#26: Intrapreneurship in 31 steps - 7. Distributed and Remote Team Management

Covid did not create a remote work culture. It certainly pushed most companies - willingly or grudgingly - to accept remote work on a global scale. However, many companies have had teams working in a distributed environment, and some of those team members have enjoyed remote work for long.

I could never understand how Deb made it appear and happen so effortlessly.

He was my client-side manager when I was a consultant at GE Healthcare. I was astonished when I heard the first time that he worked one day from the office at Brookfield, WI, and the other four days from his home 100 miles away in a Chicago suburb.

Deb was the solutions architecture lead for several areas across GEHC's data and analytics platform and managed multiple projects and teams comprised of employees and consultants in the US and India.

In addition, Deb was attending a full-time MBA program at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

This was in the year 2004. A full 15 years before COVID, companies like GE operated across multiple time zones, continents, and countries with distributed, remote, and hybrid talent pools.

I learned a lot working in that environment, and I, too, like everyone else, was allowed to work one day from home every week.

Later, during my time at JPMorgan and Santander, as my teams got bigger and spread out, global, remote, hybrid, and distributed were all just different names.

What mattered was that we had amazing people on the team who could get stuff done.

(NOTE: I started writing The Intrapreneur book before COVID forced us all to embrace a remote culture. However, the concepts apply to any leader in a position to work with remote or distributed teams common in multi-location companies.)

If you like my posts on Intrapreneurship, you may like The Intrapreneur Book. You can purchase a copy on Amazon or access the digital version.

Now that most knowledge workers are used to working offsite, what does it take to manage a team effectively?

The global workforce is not a novel idea anymore. Distributed, remote, offshore/offsite employees are familiar workforce options in most companies. The trend has been increasing over the last decade, and COVID-19 forced almost the entire world of knowledge to embrace this. Executives and managers across companies had no choice besides changing their attitudes, mindsets, and realities of a distributed workforce. 

Additionally, the gig economy (about a person working one or few gigs for a company or sharing their time by working multiple gigs across a few companies) is becoming common. Even larger established firms embrace this concept and hire talented workers for remote positions. 

What does this mean for a person managing a team of this nature?

The people who work in your team now have numerous options. From “Tell me why we need to employ you," we are getting into a place where the talented people say, “Tell me why I must bring my talent to you.”

The old style of performance management, motivation, and reward systems will need to be revised. 

As an Intrapreneur, you must be able to paint a better picture of the prospects of working with you and your company. Create a culture of inclusion, challenge, and situations where your people know they can contribute, learn, and be a part of something better and exciting.

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1. One Team - One Goal: Who is working on what portion does not matter as if one of those areas fails, your program will fail. Eliminate organizational, geographic, or company boundaries, treat everyone the same way, and hold everyone accountable the same way.
2. Greater Expectations: Gone are those days when we set different expectations for someone at the office and treated your offshore teams as coders or people who do low-value-adding work. Never dilute your expectations or lower the bar.
3. Equal Engagement: Pay the same attention and effort to engage your entire talent pool. The only difference is who pays them - between employees, consultants, contractors hired through staff augmentation engagement or offshore companies, or those experts engaged through your platform or product companies. Eventually, they all get paid from your company's budget.
4. Stop measuring work in terms of time: If we hire people who can think independently, be accountable, and act responsibly, there is no need to police their time. Such individuals with self-drive will do what is needed. Depending on their levels, they will still need coaching and directing. But we don't have to keep checking in on them. But some people will struggle or misuse this freedom. Coach or make it mandatory hybrid for the ones who struggle and quickly terminate those who misuse the privilege. Honesty and integrity are so important that those who lack them must be taken out without hesitation.
5. Start valuing outcomes: Remember that I mentioned that I started working one day a week from home while at GEHC. Almost all those days, I worked more than I did at the office in terms of time. That experience taught me that not all activities must be measured with the same time factor. Those individuals who can lead themselves will adjust their work efforts accordingly.
6. Learning Matters: At Khyanafi, we expect all our billable consultants to work at least 150 hours monthly on client engagements. That number can be more or less, depending on their work. While we bill the actual utilization to clients, we absorb all the other time. Where do the remaining hours go? Towards continuous learning, experimenting, getting to know another area such as sales, marketing, creating a reusable process, or documenting a flow that we think could be used across clients. And some days or portions of the days, to take a walk or do what they want with their time.
7. Let them own it: Deep hierarchical organizational structures need to be revised in modern work situations. Employees perform better when there is a level of autonomy built into the work culture. Ownership, pride, and engagement are all byproducts of creating a self-thinking and organized work culture with significant autonomy.
8. PODS as a primary delivery vehicle: Agile project management and a need for quick results have pushed the POD approach, and it works well in most cases. A "POD" is a smaller purpose-built team comprised of individuals with various skill sets who come together for a specific project or works on projects within a particular domain.
9. Micro-teams and Inverted Leadership: Titles and hierarchy are required for smooth administration and reporting clarity. They are irrelevant for delivering results in a remote culture (if we have done an excellent job of hiring driven, inspired, high-performing individuals). Micro-teams (modified PODs) are my favorite approach to organizing and delivering work and often have individuals leading with senior leaders supporting the delivery. If you are looking for accelerated growth of your team members and building adequate succession bench strength, this is the best way to do it.
10. Frequent Coaching: Every interaction with a team member is an opportunity to mentor, coach, and learn. I prefer ongoing project discussions to challenge, push, and grow the team members instead of 1:1s. Do we still need dedicated time to address concerns, give feedback, and listen? Absolutely. But those can be once a month. Timely advice happens while working on specific items.

Managing a remote-first team comprised of almost three to five generations of employees, geographically distributed, and multi-cultural talent needs an open mind, supportive, and compassionate leadership approach.

1. If you are an incoming leader and want to start strong, I welcome you to explore the "Accelerated Transition" service from Khyanafi Corpsulting. Our team of Corpsultants (former corporate leaders in consulting) and I work directly with leaders like yourself to ensure a great start. Early Wins Matter.
2. DAAMAAS: Data Architecture And Modeling As A Service. Finding field-tested, reliable talent for #dataarchitecture and #datamodeling work continues to challenge many companies. If this is your problem, write to us at getstarted@corpsulting.com.
3. If you are a leader looking for my advisory, mentoring, or coaching help for your company board, yourself, and your team, contact me at connect@datapreneurs.com.