Importance of Gauging and Maintaining Remote Team Health

Many companies and teams therein, are encountering what it means to work fully remote.  Companies have applied work from home (WFH) benefits for a variety of reasons such as WFH Fridays, WFH to accommodate home needs, and WFH for those who live a distance from the office, to name a few. When the coronavirus pandemic thrust itself into the human condition, it required drastic work-related measures.  One such measure is having full teams work from home. 

As companies are navigating unchartered territories with this virus, many are navigating what it means to provide WFH options. With working from home has become the new normal and with work not slowing down for many, how do you ensure the mental health and well-being of team employees?  

As employees work from home, many are stressed by the isolation from co-workers, friends, and extended family. Add to this, being forced into close quarters with spouses and children on a continuous basis adds further anxiety and stress. As past routines are disrupted and new routines are established, this causes physical and mental strain on team members.

With all of this isolation and change, it is more important than ever to gauge and maintain team health.  As a leader, what are some practical tips that you can do to help team members maintain their well-being? The answer revolves around experimenting with a variety of options.  What might work for one team may not work for others. The key is to get started, include some continuous activities, and some impromptu activities all focused on team health. Here are some ideas.      

Getting started

• Initiate and continually gauge the health of the team. This could be in the form of morning check-ins or online pulse surveys (e.g., 1-10 on how you are feeling). This helps you gauge when team health is a concern on not. Depending on what you learn, there may be continuous and impromptu things you can do. 

 Continuous

• Periodically ask the team via brainstorming ideas from the team as to what they need to maintain team health.  Soliciting ideas from them makes the team feel that you care.  
• Have virtual yoga mornings.  This can be initiated by either a professional yoga instructor or one of the team members that enjoys a leadership opportunity. Similarly, this could be a virtual walking morning.
• Provide flexibility in work hours.  As spouses and children are within the remote office (aka, home), flexible hours help relieve stress from juggling family schedules
• Set boundaries on work schedule. As the house becomes the “office”, it can be harder to escape the office and ‘shut off’. Ensure there are work hour boundaries set so team members feel they have relief.  
• Recommend employees connect with one other team member every day in a face-to-face manner via video conferencing.  This helps team members feel connected to one another in a visual manner.

 Impromptu

• Periodically apply a Wellness weekend.  This is effectively a long weekend where team members have Friday off to give them time to unwind beyond the normal 2-day weekend.
• Send care packages to team members. These packages do not have to be extensive and should be focused on highlighting appreciation.  This surprise also makes for a way to break the monotony of everyday life.

Are you a Leader that Serves?

Last week, I had the fortune to enjoy the benefits of a concierge lounge at a prestigious hotel.  As I was enjoying hors d’oeuvres, I initiated a game I like to play called “observe the people”.  As simple as it sounds, it allows me to discern how people interact with each other and identify any interesting traits. I noticed and talked to people who were travelling for business, those that may be considered leaders in their respective industries.  Most of those in the lounge could be considered a bit privileged in their expectations of both service and amenities of the lounge, not at all unreasonable in the context.

I noticed the host who was checking-in the guests into the lounge at his desk.  He was busy registering people and providing information about the lounge.  He was doing this continually for an hour as I was working on my computer getting some odds and ends done.  As guests were getting drinks and food, I saw that the host had nothing to refresh his palette yet he was the busiest person in the lounge.  With that awareness, I walked over to the host and offered to get him a drink and some food.  He looked at me with surprise and said, “You are the first guest in 5 years who has offered me a drink.” That caught me by surprise.  How could that be?

Have we gotten so invested in our privilege that we forget that part of our responsibility as leaders is to serve those that help us?  If you are reading this and thinking, “Why should I serve those that I lead when they should be serving me?” you may have a learning opportunity to help yourself and your team, group, division or company.  A major part of your job as a leader is to help maintain and improve the health of your employees.  This takes a page from the concept of Servant Leadership.

Robert K. Greenleaf coined the term “servant leadership” in the 1970 essay, “The Servant as Leader”. Greenleaf takes the approach of “the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived.”

While there are various key servant leadership attributes, the ones I find important are an ability to listen; capability to empathize with people; aptitude to heal others (both mentally, physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually; an awareness of your surroundings, ability to persuade and conceptualize, have foresight, be a steward to stakeholders, customers, partners, and employees; a commitment to grow people encouraging innovation, self-initiative, and learning; and a need to build community.

As a leader, your first response should be to greet your employees (aka, those you serve) and then ask if there is anything we can do for them and ask if you can remove any impediments in their way.  Understand that by being that servant leader, you make your employees feel known and important. You should also remove their impediments helping them deliver products and services quicker, which has the benefit of making you money earlier than later. Remember, employees or those that are helping you.  They are the engine to your success. Serve them. Remove their impediments, listen to their needs, and get them a drink. Is it time to get serious and sincere in helping them? 

Psychological Safety leads to High-Performing Agile Teams

There are two types of safety that factor into a healthy and productive enterprise environment and high-performing teams.  The first is physical safety. This is where employees have an environment where they are free from physical hazards and can focus on the work at hand. This type of safety should be part of the standard workplace promoted by company and government regulations.

The second is psychological safety that is core to enterprise effectiveness. According to Google research, high performing teams always display psychological safety.  This phenomenon has two aspects.  The first is where there is a shared belief that the team is safe to take interpersonal risks and be vulnerable in front of each other.  The second is how this type of safety along with increased accountability leads to increased employee productivity and ergo high-performing teams. 

Psychological safety helps establish Agile in that it promotes a safe space for employees to share their ideas, discuss options, take methodical risks, and become productive.  An Agile mindset promotes self-organizing teams around the work, taking ownership and accountability, and creating an environment for learning what is customer value through the discovery mindset, divergent thinking, and feedback loops. Agile with psychological safety can be a powerful pairing toward high-performing teams.   

However, accountability without psychological safety, leads to great anxiety.  This is why there is a need to move away from a negative mindset when results aren’t positive or new ideas are seen as different. If this occurs, employees are less willing to share ideas and take risks.  Instead consider ways to build psychological safety paired with team ownership and accountability of the work. This can lead to high performing teams. 

Everyone has a role to play in establishing a psychologically safe environment.  Agile Coaches and ScrumMasters can help you evolve to an enterprise where psychological safety and accountability are paired. Leadership has a strong role to play to provide awareness of the importance of a safe environment, provide education on this topic, and build positive patterns in the way they respond to results of risk taking by teams.  Team members must adopt an open, divergent, and positive mindset that is focused on accepting differences and coaching each other for better business outcomes.  Employees at all levels must be aware of the attitudes and mindset they bring.