CHAPTER 18

Managing the Performance of Remote Employees

Flexible work arrangements, telecommuting, and global offices may mean your employees aren’t all sitting together in one central office. According to data from the Global Workplace Analytics, a research-based consulting organization, as of 2014, 3.7 million people worked remotely.¹ As virtual work arrangements become more common, you will likely need to apply the elements of performance management to someone you rarely, if ever, see in person.

Managing remote employees isn’t fundamentally different than managing those who are physically present in your workplace, but communication challenges can easily arise when you’re not colocated. Giving difficult feedback or discussing a tough performance review always requires special handling, but these tasks are further complicated when the person you’re talking with isn’t in the room with you to hear your tone or see subtle cues in body language. You’ll need to put in extra effort to minimize the likelihood of off-site isolation, cultivate a positive team dynamic, address problems, and evaluate performance.

Whether your team members are in different time zones or simply working from home, you’ll need to take a proactive approach to performance management.

Set Goals and Expectations

With remote employees, it’s essential to establish a common purpose and to frame work in terms of individual team members’ ambitions and needs. Clarify goals, and spell out specific guidelines for how you’ll work together. Don’t forget the details. Beyond identifying how projects will be divvied up, you may need to determine standards for communication that wouldn’t be an issue with colocated employees, such as how the individual will collaborate with others on the team and how they’ll communicate with you, their manager.

Just as you would with a direct report working in your office, schedule a performance-planning meeting, a one-on-one conversation to identify your remote employee’s specific goals. Don’t just trade emails; set up a video chat or, at a minimum, speak by phone. You’ll have a more productive discussion, especially about professional aims and ambitions, when both of you can observe body language and hear tone and inflection. Carry the conversation much like you would with your other employees (as outlined in chapter 2), but make note of any challenges they may face because they aren’t working regularly in your office. Consider if they will require additional resources to help them reach their objectives.

Once goals have been established, ask your employee to submit suggestions for meaningful performance metrics, especially for nonquantitative goals. Set clear targets—monthly, quarterly, and yearly performance milestones—to establish accountability. By collaborating with your employee in this way, they’ll feel more invested in objectives, and they’ll have a clear understanding about what they need to do to meet them. Finally, ensure that they know how they’ll be evaluated—and assure them that you’re using the same metrics you will use with the rest of your team, so they know that any future feedback or assessments will be fair.

Manage Performance and Communication

A key challenge for remote employees is isolation. Virtual workers are more prone to loneliness and loss of motivation, which can result in compromised performance. You probably won’t get the opportunity to pick up visual cues or have impromptu conversations with a remote worker, so you’ll need to make an extra effort to see how they’re doing, keep an eye out for signs of burnout, and provide ongoing feedback. Keep the lines of communication open to prevent your remote employee from feeling truly isolated.

Just as with any other direct report, check in regularly on your remote employee’s progress. You may need to be more rigorous about scheduling ongoing conversations with these workers than you would with team members you run into in the hallway or cafeteria. Even casual conversations with remote employees may need to be scheduled in advance.

When you touch base with your employee, choose communication tools carefully. Without physical cues, anyone can miss the subtleties of in-person interactions—especially during a tough conversation, such as when you’re delivering constructive feedback. Face-to-face discussions are ideal, but don’t hold off on having a crucial conversation or even a casual check-in just because you’re waiting for an upcoming visit. Consider alternatives such as the phone, email, video, instant message, text, or group chat applications, but note that one platform won’t work for every situation. Texting, IM, and team-messaging apps are lighter-touch options that carry lower emotional stakes. Information that might elicit an emotional response is better captured by phone or video, since they can allow you to project empathy, trust, concern, or firmness.

Phrase inquiries wisely when checking in. For example, when sending a quick email or IM, “Looking forward to seeing your product demo on Friday! Anything you need from me?” sounds enthusiastic and supportive. Compare this with something like “On track for Friday’s deadline?” which may convey aggression and distrust.

Tracking performance from afar

When assessing work, tailor your approach to your remote employees. Take advantage of the opportunity to gather details about your direct reports’ performance during team meetings. This may be the best time to assess how your remote employees work with their colleagues. Write each person’s name on a pad of paper, and list their suggestions, questions, and comments. (If you find it too distracting to do this during the meeting, capture your observations immediately afterward.) When someone brings up a problem no one else has thought of, stubbornly repeats a point, or credits a colleague for doing good work, jot that down. Follow the same process as you observe conversations over discussion boards and group chats. Note who’s giving helpful feedback, making smart suggestions, mediating conflict, or contributing in some other way. By capturing these details, you’re creating a performance record you can refer to later.

As with any other employee, address performance issues with sensitivity. Start by gathering information. Your direct report’s colleagues may have a different vantage point or more information on areas of concern. Keep in mind, though, that unless they’re located in the same office as the remote worker, collaborators may not have a full picture either.

You can ask specific questions but also get more context with open-ended questions such as:

• “How’s the project going with Ahkil overall?”
• “How are you finding him as a collaborator?”
• “Akhil has been doing a great job, but I’m wondering if I can do more to support his engagement. Have you observed anything that might help?”
• “You mentioned that Akhil has seemed checked out lately. When did that start? What do you think is going on?”

Handle these sensitive conversations with great care, and keep them confidential. The employee may not want a written record of any complaints or speculations, so hold these conversations by phone or video if you can’t have them in person.

If you find that the situation warrants a discussion with your remote employee, prepare as you would for any feedback conversation. Consider the bigger picture: Do you know what else is going on in your employee’s personal and professional life? Collect facts in advance, focus on observable behaviors, and don’t speculate. Probe for root causes, so you feel fully prepared before having the conversation.

Giving feedback

When you notice something troubling in your remote employee’s work that could grow into a performance gap if left unattended, address it with the same strategies you’d use in a traditional office setting. Follow up to investigate anomalies. You’ll probably notice behavioral cues if someone is struggling or behind on their work. They might be uncharacteristically uncommunicative or have changed the frequency of their communications. They may seem frustrated, anxious, or even unusually relaxed before a major deadline while all their colleagues seem crunched. If you sense something is off, don’t delay in reaching out to them.

When it comes to more-sensitive conversations—coaching, giving feedback, or discussing performance problems, for example—don’t dictate the medium; ask your direct report what they prefer. You may well have a preference, perhaps for phone or video, but different tools can be more effective with different people. Video can provide helpful context and visual cues, but if the internet connection is poor it’s more likely to be distracting than helpful. It may be worth investing in better technical gear, like a high-quality headset, to ensure you catch every nuance.

It can take special effort to give feedback effectively in a virtual setting. A written statement—say, “Your recent work contained some major problems”—seems much harsher than the same message delivered in conversation with a compassionate tone. Pay particular attention to timing. As with the employees you see regularly, you shouldn’t plan to deliver tough criticism right before the person has another meeting or while they’re in the last throes of a time-sensitive project. On the other hand, when it comes to recognizing strong performance, you don’t need to be so careful. (Positive feedback, unlike criticism, can be delivered in writing, but your delivery will be more nuanced if you’re communicating by phone or video.)

If you’re using video when offering constructive feedback, position your camera at eye level; any lower will make it seem like you’re looming above them. Maintain natural eye contact, and keep your body language open and relaxed. Start your conversation with the usual small talk, but make an extra effort to be warm. Because it can be difficult for people to pick up emotional cues by phone or video, be explicit about your positive feelings: “I really enjoy working with you. We’ve got some work to do, but I’m confident we’ll get there.” Express your appreciation for their work, or offer some positive feedback, if appropriate: what they are doing well or what they have made easier for you. Since your virtual employee may not have the opportunity to read your tone or body language, establishing this mutual trust and reassurance will help your message become more palatable. Keep in mind, though, that you don’t want to couch your constructive comments in too much positivity, in case your request for improvement is lost. Just say enough to confirm to your employee that you’re on the same team and on their side.

Limit your critical feedback to discussing a specific behavior. Offer concrete, narrowly focused comments that are free of speculation. Listen actively to their reply, and ask if anything seems wrong. If they won’t meet your eyes in a video chat, for example, they could be feeling attacked, or it could just be due to camera placement.

End the conversation with an action item. Ideally, your direct report should offer a plan for fixing the problem themselves, at which point you can ask how you can help execute it. In some cases, though, you’ll need to suggest a solution yourself. Thank them for the conversation before logging off, and follow up with an email summarizing how you agreed to proceed and reiterating your thanks.

Conduct the Appraisal Discussion

If your company requires a formal performance appraisal, that task can seem much harder when you’re not seeing or talking to an employee on a regular basis. But if you’ve kept the lines of communication open throughout the review period, checked in with your employee, taken good notes, and provided feedback, you should have every thing you need to help the process go smoothly.

Evaluate everyone equally

In traditional offices, it’s easy to base assessments on observed face time: Who comes in early, stays late, and looks busy? But when a department allows employees to telecommute or is spread across multiple locations, management often develops a new process for evaluating remote individuals using specific metrics, while in-office workers are still assessed with the old approach. Face time unfairly becomes a factor in evaluating some but not others. While rarely a deliberate choice in the appraisal process, this disconnect in evaluation standards is especially problematic when an organization requires forced ranking. Remote employees may be “out of sight, out of mind” and overlooked for promotions or raises.

When employees work remotely, face time isn’t something you can realistically assess and shouldn’t be used as a performance metric. Instead, change your perspective to focus on the what and how of work. Evaluate the performance of remote employees in the same way as their office-based colleagues, and ensure that the same metrics are applied to everyone.

If you use a rating system, be sure to include context—concrete details that have contributed to the rating—in addition to a number. Remote workers are by nature somewhat isolated and may not have a good sense of how they and their colleagues are being evaluated. Receiving a numerical rating with no understanding of how it was decided does not make for a helpful or productive appraisal. Include details so the employee understands where they’re falling short and how they can improve.

Avoid self-assessments

Unlike with your on-site employees, limit the use of self-assessments with your remote direct reports. Anyone who works alone much of the time can end up in a vacuum of their own perception. We all share the tendency to overrate our own abilities and take the credit for good results while denying our role in bad ones, but we’re more likely to fall victim to these qualities when we’re on our own. If your organization doesn’t require self-assessments, don’t use them. But if you must, emphasize to your virtual workers (as you would with the rest of your employees) that their self-evaluation is just one component of your performance review.

Conduct the conversation with care

Any employee can go through the motions of the appraisal process, never speaking their minds to avoid conflict—and the danger of this is greater with remote employees who may already feel disconnected. For a sensitive conversation like a performance review, ask your direct report how they’d be most comfortable meeting. Video conferencing will allow for a more-nuanced conversation, but if speaking by phone would make your employee more at ease, comply with their wishes. The more often you communicate by video during the course of the year, the more comfortable both of you will be using the medium, but if it’s not something you do often, don’t insist on it for an appraisal. Applying an unfamiliar technology to an already anxiety-inducing conversation may only make it more stressful for your employee. Accepting their preference will set a tone of participation and collaboration, increasing the likelihood that your remote direct report will feel comfortable being candid.

Tone of voice, facial expression, gestures, and nonverbal communication all matter in review conversations—particularly when you can’t be together in person. Without contextual clues, misunderstandings can easily arise. As you did when giving feedback, be crystal clear when delivering feedback, and linger on positive messages. In the stress of an appraisal conversation, it’s easy for anyone (particularly a remote worker) to focus more on constructive comments than on positive ones, so emphasize your positive feedback more than you might in an in-person meeting. After the discussion, continue the process again by setting up another meeting to establish goals and by keeping the lines of communication open.

Successfully managing your employees’ performance involves a host of tasks and processes. Whether your employees are across the hall or across the globe, you should be ready to focus their efforts on the objectives that matter, work with them to move toward those goals, and ensure that they’re growing, developing, and improving. Performance management may be changing rapidly, but by following the elements and best practices outlined in this guide, you can make managing performance a part of your regular routine and ensure that you get the best out of your people.

NOTE

1. GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com, “Latest Telecommuting Statistics,” http://globalworkplaceanalytics.com/telecommuting-statistics.