How to increase team responsibility - even when working remotely

Responsibility - this is the willingness to take personal responsibility for our own actions. And without them, successful teams cannot thrive.

Have you ever worked in a team that was regularly plagued by missed deadlines, broken promises, or vague expectations? Or with managers who constantly complain and micromanage? There probably wasn't a culture of accountability on the team.

Accountability promotes better working relationships, increases job satisfaction, and helps teams work together more effectively. It gives ICs ownership of their work and promotes more effective teamwork because people know they can rely on each other to achieve something. Mastering team accountability can help teams have better performance discussions and hold each other accountable in a supportive way. It motivates individuals to exceed their goals and improve their performance and is inextricably linked to results (and sales). Loud Gallup Employee engagement helps companies outperform their competitors and can lead to 21% higher profitability.

Despite the clear benefits, you're not alone if your team struggles with accountability. 25% of remote managers say a lack of accountability is one of the biggest hurdles their team has to overcome. According to another study 93% of employees do not understand what their team wants to achieve (let alone how they can contribute to it), and 85% of managers do not set expectations for their employees clearly enough to achieve the goal.

What is team responsibility?

In a team, accountability means that the team fulfills its commitments, completes projects on time, and achieves its goals. Team responsibility means that each individual is also responsible for their own work - both for long-term goals and for daily work. In teams with strong accountability, employees take ownership of their work, communicate openly and often about their commitments, and complete tasks they have committed to in a timely manner.

Often teams only talk about accountability when something goes wrong. The term often has negative associations such as stress, fear and even disciplinary action. But that doesn't have to be the case.

Building systems for team accountability - such as regular planning and goal setting or standards for sharing progress reports - ensures accountability feels fair and without bias. It's less about a manager or a teammate asking you for information and more about you sticking to a process that everyone has agreed upon. The system holds you responsible, not just the people.

Why remote teams struggle with accountability

It's harder to align expectations

When you work remotely, you miss natural opportunities to coordinate and ask questions. It can be harder to know what is expected on a particular project or roles, which can lead to unnecessary work and misunderstandings. Team members may feel like someone dropped the ball when in reality that person wasn't responsible or didn't even know it was them. Additionally, if you work in different time zones, it can be difficult to know what is expected in terms of working methods, online times, or response times via Slack or email.

Communication requires more work

Developing communication practices that keep everyone involved informed can be daunting at first. Team members often feel like they spend more time reporting on their work than doing the work. For managers, it can feel like there are endless status updates floating around in their inbox, their project management systems, or both. Some people share too much, others too little. Important updates can easily get lost in the shuffle, and when there's no consistent source of truth, it's hard to figure out what was shared in the past.

The pressure to report progress

Especially for teams new to remote work, there is often additional pressure from leadership to report progress. Managers want to know that teams and projects are running smoothly. This is usually done with good intentions, but can quickly lead to a micromanagement effect as managers and leaders try to keep track of their team.

It can be harder to feel progress and meaning

When you work from home, it can be easy to forget about the rest of the team and not know how your work fits into the bigger picture. It's harder to keep track of team goals, especially when they aren't discussed regularly, and people often begin to doubt whether their work is meaningful. When individuals lose momentum, projects stall and the team is more prone to burnout. When you work remotely, it's also easier to focus on individual work rather than collaborative projects - which ultimately changes the work that gets done.

3 Ways Managers Can Drive Accountability in Remote Teams

1. Define clear expectations for roles, projects and ways of working

When you're working remotely, things that would have been clarified or agreed upon naturally in an office may require a lot more effort and intention. To close these gaps, it is important to develop standardized practices that focus on clearly communicating expectations.

• Use that SMART Approach: Whether you're setting expectations for a specific project, role, or your entire team, the SMART framework will help you assess specificity and clarity. This framework ensures that your expectations are specific, measurable, achievable, results-oriented, understandable, ethical and documented.
• Establish clear remote work policies: A remote work policy should clearly outline expectations for how work should be done. The guidelines should regulate things such as determining core working hours, working in time slots and communication about vacation and absence. The key is transparency. Be clear about your expectations and potential consequences, while recognizing that working remotely comes with its own challenges. Show empathy and be flexible - you never know what your team members will have to do at home.
• Create a detailed project template: Project specifications and notepads help teams align and clearly define expectations. They should include a clear timeline, detailing time zones, outlining project responsibilities, and detailing deliverables (with examples if possible). It can be helpful to create a project specification template for your team to save time and ensure that each specification contains a standard set of information. Don't know where to start? Check out our project specifications template.
• Establish project responsibility: When project responsibility is not clearly established, managers often feel the need to manage the project because there is no point of contact and they are afraid of dropping the ball. Take a look at all the important projects you are completing this quarter and check who is responsible for each task. Is there a clear, identifiable owner for each task? If not, work with your team to determine who is responsible for what.
• Clearly define roles: When team members know their roles, they are more likely to feel ownership and take ownership of their work. When teammates know each other's roles, it strengthens collaboration, communication, and trust because they know who to turn to and what is expected of them (and what is not). As a manager, you should make sure that you make everyone's role known and regularly review expectations.

2. Develop habits for daily planning and long-term goal setting

In order to be accountable to yourself and your team, you must first define what you actually want to achieve.

• Start the day with an individual planning exercise: For remote teams, where employees naturally have more freedom and fewer guidelines, daily planning is a small exercise that can help strengthen personal responsibility over time. Each individual in our team creates their own plan for the day every morning and shares it during check-in. Especially since we transitioned to full remote work, we have found this to be a helpful tool for increasing individuals' autonomy and self-awareness.
• Have regular conversations about commitments and results: Set up a system within the team for committing to work for a specific period of time - perhaps a two-week sprint or a month. Then determine how you can check in with each other and follow up. In our team, we set the expectations for the coming two-week cycle in our sprint planning meeting, exchange information about the status of the work in our daily check-ins and reflect together in a review at the end of the sprint. The goal of this process is not necessarily for everyone to deliver 100% of their commitments, but for us to have a conversation about why this is not the case and what is standing in our way (to create accountability measures).
• Set OKRs for teams and individuals: To set longer-term goals, you can help your team align their work with purpose by setting strong OKRs (goals and key results). OKRs are goals that outline not only the what and how but also the why. They help teams see how individual work contributes to the bigger picture or a specific company goal and are a good way to show employees the difference they make.

3. Create a practice of sharing progress and keeping commitments

Daily progress reports - be it in a team standup, a Scrum meeting or an asynchronous check-in - promote individual responsibility by setting expectations for the exchange and progress of the work. When people know that the team cares about their work and is tracking their progress, they are more motivated to get their work done. If done right, daily updates can also improve transparency and make remote communication less laborious and more effective.

• Try daily written updates: Written progress reports are easier for remote work teams because they fit into everyone's schedule and can be read or referenced later. Teams find them more effective and less time-consuming than other forms of status updates. Managers can see what everyone is working on in one place, employees can include tasks from other tools to get a big picture view of their work in under 5 minutes, and management always has an overview of your team's performance.
• Engage in each other's updates: Showing that individuals' work directly impacts shared team goals is a great way to increase team accountability. One way your team can do this is by reading (and responding to) each other's check-ins. This reinforces the idea that individuals' work is important and shows people that their work has an impact on the team's success and outcomes. It also helps your team feel more connected through shared goals, which brings you together as a remote team and improves your team dynamics.
• Give your updates structure: If you make a habit of sharing daily updates, it can be helpful to structure the sharing to give people a foundation and starting point. You'll probably want to try out different formats to see what works best for your team. Our team likes the GROW format - Goal, Reality, Opportunities/Obstacles, Wins.

Build a foundation of accountability within your team

Accountability should be something your team talks about every day, not just when there are gaps in performance or something goes wrong.

Building accountability systems into your team's workflow can help employees feel more confident and their managers can support them without micromanaging. You can have better performance conversations, develop healthy planning and goal-setting habits, and achieve better results. If you want your team to work more effectively, invest in team and individual accountability.