The Dictator’s Guide: Managing Remote Teams During COVID-19
If you’re the type of leader who likes to micro-manage, oversee every action your employees take and ensure that they have no autonomy or sense of control, then you’re probably feeling a little disoriented by having everybody work from home as a result of your ‘COVID-19 policy’ being activated.
Perhaps you’re not quite sure how to rule with an iron fist while all of your loyal subjects aren’t centralised under the one roof?
If this is you then you’ve come to the right place — I’ve prepared the following list of twenty-one actions you should be taking today in order to minimise unrest among the classes and maintain strict order.
It is imperative that you schedule meetings at the start, middle and end of the day. This prevents your employees from front-loading or back-loading work, and taking half a day off to pursue COVID-19 friendly recreational activities — such as watching Netflix or going for long walks in the park.
You don’t want to run the risk of employees pulling the wool over your eyes and taking calls from the beach. As such, you can use free tools such as Zoom, Google Hangouts or Skype for Business to run your remote meetings with video. This empowers you to observe your employees’ station to ensure that there is no foul play going on.
This is not to be tolerated.
Why take only 15 minutes of your employees’ time to communicate something, when you can take an entire hour to achieve the same outcome?
Insist that employees are online and available from 7am to 7pm. You can use instant messaging tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams or Workplace from Facebook to monitor employee status and enforce this rule. Offline, away or ‘do not disturb’ mode is not to be tolerated.
Add all employees to your Find My Friends app which works with iPhones, Android, and even Blackberries for the comrades of yore. This way you can ensure they are at home, and not stocking up on toilet paper at their local grocery store or market.
Every employee is to submit a 1,000 word report by no later than 5pm on what they accomplished during the day. They are to stay online until at least 7pm ready to answer any questions you may or may not have. Protests from employees that it will take them all day to prepare this report should be seen as challenges to your authority and should be quelled quickly.
Just because your employees are at home and online, it doesn’t mean that they’re actually working and not watching Stranger Things. You can use screen tracking tools like Rescue Time to determine how much time employees are actually spending on their desktops (you should expect no less than 10 hours per day), and what they’re doing with this time. Red flags — not of the glorious hammer and sickle kind — should be raised if employee time on social media is in excess of 15 minutes.
Red flags abound comrade.
AMEX cards should be tracked for evidence of foul play. Alternatively, you might want to suspend all AMEX card activity while your COVID-19 protocols are active given that there will be little justification for using said cards for work-purposes.
You should make a habit of checking your employees’ social media profiles. Doing so will give you an indication of when they were last online, whether they are mindlessly scrolling Instagram right now, and if they’re spending too much time re-tweeting #toiletpapergate and #flattenthecurve memes on Twitter.
Use tools such as Mailtrack or HubSpot to determine if and when an employee has opened an email, and how responsive they are. You should make it clear that emails are to be responded to not later than 15 minutes after receipt. It should make no difference if employees are in a meeting or not because they should still be checking and responding to email in meetings.
Employees shouldn’t miss a beat when it comes to new emails, instant messages and other work-related updates. Ensure that all work-related push notifications are turned — with sound and with volume all the way up — on both their smartphone and desktop.
By enforcing notifications and using ‘reply all’ to every single email, you are keeping your entire team on their toes. This one-two combination would make Ivan Drago proud.
You should make a habit of calling employees sporadically at different times of day in order to ensure that they are reachable and maintain a sense of impending doom or anxiety. Proceed with asking random questions that have little to do with their work.
Instant messaging tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams can be integrated with plug-ins that alert you to employee activities across the entire value chain. Take affirmative action should there be a lull between alerts. Under no circumstances are your employees to merely pretend to be working during COVID-19 social distancing efforts.
Plug-ins like these give you full visibility.
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The WorkFlow podcast is hosted by Steve Glaveski with a mission to help you unlock your potential to do more great work in far less time, whether you're working as part of a team or flying solo, and to set you up for a richer life.
To help you avoid stepping into these all too common pitfalls, we’ve reflected on our five years as an organization working on corporate innovation programs across the globe, and have prepared 100 DOs and DON’Ts.
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