How to adjust to leading a newly remote team — from the founder of a virtual business

Around four weeks ago, we started to see the reality of working in the midst of COVID-19 set in. Many companies began to shift from working at the office to working from home. I remember thinking, “Oh, we’ve got this in the bag.” The change wouldn’t affect our day-to-day. However, I also remember thinking about everyone else, and how difficult working remotely would be for them.

After managing a remote team for six years now, I recognize the kind of discipline it takes to work from home. I knew right away that businesses would struggle with not being able to keep “eyes” on everyone the same way that they would in an office, and that they may start to micromanage their employees. I’ve heard stories of employers having to go remote all of a sudden and not knowing how to cope.

At Virtual Gurus, we know that there is a learning curve for businesses to learn how to manage remote workers. In previous years, we’ve had clients leave because working with someone virtually didn’t work for them. However, that is not an option nowadays when entire businesses have to work from home, including management.

Our current success rate of matching Virtual Assistants with businesses and clients wanting them to stay on is around 7/10. Just like any business, we wanted to focus on the customer experience. What didn’t work for the remaining 3? We found that we had to educate our clients on how they could best work with a virtual assistant.

Here are some of the lessons that we’ve learned around integrating remote work into your business that we hope you can put to use today.

#1 — Your remote employee needs support and communication just like a regular employee.

When we looked closer at the 3/10 clients who said that our services didn’t work for them, we found that it had to do with the fact that they couldn’t delegate. Bringing in a remote employee is just like bringing in any new employee. You have to train them, have meetings with them and have performance reviews with them. They also cannot read minds, so you have to communicate and delegate tasks. They can’t work on what they don’t know. We do recognize that it’s not as easy as being in the same room with them, so you need to rework your policies and procedures, which leads us to lesson #2.

#2 — It’s not easy going virtual overnight. Use the tools you have at hand to build structure around your processes.

When I started Virtual Gurus I shared the workload with one other virtual assistant (who I am happy to share is still working with us today). When it was time to expand the team, I started slow with hiring, which I realize is not possible right now, but we began to test and find tools that we needed to work better together as the team grew. Among them were:

• Communication/messaging tool. We use Slack now, which works great for us, but in the days before Slack we used Google Messenger.
• Online management platform/CRM. When you are trying to be organized on the business side, we know that it can be a struggle to communicate internal business. Many companies are having to find this out the hard way now. Having a CRM was an early game-changer for us. In fact, we are still using the same CRM today. The company has helped us by building out APIs to create a system that has worked well for us over the years.
• Time tracking apps. An important part of our work relies on needing to let clients know how much time certain tasks take. It also let us build trust with our virtual assistants. Once that happened we were able to lower the amount of oversight needed with them.

#3 — Working remotely requires a change to your structural processes.

While your day-to-day has changed, your standard operating procedures of working have not necessarily changed — it’s just the structure around it. This starts from the very top of the org chart, down. Meetings that were once held weekly may now need to be held twice a week. The hallway conversations you used to have — when it was easy to drop by your colleagues’ offices or desks — are now removed. These short, quick updates will need to be scheduled so you can connect and catch up. Upper management meetings might also need to be held more frequently. At this time, it is necessary to over communicate. It may seem like more meetings and more typing, but that’s not a bad thing.

Think about when you structured your business and you had a vision for what everyone needed to do for the business to succeed. When you go virtual, those to-do’s don’t change. As a leader, you have to make sure that everyone has the discipline to work and the support and structure that they need to do it in.

#4 — Support your employees.

I am part of a Slack channel of startup founders and I remember someone saying that the COVID-19 pandemic is creating two kinds of business people: those who are leading their companies, or those who are letting them sink or swim.

I’ve heard of organizations in the last few weeks where employees have been left to figure things out. Companies need to provide support and direction for their employees to do their jobs. If you’re able to manage, business still has to go on. The job is the same, you’ve just had to pivot and do it in front of a camera for a conference call.

A good way to support your employees is setting guidelines such as working hours. You can also set examples by setting status updates on Slack so your coworkers can see if you are online or not. It’s not an easy thing to go virtual, especially essentially overnight, but there are little things that managers can do to provide support, structure, and direction.

#5 — The most important lesson: have trust, empathy, and compassion.

At Virtual Gurus, our virtual assistants are skilled workers who are able to set their hours. We also know that they may be working virtually because of certain circumstances that they have in life. They may be single or stay at home moms, individuals with alternative abilities, or simply working remotely because they want to live and work in remote communities. Because of this, we know that it is important for us to have to trust them to complete their work in the time they have committed to, have empathy if circumstances change and prevent them from being able to do so, and have compassion to understand why that happened.

We know that working from home right now is not easy for everyone. This is not just a change in environment. Many people have had to deal with working with children at home for example. And while many companies have been able to continue with “business as usual” for the most part, we know that there is an underlying sense of uncertainty as we wait and see how long this situation will last.

Therefore, employers must adjust their management and allow for life to happen, especially in these extraordinary times. Just last week for example, one of our employees had their childcare fall through at the last minute right before a webinar. We quickly jumped in to ask if she felt that she could still host the webinar, or if she wanted us to postpone so she could still do it, or if we should help find someone else to do it. Everyone knows that there is a lot of job uncertainty right now. Employers should know that their employees want to keep their jobs and keep working, but that’s not as straightforward as simply sitting down and doing the work in these times.

We at Virtual Gurus are committed to helping businesses get through the pandemic. We’ve even reached out to current clients to provide support to them as they’ve had to shift to remote work, by hosting a webinar about working from home. They know how to work with virtual assistants, and now they are applying those lessons learned to working with their remote teams.

Over the next several months we want to be able to share more of these lessons that we’ve learned here at Virtual Gurus. On my next post, I’d like to share more about why our team of VAs are all based in North America — some reasons might be more obvious than others.

If you are an employer struggling with how to adjust your management now that your team is working remotely, I’d be happy to help. Send me your questions at bobbie@thevirtualgurus.com