8 priorities for remote leadership

The pandemic and resulting economic uncertainty forced every organisation regardless of size, industry or location to quickly adapt to a rapidly changing working landscape. Suddenly we became more reliant on collaboration technologies to maintain communication among teams and with customers, with many digital transformation projects expedited as a result.

What’s more, traditional concepts of leadership had to suddenly shift gear and adapt to remote ways of communication, leading by example, motivating and project management. So many digital and technology leaders managed the switch to remote leadership successfully that it’s here to stay for the foreseeable future!

What is remote leadership?

Remote leadership is the process of managing teams without on-site of in-person interactions and the traditional monitoring and managing systems that are inherently at play in a traditional on-site office. Remote leadership relies heavily on digital technologies to manage the following:

- Measuring productivity
- Maintaining communication
- Staying connected
- Ensuring employee wellbeing
- Managing employee development
- Maintaining company culture
- Managing shortfalls with technology
- Creating a virtual recruitment and interview process
- Managing a positive virtual onboarding experience

8 priorities for remote digital leadership

With the continuation of remote working in place or a potential hybrid-working model for the foreseeable future, leaders in digital and technology industries are in an interesting position to further develop their remote leadership skills by finding ways to further optimise:

1. Company culture and collaborative technology

With a real shift in accepted working practice, tech and digital leaders should focus on implementing cloud-based infrastructures that enable their employees to be flexible and easily switch between remote and in-person operations.

Leaders have the responsibility to drive digital transformation and to stay on top of the latest trends, proactively implementing technology within their business to ensure their operations remain efficient and proactive. Adopting collaborative tech will help your remote team stay connected and work together on projects and promoting company culture and adopting technologies such as cloud platforms will help drive your overarching digitisation efforts successful.

2. Diversity and inclusion

Workplace equality, diversity and inclusion were catapulted to the top of social, political and organisational priorities in recent months as many imbalances and discrepancies came to the fore. The potential lies in leveraging diversity and inclusion properly in your team’s ethos, your own management style, and your future recruitment incentives so that you can benefit from a variety of opinions and greater creativity and collaboration.

3. Maximising talent retention

Your digital and technology team needs to be at the forefront when considering your top strategic priorities. By maintaining their morale and keeping them reassured through employee benefits, opportunities for progression and compensation, you can help provide evidence that their contributions to the business are valued.

4. Being an accessible leader

Lately the spotlight has been focused on tech and digital leaders and how they were able to overcome insurmountable obstacles, counter strong detractors and achieve success. There has also been much wide-spread scrutiny on how leaders have stepped up to support their employees during such a turbulent period and empathetic leadership has become a necessity.

Ensuring you have enough contact time with your team as a group and on an individual basis will help unify the team and instil confidence in your leadership acumen.

5. Streamlining remote recruiting

Talent acquisition is now digitalised as we enter a whole new era of hiring and recruitment. Forbes has documented that 24% of business have started using AI for their talent acquisition needs, with 56% of managers planning to adopt automated technology in the next year. Adopting a forward-thinking digital recruitment strategy will help streamline the recruitment process, saving you time and money whilst also enhancing your employer brand by promoting a positive candidate experience.

6. Looking out for new skills (soft and technical)

As well as the technical skills required to keep pace with emerging technology, soft skills that support effective remote working and collaboration will be extremely useful as we further evolve the working-from-home model. Soft skills to look out for include:

- Leadership skills
- Effective communication of technical concepts to non-technical colleagues
- Adaptation to challenging situations
- Problem solving
- Effective time management

Energize can help you shape an interview process designed to draw out these qualities, get in touch to find out how!

7. Integrating new hires

Creating a positive virtual onboarding process has also become a major focus for businesses, as it is critical to engaging new hires and establishing a team that are committed to the company’s success. A thorough onboarding plan will also help retain your new tech and digital hires, allow them to become acclimated with the business and start contributing faster.

8. Flexible resourcing options

Whilst permanent recruitment will be vital to the growth of your team and the organisation at large, being open to flexible resourcing options to shore up specialty projects will be hugely useful for maximising on expertise without breaking the bank! Contract tech and digital professionals can be embedded within your team for a short amount of time to aid and support with delivery or even day-to-day functions.
 

Let’s find the right tech and digital talent

Providing you with the best-possible recruitment experience is what drives us. We pioneered service standardisation within the recruitment industry via our implementation of Net Promoter Score®, and through our continual pursuit of customer excellence, customers choose Energize time and again, forming lasting relationships and enjoying a more effective hiring process.

With a global network of more than one million candidates cultivated over 14 years of recruitment expertise, Energize empowers organisations as you access high-value local talent supported by specialist Consultants experienced in scaling businesses with the experts they need.

The Energize Group offer niche, premium staffing solutions on both a permanent and freelance basis to customers in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, and the United States of America.

Our commitment doesn’t end there though, we continue to offer support when you interview or onboard new team members ensuring your draw out the right soft skills and make the right organisational fit with every hire.

If your organisation could use some further support with your hiring strategies, Energize Group is always available to help.

Click here and reach out to our recruitment experts!