The Long-Distance Teammate: Stay Engaged and Connected While Working Anywhere

In short, as the authors put it in the Introduction, it's about being a great teammate – someone who supports others, and gets support back in return. Someone who's good to work with, who inspires trust, and who helps to build commitment and engagement throughout a dispersed team.

And they say the difference between being just a team member, and achieving the rank of teammate, is particularly important among remote workers, where communication needs to be top notch – and connections have to be built and maintained with care.

Get those things right, and long-distance working offers great rewards – for you and your whole organization. You reduce your own travel time and expense, gain more flexibility and autonomy, and access opportunities that are no longer dependent on where you're working from. Meanwhile, your company can cut operating costs – while enjoying higher productivity and lower staff turnover.

But for this positive picture to become a reality, remote workers need to feel like proper members of the organization, and be inspired and supported to contribute fully. The book's subtitle expresses that powerfully: "Stay engaged and connected while working anywhere."

The authors point out that "engaged" goes beyond feeling interested in your role and satisfied with what you achieve. How much of your heart and soul are you putting into your work?

And "connected" means more than having good Wi-Fi, and knowing when and how to have meetings online. It's about developing the sort of rich connections that allow people to collaborate just as well as if they were in the same room. And to feel just as connected as when they used to share a coffee pot or go out for team meals.

According to this book, when you're properly engaged and connected, you'll build stronger relationships, see and seize opportunities, and get noticed for what you have to offer.

So, keep listening to find out how to stay motivated and productive when you're working remotely; why staying visible matters so much in virtual teams; and what you can do to keep driving your career forward – even if you never go back to the office.

"The Long-Distance Teammate" is written by two experts in team effectiveness, who are also prolific authors in their own rights. There's more about several of their books on Mind Tools, including a Book Insight podcast on their previous title, "The Long-Distance Leader," and an Expert Interview with Wayne Turmel about his book, "Meet Like You Mean It." The pair are frequent collaborators, and they cofounded the Remote Leadership Institute.

"We live what we write about," they say in the Introduction. And it's clear from the start that they don't have a rose-tinted view of remote working. It can be distracting and demotivating. You can feel isolated and unclear about your purpose – but have to make more decisions than ever, and still get all your work done.

But isn't the traditional workplace also full of things that get in the way of work? Office life can seem inflexible and overwhelming, and people can feel just as lonely there.

So, for Eikenberry and Turmel, remote working is what you make it. And Part 1 focuses on you, the remote teammate. What can you do to make team-working work – for you and your team?

Well, you can start with the 3P Model for Remote-Work Success. The first P is for Productivity: getting the right things done well.

The second P is for Proactivity. If you sit alone somewhere waiting for others to give you things to do, sort out your problems, or offer you new opportunities, you'll be waiting a long time! Instead, keep making the first move yourself.

And the third P is for Potential. Keeping an eye on the bigger picture enables you to have a greater impact, to find more value in the work you do, and to become a more central part of your boss's longer-term plans.

This can only happen with the right mindset, and that's what the authors explore next, offering exercises for understanding how your role affects your team – and your organization as a whole. This should help you to see the purpose in your work.

And if it doesn't? Well, the authors have plenty of other tips. Such as, take a moment to see and celebrate the progress you've made. Seek out feedback from colleagues as well as managers, to give yourself new ways to improve, plus things to be proud of. Find time to talk to a client or customer, especially when there's something you can help them with, or if you have good news to share.

But don't just focus on how you feel inside. To be a great long-distance teammate you'll need to look after your physical condition, too. When you're working alone, it's easy to develop bad habits.

To avoid this, you can consciously prioritize your health, and improve the quality of your diet, exercise and sleep. Maybe you can arrange your hours so you work when you're most alert. Or figure out which distractions you can dispense with, so you can get things finished and take a break.

And then, crucially, how do you put all these good intentions into practice? Getting the right stuff done involves resisting the temptation to focus solely on individual tasks. Instead, stay in touch with what the team needs from you. That will keep you connected with others for when you need help. It will also focus your gaze on the organizational goals you can help to achieve.

But won't you still have your personal to-do list? Don't worry: the authors know that remote workers often feel torn between completing their own tasks and contributing to shared projects. So they have some sensible advice for getting your own work done with enough time and energy left over to play a full part within your team. Plan your time realistically, for example. Break larger tasks into bite-sized chunks. And celebrate every time you cross something off your list.

What about when you're offered the chance to do work for the team? When that happens, clarify what's involved. And then, if you know you can't take on this particular task, explain why. But if you can, check that you have all the right information, resources and support. Block out enough time, and keep the lines of communication open.

Every section of this book is peppered with practical tips. Here, the authors suggest you use status updates on shared calendars and apps like Teams and Slack to let your teammates know when you're available for the team, and when you need to focus alone.

Part 2 drills down into some of the more subtle skills you need to succeed in a remote team. For example, the ability to gain clarity about your work – which can be a challenge when you're collaborating at a distance. You'll need to ask all the right questions, with why and how being as important as what, where and when. Arrange meetings whenever expectations need to be discussed and shared. And always record the details, especially the metrics you'll be judged on.

As you might expect, communication is another complex skill that's unpicked here, in the context of remote working. It's a topic worthy of a book in its own right, but again, there are some simple and effective strategies for putting good communication at the heart of your team's culture.

For starters, everyone should be given a range of communication options – and trained to use the right tool for each situation. And you should communicate clear timeframes whenever you can. Remember, your remote-working teammates may have schedules that are very different from yours.

Another skill that the authors identify is "ethical visibility" – getting noticed without being seen as egotistical. The answer, we're told, is to get your work recognized in the context of the team's success. So start saying "we" and "us," instead of "I" and "me." Offer to share your expertise. Even simple things like using a real photo instead of a random icon on chat platforms, and switching on your webcam in meetings, will help you to stay visible to the rest of your team.

"The Long-Distance Teammate" shows clearly how skills like these – achieving clarity, communicating effectively, and being seen and known – all come together to build strong relationships within remote teams. And ultimately, those relationships determine whether or not teams succeed.

This book has a wide audience: it's for anyone who does some or all of their work remotely – and wants to be better at it. And two chapters stand out as having the most immediate practical use. The first is a "how to" guide to becoming the best possible remote teammate. There are tips here on using your webcam, including how to light and frame yourself well, to enable clear and natural communication. There's also guidance on understanding and fitting in with other people's working styles, and ways to get your meaning across with ultimate precision. For instance, have you ever thought of putting your whole message in an email subject line?

The other go-to chapter is about virtual meetings. This is packed with valuable nuggets of advice, such as how taking notes can keep you focused and activate more of your brain. And why you should give people specific roles, such as "timekeeper" or "slide deck operator," to keep everyone involved. For readers with numerous online meetings to attend each week, this chapter alone should make it easier to be an effective remote teammate.

Part 3 looks to the future, with advice on settling into remote working for the long term. There's a chapter on physical, mental and emotional well-being, with a strong message about not letting your remote work take over your life. And that's an important point if you have few or no commutes to separate working and non-working time. With all your work things around you all the time, it's easy to feel like you're not so much "working from home" as "living at work!" So it's good to see a book about professional success that also stresses the importance of having a rich and rewarding life outside of work.

That said, there's a useful chapter on extending your professional life beyond the boundaries of your team – and even your organization. You'll be helping your company as well as yourself if you start networking further afield, and stay informed about your sector.

Earlier, you heard about the authors' previous book on leading remote teams, and they include a short section to summarize the key points from that. This includes modeling good communication, leading initiatives that boost connection among your people, and checking that all systems and practices support everyone – even those you don't see too often. It's a helpful glimpse at remote leadership, although readers will need to refer to that other book, "The Long-Distance Leader," to learn how to put these principles into practice.

In fact, there's so much to cover in this book that some of its advice is quite sketchy. Occasionally the guidance seems a little simplistic, too. Like the suggestion that, if you're not getting enough feedback, you should just ask for more. Having said that, there are often links to original online resources when further insights and tools might be useful.

So, overall, this is a comprehensive and highly practical guide to getting the most out of remote team-working. And the "Pause and Reflect" box at the end of each chapter provides a useful space to consider what the advice means for you, and how you can put it into action.

"The Long-Distance Teammate" is timely, too. As a result of the pandemic, millions of people around the world have now experienced remote working for the first time – and many will continue to work this way, maybe forever. The authors say COVID-19 has only served to make their advice more real and important, and it's hard to disagree.

It's also a very refreshing book, written in a down-to-earth style, and drawing on the lived experience of its authors. And while they appreciate the potential benefits of remote working, they're also honest about its many challenges. In particular, they know how distracting and stressful it can be to work from home, especially if family members and pets are close by. So they offer lots of suggestions, focusing on finding solutions that work for us.

For example, would it help to put family commitments on your work calendar, then make up any working time you've missed later on? And, at the end of the day, perhaps the best way to "put your work to bed" might simply be to throw a sheet over your laptop!

The authors admit they're far from perfect themselves. But they're committed to getting better at remote team-working, and give examples of how they're trying to connect and engage more fully every day. And that, in itself, will inspire many readers to do so too.

"The Long-Distance Teammate: Stay Engaged and Connected While Working Anywhere," by Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, is published by Berrett-Koehler.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.