creative-talents

How to Establish an Effective Remote Working Process with Creative Talents

How do you establish an effective remote working process with creative talents? It begins with good leadership but it requires knowing the comfort zone of these talents to make things work.

From a leadership and high level point of view, The Center for Creative Leadership came up with six challenges for mobility managers to work well with creative talents.

  1. Hone in on effectiveness. Develop relevant skills such as time-management, prioritization, strategic thinking, decision-making, and getting up to speed with the job.
  2. Inspire others. Inspire or motivate talents to ensure they’re satisfied with their jobs and are working smarter.
  3. Develop employees. Mentoring and coaching are essential.
  4. Lead a team. Always strive to develop and manage teams well by instilling pride and providing support.
  5. Guide change. Mobility managers need to manage, mobilize, understand and lead change. Guiding change includes knowing how to mitigate consequences, overcome resistance to change, and deal with employees’ reactions to change.
  6. Manage stakeholders. Manage relationships, politics, and image. These leadership challenges include gaining managerial support, managing up, and getting buy-in from other departments, groups, or individuals

Establishing timelines and deadlines are necessary. To do so, use the SMART method: be specific; set measurable targets; make attainable goals; be realistic and have timed deadlines, including milestones.

Practical perspective

If there’s one thing missing in this method, mobility managers need to break this down for everyone to understand. It’s time to apply a more practical way of meeting challenges. It’s time to make use of whiteboard tools. 

The all-encompassing Miro platform is a game changer when it comes to ideating in different ways and if you want to be more honed in and practical, there’s the latest, more specific and highly intuitive whiteboarding tool, Figjam by Figma. 

Both tools didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. For those who have tried them, they are more engaging than talking “over” someone on those video conference apps, because they are simply virtual whiteboards with stick-ons everyone is already familiar with. 

Communicate a process 

Managing a workforce this way can help communicate a process, if not establish a process for everyone to follow. 

As it is, a remote staff feels like everything is a meeting when a video is turned on whereas whiteboard tools’ sticky notes in their chosen color and each name is labeled on it lend the process the proper way to document the team’s efforts.

Yes, there will be someone in the team who will be resistant to using these tools but as a global mobility manager looking to relate to a creative talent, it’s a process they would actually prefer to try than seeing everyone on a video.

The important thing is to explain the task ahead, especially for HR personnel looking to establish remote work policies on a regular basis with a creative team; nothing is permanent with some countries perhaps in their strictest lockdown while others have eased up dramatically. 

Unlike off-the-cuff brainstorming sessions on-site, though, more preparation is involved. Writing down instructions and then explaining them clearly to the creative talent is essential. This way, the remote team can reference what was said in written form. The next best thing to do is to provide reference links to various sources and to have everyone share their feedback.

More collaborative engagement

As a global mobility manager, learning to be in the comfort zone of these talents is a good first step. After all, establishing connections that matter to these talents is essential for everyone to innovate and thrive personally and professionally. 

If remote work is indeed here to stay, companies and global mobility teams will always need to make adjustments. Yes, California is opening up, so on-site brainstorming work may happen more often, but there will still be some holdouts who will choose to live and work remotely, whether the office is just 30 minutes away. In this situation, having online tools everyone can use for work collaborations should do the trick. (Dennis Clemente)