Leading a remote team

• Setting the vision – how to communicate the team vision and keep employees focused on it in their work efforts.
• Creating expectations – how to clearly communicate and set performance and team expectations to ensure employees move toward common objectives correctly.
• Communicating WIIFMs – drive employees toward goals by communicating the benefits to them “what’s in it for me.”

Communication

• Quantity and quality – increased communication needed with remote employees
• Communication vehicles – the different ways to communicate with a distributed workforce and when and how to use them
• Picking the appropriate option for different situations
• How and when to have team meetings
• Accessibility – establishing your credibility through commitments, guidance, and owning decisions

Micro-Monitoring vs. Micro-Managing

• Creating and using tools to enable employees to manage themselves and track their own performance
• Increasing responsibility to decrease management time
• Setting goals – how to engage employees in their own development
• Managing to expectations
• Monitoring tools
• What can be monitored & how to monitor
• What can be managed & how to manage

Development of remote employees

• Training – methods for training remote employees, when to use each
• Skill vs. talent training
• On-going mentoring – development as a continuous process
• Reactionary vs. proactive
• Socratic coaching
• How to give good feedback
• Performance reviews and feedback – frequency, how to conduct and communicate, evaluating team
• Identifying skills vs talent performance

Motivating remote employees

• Creating leaders and building ownership
• Empowering employees – enabling employees by giving them decision opportunities.
• Turning work into play
• Ways to reward a virtual team
• No vs. low vs. high cost options
• Public vs. private reward systems

Disciplining remote employees

• Action plans
• Key items to include
• How to deliver
• How to monitor
• Handling conflicts between remote team members

Hiring remote employees

• Ideal traits of the remote employee
• Using the remote employee skill assessment

Implementing remote management skills

• Creating action plans, getting immediate results.