When a crisis emerges, the first stage might be the shock, the second compassion and the third: rolling up sleeves and taking action. We asked Slovenian managers about their remote team leadership challenges! Read about the results of an up-to-date mini CorpoHub survey we did with Slovenian managers and their challenges on leading remote teams.

As we in CorpoHub suspected at the beginning of March, the corona crisis hit and indeed it hit hard. 

Still, in the last days before the first corona case in Slovenia, we invited a small group of ten Slovenian HR directors and professionals of medium and large companies to a closed-circle session to share their forecasts on the impact of corona on managers. Specifically, we wanted to know, how managers in their companies are prepared for such situations and what could be their main challenges regarding Leading remote teams.

The challenges listed were: 

  • Technical challenges (hardware, software, etc.)
  • Meeting legal prerequisites (Slovenian legislation being rather strict on that matter)
  • Protocols and team agreements on remote work (poor or absent)
  • Online facilitation challenges (not educated in online facilitation)
  • The leadership of remote teams (lack of trust or remote leadership)

The HR professionals’ session also showed, that less than 20 % of attendees actually had a plan on how to equip the managers of their companies with Leading remote teams competencies. Considering the fact that at that time they were not subjected to a virus – crisis neither having a higher need to work more remotely, the finding is definitely not surprising.

We decided to test the 5 categories with Slovenian managers. 

We performed a Mentimeter survey on managers attending our free Leading Remote teams online workshop (Managers’ Association of Slovenia, BIC – Business Intelligence Center). The total number of attendees was 39.

Here are the results:

Challenges on Leading remote Teams
  • Technical challenges were a challenge per se: 6,3 score indicated poor technical equipment of employees, lack of video cameras, old laptops of employees not supporting video calls (or even lack of laptops at all), low internet connection, not having platforms for remote work or not using them. 
  • Meeting legal prerequisites scored rather low (4,4) on being challenging: Slovenian legislation is rather strict on that matter. Nevertheless having rules on how to establish remote work, it appeared to have that under control.
  • Protocols and team agreements on remote work (5,9) proved themselves poor or completely absent. Respondents commented that they are not prepared enough on that matter.
  • Online facilitation challenges scored 6,1 and are the second most challenging aspect of Leading Remote teams. Respondents reported not being educated in online facilitation techniques.

The leadership of remote teams proved itself to be the most challenging (6,5) due to mostly lack of trust in how employees are going to perform at home. The second challenge was the lack of being educated on how to lead remote teams, set goals and keep up with the motivation remotely.

Challenges on Leading Remote Teams

Some additional findings

  • If a manager scored low points at the annual review regarding leadership, now working with his/her team remotely will have even a worse result.
  • Being trained in Agile Leadership proves beneficial when leading teams remotely due to high psychological safety in the team, high trust, and empathy level as well as in transparent work of each individual
  • Agile teams are self-organized and stronger teams when performing remotely. Read more about making your team Basic agile.

 

Any questions? Contact us at hello@corpohub.com