Nearly every week, I read about more companies issuing return-to-office mandates. Yet, remote workers want to stay home. Recruiters find lucrative hunting grounds from organizations that have announced RTO mandates. Remote workers are more productive and engaged than in the office, aligning with my antidotal experience. Remote work is also more cost-effective for the organization and helps employee recruiting and retention. Thus, RTO mandates seem to counter what is preferable both for the employee and the organization. So why are companies shooting themselves in the foot by hurting employee job satisfaction, risking employee retention, and intentionally tanking their employees’ productivity? Something else is driving the mandates.

I believe that something else is managers and executives don’t trust their employees and don’t know how to manage remote staff effectively. The trust issue is a company culture problem and was probably an issue before more employees started working from home. Fortunately, successfully managing remote employees isn’t radically different than managing in-person employees. Doing it well can also help build trust between employees and management.

Here are a few tips to help bridge the gap between managing in-person employees and managing in fully-remote or hybrid environments.

Create a Productive Remote Environment

Any employee working from a kitchen table on a small laptop screen will struggle to be productive. A remote worker needs a good setup to be effective. For equipment, at a minimum, this usually means a powerful laptop, docking station, one or two external monitors, a webcam, high-speed internet, and some good lighting. They need a comfy chair and a sufficiently large desk for their working space. If your company is not providing all of these things to their remote employees, add some pressure on them to do so.

Also, consider how they go about doing their work day-to-day. Allow as much work as possible without requiring the office VPN. With so many cloud services available, connecting to the office network via VPN all day should essentially be a thing of the past. Avoiding VPN will make your employees more efficient and prevent extensive downtimes for the entire company when an IT problem inevitably strikes.

Meetings

The most efficient meeting is the one that never happens. Most meetings are a waste of time. Instead, push for more asynchronous information sharing where not everyone has to be present simultaneously. Encourage status updates to managers to be posted to Slack or Teams channels, with follow-up conversations if necessary. For company-wide information dissemination, create a presentation or video, share the link, ask for feedback, and hold a short follow-up live AMA if necessary.

When meetings are necessary, keep them optional and short with asynchronous follow-up. You should also record the session for anyone unable to attend. Be especially cognizant of remote employees in hybrid meetings. Consider your acoustics and the need for a microphone separate from the webcam. Also, try to keep the side chatter to a minimum. In the room, no one notices, but the extra voices make it nearly impossible for remote employees to comprehend anything.

I’ve attended meetings where it was about ½ remote employees and ½ in person. The main presenter spent the entire presentation with their back to the camera and mic, blocking about 40% of the screen and only addressing the people in the room. This is not a good experience for the remote employees. Instead, everyone should have a camera and join the meeting “virtually,” even from the main room. This allows better engagement for remote employees. Also, consider moving the main presenter to a location by themselves to reduce distractions further.

Collaboration

Collaboration looks similar to a meeting from the outside but is quite the opposite. The primary difference is that a meeting is for information sharing, usually one way, but collaboration requires a team to solve a problem through the participation of all. Collaborations are highly productive and rarely a waste of time. Because of its nature, collaboration is challenging to accomplish asynchronously, though not impossible for the correct team dynamics and problem set.

Instead, the main focus for remote collaboration should be to improve the process to be better than in person. When working in the office meeting room, you can brainstorm while one person writes on the whiteboard, and everyone leaves with plans. However, that time in the room is temporary. All you are left with is some grainy photos of your whiteboard and the notes you took. Your whiteboard has been wiped clean by the next group that came in. If you meet again, you are nearly starting from scratch.

With the right virtual collaboration tools, your meeting loses its ephemeral nature. Suddenly, everyone can update the whiteboard all at once. The whiteboard can persist after the meeting. The text can be typed and readable. The whiteboard can be shared. You can pause and resume your collaboration. If you have a late-night epiphany, you can make refinements. Everything works better.

Choose the collaboration tools you need for your company and as many of them as you need.

Set Expectations

Setting clear and reasonable expectations has always been a requirement of good management. However, with remote workers, it has become paramount. Clearly outline priorities, timelines, goals, etc., just as you would for an in-person employee. However, also be sure to establish the expectations for availability for your remote employees while leaving as much room for flexibility as possible. Also, be sure to communicate how often they should be checking in. Then let the employee choose how to meet your expectations.

Track Progress

Stop worrying about how much “fingers on keyboard” time your employees are having. Instead, focus on whether they are producing according to your expectations. You are in good shape if they meet your expectations and your projects succeed. If your employees aren’t meeting reasonable expectations, you need to do some coaching. If they meet your expectations, but your projects are unsuccessful, the problem is your expectations or planning, not your employee.

When tracking progress, encourage your employees to include details about activities unrelated to their projects. Maybe, someone from another team called to get some assistance. In the office, you are likely to see that interaction. Remotely, you’ll never know and, worse, wonder why they aren’t getting as much done as you expected. You need to know about all of these activities so that your employee can be appropriately acknowledged for the totality of their work and expertise, not just those to get a specific project done.

Encourage Them to Step Away

When working in an office, everyone starts to pack up, the office empties, and there is a natural inclination to head home. As a remote worker, however, those cues to wrap up and stop working are less pronounced. Not being able to step away is one of the most significant problems remote workers report. It is also easy to think about that project you’ve been working on and decide to knock out a little more later in the evening.

Sometimes the extra effort to complete a project will be necessary, which is OK. However, as managers of remote workers, we must discourage this type of behavior if it is a regular occurrence. Our employees should be encouraged to pursue other activities to maintain that strong work/life balance. The best way to help employees do this is by demonstrating it through your actions. Stop addressing unimportant items very early in the morning. Stop the late-night emails. Set an example to your employees about avoiding burnout by routinely working a reasonable number of hours and taking all your PTO throughout the year.

Acknowledge Remote Workers

It can be easy to overlook all your remote employees do when you don’t see them in action. However, you must ensure remote employees receive all the credit, recognition, advancement, and perks they’ve earned. This is the biggest issue in hybrid environments where it is easy to see what the in-person employees are doing, but you have less insight into what remote employees are doing. If you are tracking the progress of all of your employees equally, you should be able to avoid this problem.

Also, avoid excluding employees from the routine in-office perks. For instance, if you regularly cater lunch or have Friday afternoon drinks, ensure remote employees get something regularly as well. Instead of lunch, consider a coffee subscription box. Since they can’t access the foosball table, consider an occasional gift card to their local movie theatre. Since you are not trying to do one big group event, you can tailor the perks to the employee. This can skyrocket employee satisfaction.

Celebrate

Reaching significant milestones requires significant celebrations. Here are some tips and ideas to get you started organizing your virtual celebration. Remember, however, these should feel like fun optional events, not required work meetings.