In a post on the Harvard Business Review’s blog, Scott Edinger, founder of Edinger Consulting Group, writes that an investment firm he worked with found that employees who worked remotely were more likely to rate their leader higher than nearby co-workers.
Edinger notes a variety of reasons why this may be the case:
- Proximity breeds complacency,
- Absence makes people try harder to connect,
- Leaders of virtual teams make better use of tools, and
- Leaders of far-flung teams maximize the time their teams spend together.
I think that what Edinger really gets at is that leaders with distanced team members work in a way which simply utilizes their own time and the time of their employees more efficiently.
For an employee, it really doesn’t make sense why their boss is emailing them a massive slice of text if he or she could take the time to walk a few feet and expand on the information in-person.
Sure, people are busy and it would be silly to get up from one’s desk all the time, but it must signify something to the employee if it were constant behavior. And if the employee works remote and is always receiving extremely relevant emails and phone calls? Their perception of their boss’s skill must head in a favorable direction.
Business leaders and managers should ask themselves, “would it make better sense if I took the time to sit down with them and go over X or Y? is it a good use of both of our time?”
What do you think are the up- and downsides to working or leading from a distance?