There’s been a lot of talk over the past few years of giving greater flexibility to employees through teleworking, remote offices and other initiatives. Justification for these programs have been driven from a range of motivations including financial benefits, employee morale and talent retention.
I recently met with a client who has a model when it comes to remote working – his entire leadership team is spread out over the country. I’ve seen this trend more often lately. For my client, the flexible working environment forces their leaders to work even more effectively, think more creatively about the business and has saved an enormous amount on relocation expenses.
The question is, how can you build collaboration when your entire leadership team is located in various offices/regions? The key is about over-communication. To ensure trust and adherence to executive level responsibilities, it’s absolutely critical that leaders communicate, communicate more and then communicate even more. This ensures that everyone is on the same page, understands roles, responsibilities and timelines, and builds an absolute bond between the executive team who often don’t talk to each other nearly enough when they’re in the same office building.
To facilitate this over-communication, organizations can turn to a wide range of technological conversation channels. Still the industry standard, email and phones can be primary communication tools, but now there are many vehicles that can be used to ensure that organizations and their leadership teams are communicating. Yesterday we didn’t have all of these tools, but today, we have vehicles such as: Slack for messaging, Google Hangout for video conferencing and Skype for one-on-one calls. In addition organizations can use Yammer for water cooler conversation, PB Works as an internal Wiki, and Wrike for structured conversation about projects.
Personally, I have not used all of these tools, but I encourage leadership teams everywhere to explore, expand their horizons and try out new methods and ways to communicate with their teams. Our workforce is changing, how we communicate and collaborate with each other and our staff is also changing.
Trying out new models and tools within the leadership of your organization offers the opportunity to reset expectations among your entire workforce. Be known as the over-communicators versus the under-communicators, you’ll be surprised by the possibilities and opportunities that might be unlocked.
