Leading in digital times

The following tips should help you to lead virtual teams. Trust is very important here: Especially in times of deadline pressure, project work and leadership from a distance or from the home-office, a trusting relationship is an indispensable prerequisite for success - there is no other way.

How you support the building of trust in your team:

Establish clear rules: who, what, how, by when
Clarify how often and at what times communication takes place via which media
Organize the exchange of information and promote team interaction
Answer quickly - no matter if it is an e-mail or a callback for a phone call
Arrange feedback loops, give individual feedback frequently
Follow up on indications of breaches of trust to restore trust
Keep your word. And if you can't, give detailed reasons

Basic tips for managing virtual teams:

As a basic prerequisite for working in a home-office, make sure that you have good technical equipment - this includes contact persons for software who will support your team members. Training courses on this may also be appropriate.
Also think about ergonomics! Many may only have a dining table to work at home; renting office equipment can be helpful.
Arrange a jour fixe (fixed date for video conferences) to keep in touch and strengthen team cohesion. Ask your employees for ideas that will help the team grow together. You don't have to do everything yourself.
Employees in project teams on site are used to working independently. But you as a manager want to be informed about the progress of the project. It is important that the employees on the one hand do not feel controlled, but on the other hand receive regular feedback from you. And if you are not familiar with the project, the employees need feedback on other aspects of their performance (customer feedback, reliability, encouragement to persevere, recalling past successes, etc.).
To get your entire team in shape for digital times, it is recommended that you contact the human resources department. To make sure every team member can put aside his or her fears and develop digital sovereignty, a playful approach is often recommended: one must dare to practice without fear of making a fool of oneself. If you as a manager also take part in such training events and laugh about yourself and your mistakes, you are the perfect role model for a truly confident approach to digitization.

And here are the tips for meetings in digital times:

It is reassuring and useful for the productivity of meetings to allow a minutes for arrival at the beginning so that everyone has the chance to refocus. In a face-to-face meeting, everyone needs time to prepare their documents and get in the right frame of mind for the meeting - this is especially important when clicking from one conference to the next. So give everyone a minute to switch over - preferably in silence.
Introduce new rituals, i.e. behaviors that are repeated in every meeting, for example. Maintain these behaviors under all circumstances, also and especially if bad news comes in. This can be a breathing exercise before the start or a muscle relaxation exercise at the end. Or a so-called “report of heroic deeds” (also good for the “we” feeling, you already know that) at the beginning of a meeting: Everyone is allowed to tell what positive things he or she experienced that day.
Also plan time for a chat. You might even appoint two humor officers to enrich each meeting with funny mini-movies or cartoons
“To us he / she comes less often than to them!” Dissension between sub-groups or the feeling of being excluded by individual team members are the problems that are most frequently reported in practice. You should avoid them by treating them equally.
When a meeting is officially over, you should not discuss the content of the meeting any further with the employees who are present in person; otherwise it can happen very quickly that new ideas are found in which the “switched off” team members had no part, so that they do not support these (for them strange) ideas or feel left out and react offended.
Involve the introverted team members in particular by addressing them repeatedly and slowing down frequent speakers or mailers. Address the people personally, by name. Spend a lot of time on making successes visible - for everyone.
Encourage voluntary meetings outside of official working hours, like an after-work event in real life - but online in the form of a video conference. Especially for new team members this informal contact can be important to experience themselves as part of the team. Perhaps it is also possible to conduct virtual getting-to-know games that facilitate integration into the team.