In DefTech your best bet for hiring top talent comes from enabling remote work, so learn to manage it effectively…

In today’s modern business environment, talent is more rare and expensive than ever, and the biggest ask of employees is the biggest struggle for many companies. In DefTech, the salaries more often than not, less competitive for the top talent in many high tech fields. There’s many drivers of this, but it’s been a long running constant for the industry. In the post-COVID world the biggest new non-financial demand of labor has been the rise of remote work. Therefore the ability to support remote work and utilize it effectively, has become a critical requirement for many companies in DefTech. Unfortunately, many managers both commercial and government, have failed to evolve their own skills to match the reality of this new paradigm.

Managing a remote team is fundamentally different than an in-person one, and remote/distributed operations quickly expose the underlying flaws or deficiencies in preexisting management workflows. “Work” is not the thing that matters, and can be very vaguely and widely defined. Is work sitting in an office waiting for a call? Is work sitting in multiple meetings all day long listening to others talk? I could keep going, but the point is “work” as a series of actions isn’t what mattered, it’s was the usefulness of the resulting output that actually mattered. If the call made a sale or fixed a problem, then it mattered. If the meetings formulated a plan or trained personnel then they mattered. Organizations need to be output focused, not activity obsessed.

The tasks and the associated timelines for delivery are the critical components, and are the key to managing remote teams. A manager needs to understand their deliverables, and task their team appropriately and specifically. Managing remote personnel can be actually much easier than in-person teams because of this. For example, members in geographic isolation eliminate many of the interpersonal issues that inevitably plague an office environment. If you appropriately define the tasks and timelines, then individual evaluations of performance are very straightforward, and thereby reduce many levels of interpretation that can be muddied by the “work” (non-productive actions) people often cite they perform in an office environment.

The bottom line is remote work success is a management focused issue, with very straightforward needs and procedures.

How are you running your remote team to achieve your organization’s success?