How do I manage interstate employees?

Four of my team members work interstate. How do I include them – and keep an eye on them?

Advances in technology and the ease of travel (budgets permitting) make managing and including team members who are based in different cities and countries easier than it was 10 years ago. As I am not an expert in technology I will leave it for others with this expertise to add their voice.

However, with the demands of business and producing results it can be easy to put off creating processes to ensure that virtual team members feel part of the team.

Here are some things you may wish to consider.

• It’s a basic human need to feel heard and valued. Therefore ensuring that you have regular forums where your team members can add their voices, ideas and get regular updates on what is happening in the business/team is vital. How are you currently managing the flow of communication and what can be improved?
• It’s important to not only communicate to your team members that they are valued members of your team, it’s also vital that your corresponding behaviours and actions support this.
• Take time to get to know your team members. Lasting relationships take time to develop, therefore invest regular time to get to know all your team members. What motivates them each individually? What’s in it for them to be a part of this team? What do they care about? What are they passionate about? Research shows us that motivation is linked to performance, therefore understanding what motivates your team members is important. Also, check in with what’s in it for you to invest time to do this? Increased performance, team harmony, creativity and retention of team members could be a few.
• Find out about the challenges faced by team members (both the virtual and office based). Remember you are not there to fix, solve or save all of the challenges faced. However, being aware of them in relation to the role they perform will give you important information. This will help you to support your team members in a variety of ways, whether as a mentor, a manager or a coach. There will be times when you may be aware of personal challenges faced by team members and then you will be able to respond appropriately and supportively.
• Get together. Where possible it is important to consolidate and deepen team relationships by all getting together physically. Team strategy sessions, end of year celebrations or conferences.

Pollyanna Lenkic is the founder of Perspectives Coaching, an Australian based coaching and training company. She is an experienced facilitator, certified coach and a certified practitioner of NLP. In 1990 she co-founded a specialist IT recruitment consultancy in London, which grew to employ 18 people and turnover £11 million ($27 million). This blog is about the mistakes she made and the lessons she learned building a business the first time round and how to do it better second time round.