Download the MP3 | Run Time: 14:49

Molly, Suzi and Brandon discuss an article from Harvard Business Review on managing and coaching remote employees. During the episode, they touch on popular tools, technology and other methods for coaching remote employees.

Resources:

“Tips for Coaching Someone Remotely” by Ed Batista, Harvard Business Review

“Conference Call in Real Life” Youtube Video


Molly: Hi everyone and thanks for joining us! I am Molly Kelley joined by Brandon and Suzi. I found a fascinating article that came to my attention earlier this week through the Harvard Business Review around coaching. It was published on March 18th and the author is Ed Batista. It’s “Tips for Coaching Someone Remotely.” I’ve found this to be an increasingly hot topic with my clients as we diversify and spread out. Relocation is a popular topic right now, but so is this idea of hiring someone who is remote and then working to form a relationship with them where they’re integrating in your culture and potentially working from home or another office. It’s been a really interesting challenge for managers and supervisors who are used to interacting with someone in the same building every day to go to this remote model where we have varying levels of technology to support us, but there’s not a lot of face-to-face time.
I thought this was a really great piece, and just to walk you through some of the main points, one of his thoughts, which resonates for me, is being pretty flexible about the medium, so not insisting on GotoMeeting if maybe a phone call works better for you. A lot of this would be dependent on the support available from the individual companies and their technology. And I’ve certainly seen that, where managers are trying to connect with an employee and it’s just failed connection after failed connection. I’m sure you guys have experienced that too. Sometimes here we just resort to the old phone, which I think works perfectly for some folks. But it’s really about the idea of being flexible about how to approach your employees and realizing that there are potential technology challenges on one or both ends. The context of the article was typically just sort of the mentoring/coaching relationship, but in my mind coaching can also mean, Hey, we have a performance breakdown, and we need to have that conversation. I think that makes it extra challenging, and I’ve certainly seen managers jumping on planes to fly out to have a really difficult termination conversation.
Brandon: It shows you the value of the face-to-face, though.
Molly: Absolutely. Our counsel has always been, If you have to have a difficult conversation, you’re not having it over email. You can certainly chase in documentation later. That value of that face-to-face is really important, would you guys agree?
Suzi: I would say that one main objective of coaching, especially as it relates to performance, is increasing the motivation in the other person to change their behavior in some way. Or maybe continue doing something that they’re doing well. Especially if you’re giving some constructive type of feedback, if you don’t have that trust built, and that person receiving that communication doesn’t feel that you have their best interests at heart, they’re going to be less motivated to make any changes or will question whether or not you really care. I think it’s going to take longer to establish the trust in those relationships when you’re doing it remotely. But I think that requires even more attention, having a regular method and flow of communication with your people, so that even if you’re not face-to-face you’re talking on the phone, on Skype, whatever, to regularly build that foundation of that relationship so that when you have to have those difficult conversations, they go well.
Molly: I agree.
Brandon: Yeah, I think it’s a good point. Molly, you mentioned earlier the situation of where somebody would jump on a plane and go have a face-to-face. I think at some point people won’t do that anymore. I think we’re getting there, but it’s because not everyone has access to the same technology. I mean, we had access to technology but we don’t have access to the high quality video and audio, and I think that makes all the difference for a very critical conversation.
If I’m going to have a difficult conversation, I’m not doing it via email. I want to do it face-to-face. Skype’s available, and Google hangouts—those types of tools are available, but both ends have to have very quality video and audio service to make it very meaningful. Body language is huge in those situations.
Molly: Absolutely.
Brandon: If you don’t have high definition video and clear audio, you miss all that. And that’s why people still do face-to-face I think.
Molly: I think you’re right, and that’s definitely a couple of the points I was thinking about this. I know you guys have seen this, there’s a hilarious YouTube video about remote GotoMeetings and all of the problems.
Brandon: The conference call! We’ll put a link up to that, it’s a great video.
Molly: It’s worth looking at, because you can be in the middle of a conversation with somebody and it just drops off. And you can just imagine if you’re GotoMeeting with someone and you’re coaching them on a performance breakdown and all of a sudden you or they disappear. Pretend you’re the manager and I get as far as, Suzi, I have a really difficult conversation that I have to share with you, and unfortunately we’ve made the decision…
Suzi: Bleep!
Molly: Yep! [Laughing] Am I terminating you? Am I turning a work project around to you? Am I teaming you with someone else? Maybe taking away the company car? We have no idea. Your mind, as an employee, goes to the worst place. So, to me, I find that really interesting.
The other thing the article was talking about was the tendency to multitask, and the thought process being that if I’m going to go sit in a meeting with my employee and maybe take them out to lunch for a one-on-one meeting or what have you, or we’re sitting in a conference room, hopefully my attention is totally focused on them. But when you have somebody who’s on GotoMeeting or on a conference call where they can’t see you, the tendency on both sides might be that people might have their email up and they may be doing a few emails while they’re listening. And that multitasking, basically. The one thing that I’ve always said in my management career is that you can’t multitask people. You really shouldn’t. So that tendency to not treat it like a regular one-on-one and just treat it as one more meeting we have to work through, a webinar.

The one thing that I’ve always said in my management career is that you can’t multitask people.
-Molly Kelley

Suzi: Yeah, and it’s easy to get sucked in because you’re sitting in front of your computer and you see your emails popping up.
Brandon: And your Facebook notification comes up.
Suzi: Yeah, and if you’re not disciplined and mindful about it, it’s easy to get distracted.
Molly: Right, I agree. The other thought that I had too, and this is coming from experience here at Xenium where we have some of our own direct reports as business partners or onsite with our clients, the tendency when I check in with my teammates—I’ve got a few of those folks, fabulous individuals who are so dialed in. It’s very easy for me to spend an hour with them talking about the work at hand, the things relating to the client, the client’s issues, the handbook that we’re working on, versus my own employee’s development. And that is a huge challenge with remote employees because of the isolation that they experience, and frankly, that we experience on our end. You spend more time downloading about the work and you forget that some of that time really should be devoted, at least on a monthly basis, to How are you doing? How am I doing as your manager? Is there more I can do to support you? Let’s talk about what tools you need to be successful. Would there be additional classes we could key you in on?
Brandon: That’s why I love that section, going back to “don’t dictate the medium,” say we had a face-to-face or a video conference, one of those two. Email is a good augmentation for sending links and resources. You could say Hey, I found a good class that would be a very good support to this conversation we just had, here’s a link to it. Or, Here’s an article I just found that talked about what we just talked about. So I think that if you’re having a remote employee, email and other technology could be a good supplement to the conversation that you’re having. So not dictating the medium makes a lot of sense in this case.
Suzi: Yeah, and I think, back to what you said Molly, that I’ve had that same experience too where I’m more focused on the work that needs to get done. So let’s connect and figure out what needs to get done, versus taking the time to focus on that individual personally. And then, when they’re not there, any obstacles or barriers for them. So that’s why I think it’s important to have an agenda, to build that stuff into your agenda, otherwise it can be missed.
The other challenge I see with the human nature of remote employees is “out of sight, out of mind.”
Molly: Yes, absolutely.
Suzi: And so, if you don’t set up a regular process to have these check-in meetings.
Molly: A regular one-on-one.
Suzi: Right—reoccurring, and have an agenda and be disciplined about it. It’s one of those things that can get away from you for sure.
Molly: The companies that I’ve seen do it well, and I’ve got one who does it really well, they accept a fair amount of travel budget as a given. If they are going to hire remote employees, they are going to fly them in once a quarter for directors’ meetings or employee meetings. They’re going to fly them out for holiday parties, they’re going to fly them out for the year-end party, the company’s bonding experience company picnic in the summer. The other piece is the manager’s. I think it’s hard enough already to stop yourself with employees that you’re sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with to talk about their development. One of the things that needs to happen also is that social connection that happens when you run into one another in the lunchroom, on the way to the bathroom, or on the way into the building in the morning. That doesn’t happen with those remote folks. So that social connection isn’t there, which then makes it that much more loaded when you have to call them and say, Hey, we’ve gotten some feedback that’s… Or it feels artificial to maybe call them and say Hey! We wanted to give you kudos because we heard through the grapevine that you’re doing fabulously! So really nurturing the social connections in addition to the obvious work connections. And one of the folks who chimed in and commented on this article was talking about how her single greatest tip has been frequency, frequency, frequency. The more you have contact with those folks, if you are up on your normal daily contact with them by 2%, you’re probably still not matching the folks who are in your office, honestly—the running into each other in the hall piece. I thought that was really interesting, and just a lot to think about. And I think it’s going to be increasingly common as people either don’t want to relocate due to family ties or maybe a spouse that has a job or, frankly, as talent gets harder and harder to find in the current market. We’re experiencing that here in Portland for sure, that I may not want to give up everything have in Michigan in order to move here. It doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t be a fabulous employee working from home.
Suzi: And that’s a value proposition for employers, that flexibility.
Molly: Absolutely.
Suzi: I think you’ve got to be strategic in that sense, too. The other thing I just want to bring up before we finish this conversation is the whole idea of recognition. We’ve talked about how you’re engaging employees and that recognition’s an important thing. And again, those are people who are off doing their own thing, and they may not receive the same type of recognition as people within the office and workplace. So making sure that you’re including those folks and making others aware of the good work that they’re doing and how they’re contributing—I think that’s huge.
We’ve also talked about the huge value of purpose and culture in work. I think you, again just as with the coaching, have to try even harder to make sure that those people who are out remotely are clear about the purpose and how their specific role is contributing to the business. So hearing that, and feeling part of something bigger, because it’s so easy to get isolated.
Brandon: More of a reason for the regular touches.
Molly: The companies that I’ve seen do it well, do it really well with managing remote employees, are not just focused on the manager/supervisor employee relationship, although that’s crucial. If that’s not working, it doesn’t matter what else you do, it’s not going to work. But the introduction or the inclusion with the rest of the company is really important, too, so if there is a monthly team meeting, finding a way to network them in. Ironically, I find this as a trainer that when I ask my client to train where there’s an employee conferencing in via phone, remotely, it’s gone from my mind within five minutes of starting that training. So I actually bring along now, I’ve got a little stand-up thing that I put a little cutout person from a magazine on and put it in the middle of the table. I need a visual cue to check in and ask, otherwise I’m just off and rolling and looking at the social cues in the room, but I forget all about the person on that phone. So I’ve actually had companies who have put a picture, it’s just a conference phone, a picture of the remote employee on one of the chairs and it just reminds everyone in the room Hey, that’s right, Bob’s on the line, we should check in.
Suzi: Yeah, that’s a great idea, because I’m the same way where I will just have totally forgot that someone’s on the other end of the line, and they’re clearly not being engaged.
Molly: There are a whole variety of things you can do. I’d encourage you to read the article if you haven’t, it’s again by Ed Batista on Harvard Business Review entitled “How to Coach Someone Remotely,” and it’s fabulous. Thank you guys for a great discussion!