Leading When Your Team Works Remotely
Almost half of employed Australians now work from home at least some of the time. For many leaders, managing a team across different locations is no longer unusual. It is simply part of how we lead today.
That shift does change the way we need to lead. When people are not always in the same place, we cannot rely on walking past someone’s desk, having a quick conversation or assuming everyone heard what was discussed in the office.
But there is something useful about that.
Remote work has a way of exposing unclear leadership.
If expectations are vague, communication is inconsistent or important decisions only exist in someone’s memory, those weaknesses become much more obvious when people are not all sitting in the same room.
That can be uncomfortable, but it can also be a good thing. It forces us as leaders to become clearer and more deliberate about how work gets done.
Here are some practices that can help you.
Create clarity before the work starts
A lot of rework can be avoided by getting clear on the outcome before the work starts.
If someone does not understand what you are trying to achieve, who owns the next step or what a good result looks like, working remotely will make that gap harder to fix casually.
Before handing something over, make sure the person understands:
- what needs to be achieved
- why it matters
- who owns the next step
- when it is needed
- where progress or decisions should be recorded
It takes a little more time at the beginning, but often saves much more time later.
Record decisions where people can find them
A conversation is useful. A conversation that affects other people’s work needs a record.
This is particularly important in hybrid teams, where some people may have been in the room and others were not.
Recording important decisions means people do not have to rely on memory, ask around to find out what happened, or discover later that two people walked away with completely different understandings.
It also creates a much more useful history of why decisions were made.
Make progress visible
When people are working remotely, leaders cannot rely on seeing someone at their desk as reassurance that work is happening.
That is not necessarily a disadvantage.
It encourages us to be clearer about what progress actually looks like.
Agree on the outcome, the timeframe and how progress will be visible. That might be through your project management system, CRM, regular updates or another shared process.
When the work is visible, there is less need to constantly check whether someone is working.
Protect focused work
One of the quieter benefits of remote work is that it can reduce the number of casual interruptions people experience during the day.
The “quick question” beside someone’s desk may only take two minutes to answer, but it can break a much longer period of concentration.
Remote communication adds just enough friction for people to sometimes stop and think: Can I find this myself? Does this need an answer now? Can I put everything into one message?
Leaders can encourage the same habit whether people are working remotely or sitting in the office.
Use flexibility as an advantage
For employees, hybrid work can mean less time and money spent commuting, more flexibility and an easier way to manage responsibilities outside work.
That can be particularly valuable for people caring for children or elderly parents, where being closer to home can make unexpected situations much easier to manage.
For leaders, the advantage is not simply that employees like flexibility. It can help create a working environment that good people want to stay in.
Flexibility and accountability are not opposites. People can have both.
Bring the good habits back into the office
One of the things we have noticed in our own workplace is that remote working habits tend to follow people back into the office.
People still use the same systems. More information is written down. Decisions are easier to find. There is less reliance on someone remembering what was said in a conversation three days earlier.
Those habits benefit everyone, including people who rarely work from home.
In that sense, some of the best practices we develop for remote teams are not really remote-working practices at all.
They are simply good ways of working.
Good remote leadership is good leadership
Leading remotely does require more intention.
It forces us to think about whether our expectations are actually clear, whether people have the information they need and whether our systems support the way we expect people to work.
It can also expose poor leadership habits that are easier to hide when everyone is physically together.
But if that pushes us to communicate more clearly, document decisions, make work visible and focus on outcomes rather than presence, that is a positive.
Remote work may make some parts of leadership harder.
It can also make us better at it.