Management by remote control; When managing employees in far-off locations, keep three ingredients: knowledge, trust and connectedness

HR Magazine, April, 2004 by Jathan W. Janove

Ensuring that your employees consistently meet expectations of performance, attendance and workplace conduct is never easy. However, when separated geographically from your employees by hundreds or even thousands of miles, the degree of management difficulty soars.

Beginning with hypothetical experiences of ABC Inc., headquartered in Richmond, Va. (all taken from actual situations), this article explores what managers can do to meet the challenges of supervising employees in distant locations.

At ABC's corporate headquarters, the executive staff mulled over recent events at five small facilities around the country:

* Minneapolis. A production facility had been experiencing high turnover, absenteeism and discontent. A survey conducted by an outside consultant revealed a widespread feeling that the company did not care about the employees and probably would sell the facility at the first opportunity. The Richmond executive who oversaw this facility earned the nickname of "Terminator" due to his practice of visiting only to investigate allegations of wrongdoing or conduct terminations, and staying only long enough to get the dirty work done.

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* Fayetteville, Ark. Unbeknownst to senior management, a local salesman had been offering discounts, financing and other terms of sale to customers in violation of company policy. Now that the problem had been discovered, both the customers (who knew only the salesman and no one else at the company) and the salesman are threatening to walk, which would cost the company a valuable chunk of business.

* Cheyenne, Wyo. A personality conflict developed between two-thirds of a three-person service center. The home office asked the third person to intercede with her co-workers. After she attempted to do so without success, she complained to the home office that she lacked the authority, training or background to handle such a difficult assignment. The situation degenerated to the point that all three employees quit, leaving the company with a service-less service center.

* Fargo, N.D. The corporate manager did not want to make the long trip to fire a local support technician. She reasoned that she had already invested too much time and energy in this failed employee. The support tech took as towering insults the over-the-phone firing and instruction that someone from FedEx would pick up company property in his possession. On his way out, he deleted several critical computer files, creating a giant, costly mess.

* Buffalo, N.Y. During a telephone interview, the applicant for a local supervisor position sounded like a people person. However, after reports of verbal and even physical abuse made their way back to the corporate office, senior staff realized that their remote hiring decision had been a catastrophic mistake. They now had an office in chaos with plaintiffs' lawyers not far away.

Source of Trouble

Why do these problems happen? If you are a manager working in the corporate office with responsibility for remote employees or locations, what should you do in these situations?

As the experience of ABC Inc. illustrates, when problems go wrong between home office and remote site, it usually has to do with three missing ingredients: knowledge or information, trust and a sense of connectedness.

In the examples above, the home office does not know what is going on in the field. It is unaware of misunderstandings. It does not know of intensifying problems. Employees at the remote sites likewise lack information. They are unaware of what is expected of them and what is truly important. Both sides suffer from a lack of feedback.

The missing first ingredient leads directly to the absence of the second and third. Unhealthy speculation fills in the knowledge gap, creating mistrust on both sides and eroding any sense of connectedness. The notion that employees at the home office and at remote locations are part of the same team in pursuit of the same objectives seems increasingly far-fetched. As a result, remote sites become breeding grounds for waste, inefficiency, disloyalty, misconduct and legal claims.

In these five locations of ABC Inc., the absence of the three ingredients is apparent. Not knowing where their facility stood in the corporate hierarchy, Minneapolis employees speculated and drew the most negative conclusions. A lack of connectedness in Fayetteville and Cheyenne led, in the first instance, to a salesman focusing entirely on his own interests at the expense of the company's and, in the second, to management's inability to head off a personnel problem before it reached the crisis state. In Fargo, a lack of connectedness due to a manager's unwillingness to travel turned a difficult employment action into a disastrous one. And in Buffalo, the lack of information and connectedness with the local office led to a poor hiring decision, which in turn led to a breakdown in trust between the local office and company headquarters.

Steps to Take

Managers can take several steps to avoid a breakdown in information, trust and connectedness and to help ensure that, regardless of geographic distance, all employees remain aligned with common expectations and objectives.