Managing a Remote Team

I just want to touch on a couple of other skills for management and leadership, that I’d be interested to hear your views on. Firstly, managing a remote team. How do you approach that?

It is a hard one. I’ve seen it a lot recently, more than I’ve ever seen it before. More and more people want to work from home; want a better work-life balance. The challenge is, how do you still make them feel part of the team and/or still work remotely. There are some less tangible things but when you’re all in the office and you’re all together, there’s a feeling there. You’re all in there together, you can have conversations, some formally, behind the scenes. But the fact is, where we’re moving today, there is a need for that. When I think of specific departments, other companies provide it. You can either be left behind or you can create something really phenomenal in your office that people say, actually, I want to come to the office.

When I think about our office, for example, we have a gym inside our office. People can come in; they can go to the gym. We do culture clubs, we do breakfast. We do the whole works. But what we really want is people to come in and say, we love working here; we love being around our staff members. When you think about remote working, yes, it’s great for work-life balance, but actually, people feel as though they want it until they actually have it.

If you’re sitting at home, working five days a week, you lose that social element. Let’s be honest, you spend a minimum of 40 hours a week, you make friends – I met my wife at work. There’s a certain social element that, if you get it right, it addresses the remote working. But the fact is, it’s more and more in demand today and you can either go with the times or you can sit behind. The big focus I have is, yes, we allow remote working. We try and cap it at a maximum of one day a week and we don’t want it to be the majority of your time. But we try and really create, not only a brilliant culture, great staff, but actually make the office environment really, really good, just so people can enjoy coming in. But it’s a challenge, I think, that a lot of companies are having, right now.

Do you have structures around a remote-working policy?

We put a policy in place. At a high level, one day a week is the maximum. If you want to go two to three days a week, there would need to be a conversation or a justification. We’re up front people. If you come in and say, my partner’s out of town today and I need to pick up the kids, so I need to be flexible, stuff like that is fine. The policy for us, so far, is one day a week. If you want to increase that, then there needs to be some form of justification. Currently, where we are, with less than 100 members of staff, we don’t think, to build our team, build our culture, that remote working is the way. We’re somewhat in the trenches now. We all need to work together. I think if we allow working remotely more often, I just think you lose a lot of things that, ultimately, make a business successful.