Everybody struggles with accountability to some degree. In fact, even your remote team’s top performers deal with it from time to time.

Today, accountability is a more urgent concern in the workplace. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, companies are asking employees to work from home. This has made it more difficult for leaders to manage their now-remote teams.

But not everyone is keen on having their people work outside the office. They wonder how employees are staying productive. It all comes down to building trust and holding people accountable.

Here are some ways you can make accountability easier for your remote team.

Establish what your team is accountable for

It’s impossible to make accountability work in your company if your people don’t know who’s responsible for what. So you must specify what’s expected of them, whether it’s short- or long-term.

You can start by creating work-from-home guidelines that clearly indicate how your remote team functions. To establish effective guidelines, make sure it answers questions such as:

• Who can work from home?
• What hardware and software are needed for the home office?
• When and how often can employees work from home?
• How will your employees collaborate and communicate when working remotely?
• What metrics will be used to measure performance?
• What are your data security protocols for working remotely?

For best results, use an accountability framework (like the RACI matrix shown above) to enumerate the responsibilities of each role when completing tasks for a project or process.

Share measurable goals

Once your employees understand their responsibilities, their managers should help establish quantifiable goals that are in line with their roles.

Managers, in turn, should also communicate these quantifiable goals, and how each employee’s contributions influence the company’s successes.

To stay on course with individual and organisation-wide goals, you and your leaders should provide feedback to employees regularly, from channels such as:

• Customer or employee surveys.
• Listening posts (tools/methods for collecting feedback).
• Project updates.

Lead by example

It’s not enough to speak like a leader and tell your staff what to do; you have to lead by example as well. If you don’t practice what you preach, your members will follow suit, or worse: You’ll lose their respect and may end up resenting you.

You’ll have to show your own accountability by:

• Doing hard work yourself.
• Completing your tasks before their deadlines.
• Owning up to your mistakes.
• Letting your team do their thing (don’t micromanage).
• Showing up ready for meetings, especially those you schedule.

Document all procedures

As your team currently has no face-to-face interaction, you don’t get to see how each member does their work. The distance makes communication and trust a little more challenging than usual.

To get around this limitation, document all processes in each of your company’s departments. It provides a number of benefits:

• You get a complete view of everyone’s responsibilities.
• It standardises your process, enabling new employees to perform the same tasks correctly.
• Knowing everyone’s responsibilities will help you balance your employees’ workload.
• Since you have all the information necessary, onboarding newcomers becomes much easier.

For a more comprehensive documentation, ask your employees the following:

• Why are they carrying out this task?
• What should they do with the end result?
• How frequently do they need to carry out the task?
• For reference, please provide a sample of a well-executed task.

Here’s an important step: Store the documentation in a shared folder so that they can be updated easily, and can be easily referenced by the team when necessary.

Using the same repository of information will help keep your remote team accountable and in agreement.

Keep your remote team happy

When your employees are happy with their jobs, they’re motivated to take ownership of their work. Here’s proof – a Partners in Leadership poll found that when employees are happy at their jobs:

• 85% say they take more initiative
• 73% believe they are better collaborators.
• 48% care more about their work.

It’s simple enough to make employees happy without breaking the bank.

• Trust them to do their job well on their own time.
• Acknowledge your team’s achievements.
• Hold team-building activities not related to work.
• Prioritise their work-life balance.
• Take interest in who your employees are as individuals.

Don’t forget to get their feedback regularly and find out how they’re doing. Remote work can make people feel isolated.

Create a communications strategy

Communication is a bit tricky when working remotely. Here are some reasons why:

• Moments that occur naturally in a traditional office (e.g. water cooler talk) – which help colleagues bond in person – don’t normally occur in remote setups.
  
  
• You have to use different communication channels, depending on the situation. For instance, if you need a quick response, use instant messaging. For key discussions, go for video chat.
  
  
• Overcommunication is sometimes necessary in working remotely, but it can interrupt productivity and turn into micromanaging.

While your team works remotely, you have to establish a communications strategy to work around such difficulties and strengthen how your team connects with each other.

At the very least, aim for the following:

• Having regular video meetings (at least once a week).
• An open chat room for the entire team.
• Separate chat rooms for sub-teams.
• A non-work-related chat room.
• Using a task management tool for collaboration.
• An employee recognition program.

Partner with us

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