We’re a mid-sized organization with 80 staff, mostly frontline workers who are out of the office most of the time. There seem to be two camps developing: those in the main office who see each other every day, and those who are in the field and have less frequent contact with each other. How can we maintain a real team environment when we don’t have everyone under the same roof?

Centre versus margins. City versus farm. Head office versus branches. It’s an occupational hazard for any organization that delivers products or services remotely while having a centralized administration team; there may emerge a “we/they” perception among the members of the group who see each other every day. The people in the field grouse that the office employees in their cozy warm building don’t appreciate what they do or under what conditions. The office employees may come to think that the field people are on glamorous expenses-paid trips. There are two key ways to attack this: leadership and communication.

Leadership

Here’s where it can get lonely at the top. Lonely? The leader is the lynch pin between the office and the field. It’s the leader’s job to represent each to the other. For this reason, the leader must resist the comforts of belonging to a camp. That’s what makes it lonely. It’s the leader’s responsibility to ensure that the centralized support people understand that their colleagues in the field are their clients. The reason why their jobs exist is that they provide service to the people who are “out there”. This can be challenging. To the support people, the field employees may be nothing more than e-mail addresses and voice mail messages.

You can see how challenging this can be by visiting any supermarket. The employees have trite and repetitive exchanges with the customers, who come and go like a blur. But they have fascinating interactions with each other. It’s tough to get them to focus on the blurry, automated customer interaction, even though their jobs exist to serve the customer. This is a store leadership issue.

If your organization has a mission statement it can help a lot. If it’s a good mission statement it will refer to something outside the organization and bigger than the organization. We know that mission buy-in is a factor in employee engagement. A good mission statement states the reason why the organization exists. Not what it does, but why it does what it does. The Walt Disney Corporation’s mission statement is “To make people happy”. It’s not about what it does, but why it does what it does.

When employees see how their daily tasks and routines contribute to something bigger, it’s a lot easier for them to see the field employees as their clients. It’s the leader’s job to make this happen. There’s really no way of getting around this.

Communication

Out of sight, out of mind, right? There’s another occupational hazard. It’s only human nature to be more aware of people we can see and hear than those who are off somewhere where we’re not. It’s common for branch offices to receive communications from head office that are completely mystifying to the people in the branch. They may make perfect sense to the head office folks, but head office language isn’t always the same as branch language. And head office needs aren’t always understood or appreciated by branch employees. Care needs to be taken to communicate in ways that your target audience understands.

And please don’t ever send out anything like this:

“Everybody, we’re all going out to Stumpy’s after work today for pizza.” The field employees may be staying at a motel a day’s drive from Stumpy’s. They roll their eyes and think not very kind thoughts about the home office.

Camps form up more easily when home office employees can perform their jobs without knowing much about what the field people do or how they do it. Payroll, technology, and loading dock jobs, for example, are like that. If I don’t have to think about the field employees (my clients) in order to get my work done, I probably won’t. Leaders need to communicate why the work is important from the field’s point of view. Failure to do this disconnects the home office employees from their clients in the field, where the mission of the organization is being carried out.

Leadership and communication. The leader who plays the lonely lynch pin role provides the glue that bonds the office to the field. The office employees are more engaged, and the people in the field feel supported.

To submit a question for a future column, or to comment on a previous one, please contact editor@charityvillage.com. No identifying information will appear in this column.

Tim Rutledge, Ph.D., is a veteran human resources consultant and publisher of Mattanie Press. You can contact him at tim_rutledge@sympatico.ca.

Disclaimer: Advice and recommendations are based on limited information provided and should be used as a guideline only. Neither the author nor CharityVillage.com make any warranty, express or implied, or assume any legal liability for accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information provided in whole or in part within this article.