How to Thrive in the Virtual Workplace by Robert Glazer

Author:Robert Glazer [Glazer, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Leadership, General, Business Etiquette, Business & Economics, Management
ISBN: 9781760984960
Google: ZJ0eEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK
Published: 2021-02-23T23:32:35.977989+00:00

5

Setting Your Team Up for Success

Many successful companies with a distributed workforce share similar characteristics. They’re often nimble and entrepreneurial and embrace remote work as an effective, efficient way to access a broader talent pool while reducing overhead costs.

Leadership teams within larger organizations that tend to have long-established in-office cultures are perhaps the most skeptical of remote work. They assume the model could never work for businesses of their scale, processes, or workforce size.

Once a member of this school of thought, Vel Dhinagaravel completely changed his viewpoint when COVID-19 forced him to make his entire company remote.

Dhinagaravel is the founder and CEO of Beroe Inc., a procurement intelligence firm with five hundred employees in the United States and India. Between 2015 and early 2020, only twenty-five employees worked virtually. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, Beroe made the decision to send the entire five-hundred-person team home to work remotely.

Like many company leaders at that time, Dhinagaravel was initially concerned that remote work couldn’t work for Beroe. He was concerned that communications would break down without an office holding the team together and that productivity would dip.

Despite the abrupt transition to a fully virtual workplace, what’s surprised Dhinagaravel is the increases in Beroe’s productivity, employee retention, and engagement since the shift. Employees are getting more done, communicating effectively, and, in most cases, improving their work-life integration.

One key reason for this is that the company has been aggressively rethinking and updating its operational playbook to adapt to a virtual environment.

Dhinagaravel and his team trained managers to proactively communicate and check in with their employees, including holding daily video conferences with their teams and biweekly one-on-one calls with their direct reports. Their HR team began calling every single employee once every two weeks to ensure they felt supported and connected. Beroe also invested in multiple digital tools for employees to easily communicate with one another and with leadership.

Having seen firsthand how effective remote work could be for his entire organization, Dhinagaravel now anticipates 30 to 40 percent of Beroe employees will continue working from home permanently. His company has demonstrated that leaders’ concerns about taking their companies virtual can often be addressed and mitigated with thoughtful, proactive changes to their communication procedures, management tactics, and technological infrastructure.

The biggest mistake an organization can make with remote employees is leaving their workers to figure these things out for themselves, especially if they have never worked remotely before. Giving employees a list of best practices—such as the ones detailed in chapter 2—is helpful, but those things alone won’t necessarily lead to top-tier remote performance.

In this chapter, we’ll explore the specific systems, methodologies, tools, and techniques that make remote work more seamless for employees and more productive for organizations of all sizes.

Comprehensive Onboarding

When I started my first job at twenty-two, I had an experience that will be familiar to many employees. Neither HR nor my boss realized I was starting that day, so when I arrived, they didn’t have a computer ready for me, and the only direction I received was, “Just shadow Winnifer.

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