Respect is the Secret Ingredient for Remote Work

Respect for each other is even more important for remote work. This includes first and foremost respecting the privacy and personal boundaries of any remote coworkers.

A video call with someone in a home office may give you a window into their life, however, it’s not an invitation to dive right in.

On the other hand, you want to develop good relationships with the people you work with, and you don’t want to seem distant or cold. Sometimes it helps to extend an olive branch. When you do so, it is best to keep it light and say: “I’m looking forward to the weekend. Any good shows you like to watch?”

You have to respect the personal beliefs of the people you work with, and you don’t want to make a misstep when you are trying to establish rapport.

With remote work, there can be a tendency to act rashly with the somewhat anonymized nature of video calls. No one thinks “that person is just a face on a screen,” but it is to easy to dehumanize people when we’re working remotely.

Respect for people’s personal beliefs and their culture is even more important as remote work expands teams further across borders and time zones.

Calling attention to, or questioning the culture of others in a negative way is not only disrepsectful, it’s counterproductive. Keep to the basics of respect for people and you’ll keep a lot of noise out of meetings and communications that will ultimately result in greater productivity and greater results.

You can achieve greater productivity with your remote teams when you respect their work habits as well.

Part of the reason remote teams can be more productive than traditional on-site teams is that each person is able to work in “their own way.”

Each person has their own levels of productivity at different points in the day, and they may prefer different types of communication. As long as their work habits don’t violate any principles of company culture, or interfere with others, you should allow each person to work in the way that they are most productive.

For example, some peope prefer to check their email on a routine basis, twice or three times a day. If an email doesn’t require an immediate reply, there’s no sense in sending a follow-up email one hour later. The person reading the email will see both at the same time and the only difference will be that you will have spent time sending a second email.

Remote work, file sharing and collaboration tools, including email, allow most work to occur asynchronously. This allows each person to work on the project when it is best for them. For some, it may be early in the morning when it is quieter in their house. For others, it may be late at night. Encouraging each team member to find the times that are most productive, and structuring collaboration to occur this way can lead to greater results.

The flip side to all of this is that a lack of respect can kill productivity for remote teams.

When you don’t respect people’s beliefs, you alienate them from the team and crush their engagement. And, when you don’t respect their work habits, you don’t get the best version of their work. You may think it is, but you haven’t really channeled all of someone’s talents until they have more control over how and when they use their talents.

Working with remote teams for over 15 years, I’ve seen how people react when they aren’t respected, and how people perform when they are. Respect is so important that we made it the second principle in our CREATE system at Remote Work Results. The bottom line is, the more respect you have for your remote team – their personal beliefs and their work habits – the greater results you will see.