Remote management for what performance?

The development of hybrid management models is tending to make the function evolve towards increasingly remote management of teams that have become largely virtual. Teams meet less often, they are less and less often together in the same place, and they sometimes communicate by video or email... even when they are on the same site! The time when a team was defined by a unity of time and place, in permanent physical proximity, thus seems largely over. It is therefore legitimate to wonder how best to take advantage of these new modes in terms of performance...

To do this, we asked Arnaud Trenvouez, R&D Program Manager at PerformanSe, 5 questions.

Remote management is not a product of COVID 19. The movement towards widespread partial telework had started long before, especially in large organisations, and there are well documented articles on the subject online since at least 2005.

The question - in reality - is probably as old as management! Whether it was Julius Caesar's armies, the bishops in the provinces or the management of the colonial empires at a time when the ship alone linked continents, the large international organisations have always required remote management and have been able to organise it. But until now it has been limited, generally chosen, reserved for the most mobile and motivated teams. Now it has become almost universal and has been imposed very quickly, even on the simplest functions and the least inclined teams...

The question of the impact of distance on the performance of teams is therefore becoming more and more crucial for the manager. However, the direct link between distance and performance is not so easy to establish in reality. The available studies are nuanced, to say the least, and even contradictory. There is no explicit superiority of one model over the other, as the analysis differs according to the criteria used. 

Remote models thus allow for more frequent communication, with broader content, faster and more widespread circulation, not to mention the benefits for everyone in terms of transport time, real availability and concentration. While face-to-face modes remain essential for creating together. Task-oriented teams can easily be more effective at a distance, relationship-oriented teams on the contrary. What I do alone at my computer I can do at home, but not what I create in a group. Provided that the necessary trust is there, of course...

Trust is always essential in management, but it becomes all the more crucial at a distance. Because the most direct and obvious elements of reassurance have disappeared. How can I trust what I can no longer see? How can I know what the other person is doing if I don't know where they are? Any remote collaboration thus requires more autonomy for each person, explicit delegation and mutual trust. But trust cannot be decreed, nor improvised... it must be communicated!

Hence the importance of using time together to create / recreate common frames of reference. The more I know the other person, the more I am used to working with them, the more we share a common language, the easier it is for us to interface... even from a distance. To work well together, you have to communicate well. So you also have to know each other well...

In any case, conscious and constructed communication in teams will prove all the more important as there is less space for informal exchanges today. It will have to adapt to more demanding conditions, make visible what is no longer visible, recreate links where they have become distorted, and ensure that isolation does not harm the health of individuals or the performance of groups.

And because beyond short-term performance, there is a key issue of global affectio societatis. If we are not careful, widespread telework could be the door to a growing disaffection of employees, especially the youngest, and a major disengagement of organisations...