Jeremy Epstein
The average employee will prefer to work from home nearly half the time after the pandemic is over. Employees are also demanding flexible schedules and remote work, and as a result, executives are planning to reduce office space by 30%. The data surrounding the global shift to remote work is piling up and our post-pandemic professional landscape is starting to take shape.
Are you ready to lead a digital workforce?
The seismic shift in how we work requires a reassessment of how we manage, even for — or especially for — seasoned leaders. How do you wrangle a highly educated, decentralized workforce and rally them around a singular mission? How do you become a better people manager amid a workplace sea change?
As a seasoned CMO who has managed global workforces, I’ve finally hit my stride as a remote-only manager, all while navigating a global pandemic and riding my company’s unprecedented growth. What’s the secret sauce to managing today’s remote workforce? Strengthen your team by creating authentic workplace transparency, using numbers as a universal language and providing meaning behind your team’s work.
The biggest secret behind my management practices? It’s possible to produce more success with less stress. Consider these three ways I’ve strengthened my team and, in turn, become a more nimble manager.
Focus your team on meaningful work
A Harvard Business Review study found that knowledge workers are more fulfilled when they understand what organizations are trying to achieve and how their work lifts up their workplaces as a whole. In other words, meaning motivates your digital workforce.
On the surface, communicating your organization’s overarching mission, its reason for being, seems like a simple enough task. But I challenge you to ask each one of your team members to define your organization’s mission. If you have 10 employees, I bet you get nine or 10 different answers.
Instead of expecting employees to find your organization’s mission and vision on PowerPoint decks or on the website’s “about us” page, use the proven objectives and key results (OKRs) methodology.
The next piece of the puzzle helps you raise the visibility around why your employees are doing what they’re doing every day and creates a culture of motivation through meaning. Collaborate with your employees to create individual OKRs that identify goals and metrics for achievement. These OKRs should detail exactly how each employee contributes to the organization’s success and become the impetus behind everything an employee does.
I tell my workforce to review their OKRs every morning to help them focus on what’s important. It is like daily meditation for your business. So I didn’t worry when my director of marketing recently moved and had a baby. Because we had worked together to set thoughtful OKRs, my team member’s objectives and results were well defined. She knew where to focus her limited time. No distractions from the cacophony of requests. No anxiety over letting down her team. Just peace of mind that she was focusing on the right tasks.
You know how else to win hearts and minds and lower workplace anxiety among employees? Eliminate unnecessary meetings. A Korn Ferry survey found that 67% of workers say time spent in meetings and on calls keeps them from doing purposeful work.
On the management side, can you imagine how much time you would get back if you were free from one-on-one status meetings? I don’t have to imagine it; I phased out weekly check-ins, and I suggest you do the same.
I know that my team is on the right track, so I don’t need to waste their time or mine. Now my employees can pursue the impactful work that I hired them to do in the first place. In turn, I’m free from the tedious and time-consuming micromanagement of people and can concentrate on my own OKRs, like:
Objective: Become a coach and mentor to my marketing team.
Key result: Retain 100% of my talent on the marketing team.
Achievable? Probably not. Aspirational? Absolutely.
I used to think that the amount of time I spent in front of my computer directly correlated to my professional success. But this is an antiquated mindset, especially in our current professional climate.
I’m now definitely older and hopefully wiser and realize that the more time I spend shoring up my team, the less time I’ll spend working that quarter. As “The Effective Executive” author Peter F. Drucker put it, “The less an organization has to do to produce results, the better it does its job.”
Align your team through organizational transparency
Early in my career, I can’t tell you how often I’d sit down and diligently check off my to-do list without knowing what the person to my left or right was working on. I had no clue how I supported them or how they supported me. Now, as an executive, I realize just how detrimental working in a silo can be. Looking back, I duplicated tasks, limited my ingenuity and wasted time — not anything I aim to replicate with my own team.
I can’t afford to hire highly qualified, highly educated cogs in the machine, and I imagine you can’t either. For optimal performance, we need to foster teamwork and problem-solving. But encouraging this type of collaboration relies on an understanding of each employee’s professional responsibilities, which is increasingly difficult to communicate in the work-from-home era.
With a visual workflow map, you and your workforce can see how one person’s job dovetails into the next. This removes the mystery surrounding anyone’s responsibilities and, as a manager, removes barriers to the problem of sharing ever-evolving information.
This example may seem insignificant, but consider this. The other day I needed to speak with someone on the product team. But who? I looked at our alignment map. Just by seeing how professional responsibilities flowed together, I figured out my team’s natural ally and gave him a ring. Sure, chasing down the right person saved me an enormous amount of time, but it went far beyond time management. Understanding my colleague’s objectives from the get-go enabled me to have an informed and productive conversation with him.
I see this play out among my team every day. Simply providing insight into what their colleagues are doing spurs collaboration, creativity and thus more alignment toward reaching a common goal. And, as a manager, I can sit back and watch the magic happen.
Achieve real diversity by speaking a common language
If your organization is anything like mine, our leadership team is constantly challenged to cultivate diversity in the workplace. But diversity is as important as it is difficult to achieve. Posting about Juneteenth on social media and sending out inclusion and equity decks are baby steps forward, but I want diversity to go deeper than that on my team.
As a manager, you can achieve more workplace diversity by fixating on the outcomes and letting go of the details. What does that mean, practically speaking? If you don’t care when people work or where their office chair is located, you are free to hire the best person for the job. You can hire the single mom, the inner city native or the developer who lives halfway across the globe. This is real diversity.
So you hired a diverse workforce, now what? As a leader, you want to keep your workforce around for the long haul, and that’s just not going to happen if there’s a cultural bias among your diverse workforce. You need to level the playing field. Unify your team around one universal language: numbers. If you focus on quantitative results, everyone understands the meaning and no one gets waylaid by cultural bias.
As a matter of fact, I actively discourage the Americans on my team to use U.S. analogies because they can be inadvertently isolating and nuances can get lost in translation. Instead, we transcend cultural and linguistic barriers by adopting numbers as our communication vehicle. Everyone might not speak the same language, but we all know what 20% growth means.
By creating a transparent workflow, enforcing a universal language and providing meaning, the ambiguity around your team’s responsibilities will dissolve and morale will naturally rise. Creativity and collaboration will flourish. And real diversity will become attainable.
I want to be clear: Adopting these management practices will not replace your leadership position, but they will certainly take unnecessary work off of your plate. Take it from me: I’m working less, achieving more and have time to watch my son’s soccer game.
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