The Women In Trucking Association is a trade/professional organization with nearly 8,000 members who are located in ten countries. Despite the name, fifteen percent of our members are men who join because they support our mission to create a more gender diverse workforce in transportation careers.
Our current team consists of thirteen associates who work remotely from their home offices located in eight states with one offshore location. This has always been our work environment, as we’ve never felt that a physical structure would be beneficial to us or to our members.
For this reason, the pandemic didn’t affect our organization in regard to adapting to a work from home model. Travel restrictions did affect our in-person strategy session and forced us to cancel our annual conference, but we pivoted to a virtual event and became comfortable with the online platforms.
As the CEO, my challenge is to ensure everyone is doing their job and is staying productive in a remote workforce. The following are my rules for managing our team. They are working well, as we continue to grow our membership, increase participation at our conference while engaging our members.
First, hire the right person. To be considered as a potential candidate at Women In Trucking, the individual must be self-motivated and able to multi-task working in a home office. Although a major benefit is the elimination of a daily commute, the employee is working in the same building they live, so family members, pets, visitors, and maintenance service workers will come and go during the workday. The person needs to be able to draw a line between work time and family time.
For me, I must be up and dressed, and my workout and breakfast completed before I enter my home office. This is a way to delineate my work time and my personal time. I can also shut the door to further separate my office from my home.
If our team was not self-motivated, they could not survive working for me, as I believe in a results-oriented work culture. This means the employee has no designated vacation time, no sick leave, and no defined work hours. We expect each person to get their work done and to manage their days and weeks to reflect this outcome. They are all free to take a vacation or adjust their schedules to accommodate their families, as long as the work gets done.
A second rule for managing a remote workforce is to give each individual the autonomy to make decisions and to manage a project in its entirety. This doesn’t mean they don’t ask for input or include other staff members; it just means they have the responsibility for the outcome. This allows us to have distinct roles that don’t overlap as much as if we were all together in one location with easy access to one another. For that reason, our team members are all adept at accepting responsibility for the outcome of their projects.
A third rule in managing a remote team is to ensure everyone is focused on the mission. As a nonprofit organization, we have a clear mission to encourage the employment of women in the trucking industry, address obstacles that might keep women from succeeding, and to celebrate the success of our members. Every decision is made with this goal in mind.
By focusing on the mission, we create a vision of a more gender diverse industry. This ignites a passion for supporting our members as well as the trucking community as a whole. Every one of our associates has adopted this passion to empower women in a male populated environment such as trucking.
The fourth rule for creating a better remote workforce is to make sure everyone is having fun. No one wants to work on projects that drain their energy because they are not fun. As we continue to grow and add to our team, we take the least desired duties and either outsource them, drop them, or hire someone to accept the responsibility. For example, we recently switched to a credit card that requires the user to immediately upload the receipt and code the expense, so the staff person who handled that no longer had to remind others to submit receipts and identify the expense.
The final rule that ensures the success of our virtual team is to increase or maintain employee engagement. Although well-being and engagement are closely aligned, a disconnected team member is not the ideal. They are more likely to get sick, to be unhappy and to ultimately leave. Employee engagement via the internet can be a challenge, but a good boss will ensure that everyone is feeling valued and supported.
For me, that means listening and empathizing and eliminating any work-related stressors as much as I possibly can. I don’t rule with an iron fist, and I encourage innovation and risk taking. Mistakes are considered learning opportunities, not something that might prompt retribution. I give our team a lot of latitude in solving problems and in creating new programs. I make an effort to understand each person’s communication style and to give the benefit of the doubt when I’m unsure of their intent.
The result of the pandemic was a world learning to adapt to virtual meetings, staying at home and avoiding crowds that might give them a virus. For our team at Women In Trucking Association, we kept growing our team, adding to our programs and resources, and most recently, we more than doubled our conference attendance. We must be doing something right to continue to move in the direction of greater influence and a larger membership base.
The rules are pretty simple in creating the best virtual work environment possible and would work just as easily in an office building. Focus on the staff and not yourself and you can’t go wrong.
