Why is empathy important when managing remote teams?
Empathy is essential to running an effective remote team because understanding employees means you can anticipate challenges and solve them, keep the team on track, and most importantly, create a sense of belonging. familiar feeling. When employees feel heard and their difficulties are met with empathy, they are more enthusiastic and motivated to complete the task.
Here are simple actions you can take today to effectively manage your remote team with empathy and understanding.
“More and more we are seeing that empathy must be enhanced and practiced as a core value, which improves productivity, generates more innovation and profits.”
Realize the challenges
With the speed with which employees must adapt to remote working conditions, managers may find that some employees may experience a decline in performance or productivity at first. Common challenges employees face while working remotely include:
- Feelings of lack of communication and support from managers
- Difficulty accessing information
Feeling isolated and having trouble eliminating distractions at home while working.
Being aware of these challenges can help you be better prepared and successfully manage your remote team more effectively.
Communicate Regularly
Whether you decide to make individual calls or in groups, making sure to communicate with employees every day is important. Not only does it help ensure that everyone is on task and aware of the work that needs to be done, but it also gives you the opportunity to check in on what employees are doing and facing the situation.
Try to use video calling if possible. Video calling will allow your employees to feel more connected and also allow nonverbal signals to be communicated.
Pay attention to the signals in the call
Video calls are a very useful tool when managing teams remotely. While it's not easy to understand each other through screens, it's one of the ways we can connect when working remotely.
Managers can use this as a channel to decipher employees' emotional states and communication processes. Take a moment and analyze what is hidden behind the calls. Don't jump to conclusions, but instead look to recognize the challenges employees are facing.
If you notice someone is getting distracted, not participating, or doing something else instead, take action and dig deeper. Continue talking to them more, find out what happened, and ask for their attention. This is the best way to build trust and build positive outcomes for the team.
Be safe when asking for help
Asking for help is a way to learn new things and can save time. However, many employees will be afraid to ask for help because they are afraid of receiving negative reviews. That's why you need to make remote workers feel safe asking for help by actively helping or asking someone else to help.
When you show that you're willing to let go of your narcissism and fear of being underestimated for help, employees will feel safe doing the same.
Bringing useful things
Thinking critically and proactively about what might be helpful to everyone on the team shows that you care about them and look for things that benefit them. These helpful things can be done for individuals or for entire groups, based on what you have learned from listening.
Examples of help you can provide include:
- Provide work time flexibility to ensure that everyone can be fully focused.
- Share what you've used effectively or resources that you found helpful.
- Encourage people to set boundaries between work and personal time…
Acknowledgment of efforts
Remote workers can feel undervalued, so you need to step up your recognition efforts to ensure that everyone feels that their work is appreciated. Appreciating employees doesn't have to be expensive, just announcing in meetings or taking notes in group emails.
If you find it hard to tell when employees are hitting the mark because you don't see them in the workplace, you can run some simple surveys to get people to nominate a colleague or some new technique. to measure results to make sure no one is left out.
Businesses need to have empathy for their customers to provide them with the best product or service. Similarly, managers also need empathy for their employees to manage teams, provide them with an effective working environment and leadership. If you do this, they will also be good to you and will be an effective "arm" to support you to success.
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