Companies that employ flexible workers lack basic workplace settings that naturally encourage collaboration and connection among team members. When you’re working remotely, there is no watercooler or break room where everyone can gather for impromptu meetings and conversations.

So, the question is, how can you foster a sense of community, and how can you truly engage with your team as the leader? Especially when your employees aren’t in the same room every day. The simple answer is, it takes focus and a little extra effort. But the reward is great. You’ll get more productivity, more engagement, and higher-quality work if you can build a robust, human-focused culture at your company.

What is Human-Centered Leadership?

Human-focused leadership, or human-centered leadership, is the ability to create a work culture that puts the employee first and focuses on the needs of each person.

The chances are that you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t already have the drive to create a workplace where your team can thrive. You’ve probably been doing this throughout your career without even putting a lot of focus on it. It might just be a part of who you are as a leader. Perhaps you have determined that creating a flexible environment ensures even greater focus on supporting your team, offering them the ability to balance personal commitments with less anxiety.

However, leading a flexible team for the first time will challenge you to redesign your leadership a bit, ensuring you still build connections with your team. Realistically, being remote will not change who you are, fundamentally, as a leader. But it will require you to hone your active listening skills and create intentional team interactions. If you convey your aspirations with authenticity, your team and you can flourish.

How to Create Human-Centered Interactions

Remote leaders find one of the biggest challenges is ensuring that they don’t dissolve into communication that only focuses on project initiatives or correcting errors. Email, Slack, and project management tools are essential for deliverables. However, it’s easy to focus solely on the needed outcome for the project rather than the casual interactions that knit together to create relationships.

When you remove the human factor from communication in the workplace, it becomes easy to forget that people are your most beneficial resource. Instead, you might start to focus on the project or the product as your most valuable asset. And employees need to see their leaders as team members too. It’s hard for employees to understand what their leaders care about when they’re not around. As a leader, you want your empathy, enthusiasm, and passion to be contagious. How do you do that?

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Hone Your Active Listening Skills

Being an active listener is an essential trait to have as a leader. An active listener is someone who listens to what you have to say and puts effort into hearing your message. They will listen for the tone in your voice, the words that you’re saying, and (most importantly) how you’re saying them.

Remote team leaders will need to apply active listening to both visual and written interactions. That might come in a daily team check-in on Slack. Perhaps you have a team member who is typically invested in the conversation but seems to be just going through the motions today. Have a side conversation to say, “Hey, just touching base. You don’t seem to be your normal, cheerful self today. I wanted to check if everything is alright?”

Active listening often means reading between the lines or asking open-ended questions. When a team member says, “Oh, I just had a challenging day with my twins, my sitter called out today.” You can say, “I can only imagine. That sounds like a lot of stress. How are you holding up?” Put aside the desire to solve the problem or ask about how they will balance their workload. Invest in them as an individual at that moment.

Personalize Your Interactions

It also means remembering what you talked about last time they shared personal details—creating a way for your team members to feel like they’re an individual to you. These things are more accessible in person when you have distinctive memories instead of remote meetings that all happen at your laptop.

Work diligently on personalizing your relationships with names of places they’ve gone, an event or hobby they spoke of, names of their pets and children, etc. All aspects of leadership you probably do naturally now. Get off on the right foot by consciously bringing that factor to your remote leadership role.

Create Intentional Interactions

Creating a flexible work environment also requires you to use different communication strategies than working in an office. We have some tips that can help.

Remote Communication Suggestions

• Interact Directly: Don’t make all your communication with the team go through your assistant. Depending on your workload, it might be unrealistic to respond to all of your emails directly. However, your team should know that they can request time or give you a heads up on their situation via email or Slack if they need you.
• Peer-to-Peer Communication: One of the ways you can keep your remote workers engaged is by encouraging peer-to-peer conversations. Set up weekly or monthly “show and tell” meetings where people don’t have to self-promote; instead, they can talk about what’s going on with their work, show off new features they’ve built, etc. Or create a casual watercooler channel in Slack or daily, random question threads to build rapport.
• Regular Check-Ins: Set up recurring meetings with each team member where you’re focused solely on them. Encourage everyone on the team to come prepared with specific questions or issues they want to discuss at these meetings. Utilize some of this time to build rapport. Make notes if you have a large team, to ensure you remember details. It’s great to use a portion of the meeting for career development plans, as long as some of it’s focused on enhancing your relationship.

It’s easy to focus on rapid skill development and the latest technology trends when you start to work remotely, but your employees and team members need more than that. They need each other—both online and offline. They need to be in a community where they feel comfortable taking risks, sharing mistakes, and learning from others.

They also need a leader paying attention to their needs, challenges, struggles, and triumphs. If you design for these parts of their experience first, excellent results with remote work will naturally follow.

Flexible Teams Can Be Stronger Teams

In modern work’s complex and challenging environment, it’s more important than ever to create a human-focused place for employees to grow and thrive. It turns out, remote workplaces have an advantage when it comes to fostering this type of culture.

Communication has to be approached with more intention than in a traditional office setting. When a company is remote, leaders can focus on the experiences and relationships that build a strong team—not the physical offices where team members work.

Distinguish Your Flexible Workplace Culture