It seems like only yesterday it was the norm to lead a team of people at work under one roof. Yet, in 2016 the number of workers operating virtually, or remotely, is increasing at an unprecedented rate as technology provides platforms for touch points that can feel almost as if everyone is in the same location. Despite many business models embracing the new world model of outsourcing and remote-based staff, it's a different work culture from the one built under one roof, a culture with both benefits and obstacles for the modern work team. No matter how advanced our technology becomes, we acknowledge that it will always provide a significant challenge when it comes to tough-stuff conversations.

According to recent reports, within a few years more than 1.3 billion people will work virtually — that is, through rich electronic connections from sites of their choosing. Along with this global shift will come exciting opportunities and also significant challenges, especially for the key conversations that those managing and leading this workforce will need to possess.

Before we give you principles and areas to be mindful of when tackling the tough stuff with remote staff, let's first look at the opportunities that exist now and into the future.

Find the best, don't choose from the rest

The war for talent just got a whole lot bigger. Rather than skirmishes within small local areas, the frontline battle is already taking place across countless countries because of the most spectacularly disruptive force of modern times: the internet.

With the revolution swamping workplaces like a veritable digital tsunami, the necessity to source people from your local area has become a yoke removed from many organisational recruitment and development strategies.

The concept of selecting the biggest and best goldfish from your small geographical pond is, in many cases, redundant; an ocean of talent has become available to the organisations that embrace a remote-based staffing mindset.

Even big, mature national and multinational businesses are forging a new path for team structures these days. In the past, teams were often built around the regularity of face-to-face contact, rather than best fit for the organisational strategy. As a consequence, teams were put together as ‘all rounders,' rather than as experts with specific complementary talents. Local teams had to resemble the basic offerings from the whole business, trying to be a one-stop shop at the risk of doing it poorly. This has changed considerably: many teams within large organisations are located across the globe, connecting and delivering specific outcomes in their deep expertise areas.

Whether you're a small business, fast-start company in pre-launch mode, or a mature organisation with thousands of employees, the availability of brilliant people has never been better.

Find flexibility or narrow your choices

Nestled alongside remote-based teams as a major workplace shift in recent years is the advent of flexible work practices. What used to be a groovy Silicon Valley trademark — ditch the 9-to-5 — has become practically a basic workplace right: tailored work hours, whether for the work-from-home parent; the overseas or interstate team member; or the high-talent, lifestyle-focused next-gen. Once again, such shifting workforce practices help broaden the talent pool as well as leverage the strengths of your existing staff.

The other growth in how we work is the pool of people who are located in a similar vicinity but who are out in the field much more, resulting in a loss of connection with the person whose desk may be only metres away. Because technology allows for regular ‘check-ins' at any time, anywhere, the face-to-face connections have been significantly reduced. While it's certainly a challenge to have both a remote-based team and also one that works incredibly varied work hours, it does give the opportunity for something quite special. Work can be done while you're sleeping!

This all bodes well when work is going great, but how do you address key issues with staff when it may be a week before you see them, or when the tyranny of distance makes it hard for you to bring it up?

Key challenges for leading a remote team

While opening the doors to a more global and connected workforce brings with it great opportunity, when it comes to having the tough conversations in remote teams there are key challenges. The only way to address these challenges is through understanding their impact and then setting up guiding principles for leading remote teams.

Absence of contact

The most obvious challenge facing cultures with remote team members is the decrease in opportunity for people to come together in person and simply spend time with each other. With a richness of verbal and non-verbal language present during direct contact, it still is, and always will be, the communication medium through which people build trust most quickly and form the deepest relationships.

No matter how advanced our technology becomes, it's difficult to envisage workplaces developing a platform that will provide authentic, informal human touch points that match those which happen at the water cooler or in the tea-room. While they could seem trivial at times, these non-transactional exchanges remain critical for group dynamics and function.

The smallest touch

In addition to the richness of language modalities, the virtual world has yet to replicate another crucial medium of connection: physical touch. Touch still matters for relationships. Sure, we can form relationships with people we've never met, but in rapid-change environments where challenges present themselves, sometimes like hailstorms, the closeness of your team's bonds will be the true shelter from any tempest. The fastest and deepest way we build these strong bonds? Through physical contact. A handshake here, a high-five there. The reassuring hand on someone's arm when they're struggling, or maybe even a hug when they need it the most. While we can set up expert teams in any area and in any time zone, we will miss something critically important in deeply connected relationships of any kind: the unspoken trust that develops from physical contact.

Later in this chapter we'll explore the neuroscience behind why deep connection is so important, and what you need to do on the very occasional times when you do actually spend time with others in the same space.

The relationship is what matters

With this zeitgeist of location and time independence sweeping every industry in every country, new challenges exist continually in task assignment, accountability and reporting. There is an array of software options (at the time of writing these include Asana, Trello, Basecamp and Slack) to provide structure and clarity of duties, yet few of these produce the number-one driver of discretionary effort for an employee: the quality of the relationship between an employee and their direct manager.

Take time to think about the managers you've worked for in the past — the person who took time to cultivate a relationship with you was most likely the manager for whom you did that bit extra. Conversely, most people have had the experience of working for a manager who wasn't emotionally invested. As a result, you may have hesitated investing the extra effort. Sure, you may have produced the occasional above-average effort, but your default was more likely to be middle-of-the-road, at best, and bare minimum, at worst.

Five guiding principles for communicating remotely

Without the richness of face-to-face social interaction in remote teams, the building of the critical manager–report relationship is more difficult, but certainly not beyond us. To ensure we create a trusted, inspiring and productive relationship, there are some key principles we need to follow when using remote communications.

Do the extras on personal connection

The first principle is about over-empathising; that is, doing more than you think is necessary to get into the other person's world. Get into their shoes, show care and interest and connect with their experience. Understand their position for your work objectives and also get interested in the person with whom you are connecting, not just the worker. With remote communication, it's more important than ever to put effort into authentic personal connection, yet it's easier than ever to avoid it completely. When you don't have to walk past someone in the hall or the lunch room and aren't required to engage in day-to-day social graces, it's easy to become lazy about personal effort. Maybe you plan to be more personable, but pressure is on and time is tight, so you postpone your personal connection efforts to a chat when you'll have more time. Don't put off the personal stuff! In fact, it's even more important to overload the personal in the early days of remote communication; building a strong foundation of rapport will serve you well for those future moments when you only have time for a brief transactional chat. Furthermore, choose the most personal medium you can: go for a video chat rather than the phone, or send a detailed email rather than a cryptic text.

Keep it real

The second principle — virtual reality — means trying to get something as close to the real thing as possible. It can be easy to treat remote conversations differently from other conversations. They're not as ‘real' so we may let a few things slide. Just because there's an ocean or an ethernet cable between you and the person at the other end of the line, doesn't mean you should drop the important bits of a face-to-face conversation. Undivided attention, respect, active listening, engagement: all of these are still crucial. But, with remote communication there's an increased opportunity for unchecked external distractions. So, you need to do the little things we normally do that facilitate good face-to-face interactions: turn off the phone, shut down the web browser (unless you're googling something relevant to the conversation), update Facebook later, turn off email and its notifications, and get present to the person in front of you! If you're the person who is remote and at home, have a shower and put on a work shirt — no hanging out in your PJs (even if it's not a video conference). You'll feel sharper and communicate more professionally. If it's a formal conversation or meeting, set up an agenda and stick to time frames.

Continually monitor and navigate bias

The third guiding principle for communicating remotely involves avoiding bias. One of the biggest challenges with remote communication is that, with a greater absence of typical communication cues such as body language, facial expressions (including emotional micro-expressions), tone, projection, emphases and spatial orientation of body position, we have a lot of blank space around words, obscuring the communicator's intention, meaning and emotional state (see figure 5.1). This blank space increases significantly as we go to less personal and briefer forms of communication such as email and texting. Without sufficient cues, receivers of the communication will fill in the blank space, interpreting the message through a biased lens based on their own emotional states, intentions and meaning, potentially creating significantly altered messaging and unnecessary tough stuff. When you're delivering the communication, be careful not to assume that your intention, meaning and emotional tone are clear; similarly to the personal stuff, err on the side of providing extra clarity. If you're receiving the communication, constantly challenge yourself to see beyond your lens of interpretation, and seek clarity and reassurance of the communicator's intention, meaning and emotions.

Use your tough-stuff skills

The fourth principle is to keep practising the tough-stuff skills outlined in the other chapters of this book, and make sure there's effective training and development on these crucial human skills for all involved. Bring all of your tough-stuff skills into the conversation. Find innovative ways to deliver a remote tough-stuff conversation using Michael Grinder's three-point communication (for example, have them draw a model that you talk through, or email them a document you can discuss over the phone). Make sure your emails are written in ‘behaviour-versus-trait' language, and practise exploring the antecedents from the ABC model, even in a texting exchange.

Leverage technology BIG TIME!

The final principle entails using the best technology possible to deliver on principles one to four wherever you can: to facilitate personal connection, simulate real face-to-face conversations, navigate interpretation biases and implement the tough-stuff skills. However, be wary of both user and technology limitations — it's no good using the latest virtual-reality video conferencing technology if it takes 30 minutes of your meeting time to set up and connect, or if poor bandwidth at one end creates long pauses and dropouts. Sometimes the good old landline connection serves you best!

Get to know which platforms perform best for your circumstances; for example, maybe it's Skype for one-on-ones, Google Hangouts for informal group conversations or the group discussion forum on Basecamp for remote group problem solving. And, where you can, look to leverage the digital versions of analogue communication mediums, as you would in any face-to-face meeting. For example, if you like to create visuals and draw models in a meeting using a whiteboard, then get a digital whiteboard or sketch pad (and learn how to use it well before you bring it to the online conversation!). If you like to move around the room when you talk, make sure your video camera has a wide-enough angle lens, and ensure you stay in frame in order to capture the rich body language that comes with your movement. Invest in a high-quality microphone and headset to deliver the best audio possible. And, wherever you can, upskill on user technology capability — both your own and your team's. (Ever been frustrated trying to troubleshoot a tech glitch on social media with Mum? Upskilling is worth the investment!)

If you embed these guidelines into your general approach to the remote stuff, you'll be far ahead of the game.

The process

If you want to go one step further into the detail of how to go about any single remote conversation, we know it helps to have a method for the madness, so we've created a blow-by-blow process to follow for delivering your next remote tough-stuff conversation: prepare, engage, frame, focus, explore, conclude and plan.

Prepare: be ready in advance

It ain't rocket science (and we would say the same thing for the face-to-face tough-stuff conversations), but good preparation sets you up for success. We know it can be easy to treat remote conversations with less care, particularly the non-video kind, because of the decreased accountability that comes with decreased visibility. However, what are you in your role for? To get stuff done or to get away with not doing stuff? It's tough to speak off the cuff for the tough stuff — script it out to get it out! If it's complex, create an outline, agenda, objectives and resolutions, all within a time frame. If it feels awkward, practise delivering to a mirror until it comes out smoothly: you may be surprised at how good a communicator you can be when you prepare well!

Engage: rapport first

Following the first principle on pages 77–78 for communicating remotely, make sure you emphasise the personal stuff right up front. Time pressures may drive you to dispense with the rapport stuff and go straight to the detailed content, but if you haven't captured your audience, you're wasting your time anyway. It's better to have a person leaning forward, buying in and integrating one important piece of feedback than a person resisting 10 pieces of what you deem to be important information. Build rapport at every opportunity — it's always a step in the right direction.

Frame: set the scene with context and purpose

If you want to capture your audience, give them direction at the outset. Make sure people know what you're going to talk about and why before you get too far into it. Get alignment and buy-in early on rather than dealing with irrelevant tangents down the track.

Focus: get to the point

Once you've connected personally and framed the conversation, get right into the concise feedback. Nail your core take-homes early in the conversation and keep it simple. If you have 10 points of feedback to give them, just deliver the top three today (you'll get to the other seven in good time).

Explore: get input on others' perspectives

Give people time and your attention to provide their side of the story. Make it safe by creating an environment of non-judgemental observation. Explicitly state you're not there to judge what they have to say, only to understand so you can problem-solve with them more effectively.

Conclude: close the loop — resolve issues and answer questions

When you have time and space between important conversations, which you do with a remote team member, you don't want to leave crucial issues unresolved until the next scheduled touch point. This can leave them vulnerable to festering, creating unnecessary resentment and conflict (it's like the saying, ‘the secret to a happy marriage is not to go to bed angry'). Make sure you and your staff member have addressed the key questions and created a resolution to or an action plan for the pressing issues before you finish the conversation.

Plan: commit to connection — schedule the next meeting before you hang up

We know that a lack of presence decreases accountability, and the moment you hang up it's ‘out of sight, out of mind', so it's crucial to keep remote communication frequent, regular and responsive (particularly if there are any unresolved issues). The easiest way to do that is to end each remote chat with a confirmed date for connecting again, particularly if there are ongoing issues to resolve (they aren't just going to go away because the person is far away).

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When it gets tough, don't fall into the trap of taking the easy option. If it's a tough conversation, look for your best option.

By following these guidelines and this process you'll not only avoid some of the biggest mistakes managers make when leading teams that aren't co-located, but you'll ensure you follow a process that works.

It's more than a transaction

While principles help to guide us, sometimes numbers can help us to balance our connections to ensure we're getting optimal leverage.

What's your ratio?

Each day we have numerous interactions with our colleagues, our team, our staff and our customers. Thinking about the types of interactions that you have with each of these groups, it's worth considering what your ratio is between positive and negative interactions. How many times do you give a positive comment as opposed to a negative comment?

Far too often when we're separated by distance we default to transactional communication: When I want something, I ring. When you need something, you text. We're both busy, so let's not waste each other's time with meaningless ‘chit-chat' next time we're on Skype. Oh, and the teleconference … let's stick to an incredibly tight agenda …' And all of that, as well meaning as it seems, can be a problem.

While transactional communication also happens in both the remote and co-located office environments, the chance of sociable communication occurring — asking how each other's day is, checking in on wellbeing, having a laugh together — is much more likely in an office environment. And while it seems trivial, this unintended sociability is an important factor for engendering trust and building functional relationships.

Transactional relationships in typical workplaces are more likely to favour critique — not necessarily belittlement or condescension, but constructive feedback for improved effort. Nonetheless, no matter how well intended the critique is, it's still not reinforcement or reward, creating an unfavourable imbalance on the negative.

In 2005, psychologist Marcial Losada uncovered an important ratio that provides us with some interesting reflection. Studying a range of relationship dynamics, Losada discovered a minimal ratio of approximately 3:1 exists between the positive and negative human interactions required for relationships to flourish.

In easy–speak, that means if in your relationship you're having fewer than three positive exchanges (such as reinforcement or praise) for every negative exchange (such as critique), you're on the pathway to dysfunction.

According to Losada, while 2.9013 is the minimal ratio required to lift teams and relationships above dysfunction, dysfunction also occurs when the ratio of positive to negative exceeds 11:1. In other words, when there is too much honey, people drown in it! It's not simply the absence of reinforcement that can harm a relationship's function, it's also the absence of critique. Having the right balance is essential.

The optimal ratio used by high-performing teams sits between 5:1 and 6:1, wherein the majority of communication is positive in its delivery. Nevertheless, communication in high-performing teams still drives accountability and provides the necessary critical feedback.

Like all populist social theories, Losada's work has and will be challenged, particularly around the validity of optimal ratios of positive to negative communication. However, at face value his model remains extremely useful for the manager leading remote employees.

So before you read on, we want you to consider the following question. Where is your ratio currently sitting? Better still, if you have a pen and paper, follow these two steps:

• Write down the names of all your direct reports.
• Give an approximate positive–negative feedback ratio for each person.

Invariably, you'll find the ratios are lower for direct reports with whom you are experiencing conflict. It's imperative to create positive exchanges with your tough customers in order to reverse such relationships from descending into chronic dysfunction, which is extremely difficult to undo.

With staff that aren't co-located, you may also see the ratios trending towards the skinny side. Make the effort to create a few more social exchanges rather than just the transactional connections, and look for wins you can celebrate virtually, today, rather than waiting for the quarterly team get-together!

Shared experiences and cultural rituals

Along with ensuring you have achieved a balanced ratio of communication with each individual (using Losada's model as a guide), another key focus area of successful teams who have great cultures is investing time in both shared experiences and key rituals.

Share the space, no matter how rarely

Our experience at Pragmatic Thinking and that of a range of our clients who have remote staff and high-functioning cultures is that they religiously follow a key strategy: they invest heavily in creating awesome shared experiences when they do get together face to face.

Sure, they may only come together as a team on very rare occasions, but when they do, they maximise the time and opportunity to connect deeply as human beings rather than just discussing job descriptions or delving into strategy. The legacy of these connections carries on and strengthens relationships at a distance. Neuroscience is starting to really understand the power of these important connections.

Systems and neural complexity specialist Dr Fiona Kerr states that we are hard-wired to connect. Our brains are constantly forming new neural pathways through a process known as neurogenesis. When we come together we literally change each other's brains by creating and stimulating neural pathways. One of the ways this happens is through what Dr Kerr calls ‘retinal eye-lock': when we look someone in the eye our retinas actually lock on and both parties map very similar neural pathways in their brains. This is the basis for why we experience a greater sense of connection and empathy when we have the chance to truly sit down and connect with someone. This neurological connection increases our ability to collaborate.

One of the strategies that Dr Kerr suggests for increasing a sense of collaboration among a team — something that's a heightened need for teams that work in remote locations — is to provide opportunities for individuals to work together on a creative or challenging situation.

This research provides an alternative to simply getting your team together for purely social interaction. While the dinner and the round of tennis together are fun, one of the greatest ways that you can maximise your time together as a team and elevate collaboration is to provide shared experiences that encourage creative thinking, that tackle the big-picture issues within the team and that ask team members to work together on ideas.

Interestingly, Dr Kerr's research found that, if people's brains were scanned while they are collaborating on something that's highly stimulating, there would be a part of their neural pathways that would be mapped. These maps would match the people with whom they are collaborating. So get people on the same page by maximising the time they have together, have them work collaboratively and the strong connections that will be built will carry over to their interactions when they go back to working in remote locations. It's in this that way that we leverage and extend the value of our time together.

This ability to impact someone else's neural pathways through connection is also evident in our ability to impact heightened emotions and calm the other person down. If there's a sensitive issue or an important discussion that needs to be had, try to have this conversation face to face, either in the same location or via Skype.

If you have remotely located team members, do you take time to make the times you come together special ones? It's so important to move past transactional exchange and get to know and trust each other on a deeper level.

Rituals bind behaviour

Along with investing effort into creating wonderful shared experiences, another area for forming culture and helping to navigate the tough stuff is creating regular rituals that all staff take part in. Being in a different space doesn't mean they can't deeply immerse themselves in the collective spirit of ‘what we do around here'. In fact, if you don't make this effort to include remote-located staff into shared rituals, you will undoubtedly create a divide that will lead to many more tough conversations down the track.

Conclusion

There's little doubt managing remotely located team members is an advanced challenge worthy of your skills, especially if you're used to having all your team under the same roof. Moreover, addressing the tough conversation with someone via technology is a different beast from tackling it face to face. But it certainly isn't unachievable. Spend time building a solid culture and making sure you include all team members, not just the ones in the central office. This will reduce conflict and make the pathway much easier when it does occur. You've been blessed to lead teams of talented people from around the country or even the world. Don't squander that talent by not following the principles, ratios and suggestions outlined in this chapter. Your team deserves better, but more importantly, you deserve better.