Remote management - What 3 decisive factors are there for success?

Remote management

When there is distance between the management and the employees, it can be described as remote management. During the corona crisis, remote management suddenly became a concept that many companies had to deal with, as it was no longer possible to work under the same conditions as before. 

In this blog post, you can immerse yourself in what distance management is and learn more about how distance management can be a success in your company.

What is remote management?

Perhaps you know the terms:

Virtual management

• Hybrid management
• Remote management
• Distance leadership
• Digital management
• Distributed management?

This type of management has many names. In this article, we use the term remote management, which covers leadership at a distance.

Read on in the next section, where we will examine what it takes for you to become a good distance manager.

The secret behind good remote management

Let's look at the following topics within good remote management:

• Communication
• Confidence
• Knowledge sharing

Communication

More is required of managers when they have to communicate clearly and clearly at a distance. Therefore, as a manager, you must be aware that information must be communicated clearly and distinctly.

Communication is the glue that binds the workplace together. It is the management's responsibility to make it clear to the employees what is expected of them. With good communication from the management, you help to ensure that the tasks are carried out correctly.

Trust requires availability

It can be difficult to build trust as a leader if you lead from a distance. This is because, as a remote manager, you are not physically present. Therefore, you can meet the challenge over time by meeting the employees' need for you to be available.

You can create a strategy for how you want to be more accessible to your employees. The strategy may contain a plan for how you will ensure that your employees can contact you for a 1 to 1 conversation. In addition, in the strategy you can also come up with concrete solutions for how you can be available on as many platforms as possible.

It is important to remember that you must show confidence in your employees if they are to have confidence in you. A possible obstacle for you in gaining the trust of your employees can arise if you practice micromanagement and thereby become too over controlling.

In order for remote management to work, it is necessary that you as a manager delegate tasks and that you maintain the employee's motivation to solve them.

Knowledge sharing

In a hybrid workplace where you both work from home and physically in the company, it is important that knowledge is not lost along the way. Some employees may feel that they are being lost in the decision making processes. In addition, it can be difficult to find the connection between the company's larger strategic objectives and the individual employee's efforts.

Therefore, knowledge sharing is essential in a workplace where people are not always together. A solution to the problem may be to have a greater focus on self management in the company and for the senior manager to motivate employees to share knowledge and cover any gaps that arise when you are not always in the same place at the same time.

It is an advantage to know the strengths and weaknesses of both virtual and physical meetings when you have to plan what works best in your company. Read on as we dig deeper into the advantages and disadvantages of online and physical meetings.

Virtual meetings versus physical meetings

If we take visual meetings and compare them to physical meetings, you can experience the following:

Virtual meetings

If meetings are held online, the meetings are often short and structured, which is an advantage for your company if you are pressed for time. In addition, the virtual meeting provides a good prerequisite for everyone to show up at the same time, which makes it easier for the manager to provide information to everyone at the same time.

Another advantage of holding virtual meetings is that you can meet online more often, as there are no travel costs associated with the meeting.

The downside of online meetings is that it can be difficult for the manager to know if the employees are following along when they are silent behind the screen. As a consequence of this, the meeting leader can feel alone. It is therefore a good idea to structure the meetings so that all employees are engaged.

When the company's employees have to work together on a joint task solution, the online meeting can be an obstacle. A possible way to get ahead of this problem is to use the "screen sharing" function in the meeting program, which makes it possible for all the participants in the meeting to see what is happening on the screen.

Physical meetings

The advantage of meeting physically in a company is that it contributes to employee engagement and thus a healthy and good work culture. The physical meetings can be informal and social, which can benefit the company when employees are expected to start a new team, a new project, or discuss and be innovative.

The physical meetings should be held when new employees are to be introduced and when new tasks are to be started. The advantage of the physical meetings is therefore also that they increase the feeling of togetherness and thus contribute to joint task solving.

In this way, the physical meetings can also create an increased commitment amongst the employees, which prolongs the feeling of motivation to solve the tasks.

With this in mind, you are now ready to revisit your management strategy to achieve the best possible outcome with virtual management.

Reevaluate your management strategy

If you would like to work more purposefully with your management style, it can be useful to revisit your management strategy. Innovation can advantageously be a focus area when this strategy needs to be rethought, as the innovation can be lost when everyone is not gathered physically in the same place.

Below are a number of points that you can ask yourself when reviewing your leadership style

1. How do you feel about the current situation in the company that you are facing right now?
2. Talk about what you in the company already know factually, whether there is anything new that you have to deal with. In addition, it can be agreed who makes which decisions and who must be involved in certain situations
3. Where are you going as a company? What have you learned? What needs to be developed and which measures will you continue with?

When you have gone through these three points, you are well on your way to being able to further develop your HR strategy.