The Remote Trap

Good managers make their team more efficient. Bad managers make themselves more efficient at the cost of their team’s efficiency.

For example, bad managers organize large meetings with many attendees. Organizing a single hour-long meeting instead of two half-an-hour smaller ones is more efficient for the manager but not for the attendees, who must each sit through long stretches of discussions that are irrelevant to them.

Working From Home exacerbates this tendency. It tempts remote managers to use “tools that scale,” such as emails, Slack, and Project Management tools. These are powerful tools, but only when used correctly, asking people to provide only relevant information and only to people to whom it’s relevant.

For example, Zoom is an extraordinary tool. But resist the urge to use it to organize large meetings. They are not a great tool to keep everyone on the same page or provide teamwork and connection. Think about the last large Zoom meeting in which you participated: how engaged were the attendees, really?

Instead, teamwork, connection, and trust are better engendered with one-on-one Zoom calls. Have weekly one-on-ones with each of your subordinates, and encourage them to have one-on-one Zoom calls with each other when appropriate.[1]

I’m not saying not to have large Zoom calls. I’m saying to save them for special occasions such as company-wide announcements. For everything else, split large meetings into many smaller ones. Any discussion relevant to only a few of the attendees is better had as a separate meeting between the interested people only. (Do your people the favor of scheduling most meetings at the very start of the day or at its very end, to minimize disruptions.)

Yes, “keeping everyone on the same tab” is important, but so is not wasting your people’s time. If you think about it, many employees choose Working From Home to escape irrelevant meetings.

My favorite Working From Home approach is as follows. During the week, have at least one one-on-one Zoom call with each subordinate of yours. Then, on Monday, have a short team-wide meeting in which you make the relevant announcements and you mention what everyone will work on during the week. Every other meeting is project-specific or function-specific.

Another temptation of Working From Home is to abuse time-logging apps, Project Management tools, and similar software. Using these can be useful, but you should not collect data that doesn’t add used value. For example, do all fields in your Project Management tool matter? Do you really need people to log their non-billable time? Are you actually using that information?

I could go on, but you get the gist. Your job as a manager is not to make your job easier; it’s to make your team’s jobs easier. Use tools that add value to them, not to you, and use them in a way that adds value to them, not to you.

Note: in the inevitable trade-off between conciseness and completeness, I chose the former. Of course, there are a lot of edge cases, and of course, I could have hedged each of the essay’s sentences. To avoid wasting my time and yours, I didn’t. Don’t take the points of this essay too literally; instead, consider the problem that caused me to write about them, and ask yourself if it applies to your team.

Notes:

[1] When should you encourage people to have one-on-one Zoom calls with each other? When building a shared understanding is more important than saving time. For example, delegation and feedback are often more effective on a one-on-one call. Of course, you might have to coach people on delegating and giving feedback.