performance reviews. This increases course completion and elevates the employee experience. It also promotes learning, career advancement, and loyalty to the organization.

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Do You Offer Clear Career Development Methods?

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Offering clear development methods is essential for business success. This emphasizes opportunities to add more value and advance within the company.

As a result, managers must look beyond the skills their employees need to fulfill their current job duties to promote career development. Managers also should focus on the skills their employees developed through previous roles, current interests, and hobbies that support advancement within the organization.

Follow these guidelines to offer clear career development methods within your company.

Prioritize Agility

Use technology to break jobs into projects. Then, let your employees choose which projects to work on. This process distributes employees’ skills and contributions according to need. It also supports career development.

Dividing jobs into projects helps you better understand your talent. Knowing their strengths and capabilities helps your employees adapt to changing business conditions and priorities. This includes evolving customer demands and competitors entering the marketplace.

Developing your employees’ skills reduces the need for hiring. Your employees can take on project-based work as part of the learning process. This provides exposure to new situations, colleagues, and coworkers who can help with upskilling while completing work.

Using an internal talent marketplace promotes equity and inclusion. Managers have a larger pool of workers to draw from to gain the skills and competencies required for a project. This minimizes favoritism in deciding which employees get which roles. It also increases engagement, performance, and productivity.

Inventory Employees’ Skills

Maintain a list of each employee’s current and desired skills. This helps managers understand the talent pool they have to draw from to complete projects. It also lets employees take on new projects to develop their skill sets.

Managers can divide the work into projects, then determine which skills are required to complete the projects. Next, managers can match employees who have or want to develop relevant skills to the appropriate project roles. This promotes career development.

You can use technologies that evaluate resumes, LinkedIn profiles, or your human capital management system to create your skills inventory. Then, you can ask employees to add or modify the skills in their profiles. You can use the information to match the right employee with the right skill level to the right project role.

Develop Adjacent Skills

Implement technology to help employees develop skills related to the ones they have. For instance, a programmer who is fluent in one language could learn to code in another language. This process makes it easier for employees to connect with colleagues and coworkers who can help them upskill. It also provides employees with clear career development methods.

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Set Employees Up for Success with a Great Onboarding Process

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Bringing a new hire on board takes time and planning. Your new hire’s experience acclimating to your company impacts their attitude about the work, their team, and your employer brand.

A great onboarding process prepares your new hire to become productive and successful in your organization. It helps develop an understanding of your company culture and how to fulfill the job duties and responsibilities.

Your onboarding process must help your new hire feel welcome and included. This promotes engagement, team cohesion, and retention.

Follow these guidelines to create a great onboarding process that sets up your employees for success.

Clarify Company Policies and Procedures

Give your new hire a copy of the employee handbook. Go over the relevant information.

Talk about how your new hire should go about their daily activities. Include where to find the necessary resources to maximize productivity.

Provide an Onboarding Buddy

Partner your new hire with a teammate to provide guidance. The teammate can show your new hire around, answer questions, and help resolve issues.

Matching your new hire with a seasoned partner helps build security and team cohesion. It also sets up your new hire for success in your organization.

Frequently Communicate

Regular communication with your new hire helps orient them to the job and work priorities. It also provides a clear picture of the reporting structure and an understanding of the business processes and procedures.

Provide clear expectations and milestones throughout the onboarding process. Include how progress and success will be measured.

Letting your new hire know what to expect helps them see their movement toward goals. It also helps them feel secure and succeed in their position.

Emphasize Inclusion

Share with your new hire your company resources for inclusion. This may include introducing your new hire to peers with common traits, hobbies, or interests. It also might involve educating your new hire on your employee resource groups (ERGs).

Prioritizing inclusion helps your new hire navigate the work environment and feel like a valued member of your company. This promotes appreciation, respect, and loyalty within your organization.

Request Feedback

Regularly ask your new hire for constructive feedback on your onboarding process. Find out what they like best, what can improve, and specific suggestions to do better.

Improving your onboarding process enhances the employee experience. This increases employee engagement, performance, and productivity throughout their tenure with your organization.

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5 Tips to Improve and Encourage Employee Engagement

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Employee engagement measures how strongly employees feel connected to their work and employer. This includes employees’ motivation to perform their best, commitment to the organization, and desire to refer others to the company.

Sustainable employee engagement is based on intrinsic motivation. This includes mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

Your employees’ engagement levels impact their performance, productivity, and morale. It also affects retention and your bottom line.

Engaged employees are passionate, energetic, and committed to your organization. They go above and beyond to support company strategy and elevate your employer brand.

As a result, you must do what you can to improve and encourage employee engagement. Here are some suggestions.

Choose among these five tips to improve and encourage employee engagement.

1. Live Your Company’s Culture

Convey your company’s mission, vision, and values in your behaviors. This encourages your employees to follow suit. It also shows they are part of something bigger than they are.

Using your actions to demonstrate your culture enhances the work environment. It also adds meaning to your employees’ jobs.

Living your company’s culture shows your values align with business functions. This encourages buy-in from your employees.

Employees who understand the company’s culture feel inspired. This encourages employee engagement.

2. Prioritize Onboarding

Your onboarding process impacts how your employees view your company and their jobs. It helps your new hires align with company culture and understand how their role impacts your organization.

Use your onboarding process to show what makes your company unique and why your new hire’s role is essential for team and business success. Include information about the role and expectations. This promotes employee engagement.

3. Emphasize Career Development

Work with each employee to customize a career development plan. Include the knowledge, skills, and experience required to advance within your organization.

Provide the necessary training and development to move to more senior roles. This may include stretch assignments, cross-training, or mentoring. It also could involve seminars, conferences, or classes. Having a clear path for advancement supports employee engagement and retention.

4. Provide Employee Recognition

Regularly point out each employee’s accomplishments. Include the actions your employee took, their results, and how they impacted the organization. Provide a bonus, pay increase, or promotion when appropriate.

Recognizing your employees shows you appreciate their contributions and results. This encourages employee motivation, performance, and engagement.

5. Encourage Feedback

Remind your employees to give and receive constructive feedback. This helps your employees feel informed, heard, and respected.

Your employees can uncover inefficiencies in performing their work and suggest improvements. This enhances work processes and creates a more productive environment.

Consistently finding ways to improve employee and company performance helps reach career and business goals. This encourages employee engagement.

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Ask Your Employees These 6 Trust-Building Questions

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Creating a cohesive team requires trust. You must trust your employees to complete quality work on time. Also, your employees must trust they will be compensated for their contributions.

Building trust can be especially difficult when you have new, introverted, or remote employees. However, trust is essential to help your employee remain engaged, productive, and loyal to the organization.

Asking questions and actively listening to the answers is an effective way to build trust with your employees. Questions lead to conversations. Conversations build engagement and trust.

Ask your employees these six trust-building questions to increase cohesion among your team.

1. What is a great movie you recently watched?

Talking about movies helps your employees feel like they are talking with a casual friend. This promotes a casual work environment. You may learn about a movie that interests you. Watching it can help you connect with your employees on a personal level.

2. Can you recommend a book you recently read?

The types of books your employees read provide insight into their minds. You can learn about your employees’ thoughts, philosophies, and sense of morality. You also can uncover whether you like the same types of books or authors. This promotes mental connections.

3. What is the strangest meal you ever ate?

Your employees may have eaten tarantulas, snails, or other exotic food. Talking about these experiences promotes a relaxed atmosphere. It also helps you get to know your employees on a deeper level.

4. Do you prefer beer, wine, or neither?

Most employees enjoy humorous discussions about alcohol. You can use this topic to determine whether any of your employees prefer nonalcoholic beverages. This helps you provide appropriate beverages when you host an event.

5. If you could develop a new skill in 10 minutes, which skill would you choose?

Understanding the skills your employees are interested in is important. These skills indicate potential goals and career paths for your employees. You can implement training programs to help your employees reach their goals and advance their careers.

6. Which emerging technological innovation will significantly impact the industry in the next five years?

Find out what your employees think about the future of your industry. Also, determine where they see themselves working long-term. Talk about whether there are opportunities within your organization that may interest your employees. Discussing internal career advancement elevates employee retention.

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Surprise Your Team to Promote Employee Connection

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An April 2022 Gallup survey showed that only 32% of employees were engaged at work. Disengaged employees are not very productive. They lower employee morale and retention.

To improve engagement levels, building employee connections should be among your top priorities. One way to accomplish this objective is by doing something unexpected for your team.

When humans experience change, they process what happened, then return to their typical level of happiness. This is beneficial when, for example, an employee is passed over for a promotion. They will return to their baseline happiness within a few days.

However, this adaptation to change is unfavorable when employees get used to the perks they regularly experience at work. For instance, if you provide bagels for your team every Tuesday, they will expect to eat bagels every Tuesday. At some point, your employees no longer will see eating bagels on Tuesday as an advantage of working for your company.

As a result, you want to regularly provide employees with novel experiences. This consistently disrupts their typical levels of happiness. The more times you add to your team’s happiness, the more fun they have. This increases engagement, productivity, morale, and retention.

Implement these tips to surprise your team and build employee connections.

Promote Creativity

Incorporate the “yes, and!” structure into your next brainstorming session. When one employee shares an idea, the next employee says “Yes, and…” to build on it. This activity encourages your team to develop what they have into something bigger.

Encourage Play

Put board games or question cards in the break room. Suggest coworkers play the games or ask each other questions during their downtime.

If your team is remote, use a video conferencing app like Mibo to create immersive online experiences for your employees. They can interact with each other in the virtual environment. These actions promote happiness and well-being at work.

Facilitate Fun

Create a Slack channel dedicated to fun. The theme may be memes, office pets, or anything else your employees may find amusing. Your team can laugh at the contents to reduce stress throughout the day.

Promote Laughter

Add humor to your presentations by including a meme. Laughter helps make your content more memorable. It also promotes participation, learning, and recollection of facts.

Encourage Collaboration

Plan team-building activities to build employee connections. Also, encourage social coffee breaks and walks with coworkers during employee downtime. Participating in fun activities and socializing with coworkers increase work engagement.

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