Tips for leading people at a distance

strategy+business, June 23, 2021

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by Urbancow

It seems less and less likely that the pandemic will be the impetus for a permanent, wholesale shift to remote work. Sure, employee sentiment polls find that most people like working from home, and anecdotal evidence suggests a few of them will refuse to return to the office if and when their leaders summon them. But the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that only 16.6% of employed persons teleworked or worked at home because of the coronavirus in May 2021, down from 18.3% in April. Moreover, few CEOs of major companies are wholeheartedly embracing remote work: some, like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan, are rejecting it altogether, and many, including Tim Cook of Apple, are offering some form of hybrid work instead.

This suggests that the title of Harvard Business School professor Tsedal Neeley’s new book, Remote Work Revolution, is something of an overstatement. Indeed, in the book’s introduction, Neeley reports that JPMorgan “is considering a permanently remote workforce”—which isn’t happening. But that doesn’t mean leaders shouldn’t read the book. It is, after all, more and more likely that leaders will be called upon to manage people who are working remotely some of the time. That is, if they aren’t already responsible for distributed teams, salespeople, and other employees whose work takes them on the road, or mixed teams of full-time employees and external contractors. And they will need to be prepared.

“For workers and leaders around the world,” explains Neeley, “untrained remote work isn’t a panacea. In fact, you may have experienced some or all of the many challenges that are inherent in virtual arrangements.” The challenges for leaders include keeping people connected when they aren’t in the same place, building trust and alignment without in-person contact, avoiding Zoom fatigue and other technological pitfalls, creating viable boundaries between work and private lives, and transferring highly coordinated work to distributed settings. Read the rest here.