Remote Work Success: Building Trust Without Surveillance

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A Better Way to Monitor Remote Employees. This comes from the article Research, A Better Way to Keep Tabs on Your Remote Workforce by Alexander Hamrick. All right. Well, the article says remote work isn't going anywhere, yet many managers still struggle with how to track employees' productivity. It's like, I can't see them. I don't know what they're doing. So while invasive monitoring tools, you may have heard of these types of things,

promise efficiency, they often undermine trust. They undermine engagement and undermine creativity. Now, research shows that not all monitoring is harmful. It's just a matter of how it's done. So here's how to create a more effective and ethical monitoring strategy. So number one, engage, don't just observe. So instead of relying on passive tracking software, I mean, I've heard about these things. I can't imagine any manager would do this.

Instead of that, the article argues, and I'm fully on board with this, to prioritize regular check-ins through video calls, phone calls, one-on-ones, virtual open doors where you have virtual office hours where you're going to be available to your employees. Use these types of meetings to gather updates, provide feedback, discuss progress, align on your goals and objectives, and get to know your employees' perspectives on work and other things. But don't use passive tracking software.

To me, that is ridiculous. That is the epitome of what managers should not be doing. We should be getting to know our people very well and building trust and rapport with them. Okay. The second tip here is to adapt to the job's complexity. And basically what this means is people who are very creative, and I think I speak from experience here, or they're in very high skill roles, require autonomy and the ability to solve problems on their own.

So micromanaging creative types and people who like to solve problems is not effective at all. And so if you are a micromanager and you're interested in constant surveillance, this is not going to work for those types of employees. For these types of employees, is interactional monitoring, meaning frequent communication with them. That's what I interpret this article saying is interactional monitoring.

That's what fosters trust. That's what leads to innovation, making them more likely to share ideas with you, be collaborative. Trust you, not try to hide anything from you, be transparent with you. That's how you foster that. Okay. And then the third thing is to be transparent. Employees are more receptive to this interactional monitoring when they understand its purpose. And so to build trust and to reduce resistance.

Explain the extent to which observational monitoring practices are being used, why they're being used, and then how they will benefit not only the employee, but the company and you as a manager. I remember not too long ago, I was a new manager to an organization, and I had an employee who really thought that I was micromanaging them. And after constant reassuring that my intent was simply to learn the job, learn what they do so that I could help them more, it just didn't work.

And that employee left the organization. They wanted to come back after a certain amount of time, but I decided not to bring them back because they just didn't read the intent. They didn't read the trust. I've never been a micromanager, never will be a micromanager. And that was all I was doing was trying to learn. I think most of the time, explanations, sincere explanations like that usually work.

It didn't in my case, but I think that's the way to go. So for me to summarize this article about remote employees, I'm a remote employee. I have one direct report that's fully remote, another one that's kind of in a hybrid situation, but could be fully remote if they so chose. Here's the best way to attack remote work. Number one, schedule weekly one-on-ones. If you cannot do. Even imagine doing that. Schedule them at least once every two weeks at the very extreme once a month.

Try to do them weekly. You'll see how they work. 30 minutes once a week. It's on the books. It's a place for them to put things on your agenda, on your calendar, so that they can come and get their problems solved. They can get resourced. They can talk about what's going on at work. They can talk about what's going on with their personal life. It's just a brilliant management strategy to have weekly one-on-ones with every direct report. Okay? Everyone. It's a priority for managers.

And I see way too many managers not doing this. So I would encourage you to. Number one, it just builds strong trust, strong rapport. It lets them know that your intent is for them, because if you're going to give up half an hour for them every single week, hopefully that sends the message to them that they care about you, they care about your success, and that they're for you, right?

So do that as a manager, and hopefully you'll send all those strong messages and build really strong trust with your people. Also, try to share productivity documents. So whether it's a shared team site or, you know, a note sharing like Notion or Evernote, I use Evernote a lot, but I also use Microsoft Teams to do this, where productivity documents can be shared and you can update projects, update tasks, update things to talk about at your one-on-one.

And this, again, you know, it can really build a lot of trust between manager and direct report. Now, you can engage with people, you know, on a daily basis in informal ways, but these are some very formal ways to do that. And what happens is you start to develop productivity that, A, the organization needs, B, you're required as a manager to deliver, and C, and maybe most importantly, keeps the employee engaged, motivated, and happy. And to quote Dr. Stephen R.

Covey in his landmark book, The Seven Habits, to quote Habit Four, that's a win-win on every front. So that's it for today's Manager Lab. And until we meet next time. Music.