It's one of the biggest challenges in a dispersed workforce: communicating between team members, across teams, and in fact throughout the organisation. Widely differing communication preferences - some generational, some related to the role - add even more complexity to the model. And the most common way of dealing with it is, unfortunately, for many managers to throw their hands up and demand everyone come into the office where they can speak to each other in person.

But the pandemic has already shown that this isn't always feasible. And there will be times when the benefits of being able to communicate face to face are completely overshadowed by the time and productivity costs of getting people into a face to face situation at all.

What are managers and leaders to do? People Matters met with Barbara Matthews, Chief People Officer of Remote, during her recent visit to Singapore, and got her thoughts on how to make communication and connections work in a flexible model.

Intentionality is important for creating culture

"Back in the day, people weren't so deliberate about creating relationships or building the culture. It just happened by osmosis, because you were there in the office, and it automatically happened with the person beside you. But to build culture and communication with a dispersed workforce you have to be very intentional, very deliberate," said Matthews.

This is extremely important when culture comes into play, she explained. The people team, not to mention leaders and managers, need to have a genuine in-depth understanding of what the company stands for; what its values are, and by extension the values of everyone working there; what its culture is, or how people get things done. And all these things have to be imparted at every level of the company.

"We talk about our values all the time," she described Remote's approach. "We have a virtual all hands meeting every month where we're reinforcing our values and our global makeup, to make sure that there's a feeling of inclusion and belonging. And we constantly reinforce how we work and the way that we approach work. All these things are the foundation for the culture."

The reinforcement doesn't just happen at the front, either. Behind the meetings and conversations is a communications infrastructure using channels such as Slack to transparently communicate processes and decisions company-wide.

"We don't want people to feel like they're missing out on that water cooler conversation," Matthews explained. "We want everyone to get all the information all the time, and we want to be very equitable in how we're sharing that information on an ongoing basis."

Managers need to upskill themselves in communication too

For most people, their main point of contact with their employer is going to be their managers. And so to maintain consistent and transparent communication within the company, managers need to constantly communicate with everyone on their teams. They need to spend time building rapport and relationships, and they especially need to do this with younger employees who want both autonomy and support at work.

"When managers start in their role, I encourage them to build what I call a 'Working With Me' document," Matthews said. This document is something like a fact sheet about the manager, explaining about how the manager works, their availability and any family information that may affect it, feedback and communication styles. Employees are also encouraged to provide their managers with similar information, so that both are on the same page about how to communicate.

"After that, the manager's role is to adapt. With this information they know what they should do for their team, and they know how to support their team."

Being able to do this requires training. Few managers enter the role already knowing what to do and how to do it, and without a training structure in place, they may not even learn how to do the job of managing a team. This was the experience of many managers at Remote early on, Matthews shared frankly.

"We didn't have strong manager training. We did everything virtually, there was no training required, and so employees or managers just didn't spend any time training. So now when we bring people into a managing role, we give them foundational training on how to communicate, how to engage, how to be an adaptable manager, and we make all these requirements for them to become managers."

Similarly, Remote has put a monthly feedback system in place where employees are asked specific questions about their managers so that the managers can immediately make any needed adjustments to how they are running their teams, rather than waiting for sentiment data on a yearly basis.

All these measures are critical, she said, because a lot of managers - especially in startups or companies that are scaling - become managers simply by virtue of a team growing around them. But that doesn't mean they actually have the skills to manage that team.

The communication differences between flexible work and face time

In the past, prior to flexible work becoming a norm, communication would be far more spontaneous and without much care taken, said Matthews: "If we were all just still in the office, I would have a conversation with you, and I'd walk out of the room and maybe we'd remember it, or maybe we'd forget about it. But I think that has changed."

Now, she believes, people have become much more conscious of communication styles and of the entire process involved in communicating something. She broke it down into four structured steps:

1. Engage with the person to understand how they would like to receive messages.

2. Determine what the message is and what the person should take away from it.

3. Deliver the message in the various modes available and appropriate to the person's communication style.

4. Follow up one to one to make sure that there is a consistent understanding of the message - even if the conversation is in person, a follow-up still must be done in writing.

Having this level of awareness has definitely helped many people become better at communication, she added. "When people have to lean in, they're ready to lean in. They know that when they communicate it really matters, because it's it's rare in their day, so they're very focused on it."

And a tip for those who struggle with finding the energy reserves for such intentional, sometimes intense communication: don't schedule meetings back to back, and prepare in advance.

"I don't do a lot of synchronised meetings, because I work asynchronously," Matthews said. "But when I do have sync'ed meetings, I'm actively listening. I'm really focusing on what you're saying, and I'm really focused on engaging, because I'm not already exhausted by engaging for a full nine hours. And my advice to managers is, when you are working asynchronously, use that time to go through your sales dashboards, your metrics, whatever you need to review. Then when you're together with the person you're meeting, use that time to find out more about the person. Build trust, build rapport, build that relationship, coach them, grow them. Find out what their growth plans are, where they want to develop. That is way more valuable than the two of you sitting together looking at a dashboard on a screen and going through that in real time."