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This article describes a bespoke training program designed by learning and development specialist Academee to equip managers at Finning, national Caterpillar dealer for the UK, with the skills needed to manage remote teams effectively.

Draws on information provided by Finning's compensation and benefits manager, who was the company's training and development manager at the time of the program.

Highlights the importance of: developing an understanding of the impact on managers of working with remote teams and identifying appropriate tools and techniques that will help them to be more effective; fostering a clear view of the impact of working as a remote team member and identifying approaches that can improve the working environment; sharing experience and identifying existing best practice; exploring the particular communication challenges associated with managing remote teams and identifying appropriate processes that will ensure effective team communication; and exploring the particular performance‐management issues associated with managing remote teams and identifying appropriate processes that will ensure effective performance improvement.

Shows that, with more than 1,000 remote‐based sales and service personnel, effective remote management is critical to Finning's business success and customer service.

Demonstrates that the power of the training program was in creating the feelings of being remote, and enabling people to discuss as a group the practical impact decisions had on the teams and the team leaders.

This chapter offers descriptions of many current uses of video conferencing technology for the delivery of assistive technology (AT) services at a distance. It begins with definitions of remote AT services, virtual teams and virtual teamwork and moves to a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of remote AT supports for individuals, teams and organisations. A review of research regarding the outcomes of remote services helps to clarify ways that assistive technology providers can enhance function and build agency capacity by working, at least in part, in a virtual support environment. The chapter provides a discussion of various aspects of virtual teamwork that affects how individuals work together remotely as well as potential barriers to the provision of remote AT services. Multiple examples are provided throughout as well as descriptions of specific features of video conference technology options that should be considered before adoption. A planning form for the integration of remote assistive technology supports into the array of AT support services is included.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the supportive aspects of a team approach for a remote mental health team that report high stability in senior clinical roles, in a region where voluntary turnover is typically high.

This qualitative research study examines the reflections of team members on their role and job characteristics through informal semi-structured interviews.

The extant themes identified as supportive aspects of the team approach included engagement and both personal and professional support. The intrinsic role of support in remote work environments, and the impact of intrinsic job satisfaction through client-focussed practices further supported low turnover, improved stability and consistency of service provision.

Continued support for existing experienced health professionals will contribute to workforce stability in remote regions where needs are complex and continuity of care is improved by consistent, reliable services. With health professionals working in remote Australia reporting high levels of job satisfaction; it follows that the next steps involve minimising dissatisfaction through effective workforce support mechanisms. Health professionals already working in remote regions, suggest that this is about engagement and personal and professional support through flexible work systems. While the findings of this study may not be generalisable, the authors suggest that these supportive aspects are transferable to other multi-disciplinary team settings.

The purpose of this paper is to provide leaders with a clear understanding of some key issues they face when leading remote workers and to provide practical suggestions on how to deal with those issues.

The main method of research for this paper is data from participants in workshops over a ten‐year period. Participants included all levels of management, as well as non‐managers in a variety of large organizations across industries. Industries include high‐tech, food, consumer products, energy, entertainment and manufacturing. Participants included those with global teams, teams within a country and teams with work‐at‐home members.

The key finding is that remote leadership requires the same good management and leadership skills that co‐located leadership requires. However, in the remote environment, leaders must be more deliberate and planful about building relationships and trust and in communicating.

Leaders can implement specific techniques, several of which are presented in the paper, to increase their effectiveness of leading remote employees and teams.

While remote leaders often struggle as they try to work effectively with their employees, they do not often identify that it is specifically the remote factor that is causing much of the challenge. This paper provides practical techniques for anyone trying to get work accomplished with remote employees.

This study examined employees’ experiences of remote work and the impact of remote work on working life.

This was a mixed-methods study undertaken in three Finnish nonprofit firms. In total, 1,154 respondents took part during the first and second COVID-19 waves in Finland.

COVID-19 remote working saved employees’ and businesses’ financial resources; increased job satisfaction, firms’ performances and employee employment opportunities; and positively affected organizations’ trust outcomes. This study found that female team leaders were significantly more likely than male team leaders to trust team members’ data protection abilities. In addition, remote work can reduce climate pollution. Remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic also affected the social lives of the employees and work relationships and led to a reduction in physical activity levels and work overload.

The main theoretical contributions of this study are the identification of remote working characteristics during the COVID-19 pandemic, positive/negative outcomes of remote working, and further forms measurable propositions. This study contributes to the change management literature and opens up new avenues for future research.

This study can help managers to better understand and lead employees at a time when significant numbers continue to work remotely. Continued work in this field is important because organizations are required to be agile in a changing operating work environment. Given that home-based work has become the new normal, organizations may need to update their data protection rules and address organizational trust issues.

Social effects can be seen as an increased understanding of the effects of remote work in the colleague network. Although remote work suits many employees, they also wish to see their colleagues occasionally. Thus, a mix of remote work with some in-office time may be a more attractive option than remote work only.

The integrated multidimensional framework applied in this study is based on research findings. The framework is dynamic and can be further expanded with new findings, serving as a theoretical basis to guide future research.

Social work teams can provide a secure base for social workers, supporting them to manage the emotional demands of child and family social work (Biggart et al., 2017). As the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated increased remote working, social workers have needed to maximise their use of virtual networks and navigate new ways of connecting with colleagues. This study aims to examine the extent to which social work teams can function as a secure base in the context of remote working.

Between 19th March and 13th June, the authors undertook 31 in-depth, qualitative interviews with child and family social workers across 9 local authorities in England. this research captured social workers’ perspectives on remote working and team support throughout lockdown in England.

In this study, the authors report findings in three key areas: how social workers experienced the sudden shift to increased remote working; how social work teams provided a secure base for remote working; and the challenges for sustaining the team as a secure base when working remotely.

These findings will be of interest to social workers, managers and local authorities as they adapt to the challenges of increased remote working in child and family social work.

One of the issues concerning businesses today, which are reconfiguring the workplace towards more remote working, is avoiding the build-up of “silos” – teams, which operate as sealed off windowless units within the business. These interfere with the creation and maintenance of a one-team culture within your organisation.

With everyone working from home, this situation can potentially become even more difficult to address. Teams may meet regularly over digital channels but they likely have less contact with the people in the wider organisation, who they do not work with directly. If you were to map the points of contact in your organisation, you would see that remote working in many organisations is very much reducing them and confining them to within teams. So, in remote teams, there is more of a need than ever for HR professionals and business leaders to work to break down silos to keep the one team culture.

Here are some tips from the author’s experience for breaking down silos in remote teams: create opportunities for more relaxed social interactions, focus on the customer experience and share information across the organisation.

There may be opportunities for these underused skills to be deployed in another area of the business. But if the resource availability is not visible, that is less likely to happen. Equally, if each team does not share what it is doing in an up to date and accessible way, other teams will end up stepping on their toes. So, having a way of sharing accurate, real-time information across the business underpins the effort of working together in a unified and efficient way.

This study aims to widen the understanding of how remote work shapes the feedback environment by examining the perceptions of leaders and subordinates of daily, dyadic feedback interactions. The emphasis is on understanding how reciprocity within leader-member exchange (LMX) relationships manifests and how it influences the feedback dynamics.

Template analysis of a qualitative data set consisting of 81 semi-structured interviews with leaders (n = 29) and remote working subordinates (n = 52) was performed.

Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of the feedback environment and the leader-member exchange, the findings demonstrate the imbalance between the efforts of leaders and subordinates in building and maintaining a favourable feedback environment in the remote work context. The results of this study highlight the importance of the dyadic nature of feedback interactions, calling for a more proactive role from subordinates.

Given the estimation that the COVID-19 pandemic has permanently changed the way organizations work, leaders, subordinates and HR practitioners will benefit from advancing their understanding of the characteristics of dyadic, daily feedback interaction in remote work.

Qualitative research on feedback and leader-member exchange interactions in remote work that combines the perceptions of leaders and subordinates is sparse.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many organisations to transform face-to-face teams into virtual ones through the adoption of remote working modes. This event has represented the starting point of a process that is changing how management control (MC) systems are designed and implemented to guide employees towards organisational objectives. The previous literature on virtual teams (VTs) has devoted scant attention to MC issues. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring how MC – and particularly cultural control – has changed to cope with the shift from face-to-face to VTs and by analysing the interrelationship between the different control mechanisms and the resulting tensions.

The research adopts the methodological framework based on abduction to provide a theoretical explanation and conceptualisation of MC in virtual settings. To tackle the research objective, this work undertakes a cross-sectional field study based on semi-structured interviews with managers of different service companies.

The results of the research highlight the key challenges that managers are called to deal with to design and change MC systems when implementing remote working. In particular, managers must cope with the reduced possibility to leverage cultural controls. To do this, this study’s analysis found that managers act by introducing and/or removing formal and informal controls and by orchestrating the interplays and tensions between these mechanisms.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, to date limited attention has been paid to MC in VTs. Moreover, few researchers have investigated the process of MC change from face-to-face to VTs. This work aims to contribute to this nascent stream of literature by providing interesting implications for both research and practice.