6 questions managers of remote teams can ask to help foster fresh thinking

“A creative environment is a mental as well as a physical space, and therefore one you help shape.”

Advice for managers of home-working teams

If you’re the manager of a team right now, remote-working has probably dealt you a double-whammy. Not only have you had to figure out how to adapt to your own home-working situation, but also how you lead and support your team effectively in theirs. 

Managing people working remotely is inevitably challenging. But it is undoubtedly made easier when the path they are on is well-trodden; when the ways they need to think and operate are familiar and practiced. What happens though when - as many of us are experiencing - the circumstances a business operates in changes, and the business itself needs to adapt or even pivot? As a manager, how you help your team bring fresh thinking to weather or even thrive in unfamiliar circumstances gains additional impetus. 

Let’s take working environment specifically. The millions invested by businesses in creating stimulating office surroundings reflects their importance in prompting people to perform at their best, facilitating collaboration and inspiring innovation. I spend a lot of my time talking to businesses about the conditions that support a creative workplace, and one mistake some make is to think that it begins and ends with this physical environment. That’s not to say physical space isn’t important. Goodness knows your team are probably struggling with this right now too. But one of the most important mindset shifts you can make as a manager is to recognise that a creative environment is a mental as well as a physical space, and therefore one you help shape. Your team may be working from a spare bedroom, a shared flat, a garden shed or a kitchen table. There are only limited ways you can affect this. But don’t feel that your ability to create a stimulating environment is entirely diminished by home working. In fact without the guardrails of your usual office surroundings, how you choose to manage influences this more than ever. 

1. Could you give your team greater control over how they approach tasks?

Autonomy and agency are fundamental to people feeling motivated and productive. But in an organisation they often need to be consciously given for people to exercise them. Particularly for junior team members, remote working can sometimes default into a prescriptive to-do list that’s easier for a manager to keep a check on, especially if a business is evolving at pace. So the active signals you give as a manager are critical.

Empowering people to take greater control isn’t simply about when and where a task is best done - although talking about this is still important. If someone has been engaged in a task or meeting regularly, they’re well-placed to have thoughts about how it could be made more effective or efficient, or put to wider use. When was the last time you asked this of your team? 

The greatest tool you have at your disposal in this regard is to switch to focussing on objectives rather than tasks. As a manager the best gift you can give your team is clarity about what needs to be accomplished and why. And then create the time and space for them to consider or discuss how this is best done. 

2. Are you mistaking structure for bureaucracy?

I’ve worked with a few businesses recently whose senior managers felt they were empowering their teams by giving them responsibility for achieving something and then leaving them to it, believing this gave people freedom and control. The mistake they made was to confuse responsibility with empowerment. Often those teams were left without sufficient guidance to facilitate their success. Structure is good. Buildings need it. The human body needs it. Elite sports teams need it. It doesn’t dictate the form of the outcome, but it does create a framework for success. 

Arguably structure is even more important when your team is working remotely. So the next time you're briefing your team on a project, ask yourself whether you’ve given them enough of a framework to succeed? Has the problem to be solved been clearly articulated? Have the KPIs been determined? Do they have access to the information they’ll need? Do they need additional resources or insight? What stakeholders will need to input and when? Are the team able to spend time outlining potential barriers? What part do you need to play as a coach rather than an enforcer?

3. How could you facilitate greater diversity of people and thinking?

In recent months our worlds have inevitably become smaller. The number of people we’re interacting with on a daily basis is fewer, often limited to immediate work colleagues, with conversations focussed on immediate priorities or reporting on the status of live tasks. In this environment, thinking is more likely to be convergent rather than divergent; reinforcing or building on existing approaches rather than challenging with fresh perspectives and ideas. 

You may think as a manager that your hands are tied in this regard. But think creatively about how you could facilitate this. Look within your wider business as a start point. Or within sister organisations, industry bodies, clients or consumers. Who else could be involved? Be conscious too that even within your immediate team some voices will be louder than others. If you’re running a workshop remotely, are you making sure everyone has a chance to contribute? Are you providing virtual break-out spaces or downtime between exercises to help different thinkers work through their response?

4. Are you spotting and rewarding fresh thinking when it happens?

A definite downside to remote working is the risk that conversations and meetings are focussed on output and results. Those never-ending status meetings can feel like command and control management; about less trust, not more. One person I was speaking to described the lockdown increase in meetings as suffocating. And as a manager, it makes it harder to see the inputs and behaviours you want to encourage. If we support and celebrate how people think, we can worry less about policing the output. 

Look at your diary for the next week. If most of your scheduled team interactions are focussed on status check-ins, you could be missing out on the opportunity to see where your team is really shining. Are you holding the right kind of meetings? And if you are, do you need to be the host? Asking someone else to lead or facilitate a meeting frees you up to listen and observe, to call out when a crazy idea is worth further exploration before it gets forgotten. And as you can’t - and shouldn’t - be everywhere, how could you encourage examples of fresh thinking to be called out by others?

5. Are you helping the team learn from mistakes or failures?

In a working-from-home environment team members may be more inclined or find it easier to hide mistakes or downplay things that haven’t gone well. Aside from breeding anxiety and even mistrust, not facing these openly can cause people to become more cautious and less confident. How you foster a culture of learning and risk-taking where mistakes or failures can be comfortably shared and talked about is more important than ever. As counter-intuitive as it might seem, how could they even be something you call out for celebration?

6. What more could you do to help people see their impact on the wider business?

This is perhaps one of your hardest tasks as a manager right now. It’s particularly difficult for your team to see the impact they’re having individually and collectively when they’re physically distant and working in isolation. Perhaps you could instigate a weekly team wrap-up. Or draw someone’s contribution to the attention of a more senior colleague. Even if you don’t feel able to address the previous questions, take a moment to think about whether there is anything more you could be doing here. Your team will reward you for it in turn.

If you’re thinking these are relevant questions to be asking as a manager regardless of current circumstances, you’d be right of course. They are not situation-specific. But remote-working in some shape or form is with us to stay, either from necessity or desire. Whether enabled by technology, prompted by the need for in-demand or more diverse skills, or necessitated by clients, managing integrated, cross-functional teams across different locations is now a common requirement for many managers. So how we consciously think about fostering creative, stimulating environments beyond the physical is an essential part of our new normal toolkit. I hope some of these suggestions have prompted a few ideas for how you can support this with your own teams, now and into the future.

You can find out more about these and other conditions that support creativity at work on our  Creativity page, or  more detail on our Spark process here.