- Hi. This is Wayne Turmel from The Remote Leadership Institute. Today, we're taking a look at something that is really important for managers of remote teams. 

You know, when everybody's located in the same place and tension starts to bubble, you can almost feel it. You can walk into cube land and kind of feel the tension in the air. Online, you don't always know that there's a problem until something happens, but there are some signs if you know what to look for. 

One of the things to watch for is you suddenly get cc'd on all the email going back and forth, either between the team members or individual team members. Very often, a sudden increase in that behavior is the result of a trust breakdown. Somebody doesn't believe that somebody else will respond unless the boss knows about it. 

If you suddenly see yourself getting copied on communication, particularly between two individuals, without an explanation, it's probably worth asking. Talk to the sender. Find out why were you copied on this, is there something that you should know. 

The second thing is, just in conversation, you start to hear a lot more complaints, sometimes about an individual, sometimes about a group. When complaining goes up, rather than just turn a deaf ear, it might be an idea to ask some more questions. Make sure you're asking open questions because if you just say is everything OK, they'll say yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. But if you ask an open question, like, what do you think is happening, you're much more likely to get a good quality response, and then you can determine your actions from there. 

One of the most important things about remote teams that's different than colocated teams is one of the biggest signs of conflict is exclusion. People aren't being included in information. They're not being invited on meetings. They're not being told certain information. 

So when people say, well, I didn't know that, or I didn't hear that, we all know sometimes that's just an excuse. But if you hear it enough, you may want to know why. Do people know who they should be including, and are they excluding people on purpose? 

Again, this is part of the manager's job. When you see a problem, you need to identify it. It doesn't mean you have to jump in. It doesn't mean you have to be Mommy or Daddy and solve the problem, but you need to know is there something here that could be a problem. 

Finally, a couple of things you need to ask, which is is the conflict simply between two individuals, or is it systemic. An example of a systemic conflict is where the people who are teleworking are acting differently or feeling like part of a club that the people who are in the office are not part of, and vice versa. On hybrid teams, that can be a real issue. 

So in our next week's video, we're going to take a look at what do we do about it. But today, we wanted to make sure that you were aware for signs of conflict on your team before it becomes a much bigger problem.