Motivating Remote Teams

Welcome to Episode 4 of The Change Agent, the podcast that equips leaders, managers, and professionals with the strategies they need to drive success in today’s dynamic workplaces. Hosted by Eric, we tackle real-world challenges in leadership, team management, remote collaboration, project execution, and empathetic leadership. Each episode delivers practical insights, actionable strategies, and engaging stories to help you build strong teams, foster trust, and inject value into your organization—fast. Whether you’re navigating a tough project, leading a remote workforce, or looking to refine your leadership style, The Change Agent is your go-to resource for making a lasting impact. Subscribe now and become the leader your team needs.

🎧 A conversation about the challenges and solutions to motivating remote teams. 

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Transcript

Speaker: 0:00

Welcome to the Change Agent, sponsored by Beyond the Glare and Kalena Vision Professional Services, where we dive into real-world challenges and strategies of leadership, team management, leading remote teams, project management, being an empathetic leader, technology, and more. So whether you're leading a new team or trying to energize an existing one, we've got insights, tips, and stories to help you succeed as a leader and inject value fast into your organization. So let's get to it. So listen up, follow me through the whole podcast, and let's get started. Now, is it arguable now to say that remote work is here to stay? I mean, I get the feeling not, as more and more offices are clearly clearly moving away from that, and in my opinion, is to their detriment. However, regardless, remote work has plenty of benefits. And it also comes with challenges. Two of the biggest being trust and the feeling of connection. So how do you create a strong, cohesive team where people are scattered across different locations, time zones, or even cultures? And that's something we're going to dive in today. So let's go ahead and get started. So let's start with the obvious. Why does trust matter so much in remote teams? Well, in a traditional office, trust is built through daily interactions, talking around the water cooler, spontaneous brainstorming sessions, just saying hello and seeing each other in the hallways. But in a remote setting, those types of organic moments don't happen easily. Research has actually shown that teams with high levels of trust are more productive, engaged, and resilient. And when trust is missing, communication breaks down, people hesitate to collaborate, motivation drops, and the list goes on. So how do we fix that? By being intentional about how we build trust. We've talked a lot about this in past episodes, so we won't go into too much detail about that in this moment. But let's check out uh you could check out other podcasts to learn more. And while we're on the topic, though, of trust, we should discuss it a little bit. So the first key to building trust is transparency. People need to know what's happening, what's expected, and how their work fits into the bigger picture. And uncertainty breeds distrust. We talked about that some as well. Remote teams have a really dangerous foe. Now you might laugh a little bit when I say this, but it is one of the biggest foes is their own minds. They say an idle mind is a devil's workshop. And this is definitely true. When we're disengaged from remote team members, leaving them to fend for themselves, their minds tend to wonder about things like, am I part of the team? Was I included on that? Why haven't I heard from anyone on this or that? Is anyone wondering how I'm even doing? Now, of course, there are people that are just fine working on tasks and need no engagement. But we as leaders do not run at the slowest pace. We don't sacrifice good leadership principles simply because someone else on our team would be okay with us being lazy leaders. No, no, absolutely not. That's not what we do. We are leaders all the time because that's how we're built. So, how can we increase transparency with remote teams? Well, there's a few tools we can use. We can set X uh clear expectations by defining roles, deadlines, and deliverables up front. If you have kickoff meetings, this is a great time to do that. If you have new people on boarding onto your project, it's a great time to do that. You can use tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other applications to keep not only the happenings of the daily work visible, but also workflows, organizational charts, policies, work uh other documentation. I've forgotten my brain's turned off in a second. Uh, you can have regular check-ins, not to micromanage people, but to stay aligned and offer support with them. This might simply just be a message to a team channel in Slack that invites them to have a great day. And personally checking in one-on-one with those people that are remote. Be honest about challenges and setbacks that you see and that are existing at the moment on the team. People appreciate that honesty over vague reassurances. We don't want to hear everything's fine, don't worry, but they see smoke behind you. That's not what you're looking for. And ensure to include and enlist solicit feedback from everyone, especially those people that are remote. A quick story. I I regularly use Slack to engage my teams and people one-on-one via huddles. I use cameras and I make it, it really makes a difference uh on the team and on myself, because actually I'm one of the disconnected people, the dislocated people rather. So it really helps me personally to engage and feel engaged. And so I'm obviously taking a personal vested interest in engaging the team because it helps me personally. But it's all not it's not all about the process improvement. What can we improve, what can we change? It's also about relationships. So when people feel connected to their colleagues, they're more likely to communicate openly and collaborate effectively. Communication is key in developing strong connections within teams. Some ideas to do this might be things like starting meetings with a quick icebreaker or personal check-in or simple social time. You can organize virtual coffee chats or coffee breaks, team lunches, brown bags, and stuff that are online that people can dial into from a remote location. This is a great spot when you have both people in the office and remote. You can play online team building games like trivia or escape room challenges. Um, but one of the more I would say that's one of the strongest ways to do this is to recognize achievements publicly. Shout-outs in front of people go a long way. Obviously, we'll talk about more about discipline and in other podcasts, but you don't ever want to do that publicly. That's those are private moments with witnesses. Invite teams during one of those sessions to showcase something that matters to them. You can have people come up on the on their cameras or wherever and showcase their cat, their guitar skills, or completing that latest 10,000-piece Lego set. So whatever it is you can dream up, you can learn a lot about people by implementing those intimate moments like that. Now it may feel a little bit forced at first, but these are small things that can really recreate a casual human interaction that you would normally find only in an office setting. And that kind of really builds those teams together, connecting those remote teams to the on-site teams and making sure you've got a strong foundation for team cohesion. But again, as we've mentioned in other podcasts, you can't motivate people by demanding and expecting people to do exactly what you say. You lead by doing, you lead by example. So let's talk about that for a second. If you're a leader or a manager, your team will take those cues from you. We talked about that before. Having the emotional intelligence internally as a leader to understand how you react will impact other people and influence the way they react to a specific situation or comment. If you want to build trust, you need to model transparency, accountability, empathy. Make sure you follow some few ideas to be successful at that. These are, again, stating the obvious, but they often get overlooked. One, respond to messages in a timely manner, a timely manner manner. This could even be just an acknowledgement of an email to say, hey, I got your email. I'll get right back to you as soon as I can. Because silence is deafening to team trust. It's the worst thing. Did they ever get my email? How come they don't respond? Be clear about your own availability and boundaries. Manage others' expectations on when you're going to be available and where you're going to be available. And when you say you are, you make sure you are available when you say you will be. It's in my experience, I've had situations where I've said I'm going to be available, and then another manager impromptu collects me to talk about something. I can't escape it. My team member comes to look for me and I'm not available. And then I more often than not never get to engage that individual about that topic anymore. They just say, Oh, it's fine, I've taken care of it, or it's OBE or whatever. Show empathy. Remote work can be an isolating thing. So checking in on people and asking how they're feeling really does matter. We talked a little bit about this before, but check in and say hi. It really only takes a minute. Doesn't take much effort to do so. Now give people autonomy. Trusting them to do their work without unnecessary oversight really goes a long way. But don't just sit back and say they got it. You know, they need, they don't need me. We're leaders. We're not lazy leaders. So we talked a little bit about trust. I want to talk a little bit more about that. It's not a set it and forget it thing. It requires a whole lot of effort. You need to be working on that constantly and figuring out how you can build trust in your team. But here's a good couple of ways you can keep a pulse on indicators on how your trust is. Use anonymous surveys to gauge team sentiment. You can use things like simple polls and Slack, create something on SurveyMonkey or holding in-person meetings and implementing agile methodologies for collecting feedback. And we're going to go on to some agile methodologies and stuff like that in future episodes. So stay tuned for those. Encourage open feedback, ask team members what's working and what's not in those settings, and regularly assess your communication and collaboration tools to see if they're helping and hindering trust. There are a lot of tools for managing and assessing communication. We'll talk more about those as well as well in future podcasts. But if you notice engagement dropping, it could be a sign that trust is eroding. Address it quickly and proactively before it becomes a bigger issue. And the last point I want to make is about meetings. Now we're going to do a detailed dive in future podcasts about holding effective meetings. But for now, while time permits, and I've got a couple of minutes, let's talk quickly about this. To many people, meetings is a motivational killer. It's too often you have you have been or currently have been in situations where there's a there's one meeting to say what we're gonna do and what we need to do and what the plans are, and then right behind that there are other meetings that are not related or even related that occupy the time to the point that you never had time to work on the task from the first meeting yet. And that's a killer to team motivation. There's an easy fix though. No freaking meetings that don't produce uh that don't they don't produce only the action but the opportunity to do those things. Your meetings need to be able to have an action, go out and do, and you've got to provide the opportunity to do. If you're holding meetings and 50% of the people that you had in that meeting don't speak up, don't engage, then you've not only got twice the number of people in that meeting that you need, but you're actively removing bricks from the foundation of sound leadership. Get rid of those useless meetings. Don't require people to be in there that are not active participants to attend, um, unless they choose to and they have the cycles to do that. And don't smother the day's productive moments with other meetings. Your organization is betting that their expense on you delivers them value. Meetings don't generally generate value like that, so you need to get out and start generating value. That's where the agile part comes in. So building trust in remote teams isn't just about some fancy software which we use or forcing constant video calls, which we can employ, but it's about being intentional about how you communicate, collaborate, and connect as a human. It's about being included in meetings, it's about including others in meetings, especially those in remote locations, to get them to communicate, collaborate, and connect. We need to ensure that we're doing what we can to include remote workers as if they were actually solicit actually in the office, and we're soliciting feedback consistently and simply asking them, How are you doing? and actually asking. So that's a wrap for today. If you found today's episode helpful, don't forget to subscribe to this podcast and make sure you leave a review. If you'd like more information on how to engage with me directly, you can head over to the website Kalinavision.com, spelled K-A-L Y-N is a Nancy A-vision.com, and catch us on YouTube at Beyond the Glare to learn more about how we can help you and your team remove obstacles and address challenges, enabling your team and organization to run like a well-built machine. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time. Take care of the video.