There’s a paradox at the center of the remote work movement… On one hand, employees claim to love remote work. According to McKinsey, 87% of Americans want to work in a flexible environment that enables them to work from home, but 50% of leaders want their teams back in the office full-time. As a result, employees are doing everything in their power to force employers’ hands to avoid returning to the office.
On the other hand, employees are burning out at unprecedented rates. A survey by monster.com found that 69% of employees are experiencing burnout symptoms while working from home.
This leads to a simple question… If employees love working from home so much, why are they burning out while doing it?
The answer to that question actually has more to do with motivational psychology than working from home. To help us navigate this paradox, I’m going to borrow generously from Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink.
According to Pink’s research, human motivation is driven by three key variables: Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose. When our teams have all three, they’ll also have high levels of self-motivation. This isn’t a secret… In fact, many organizations I’ve talked to felt like they nailed these variables when they were in person.
When we moved to a remote-first context, however, these same companies struggled. Leaders and managers felt like they were adapting effectively, but they started to notice burnout, quiet quitting, and employee churn among their teams. What’s worse is that all of the playbooks they had run in person seemed to fail in this new context.
Instead of employees being motivated by team dinners or happy hours, these commitments became a chore. Instead of team-building days being a diversion from work, they felt like a distraction from what matters.
Leaders and managers were stuck scratching their heads and hoping they could find a recipe for success for their team, but the solution to their problems was hiding in plain sight… Right back in the motivational psychology that inspired our in-person cultures a decade ago.
The truth is, the principles of motivational psychology haven’t changed at all. Our teams still want to feel Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose. Transitioning to being fully remote doesn’t change these fundamentals, but it dramatically changes how our team experiences each of these phenomena.
Let’s hop into each of these principles to discuss how it’s different in a remote-first capacity and what we can do to empower our teams more effectively…
Mastery
How Remote Work Affected Mastery
Professional mastery has remained virtually unchanged for millennia. It doesn’t matter whether you were training to be a blacksmith or studying under Socrates, face-to-face mentorship has always been a core component of developing mastery in your craft.
In an office setting, this manifests itself in both formal and informal mentor relationships. The formal mentorship of a manager provides tactical coaching and a career path to continue this development. Meanwhile, relationships develop across disciplines, producing soft mentorship from a diverse set of colleagues.
As a leader, this isn’t something you need to think about that critically. It tends to happen organically and the extent of your involvement is likely nudging people in the right direction.
But what happens when those manager check-ins become less frequent and soft mentorship disappears overnight?
Remote work turned professional development on its head. The old ways of developing our team didn’t translate as effectively and many leaders struggled to adjust. Now, our teams are feeling rudderless and many are jumping ship in the hopes another organization can help them level up faster.
Here are three things you can implement today to stem this tide in your organization:
Develop Career Paths for Your Team: Managers need to think about the career ambitions of everyone on their team. I recommend sitting down with every team member 1:1 this week and asking them about what they want out of their job this time next year and working with them to develop a plan to get there. This won’t take long, but it will make a huge difference in getting buy-in from your direct reports.
Start a Book Club: I’ve done this in several organizations with fantastic results. While mandatory book clubs can be an absolute drag, there’s no better way to see your people come out of their shells than to let them take ownership of a professional book club. I’ve loved watching junior teammates lead group discussions with more senior colleagues and witness the team's transformation.
Set Up a #Mastery Slack Channel: Public communication about self-development is an excellent solution to the soft mentorship problem. I’ve seen this in multiple organizations… Person A posts about a course they took, Person B finds it interesting and reaches out. Next thing you know, they’re doing informal coffee chats once a month to coach one another. Soft mentorship can happen remotely, but it requires new lines of communication.
Autonomy
How Remote Work Affected Autonomy
The “flexible work environment” of yore is dead. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can move on to something better.
Teams regularly patted themselves on the back in an in-person setting for their “flexible” environments. Here’s what that looked like in practice:
You can come and go as you please. We might have a slight preference for some specific hours, but no one will be on your case for leaving early or coming in late if your work is done.
You’re not likely to be micromanaged. We’re not counting butts in seats and tracking your every keystroke. Check Facebook if you want.
You can wear jeans, dress down, take a long lunch, maybe even have a beer at 4!
There was a time when this was the pinnacle of workplace flexibility, but as our teams spread across time zones and life began interweaving more with work, flexibility began to take on an entirely new meaning.
Now, we need to be able to accommodate our entire team, meaning the morning bird and night owl have to be able to work together. We have to provide flexibility for the dad who needs to drop his kid off for daycare and the daughter who needs to accommodate her parents’ eldercare schedule. We need to ensure that the folks on Eastern Time and Pacific Time are in sync and not waiting on one another for key work to get done.
Moving to a remote-first cadence made it abundantly and painfully clear how many dependencies our teams have to get their work done. By definition, dependencies make autonomy impossible. As leaders, we need to step up and improve our processes in order to reduce dependencies and increase our team’s autonomy.
Here are a few ways you can make progress
Perform a Calendar Audit: The person who owns your calendar owns your life. The unfortunate truth is that, if your team is stuck in tons of meetings that they didn’t choose to be in, they’re not in control. This means they lack autonomy and you’re failing on this mark. Go through your direct reports’ calendar and identify how many meetings they scheduled vs. how many they’re going to because someone invited them. From there, open up a dialogue around the value they’re getting from those meetings and look for ways to deliver that value asynchronously. This will free up their time and give them more freedom in how they work.
Build Your Internal Wiki: A lot of organizations struggle to move to a more asynchronous working cadence because they need answers from one another… They set up a meeting, send an email, or send a Slack message to someone else to find an answer because self-service isn’t an easy option. The easiest way to mitigate this issue is by building a robust internal wiki for your team that helps them self-serve the answers to their key questions.
P.S. - If you’re looking for help here, send me an email at tim@yourremoteworkcoach.com. I’m happy to help you get your team’s internal wiki set up so you don’t have to worry about it.
Eliminate Meetings That Could be Google Docs: Follow the guidance in this previous post about how to turn more of your synchronous meetings into asynchronous Google docs. If this exercise doesn’t save you time next week, I’ll buy you a coffee.
Purpose
How Remote Work Affected Purpose
I’ll admit it… working in an office did have some juice.
You could walk into a room and sense the energy. Some companies brought great energy to the table and tapped it to great effect. When you’re sitting in the same room as your colleagues, working towards solving a common problem and hearing inspiring stories in regular team roundups, it’s easy to get inspired.
When we moved remote, we lost all of that… The energy felt zapped and it’s hard for executives to get the team bought into a vision over an all-hands Zoom call.
This is why I talk about the parasocial relationship between remote leaders and their teams and talk ad nauseam about the differences in communication channels we have to use to inspire connection.
Here are the two simple changes every org can implement to get their team bought into the company’s purpose…
Public Communication: The first and most important change that remote leaders, especially in the C-Suite, need to make is defaulting for public communication. In far too many organizations, C-Suite members have shut them off from the rank-and-file entirely. The vast majority of their communication is happening with their VPs and Directors, in private, and the Individual Contributors on their team can go weeks at a time without hearing from them.
This is a failure of leadership. Our team feels a sense of purpose when they hear from their leaders… We owe them that transparency. Try to find an excuse to post publicly at least once per day on a public Slack or Teams channel. It doesn’t matter whether we’re celebrating a win, sharing an insight, or posting inspiration… Our team needs to hear from us to have a connection with us.Internal Podcasts: This is my secret weapon for developing intimate relationships in a distributed team.
Just imagine what this could look like… Imagine you get hired and onboarded by HR and your manager, then you receive a link to a private podcast where your CEO is having intimate conversations with other leaders and executives. They’re discussing the company’s founding, mission, and purpose. They’re sharing company lore and stories of the good ol’ days. They’re sharing their perspectives on the industry and economy.
You can listen to these episodes at your own pace… Maybe you binge them, or maybe you listen to an episode every once in awhile while you do the dishes. Either way, you’re hearing from the executive team regularly and seeing how they think, talk, and act.
Shifting to a remote-first workplace has been a dramatic shift for everyone, but our teams are dealing with the brunt of the pain. Let’s level-up our systems this year to ensure that we’re setting them up to be successful.
Tim Hickle is a marketing leader who helps high-growth startups and scale-ups get unstuck and hit their goals while embracing AI and the future of work. To learn more about how Tim can help your organization grow, visit TimHickle.com