#WhyShaiWhy Episode 85
We’re living in a time where we all know that communication is key to a successful virtual team, but it’s not always easy to keep everyone motivated.
Use these 3 steps to motivate your team and watch them perform like never before.
Welcome to Why Shai Why Thanks for joining me today as you know Why ShaiWhy is all about questions I get asked from our clients our client communities all the people that were coaching and mentoring And we bring them back to you guys because we know that you’ll be struggling with the same sort of things Speaking of struggling A couple of years ago something quite detrimental happened And most of us started working virtually especially in the technology sector Motivating virtual staff though is a skillset that people don’t just pick up overnight So here we are two years later and we’re starting to see the changes that are happening to the world because of that Great great example of that Being a lot of people leaving their jobs Because you just don’t feel motivated enough in a virtue setting So here’s three things that I thought we talked about today Help you start the process of motivating your virtual team members One of them And probably the biggest is to start to build something called psychological safety for your team members This is kind of what it sounds like you feel safe enough to be yourself And that’s kind of hard I mean we had this problem in our face-to-face world as well when we were all co-located in the same office Now it’s even hottest especially when we’re starting to talk to people that don’t put their cameras on That might be a little bit embarrassed about their background or that there’s kids screaming or there’s cats all over the place Whatever the case might be We need to be accommodating enough to build this in that team member so that they feel like they can open up over a virtual world That’s not easy Okay And I promise you there’s there’s lots of new ones here and lots of things that you could deep dive into and it could take you years to actually get good at this But start at one simple idea of equal voice Jump on line do a quick Google figure out what’s the best way to do equal voice for your team And start down that process Okay Number one psychological safety The second thing that you need to start thinking about is your communication style as a leader and not only your style but your timing Because again we borrow this from you know years and years decades of leadership training The idea of communicating to people nothing new The idea of timing your communication Also nothing new The only difference now is that we need to be context specific So what I mean by that is this You might think that you’re a brilliant leader because you’re communicating with the team because you all jump into a very efficient 30 minute core What you’re not recognizing is that 30 minute call may have some people that are a little bit more open They feel a bit more psychological safety And you’ll have others that are not so open They have less psychological safety and you haven’t gone through that process of creating equal voice in that call What you’re going to find is some people may walk away from that call Or switch off from the call less motivated than numbers We all have a different working style So for you as leaders your job now is to communicate directly in a timely manner One-on-one with your people One-on-one being the key here and timely being the key here If you are going to speak specifically about performance time is of the essence You don’t go and reprimand someone three weeks or three hours after something bad happened Think about your context and start talking to that person almost instantly I know that’s really hard when I don’t know my schedule up when you have a schedule looking like anyone like us but really at the end of the day what you’re looking for is to motivate your people because that’s how you best scale yourself
Last thing guys to think about is What is the cultural and contextual nuances of the person that you speaking to of the team member that you’re with That you need to be super sensitive to I use the word super sensitive because I really want you guys to be super sensitive Okay What I mean by that is this
When a worker is working from their home environment they don’t work in a business culture anymore They don’t work in your organizational culture anymore They’re actually working in their home culture but you’re expecting a organizational culture Element to that Don’t expect that Instead ask It’s very easy to ask Hey look I’d love to be able to do this but I’m a little bit worried about
you know you’re in your kitchen and I don’t know I don’t want to interrupt anything else that might be happening there Or if I drag you out to a in-person meeting I don’t know what your drive time looks like or you might have cultural nuances now People have moved around but they’re still in your team They moved from east coast to west coast and for one continent to another They have a different culture in which they live Right So it’s not just context It’s also culture I start thinking about what is the context and what is the culture for that specific person
Layer in your communication At the time we met her and started building out that psychological safety And now you’re at a place where you can start to build motivation in that person Remember motivation is all about effectiveness You kind of be efficient with this stuff Okay You can motivate a bunch of people at once If you could you’d be not doing what you’re doing instead Try to do it one by one with one person at a time And what you’ll end up with is a really high performing team All right guys So that’s it for us for today If you found this sort of stuff valuable please feel free to like and share if you have any questions for why show R Y shoot me a message on any of our channels and I’ll get back to you and we may even do a video on it Thanks!