Note to managers: Employees, especially those who work remotely, want a lot more attention and feedback from you, even if it’s sometimes negative.
According to our research, 66% of employees, both in-house and remote, say that they have too little interaction with their bosses. But employees don’t just want warm-and-fuzzy interactions. While 67% of employees say they get too little positive feedback, 51% also say they get too little constructive criticism from their bosses. Perhaps most troubling is that employees who said they didn’t get enough feedback were 43% less likely to recommend their company to others as a great organization to work for.
As bad as that is, in most cases when we study communication problems in the workplace, we find that issues are magnified between leaders and employees who work in different locations. And here’s why:
- One of the biggest concerns shared by remote employees is being “out of sight, out of mind.”
- Remote employees simply don’t feel that they have the same exposure to their bosses as do face-to-face employees (the technical term for those folks is “co-located”).
- Exposure or visibility is still seen in many organizations as a critical component of career success.
- After all, they think, who’s more likely to get that next promotion; the employee with lots of exposure to the boss (like perhaps the day before they choose who gets the big promotion), or the employee who only sees the boss every six months?
Now, this may or may not be true in your organization, but it’s a major concern of remote employees nevertheless. Yes, there are some employees (like Dilbert) who feel like they’re better off without seeing the boss. But still, the numbers don’t lie, and the majority want more exposure and contact.
Parenthetically, in an ironic twist, while remote employees tend to be jealous of their co-located colleagues’ visibility and exposure to the boss, the co-located employees are often jealous of their remote counterparts’ autonomy. Yes, it’s a catch-22, and it has frustrated more than a few managers over the years.
Now, it’s not just climbing the career ladder that drives remote employees’ desire for more contact; it’s also their desire to do the best possible work. If you’re trying to meet your boss’ expectations on a particular project, it’s a pretty common assumption that the person who gets the most exposure to that boss is going to get the most feedback. And whoever gets the most feedback is most likely to stay on track and most likely to meet the boss’ exact needs.
All employees are desperate for your feedback. But your remote employees feel this need even more intensely. And they feel vulnerable in their careers and on-the-job performance by not feeling like they’re getting the same feedback as their colleagues in the face-to-face world.
I need to share one more important point: Don’t try to get more communication time with your remote employees by making your group meetings filled with chit-chat. You still need to make your communications purposeful and meaningful, and that’s especially true of remote meetings. After all, as short as attention spans are in face-to-face meetings, they’re about half that in a remote meeting. And in virtual meetings, when employees’ attention does fade, you usually don’t have the visual signals that they’re spacing out and thus you don’t know when you need to bring things back on track.
So what can you do? Simple; schedule some purposeful and meaningful time to connect individually with your remote employees. You can catch up with them, find out what’s hampering them, what’s motivating them, where they’re growing and developing, where they need some course correction, and more. Trust me, in remote situations, there’s a ton for managers and employees to talk about.
Ultimately, your goal is to make sure your remote employees succeed. And to do that, they need lots of feedback from, and connection with, you, their boss.
