Building and managing a virtual support team

What is a virtual team?

‘Virtual’ commonly refers to working from home, though the term may also reference a ‘distributed’ team, meaning a team whose members are distributed across several locations.

What are the benefits of having a virtual team?

There are some true upsides to a virtual team, whether you’re building one from scratch, have inherited a team that’s already distributed or are moving a traditionally in-office team into the digisphere.

• More comprehensive and timely support for customers
  For support teams offering 24/7/365, tier-1 support, for example, it can be a boon to have someone actively working in the time zone that needs the relevant coverage. Of course, managers might need to schedule late-night or early-morning calls with remote employees around the globe, but the team will be less fatigued and will be able to perform at their peak when interacting with customers.
• Increased flexibility and quality of life
  Flexibility can go both ways. Allowing remote employees the flexibility to manage or make their own hours, or work out of hours, also means that you can have additional coverage. Removing a commute can sometimes add hours back into the day and may allow employees to tend to their families and lives, whether that’s picking up a child from school, eating dinner together as a family or visiting the gym. Many people welcome odd hours in exchange for flexibility.

What are the challenges of having a virtual team?

Just as they present opportunities, virtual teams also present some challenges.

• People feel lonely
  Some workers thrive in remote scenarios. Others live for the social hum of the office. And everyone feels lonely sometimes. Camaraderie and a sense of community are key elements of every healthy team. Managers can schedule additional team meetings over video conferencing, and encourage the team to talk to each other and ‘gather’ in collaborative tools. Human contact is part of your ecosystem. At the same time…
• People become distracted and struggle with time management
  Of course this happens in the office too, which is one reason why some people prefer working remotely. But washing up, gaming systems and doing the laundry are a whole different set of challenges. Twitter has long been raging over whether remote workers should get dressed as if they were going to the office or embrace working in their dressing gowns. But these are personal choices. What’s key is to separate work tasks from household or social tasks – and to communicate and encourage this with employees.
• Communication can become more challenging
  The inner keyboard warrior can roar to life when we’re alone too much. Rule of thumb for managers and everyone else: Assume good intentions. Assume that colleagues are doing their best, just as you are. Get onto a call or a video conference if email or Slack are getting tricky. Encourage employees to ask for guidance or even contact you just to vent. Have the team err on the side of checking in more often, to stay in touch and keep everyone in the loop. Even when employees feel a little isolated, the reality of a virtual team is that everyone’s in it together.

Radical trust and good communication are crucial between managers and employees who don’t see each other with any regularity. Encourage communication, engagement and self-sufficiency. Fostering these traits will help managers focus on creating an environment in which the team will not only function, but thrive.

Hiring and training a virtual support team

Setting up a virtual support team starts with hiring and onboarding. The good news is that support agents are often a good fit for remote work, as many tools are cloud based and require as little as a laptop and headphones. Agents also often do a lot of collaborating within tools and need focused work time. Just bear in mind that if you are transitioning from an in-office to a remote work model, your agents might need additional training to get them up to speed on processes, tools and best practice for remote teams. More on that below.

Hiring must-haves

While it might be daunting to imagine expanding your candidate pool to, well, pretty much anyone, many of the hiring practices are the same. The best candidates are still likely to be sourced via networking and recruiting, and hired through a series of phone screenings, virtual interviews and in-person meetings (if circumstances allow).

When evaluating candidates for a virtual support role, consider the following qualities that are likely to help someone thrive in a remote work environment:

• Must be a great self-manager

• Must be a good communicator – both in written and verbal skills

• Must proactively ask for help

• Must have integrity

• Must be able to work independently

• Must thrive under a low-touch, high-flexibility management style

• Must be happy without a regular, social environment in the workplace

These qualities aren’t always easy to identify, so take advantage of phone calls and video interviews during the hiring process to test how candidates perform in a virtual setting. For example, if there were any scheduling conflicts, did the candidate respond proactively with other times when they’d be available? Or, if they didn’t understand a question, did they probe for more information before answering? These are cues that can help you identify whether someone is suited to remote work.

When in doubt, don’t overthink it. Self-starters who can manage their time and balance competing priorities tend to make good employees, whether the position is on-site or remote.

The importance of onboarding and training

Regardless of location, every employee deserves to have thorough onboarding. To set remote workers up for success, you’ll need to provide the same resources that on-site employees receive, plus additional support to make them feel welcome and valued.

Ideally, you’ll have a digital repository of written or video onboarding resources, which could including things like:

• A high-level review of company culture and processes

• Introductions to teams and key stakeholders within the company

• An explanation of product/service offerings and positioning

• In-depth training specific to their department and role

• Hardware and software tools (including appropriate training in how to use them)

Onboarding new employees in person can be beneficial, but isn’t always practical. When onboarding and training employees virtually, encourage the use of tools that allow screen sharing, and encourage video conferencing whenever possible. Seeing people’s faces helps to establish personal connections, which is critical in the absence of the natural ‘water cooler’ moments that you’d have in a shared physical space. The same is true for employees who are transitioning to a remote environment – give them the tools and training they need to still feel connected to the group. Ideally, implement a centralised knowledge base that everyone can access and add to.

Whether someone is new or simply new to working remotely, they’re likely to have a lot of questions. Implementing a virtual ‘open door’ policy can help them feel comfortable with asking for help. Let your employees know that everyone should feel empowered to make contact via email, phone, video or your company’s messaging platform (Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc.) if they have any questions. Communication should happen early, often and without hesitation. Just note that where there are multiple tools and communication mechanisms in place, employees should know where to look first for any urgent communications.

Tips for managing a virtual team

Maintaining a sense of accountability across the board

Working from home requires employees to manage their own time, be self-motivated, disciplined and organised. This can be a change for some who are used to a more regimented schedule with lots of face-to-face interaction. Asynchronous communication will now serve as the primary way of communicating, and this can be a difficult transition, especially for managers. Simply put, this means not expecting your employees to answer immediately. Focus on the work deliverables as a performance measure.

Some specific strategies include:

• Setting specific boundaries on working hours by establishing a set meeting cadence, such as a daily morning stand-up meetings or a checkpoint at the end of the day.

• Determining who will be responsible for maintaining tools and what the policy is if something goes down while the person who ‘owns’ the tool is offline.

• What does the support schedule look like? With a virtual/distributed team, do you need an on-call schedule?

Enhancing productivity

It can be easy to assume that virtual teams will struggle with productivity – without a manager looking over their shoulders, won’t employees be distracted by the Internet, video games and the temptation to take a long afternoon nap? While some team members might succumb to these distractions, most will want to stay focused. And with some forethought, managers can help their virtual teams do just that.

Adopt a scrum-style daily stand-up meeting: This is a short video call in which each employee states what they are working on, pain points and so on. Besides giving managers an idea of what everyone is working on, the meeting itself can instil a sense of accountability, since tomorrow’s meeting will cover whether or not today’s tasks were completed. Meanwhile, make sure that you establish one-to-one meetings so that you can deep dive into what each worker has on their plate. This will also serve as an opportunity to discuss more sensitive topics and carry out some training.

Set boundaries: This is vital. Virtual teams often face after-hours emails and calls when they should be off the clock. This is a life/work-balance issue that, if ignored, will lead to burnout and lower productivity. Also, take a look at how many meetings remote workers have to attend – just as with their on-site colleagues, unnecessary meetings can sap productivity.

However, it’s important for remote employees to understand that it’s their responsibility to stay engaged and productive. Being self-motivated, disciplined and organised comes from within, and good practices can help employees keep distractions at bay. This can include taking breaks at specified times, setting up a work area away from things like TVs and even dressing as if you were going into a physical office.

If your team has recently transitioned from on-site to virtual work, don’t panic when your reporting tools indicate that productivity has dipped. This is normal as teams adjust to the new work environment – but keep an eye on the analytics to see whether productivity returns to previous levels or if the decline continues.

Encouraging collaboration

Collaboration is ubiquitous to any healthy work environment, but it can be tough to collaborate remotely. The chances are that virtual team members may never meet, and even if they do, this won’t ensure that future collaboration between them will be smooth and efficient. The good news is that there are tools and processes that managers can put in place to foster successful collaboration between team members.

To start with, you’ll want to consider what forms of collaboration work best for your team. Here are some questions that will help:

• Which combination of email, phone and/or video conferencing is most effective?

• What tools should the team use? Consider Skype, GoToMeeting, Google Hangouts and Zoom.

• What other collaborative resources are available? Or, is there an app for that? Perhaps there’s a team Slack channel, or a shared Trello board to track projects.

When you’ve chosen the right tools to help your team collaborate, you’ll want to determine how often each employee should interact with other team members and set up recurring meetings (virtual dates) to follow through with that goal. Use meeting times to check in with each other and collaborate on work projects. This can be as a one-to-one interaction or with multiple team members – whichever achieves the better collaboration goals.

Remember, most remote employees will be working from different time zones. Schedule meetings that are convenient for all participants and that fall within normal working hours. Obviously this isn’t always possible – especially if the team is located across the globe. In that case, rotate the recurring meeting so that everyone has to make a small sacrifice now and then, taking a meeting at six in the morning if necessary. An excellent tool for planning meetings in multiple time zones is the World Clock Meeting Planner at timeanddate.com.

Fostering excellent communication

The best thing for a manager to do, apart from making employees feel appreciated, is to foster excellent communication. Managers should communicate as frequently and proactively as they expect their team to. Make an effort to connect as much as possible, be proactive about sharing status on work projects, stick to the recurring check-in meetings and record meetings as required for future reference.

To begin with, managers will need to adjust to relying more on written communication. This means that we often lose tone, nuance and non-verbal cues as mediums to express ideas. As such, it’s important to be empathetic and assume positive intent to avoid potential misunderstandings.

Recognise that, for some, remote work is a transition. Put yourself in their shoes and be patient. Managers will want to use empathy-building questions to better understand each employee’s different communication styles. Ask your colleague questions about themselves: how they’re doing, what they’re working on and so on. More than anything, effective communication is making an effort to understand who your colleagues are as people.

Motivating employees to thrive creatively amid uncertainty

Motivation will drive a lot of decision making, which involves motivating employees not only to continue the good work that they’ve been doing, but to thrive creatively amid uncertainty, whether that’s uncertainty at large or just feeling disconnected from decision makers. Here are some ideas for you to put into practice:

• Award extra time off
  While remote employees may be very good at managing their workload, they will still appreciate being recognised for the times when they’ve gone above and beyond or have worked extra-long hours.
• Surprise individuals who are doing a good job with a gift card delivered to their email inbox
  Promote and support attendance at virtual training events. Where in-person versions of continuous learning opportunities can encourage them to think differently and approach problems in new ways, virtual ones can do the same.
• Focus on relationships
  While you won’t have the water cooler any more, you can still foster good relationships with your employees – you just need to be more intentional about it. Host a regular team or organisation virtual happy hour, have coffee with someone virtually or create new ‘water cooler’ opportunities for connecting socially with your team.

Prioritising job satisfaction

Humans are, by our very nature, social animals. We’re drawn to each other, driven by a need to collaborate, communicate and commiserate. For remote workers, these imperatives can be difficult to satisfy, which can have a disastrous effect on morale and job satisfaction. So what can a manager of a virtual team do to overcome this?

Firstly, think about one-to-one interactions. Make sure that you contact your team members frequently – once a day if you can manage it – and let them know that you’re available. That said, don’t make it just about the work. If the only time you communicate is to ask about the status of a project, you’re missing an opportunity to connect on an emotional level. Remember that unlike on-site teams, you can’t just tap an employee on the shoulder and invite them for a casual lunch or a cup of coffee.

But this doesn’t mean that you can’t have coffee time with your virtual employees – the very technology that makes remote work possible can bridge the physical divide. Be creative about setting up regular video calls, and how to best use the time to combat isolation and foster stronger bonds between team members.

Similarly, take advantage of collaboration tools like Slack to encourage connection. For example, remote collaboration tools can randomly pair employees from different teams for a conversation, which can help your virtual employees feel more connected to the company at large.

However, all the technology in the world won’t overcome the challenges of managing a virtual team. It’s also important to sometimes bring everyone together, into the office, for periodic team-building events or off-site meetings. Try to schedule quarterly working or planning sessions with fun social activities, whether it’s a trip to the local axe-throwing venue or a pottery-making class. These opportunities for socialisation and bonding will help keep your virtual teams feeling happy and motivated.