Leading a virtual team is simultaneously one of the most rewarding and most challenging aspects of owning your own business. While many of us try to keep our work and personal lives separate, the reality is that personal opinions may sometimes seep into our work lives and potentially become a disruptive force. While we may think that home-based businesses and remote teams are less susceptible to these kinds of dynamics than physical office spaces, this is not necessarily the case. Knowing how to prevent and manage divides among employees is as essential for remote team leaders as for any other kind of business.
At the end of the day, managing a workplace comes down to managing relationships. Many of the same skills that go into solving conflicts and maintaining healthy relationships with our loved ones are equally applicable at work. Focusing on establishing guidelines for clear, respectful communication at all times and engaging in shared activities and projects together can help diffuse tension and enable employees to work together to achieve a common goal, even if their views or attitudes do not align.
Following are five essential practices to help manage divides in the workplace:
1. Set a positive example.
One of the most fundamental skills that all effective leaders share is a capacity to set a positive example through their actions. It’s important to have clearly stated values to guide a business or project, but that’s only half the battle: the true challenge is living up to these values through your everyday behaviors. When it comes to setting a positive example, even very small gestures can leave a large impact, so it is important to be cognizant of what your organization’s values mean to you and how you can embody them in your interactions with others. If you value a diversity of perspectives and open, respectful communication, then you as a business leader should try to practice these behaviors during meetings and exchanges with both coworkers and clients. If conflicts do arise, acting as a patient, respectful, and open mediator can help you develop a company culture based around respect and cooperative problem-solving. Consistency, neutrality, and transparency are essential principles for ensuring fairness in the workplace, as they ensure that employees maintain trust in the conflict resolution process.
2. Embrace Challenging Conversations.
These days, when our lives are constantly saturated with discourse from social media and other forms of media, it can be tempting for business leaders to want to discourage or even bar certain topics of discussion outright. However, an approach which simply tries to ignore or divert such conversations often ends up making it worse, as it leaves conflicts to fester rather than proactively solving them. Learning how to effectively regulate sensitive discussions rather than prohibiting them altogether can lead to a stronger team in the long run. This does not mean ever forcing anyone into having tough conversations, but rather setting out clear guidelines for how these conversations should be conducted if they ever arise. Having these guidelines in place and establishing clear conflict resolution procedures can turn potentially difficult conversations into opportunities to improve communication skills and build respect amongst your team.
3. Engage with individuals separately.
Sometimes, divides among employees may become heated enough that management needs to step in to help resolve them. It’s not that these conflicts occur that matters, but what you do to resolve them. While there are many different ways to approach conflict resolution, it’s often helpful to engage each employee one-on-one before potentially bringing them together to discuss the problem. Meeting with each employee separately to gain a deeper understanding of their perspective can help you better mediate between the two of them in a way that makes a mutually satisfying resolution easier to achieve. It’s often easier for a third party to find a way to frame these conversations in a constructive way that takes some of the intense emotions out of the process. However, in order for this to work properly, it’s absolutely essential to bracket your own biases. If you personally feel incapable of doing so for whatever reason, it is advisable to find a different person in your organization to serve as the neutral third party, as the lack of bias is what makes it possible for each employee to open up on their own terms.
4. Engage in team-building activities.
Team-building exercises are valuable in general, but they are not always easy to organize. This is especially true of home businesses and remote workplaces and is made more challenging if employee divides are also present. While team-building exercises are more of a long-term preventative measure than a direct problem-solving one, they can nonetheless play a major role in helping manage workplace divides. Many team-building activities are focused on encouraging employees to collaborate with one another to achieve a gamified end, allowing them to engage their teamwork skills without the added pressure of a serious, work-related goal. Others involve a fun get-to-know-you component, often with an emphasis on facts that are potentially surprising or unexpected. Both of these kinds of games can help bring a divided workforce together. This is because they give employees a golden opportunity to discover unexpected similarities and to gain direct experience working together for a common goal in a low-stakes environment. For small and/or primarily remote teams, opening meetings with icebreakers that emphasize commonalities among team members can be a good way to integrate this kind of team-building into your weekly or bi-weekly schedule. While interoffice competitions (e.g. an ongoing leaderboard to see who can raise the most money for a charity) can be a fun way to encourage employees to get more involved, they may also exacerbate division between individuals or groups, so finding ways to put a collaborative spin on such activities can be a great way to build camaraderie in the long term.
5. Focus on the bigger picture.
Division in the workplace is rarely a matter of fundamental, irresolvable differences between personalities. Instead, it tends to build up over time as unresolved smaller-scale disagreements turn into larger-scale conflicts. As a team leader, you are in the unique position of being able to interrupt this process by speaking to people’s underlying values and engaging them in a mission that brings them all together. By maintaining a focus on who people are and what particular value they bring to the team can help create a work environment in which people are better able to gain a deeper understanding of others’ motivations and values. Keeping this bigger picture continually in view makes it easier to approach complex and challenging conversations with the proper amount of context and proceed with more respect and empathy.
