johnmaconline

A quick but important divergence into the negative.

As a leader, you have a plethora of supervisory tools at your fingertips. The IT department can probably provide login reports, keystroke activity, and browser histories. Ignore them. Throw them away. Disable them.

The remote work environment is not a shop floor, nor is it a kindergarten classroom. You don’t need to maintain a watchful eye. You don’t need to ensure people are doing their jobs by making sure they’re online for the prescribed amount of time.

You might be tempted to create a standing Zoom meeting for the start of your workday or maybe mid-afternoon. If your project requires or runs better this way, then go for it. But if your true purpose is to ensure your team is working at what you consider the right time of the day, resist.

It’s not about supervisorship. It’s about respect and empowerment. It’s not about hours. It’s about impact.

Lead like a leader.

Provide more. Expect more. Get more.

Leading teams remotely is about, well, leadership. Specifically leadership in the new work paradigm. The new work paradigm calls for true leadership, not the supervisorship and micromanagement of org chart leadership. True leadership requires vision, connections, courage, respect, willingness to try things that might not work, and the ability to change one’s mind. 

Ensure each member knows what is expected of them and are empowered to control their own destiny. Empower through tools, responsibility, and trust.

Respect each team member’s schedule and the integration of work and home life. Consider alternate times for meetings. Does 7 am work better than 10 am now that no one is commuting? Use the tools to socialize everyone’s status throughout the day. 

A productive work community does not require a commitment to a daily schedule, but it does require a commitment to one another and to the mission. Encourage the commitment to one another and foster the commitment to the mission.

Developing and then keeping a productive and happy team is all about embracing the differences between the home and office environments, enhancing the benefits of working from home, and equipping your team to foster community and conversation. 

The schedules are jumbled. The distractions are greater. The isolation can be real. 

Acknowledge these challenges rather than ignore them.

Lead by example — work socially.

One of the keys to a cohesive, productive, and happy remote team is to foster community and conversation. Your team wants to feel cared for and cared about. You can do this through your actions and by encouraging everyone to work socially.

Start by putting a proper toolset in place, then use it correctly. Email ain’t it. Not for conversation anyway. Use tools such as Teams, Zoom, or Slack or even non-business tools such as WhatsApp (especially if you have a global team) for conversation. These tools make private and group conversations effortless and useful. Once you master them, it’s like you’re all sitting around the conference room table.

Establish daily contact. It doesn’t have to be intense, formal, nor even work-related. A few chat messages. A quick video session. Just like you might run into someone in the hall or walk by their desk.

Pull people into conversations on your messaging tool. Make sure they’re included and their voice is heard and valued. Actively seek out input from those who prefer to hide.

Once you master the art of working socially, your team will be on fire.

More to come…

The first step in successfully leading a remote team is to allow and help each team member to master it themselves.

Help them establish the same principles that you did:

1. Create a space
2. Find a routine
3. Take breaks
4. Work socially

Push for a budget. Your team needs quality gear and a comfortable setup to mimic an office vibe. Lobby for this. If they’re set up right, they’ll produce right.

Routine matters. Understand each member’s personal flow. Are they morning people or night owls? Schedule around these nuances. The aim is to integrate, not disrupt, their daily life.

Breaks aren’t optional. They’re necessary. Encourage your team to step away, recharge, and come back stronger. A walk around the block or a quick workout can do wonders for productivity. Make it a part of the work culture.

Social interaction keeps the team vibe alive. Use video calls, chat apps, or virtual meetups to keep everyone connected. Loneliness can be a creativity killer; keep the energy flowing.

You’re not just managing tasks; you’re curating an environment. Do it right and you’ll transform remote work from a challenge into a team superpower.

More to come…

Now that you’ve mastered your own remote work environment and practices, it’s time you figured out how best to lead your remote team.

I’ve been leading remote teams worldwide for the last decade, just as I’ve been working remotely myself. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Your goal for your remote team is really no different than if you all sat together in an office. You want to keep them productive, on target, and happy (maybe you don’t care about happy, but I do). The key is to embrace differences between the home and office environments, enhance the benefits of working from home, and to equip your team to foster community and conversation. 

Home life and work-life are now integrated, by definition. Rather than trying to ignore this integration, use it to everyone’s advantage. There is no more commute. The kitchen is steps away. Suddenly, the 3rd grade’s 20-minute presentation of Christopher Columbus’s arrival at the New World looks like something a parent can and should attend. Yes, you can take that 10 a.m. dentist appointment.

The workday might look different, and that’s OK if you know how to lead through it.

Isolation is real for your team. It’s a benefit for unencumbered focus time, but it can suck their life out when they need the energy and vibe of the team around them. 

Nail this leadership, and you’re not just running a remote team—you’re pioneering the future of work.

Mote to come…

I have found this one to be the most important one and the one that eludes most people.

The great news is that it’s not that hard, but it does take some awareness and intention. In fact, for introverts (like me), using your remote toolset to work socially can be better than sitting in an office full of people. Less distractions and more flow time. 

What does “work socially” mean?

Fostering conversation and community around work, but also around life.

How do you do that? By fostering community.

You probably have tools such as Slack, MS Teams, Zoom, etc. Use them instead of email for conversation. Email is a great tool, but not for fostering community. Email is for documentation, publishing, and formal external communication. 

These other tools make real-time conversation effortless. Real-time conversation helps develop a community. Use these tools to “overshare” what you are doing, ask questions of others, and generally create a transcript of the daily work and life conversation.

Turn your video on in meetings. If you have your video on, others feel more comfortable turning theirs on. When everyone has their video on, it’s like you’re sitting around the conference room table. And the potpourri of weird stuff in the background of your video? That just enhances the conversation.

Fostering and participating in conversation and community are the keys to working socially. And working socially is the single biggest factor that will help you master working from home.

OK, maybe that sounds silly, childish even, but I’ve found that taking breaks is one of the keys to unlocking the master of remote work.

Like a commute creates a natural routine, the office environment naturally provides mental breaks in your day — lunchtime, watercooler conversation, meetings, a trip to the coffee machine, a colleague stops by to lament about the game last night, a walk out to the restroom.

These little breaks don’t come as naturally when you’re by yourself. 

Done right, breaks can be your superpower. Not taken or done wrong, and you can derail the rest of your day and leave yourself mopy or agitated. 

How do you design breaks into your day?

Like your routine, try stuff and adjust, but start with a lunch break. 

If you don’t normally take a lunch break, start taking one. Take a walk. Workout. Run some errands. Decline your meetings over lunch and take a break.

Then be diligent and intentional about taking some other breaks throughout the day. Walk the dog. Go out to get coffee. Run to the post office. 

One warning — there can be a fine line between productive breaks and unproductive distractions and interruptions, especially when working from home. Setting boundaries helps with distractions and interruptions. 

Master your breaks, and you’re one step closer to mastering remote work. It’s that simple.

When you commute to an office, you have a routine. That routine serves the important purpose of transitioning you from your home self to your work self and back again.

This routine is critical in transitioning your mind and body into the workday in the morning, and out of the workday in the evening. These transitions occur naturally when you commute.

One challenge of working from home is the integration of home and work thwarts that natural transition. You’re unmotivated or distracted to start your workday, and that turns into difficulty staying engaged throughout, which then leads to a challenge in being fully present with your family in the evening. 

It took me a while to find what works for me, and it shifts around a bit. My routine currently doesn’t look exactly like it did a couple of years ago. But when I’m on my game, it always involves these 4 elements:

1. Intention to start the day
2. Priming my mind
3. Priming my body
4. Creating a ToDo list with a clear head prior to the firefights and distractions of the day

What should you do? 

Experiment. Try different things. Start with something similar to what you do today. Take a shower and getting dressed as if you were going to the office. Take a walk to emulate the commute. 

The key is to find a routine that transitions you from your home self into your work self. Once you have that, you’ll find your motivation and focus return. 

You still gotta go to work, which means you need a spot. 

Creating a physical space helps bridge the mental transition to the workday and sets boundaries for the others in the house.

Working from home full-time, or even just for a full day, is not the same as sending a couple of emails after dinner. You can’t do it from your bed or the couch, at least not effectively. 

Effective working from home requires a mindset commitment to the workday, just as if you were going to the office. Having a physical space helps transition your mindset, just as your commute did before. Once you set those physical boundaries, your focus sharpens and you’ll have a better time ignoring interruptions. 

At the office, everybody’s on the same schedule, but at home, the schedules clash. You can’t run your day interrupt-driven from your family and expect to be successful. 

This may be your biggest challenge, but it’s worth sacrificing a spot in your house. Even if you have a tiny apartment, make a permanent spot that you can go to each day. Set up your big monitor and docking station. Layout your favorite pen and notebook. Leave this stuff there just as you would at your desk in an office. 

When you go to this space and sit, you are going to the office.

Even though I started working formally from home ten years ago, my journey started about 15 years ago, in the middle of the night.

At that time, I was burning the midnight oil from home just to keep up with my job as a programmer. Found myself thinking, “I’m productive alone. What if I ditch the commute and office distractions?”

Tried it, but ultimately failed. Slow internet, household distractions, and isolation killed my motivation. I didn’t yet know how to do it effectively.

Then I took the job ten years ago. The daily grind of a three-hour commute to Philly forced my hand. I knew I had to get serious about remote work. So I went at it for two days a week. A lot had changed, but what really made the difference? I was mentally committed.

That’s step one.

Then I got laid off, but it was a blessing because I had learned how to work remotely by that time and started to love it. So, I jumped at a full-time remote opportunity and never looked back. I lead teams all over the world now from the comfort of my home office.

I’ve learned what makes me tick in this setup. And I’ve figured out how to keep a remote team humming.

Ready to dive in? Next up, I’ll share the secret sauce for successful remote work. Stay tuned.