A leader shares how to coach remote and hybrid teams: treat remote work as a spectrum, not binary. In-person visits from senior leaders boost motivation more than video calls. Set KPIs collaboratively so reps own their targets, then translate them into clear daily expectations.
First of all, we should probably set expectations. It's like everything else in life. It's not black and white. There are shades of gray. Right. And that does extend to how remote are our remote teams. Right. It's not just in office or fully distributed. A lot of companies right now release intentionally. After Covid hit, they did try to build for these hub and spoke models. We have like little pockets of folks that are based around the country. If that's the case, as far as not seeing people nearly as much as you used to, I think a lot of leaders underestimate the power of just being visible in person. Right. There is a benefit to seeing how tall people are, but there is also an additional benefit just from a leadership and a motivational perspective about you as a leader, especially if you're a level above maybe their frontline leader, actually spending time in person with these folks. But taking a step back, just talking about managing and motivating remote teams in general. Cardinal rule is that there's never such thing as too much communication. Another thing that, that I know a lot of leaders have rolled out that's worked really well is leadership. When it comes to things like KPIs and metrics and obviously the higher level goals, it's instinctive for us to make assignments. There is a whole lot of value, and especially when you really are drilling deep into the KPIs of making that sort of a collaborative process. Right. So that the reps that might be operating on their couch, they feel some level of ownership because to an extent they kind of help come up with the KPIs. Right. These are the goals that we're going for on a monthly or quarterly basis. Let's kind of work backwards. And what do you think are going to be an appropriate set of KPIs that we're going to be able to manage you towards. And then last but not least, once you have those settled, it really does come down into drilling deep as far as expectations setting. Right. So these are the goals and we've kind of agreed on these KPIs on a daily basis. We need to make sure that we're setting clear expectations of, okay, here's how we're going to achieve these KPIs that we again collaborated on together.
