article | mobility

How to empower your team from a distance?

Mark Bouris

I’ll be totally honest. I used to think that when someone asked me if they could "work from home", it was like they were trying to pull one over on me.

Needless to say, I’ve been proven wrong. When I had to send all my employees home earlier this year, to my surprise, productivity improved.

If you told me a year ago that I would now be advocating for my employees to work remotely I would have said you’re crazy, but here we are.

There is a lot of advantages to it all; no more commuting, more time with family and friends, the feeling of being trusted. However, distance does bring some downsides. For starters, you lose a bit of that "tribal knowledge", it can be difficult to ask a question and solve a simple problem, and for new solutions to quickly spread amongst your whole team.

Being able to function effectively while working remotely is so dependent on the right technology.

So how do you overcome these challenges and empower your team? Well it’s quite simple.

It’s about trust. Trust in your people and trust in your technology.

New research by Lenovo and YouGov shows that Australian office workers have spent $2.3bn of their own money in the last three months to ensure they have the technology they need to work from home. Two in three admit that they’ve used their personal devices for work purposes simply because it was more convenient or because their work device wasn’t up to par.

Not to mention the compromised security that accompanies the use of personal devices, and the fact it can create further barriers to communication amongst your team, when your team has to spend their own money on essential technology to do their job, you’re simply not providing them what they need. In my business we had everyone on desktops in the office, and we had to go out and get them the laptops they needed to work from home.

Your employees still need access to IT assistance and support, with Lenovo’s research revealing that 70% of workers still prefer access to their company helpdesk over the use of the internet. When we got everyone their new laptops, we also had to get them the software they needed. Now you can’t drop new tools on people and get them operating straight away, so we had to spend the time to educate them, as well as making sure that help was a moment away, 24/7. This is where Lenovo Managed Services come in – they offer solutions to help businesses, especially SMBs, who have had to recently adapt and adopt to new working arrangements. Options like Lenovo Managed Services provide a solution that removes the heavy lifting and takes care of time-consuming IT tasks and assist with employee tech concerns.

To empower your team from a distance, you need to equip them with the fundamental tools of the trade, and tools that they can trust. Equip them with the resources, support, and education they need to actually use these tools. Then, you need to equip them with a structure to apply these tools to.

Once the right tools are in place and your team has the knowledge they need, you’ve got to nail a structure. This will give your team clarity and direction. My group leaders meet every morning to set the day’s agenda, before quickly meeting with their individual teams shortly after. This structure points everyone where to go & ensures we constantly reviewing and improving.

The last element in empowering your team is staying in contact with them, by showing them that you care. Since the shift to remote work, I’ve been calling a different member of my team everyday to ask them how they are, to see what they’re up to, to find out what’s worrying them. You can’t truly empower your team if you don’t know what’s going on, so you’ve got to actually empower yourself by keeping your finger on the pulse.

When your team feels that you’re invested in what they’re doing, that you care, that you’re checking in with them, then they’ll help you move mountains.

¹ Lenovo Remote Work Survey