How does each of the nine Belbin Team Roles cope with working remotely? As a manager, what should you be doing to help everyone feel a valued member of the team? Here are our tips on how to manage a remote team.
We need to keep things small to keep them manageable
Keeping teams small is a crucial (but often overlooked) factor in team success. The organisational chart may say one thing, but now that’s stuck to the wall of an empty office. Suddenly, we need people to work remotely, but the larger the group, the more difficult it is to arrange online meetings, achieve consensus, meet deadlines, the list goes on…
Communication changes
With many of us working from home, it’s clear that communication is going to change. On Monday, Microsoft Teams crashed when millions of Europeans began logging in from home. Whilst it’s important to get the technology right, it’s equally important to consider the human implications of these changed communications.
On the plus side, we might find that we re-evaluate the importance of meetings, limit meeting times and discover more innovative ways of sharing content, such as video conferencing, webinars and live chats. We might become more disciplined about the timeframes for meetings and use the technology to ensure that all voices are heard.
On the downside, many of us are losing the opportunity to speak face-to-face. If we’re relying more on email, that also means we might have less control over the tone of our words, and perhaps aren’t receiving cues (through facial expressions and body language) about how they are being received. It’s important to remember that the Team Role framework is not only for describing how people behave, but for offering clarity around approaches to work. For example, imagine that you want a colleague to proof-read a strategy document where the strategy has already been agreed. Using a Team Role shorthand to clarify that you want a ‘Completer Finisher eye’, but don’t want the other person to ‘ME’ (Monitor Evaluate) the work at this stage, will save time and effort on both sides.
We need trust and psychological safety
Coach Tammy Turner speaks eloquently about trust and psychological safety in teams. In short, trust is measured by – and exists between – individuals, with one person giving the other the benefit of the doubt. Psychological safety is a team construct, which measures if it’s OK to share and make mistakes without fear of recrimination, and gives each of us, as team members, the benefit of the doubt in making your contribution.
With teams working remotely, informal opportunities to speak to a colleague or a manager about our concerns or mistakes might be lost, and we might find ourselves having to announce those reservations or errors on a larger stage. What’s more, the stakes are higher if people don’t feel able to speak out, because it might take longer for mistakes to be identified. So, if we are to create (or preserve) an environment in which each team member feels confident in getting it wrong, there is work to do. We need to celebrate behavioural diversity and recognise the challenges where some are contributing in a different way to others. For example, a Plant providing ideas to a team of Monitor Evaluators and Implementers needs space to explore and communicate those ideas without being immediately quashed or reasoned out of it. In turn, when Shapers want to move first to implement a new responsive policy, Monitor Evaluators, need to feel able to apply the brakes.
We use our resources
There’s a likelihood that a team’s usual resources may be strained or unavailable, with members falling ill or dealing with changes in circumstances. Whilst the inevitable disruption may cause difficulties in the short-term, it also presents an opportunity to explore other avenues and forge new connections across teams. Who else do we know in the organisation who is good at detailed work and has been freed up from a project put on hold? Can someone with strong Resource Investigator tendencies source the widget we need, since their conference was cancelled? If we are used to delivering our product in a particular way that is no longer viable, can we draw Plant contributions from another team in the short-term to help generate new ideas?
All of this starts with knowing our strengths, individually and in our teams. Simply put, these strengths enable us to use the resources available to us more fully, organise ourselves more effectively, and communicate with fewer misunderstandings.
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