WLP287: The Struggles of the Remote Manager
Today’s episode features an interview with Corine Tan, co-founder of Kona, about their recent research into the realities of remote management.
The Kona team worked completely remotely during the pandemic, but when Pilar spoke to Corine for this interview, they were briefly colocated for the first time due to a launch.
Corine and her team recently published their Remote Manager Report 2021 to explore the user need for their product, and for the fieldwork they interviewed 200 remote managers from 150 companies to better understand this. They specifically focused on the middle management experience, to identify the requirements of this particular role, and conducted most of their participant recruitment via LinkedIn.
During the pandemic, these managers struggled with loneliness and isolation, and this impacted on relationship building - this was the main issue which these managers shared with Corine and her team, because these people really wanted to build trust and support their teams to do their best work.
Indeed in the heightened emotional straits of the pandemic this was intensified, and contributed to burnout and overall stress levels in many situations. Managers had to act like therapists and expand their role, to help their teams cope with the unprecedented circumstances under which they had to work, and also to balance their work-life challenges and commitments.
But they did perceive a new acceptance of remote and its challenges, and the potential to make a remote-first future work, provided these relationship-building difficulties can be overcome.
Corine Tan, Kona
Management seniority and the size of team they managed also had a bearing on the outcome, and the speed of growth did as well (their sample did bias toward the tech sector, and also included managers who had been promoted during the pandemic itself). Hiring remotely meant that many senior people had large numbers of direct reports at various levels including colleagues they had never met in person, and the middle layers in particular were overwhelmed and stressed.
When you are remote, larger teams find it difficult to build trust, or to figure things out. Scaling relationships is hard, and identifying problems early is also more difficult. Function creep was a huge problem, and sheer overwork combined with personal factors was the main issue, rather than the easy target of ‘Zoom fatigue’ and too many meetings - which lots of teams were already working out for themselves, how to move away from.
Comparing different models of remote across three different companies was a valuable highlight of the research, reminding all readers that there is no one way of doing this! Comparing Buffer - fully remote, totally async, and committed to 100% distributed growth since their inception - with Figma, who are moving to remote/hybrid from a more traditional centralised on-site startup approach, and Asana (office-centric while adapting to a hybrid future), offers great insight.
The common thread is that all three are evolving and learning in changing times, while being highly value-centric and driven, with a focus on reflection and transparency steering each transition - being clear about their ‘why’, for each iteration of ‘how’. At Buffer in particular the self-reflection piece was central, while the other two office-based organisations had more emphasis on speed.
22.53 Kona’s solution
Corine’s academic background in entrepreneurship led her to a hackathon where she met her future business partners, and this research was part of the background to a new product
After a number of pivots they centred on the need for an emotional wellness platform, to bring a human touch to work, which can be missing from remote. Helping teams to create habits and behaviours around checking in, being vulnerable, and generating closeness, is the mission:
“Trust doesn’t require an office.”
Kona slots into your own Slack community and channel, and encourages a brief daily check-in (via emoji), and offers a space to share the external context of work in the team space. A bot asking this question, in the form of a cute dog, breaks down barriers somehow - and enables a degree of openness which might not otherwise be present if a manager asks the question directly.
This helps to raise the psychological safety, and unpick decades of perceptions around professionalism being associated with a separation of work and life. Challenging this stigma is worth it, as there’s abundant evidence that trust and emotional intelligence promotes high performance in teams.
In addition to the research report, Kona have a team building guide which offers a brief and less data-heavy guide, which listeners may find valuable.
And you can follow Corine and Kona on Twitter, to keep up with their launch, and the results they are achieving in helping teams share their emotional wellbeing online.
Don’t forget to keep in touch with us and tell us how you’re managing emotional resilience within your remote team. We have a form for you to contact us, or you can tweet Virtual Not Distant, or Pilar and Maya directly, with your thoughts and ideas about anything we have discussed in this episode or others.
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