If we’re to believe the experts, it is difficult to stay productive and on-task at home. There is an inherent level of group accountability in most offices, even if it is only a subconscious pressure not to be caught slacking off. When we’re alone and in our homes, however, that accountability disappears. Distractions are easier to fall into and the road to disengagement is shorter.
As leaders, we have had to alter our systems at a break-neck pace. We can put all of the digital systems in place to work at home at a distance from colleagues and coworkers.
However, when you’re not face-to-face with the office, your team, your clients — it’s easy to fall through the cracks. In leadership, it is our responsibility to remain not only engaged with our work and our colleagues but to maintain our influence as leaders.
Accountability, in large part, is gone. Is your leadership enough to lead to success?
Here are a few ways you can continue to be an engaged and influential leader, even from a distance.
4 Ways Great Leaders Engage Others While Social Distancing
1) They’re proactive.
Leadership demands an extra measure of proactivity, particularly when managing your colleagues from a distance. If anything, you should over-communicate with your team. You want not only your expectations to be clear but for that channel of communication to be clearly open. Prompt progress reports, convene on tasks and projects, and make your presence something that is top-of-mind.
If there is any time to become social media savvy, it is now! Be there, on the digital front line. Create avenues of communication, be it on Slack, Zoom, Facebook, Skype, or another platform. Proactivity isn’t about sending nonstop emails. It’s about being present, asking the questions, prompting the work and the response. It is what keeps you and your business top-of-mind. With more and more digital media vying for our attention, it is even more critical to have your voice be heard.
2) Evaluate team health.
You can create all of the avenues for productive work and communication in the world, but if your team is suffering with their mental and emotional health, it won’t matter. During this time of stay-at-home orders and self-quarantine, mental burnout is a real issue. Depression, emotional fatigue, and anxiety are chief among the problems plaguing Americans.
As a leader, your concern does not lie in productivity alone. You need your team to be healthy. You need your team to be engaged. This is why you must invest personally in your team. Share in one-on-one calls. Ask those questions about how your colleagues are doing, where they are struggling, and how you can help. Listen with empathy, not just in hopes of helping your bottom line.
Make it clear from the get-go that your team’s wellbeing is the top priority. Each week, evaluate each team member on perceived levels of engagement as well as stress. Then ask about it!
3) Adjust your expectations.
Listen: these are strange and disconcerting times. There’s a large chance that many of your colleagues are not only adjusting to working from home, but suddenly being the stay-at-home parent, the educator, and a professional all at once. That’s not even to mention the mental and emotional stress of the COVID-19 pandemic.
While in leadership, we always want to inspire that “higher standard” in our team, we also must recognize that our expectations need to change. The leader who keeps their team engaged is the one who recognizes changing circumstances. They are willing to recognize and accept that things might be different, results might be less robust, and things will move more slowly for a time.
Leadership doesn’t make excuses for these things, nor does it berate colleagues who fall short of your original expectations. It adjusts. It encourages. And most of all, it demonstrates that you are there to be on the same team — working together, not against one another.
4) Create accountability.
In our isolation from the workplace, accountability is one of the first things we lose. Sure, most of us keep working and completing tasks, even at a diminished speed or capacity. In leadership, however, that accountability is a huge motivating factor!
Fight the distractions. While we do adjust for our circumstances, we also want to keep pushing forward. We want to see fruits of our labor, to push through to the other side, to come out stronger.
As leaders, we can do this by creating systems that promote accountability, even from a distance. What does that look like, exactly? There are so many apps and programs out there that help. Have a voice-chat to check in with progress. Pair up team members that can check in with one another and work together. Demonstrate publicly the work being done, the deadlines being set, and where you are.
Being public, whether in general or among team members, motivates us to reach concrete goals.
Accountability doesn’t just happen. As leaders, we must give our colleagues the tools and the structure to stay on track as much as possible.
How are you creating accountability for yourself and others while working from home? Share your tips in the comments.