It’s common for virtual teams to get into trouble because members avoid giving feedback or conflict with people not sharing a physical space with them. Here’s a little secret: healthy conflict and feedback is even more important in remote teams.
Conflict is defined as a clash of interest. When ignored, it will fester, cause friction in your team’s relationships, and stall everyone’s productivity. Thus, it’s prudent to address conflict right as it starts.
Why conflict is harder to solve remotely
Conflict is a bigger problem in remote teams because you don’t physically share a working space with each other. This makes it harder to raise issues and work through them. Some reasons why:
- Moments that occur naturally in an office (e.g. water cooler talk, sharing cake), which help develop relationships among work teams, don’t normally happen in remote teams. Without them, it’s also harder to know if there is conflict between colleagues.
- When you confront conflict head on, it’s likely over video conferencing (at best), which may have technical challenges; or email (at worst), which isn’t ideal for uncomfortable conversations.
- It’s easy to put off conflict when in a remote team. If you’re not running into someone while they give you dirty looks, you’re not motivated to fix the issue right away.
- If you occasionally see people face-to-face, it might give you the excuse that you want to wait until you see them before you handle the problem.
If anything, conflict in remote teams tend to be delayed, which can cause it to balloon into a bigger deal than it really is. Once you get the sense that something is bothering you, that’s actually a good time to get on it. Otherwise, the misalignment could grow increasingly larger.
How to manage conflict
To help you manage conflict in your virtual team, here are the steps to prepare for, execute, and follow up on uncomfortable conversations with your remote employees.
1. Prepare what you’re going to say
When conflict arises in a traditional team, you can’t just undo it. Maybe you’re in a meeting room together, you lose your temper over an issue, roll your eyes, and everyone sees your reaction. Before you know it, you’re in a heated argument.
With virtual teams, you have time to think about how you react. You can gather examples of what bothers you, so that when you share the issue with the person, you have enough evidence to support your point.
Likewise, you can pause and ask other people for comment, not necessarily to back your side, but to get perspective on the situation as well.
2. Give the other person a heads up
The other person needs to know that you want to have an uncomfortable conversation. Why?
- In a regular office, people can usually glean that something is up with a colleague through their body language, eye contact (or lack of it), and even voice pitch.
- For remote teams, such clues are usually absent from interactions – or too far in between – so people would have no clue that there’s any conflict to begin with.
Here’s a sample scenario. Let’s say you emailed the following to a team member: “I’m worried about how our weekly priority setting is going. I’ve sent a meeting invite to discuss this concern.”
With this message, you give the other person enough context to think about how they feel regarding the subject. They can also gather their own evidence to support their point. Doing so increases the likelihood that the two of you will have a dialogue and figure things out.
Consider the opposite: If you didn’t give any heads up and instead emailed a long list of evidence and presented arguments out of the blue, the recipient would construe this as some sort of “gotcha” situation. They’d likely receive it poorly because they were blindsided.
3. Use the best tools at your disposal
If your company has access to cutting-edge communication software, use it for connecting with your virtual team. Remember: The more body language people see in your video calls, the better.
Furthermore, video conferencing software lets you see your facial expressions as they occur, enabling you to be aware of your reactions and respond accordingly.
If all you have is the phone, it’s fine – but you’ll have to add a running commentary to your conversations. Something like: “Sorry, I know I was quiet for a moment there. I just noticed that I’m getting frustrated and I’m trying to say this in a way that’s fair.” It’s like subtitles for your dialogue.
But if all you have at a specific moment is email (e.g. someone’s travelling or in a car), wait. Email isn’t a good medium to address conflict or deliver uncomfortable feedback.
4. Bring notes to the conversation
Here’s another advantage of handling conflict remotely: you can have a cheat sheet in front of you.
It can be as simple as a big sign that says “BREATHE” to help you relax. Your notes can also contain the main points you want to prioritise. Or perhaps you want to write your feedback word for word, ensuring that it’s objective and free of any judgment.
Whatever your purpose, a cheat sheet provides you all the details or affirmation that you’ll use during your dialogue. Simply glance at it when you need to refresh your memory.
5. Work through the dialogue
Just a few things to remember:
- Give clear, succinct, and objective feedback about the person’s behaviour. Rather than saying, “You were rude to me during our meeting,” try “You interrupted me several times.”
- Listen intently to the other person’s perspective on the disagreement, then share your reaction as your own perspective and not the objective truth.
- Go over the issues at least twice or thrice to ensure you’re both on the same page.
- If the person doesn’t report to you, make sure you inform their manager beforehand.
6. Follow up
When you’re in the same office as somebody, there are several ways to find out if your dialogue addressed the conflict. Eye contact, rapport, and smiles may start to return.
You don’t get real-time feedback when you’re dealing with a remote employee or teammate. Because of this, you have to follow up.
Just a few things to keep in mind about follow ups:
- Keep them short.
- Don’t limit follow ups to official calls; take the time to re-establish rapport. You can send interesting articles or share cat videos to break the ice.
- Find opportunities to close the loop. You have to do this consciously because it’s not as easy in a virtual team.
7. Reconnect on a lighter note
See to it that you’re developing the relationship before another conflict arises.
The saying “No news is good news” is a bad rule to follow when it comes to virtual teams. If this saying were true, then the only time you hear from your team members is when they’re mad at you, or some other negative reason.
You don’t want that. No leader does.
It’s important that you start to shift the balance so there are more conversations that you’re having about constructive, forward-looking matters and fewer ones about things that have gone wrong.
But because you’ve reconnected on a lighter note and invested in the relationship, you’ll give each other the benefit of the doubt in case disputes occur.
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