The Ultimate Managers Guide To Managing Remote Teams

Because you are working remotely, following a schedule like weekly one-on-ones can be really helpful to ensure that everyone is on the same page. For larger performance review conversations, there are many options you can follow outside of the standard annual performance review, like quarterly or bi-annual reviews. Creating some time to meet as a team when possible can help increase employee engagement and strengthen workplace bonds, which leads to increased productivity and benefits to your small business. For topics and discussions that may require more detail, however, an email could sum everything up, but it might also be a good time to hop on a phone or video call. While technology makes quick communication like instant messages easy, the tone of messages can also get lost (i.e. sarcasm), which could complicate a situation. Creating a simple document outlining what communication method is best may also be helpful.

While Slack or Google Hangouts helps you stay connected in real-time. But if you’re ready to take things to the next level and provide remote workers with everything they need to succeed then you need a mobile app. And not just any mobile app, you need the mobile app that was built for remote, deskless workers – Connecteam. With ActivTrak, managers can access a bird’s eye view of employee activity as well as granular insights into workflows and key productivity metrics including work hours, focus time, and app usage. That kind of data helps managers better understand how their distributed teams work, pinpoint what they need to succeed, and improve productivity overall.

To prevent disputes from brewing, you need to learn more about the issues and settle them without any delay. Inform your team with clarity if any substantial changes are in the pipeline. In terms of project management, use apps like Asana to log every sub-task of a project. Thus, everyone involved in the project will have a clear idea about the assignees and progress. Working from remote locations takes away the opportunity of learning from colleagues and their feedback during the work in the office.

Turn that function over to the shared-drive project management system outlined above. If your process outgrows Google Sheets, Trello and Jira are robust project-tracking tools that can keep your far-flung team on target. And these tools make it easier to start with the big picture and turn it into an ever-more-granular flow of ongoing projects and day-to-day tasks.

These interactions provide a sense of personability and accountability that are critical to small businesses. Even if employees do not feel alienated, having common ground between employees is essential. Whether that understanding is related to work affairs or personal troubles. Managing a Remote Team By doing this, you will have to trust that your employees work just as hard in lieu of direct monitoring. Often new hires will have tons of questions that you will need to answer. Currently, digital communication is not an ideal option for the onboarding process.

Collect Feedback From Your Employees

This gives your team members the chance to address any issues they might be afraid to bring up in group meetings, or don’t want to discuss via email for fear of being misunderstood. If you’re just moving to a remote model for the first time, or even if it is an ongoing process, gathering feedback is essential to make sure that it’s working well for your team. If your team members are working remotely, then often they don’t have access to the same tool kits they would in their normal work environment.

Part of developing rapport is associating with coworkers and other employees on a social level in addition to the context of the workplace. After building expectations, manage them by defining standards for your team. Set up a system where those involved will always be held accountable for those standards. Managing a remote team requires a constructive relationship with the people you are working with. Most recently she was a senior contributor at Forbes covering the intersection of money and technology before joining business.com. Donna has carved out a name for herself in the finance and small business markets, writing hundreds of business articles offering advice, insightful analysis, and groundbreaking coverage.

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If you find yourself micromanaging, there is something bigger that must be addressed. At The Remote Company, we developed an agile project management system that is simple and allows team members to feel empowered to take responsibility for themselves. While the process is designed to keep track of everyone’s work at a team level, we don’t tell people how they must accomplish their tasks. Follow our list of practical tips for managing remote employees and enhancing your business’s performance and productivity. Beyond the simple daily check-ins, over-communicating is imperative when it comes to the team’s tasks, duties, responsibilities and desired outcomes, which we’ll cover more in a minute.

Important things are communicated in the richest and most powerful channel available. Leave chats to other things and don’t assume that typing guarantees “reception” let alone “understanding”. If we were all robots coordinating would be very simple, and similar to playing a video game.

Collaboration tools are crucial for managing remote teams as they help your workers communicate, manage tasks, and share project files. Scheduling daily check-ins may seem like overkill, but it is vital to ensure workforce performance. In addition, it improves time management while managing remote teams. Or how about the fact that 70 percent of people globally work remotely at least once a week? While there are many benefits to work-at-home jobs for both employees and employers, there are also some things to consider when managing a remote workforce.

In a remote setting, individuals should understand the importance of deliverables and goals. Even though such individuals still need direction and guidance, they should be able to get the work done no matter where they are. This implies that such individuals can be trusted to deliver outcomes with minimal supervision. You will also need to understand your role in applying the rules of the company fairly and consistently. Added to this, you have the responsibility to ensure that employees have access to the resources they need and to you when there is an emergency. Figures from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics show that 23.8% of full-time employees worked an average of 3.40 hours at home per day in 2019 .

The Ultimate Managers Guide To Managing Remote Teams: 12 Tips

That still holds true, perhaps more so, if you are managing remote workers. While it’s harder for a manager to “control” a remote worker’s day, suggest that they schedule their day with breaks, personal comms time, getting fresh air, etc. Having company wide-virtual coffee chats, hydration nation trackers , virtual walks outside..

The biggest difference between managing remote teams and having employees at a central office is that your face-to-face interactions will be severely lacking. Without a physical presence, management can find it hard to get the company’s ideas across to remote teams. As a result, remote employees may experience a significant drop in motivation and momentum.

How To Successfully Manage Your Remote Workforce

While your team might be connected in the virtual world, you can’t be certain what your team is doing in the real world. You’ll need focused exercises and activities to help your team get to know each other. When a developer changes his or her thinking regarding a specific task, https://globalcloudteam.com/ they must actively update the requirements document to keep the rest of the team on the same page. For example, if you were working on building out an authentication feature, requirements might entail the different kinds of platforms a user can sign into your product with.

• A study from Gallup found that employees who reported having a best friend at work led to 7% more engaged customers and 12% higher profit.
• Encourage your employees to take breaks now and then so they can relax and feel refreshed.
• Remember that remote employees can be as effective as those you have on-site, but only if they have a manager who always has the team’s back.
• “Employees just might have to switch out their high-five for a virtual elbow bump for the time being.”
• Technology is reshaping business in various ways, and the overall concern is that companies without the latest technology adoption will soon be left behind.

Remote teams will enjoy work more when they enjoy who they’re working with. Many remote workers struggle to compartmentalize their home lives from their work lives. Having a well-established culture is an indisputable advantage in business. When people believe in what they are doing, and feel united over a mutual cause, this leads to increased performance.

This virtual face-to-face assessment could be the perfect time to ask for project management feedback and suggestions on how to move forward. As a team manager, the mental health of your employees should be of utmost concern, especially since they will deliver better results when they have sound health and feel supported. Appreciate performance – Let your deserving employees know they are doing a great job. It not only encourages them to perform better but keeps the entire team competitive in terms of individual performance. The more you appreciate them for their right task, the better output you will receive from them. Project Management Optimize productivity, process & profit with project management.

How To Motivate A Remote Team?

Instead, focus on efficiently managing your remote team to turn them into your biggest asset. You won’t believe how much you can achieve when the right communication is put in place. Your employees will be calling you to arrange meetings and advise you of their work progress. Other options include virtual pizza parties , or virtual office parties (in which party “care packages” can be sent in advance to be opened and enjoyed simultaneously). While these types of events may sound artificial or forced, experienced managers of remote workers report that virtual events help reduce feelings of isolation, promoting a sense of belonging.

This may include involving them in determining the values of your company. You can also find a way of aligning your company values with employees’ values by selecting new employees based on your values as a company. While it is vital to treat everyone in your remote team equally, you should still be able to recognize excellence. Because you will not meet the employee in the corridor and remember to recognize them, be deliberate about mentioning this during team meetings and in your one-to-one meetings with your employees. This also provides other employees with details about what the expected standard is.

An insight into the work that you are doing fruitful is gradually lost due to a lack of feedback. This needs to be consistently reaffirmed by the thanking colleagues and highlighting achievements over daily calls. Associating a face to a name and understanding the person behind it helps generate team bonding, the feeling of purpose and a common cause that they are working towards. This will align the team in the direction of the project and the progress of each team member. It will give you an update on what is going right and what style of working is not aligned with the Remote culture.

Look For Opportunities For Collaboration

Since that’s not the case anymore, you’ll need to let go of the usual expectations you have from everyone. Learn from our 60-minute free online leadership workshop, personally taught by our CEO, Claire Lew. Resource Management Quick view of your teams’ availability for effective resource allocation. Agile has proved to offer a strategic vantage point in terms of ensuring customer success and enabling outcomes that are in direct alignment with their business goals. Sprint Retrospective is about assessing what went wrong and what worked in the previous sprint! The lessons learnt act as inputs to the sprint planning meeting.

Sign up to our weekly newsletter and receive a FREE Template & Sample to help you welcome new employees to your organization. Jonathan Kanter, a professor at the University of Washington, concludes that the social isolation caused by the social distancing measures could have some adverse effects in the long run . Such conclusions show the importance of maintaining social interaction. Software for scheduling that lets employees swap shifts and make changes among themselves is one way to help the situation.

In a normal workplace environment, lack of communication can already be a challenge. But when employees are working remote – and potentially now focused on new or different tasks and goals, communication is paramount. Set realistic expectations – As you have a distributed team, surely the time zone is different from employees to employees. As a team leader, provide your team with appropriate instructions on how to conduct the task, so that they can work as a team or independently, and finish their task before the deadline. Divide the task amongst team members, and while doing so keep everyone in the same thread to make it easier for them to understand who is assigned for what.

Furthermore, we try to plan activities that broaden our minds during our work/staycations. During one of our 2020 staycations, we learned how to meditate, identify new trends and craft great stories. We also organize our RemoteFair, which is a company fair where teams host their own booth and talk about their projects, progress and accomplishments. Another important part of supporting remote workers is to show appreciation. 15Five offers virtual high-fives that people can hand out to shine a light on other team members. We solve our challenges with different time zones by communicating asynchronously.

“As a manager, you have to stop paying attention to the process and pay more attention to what things are getting done. Just talk to your team about what you want them to accomplish,” says Kropp. Make remote work productive and engaging for employees with these empathetic but practical actions. Finally, and I am sure I have left some things out so I invite you to leave your comments, we must establish performance evaluation mechanisms. However, it all depends on the maturity level of the team and the capacity we have as coordinators to collect performance information in an objective and timely manner.

To make things easier for yourself, let the employees be responsible for creating the standard operating procedures for their roles. There is no dispute that you have to establish procedures and expectations for your remote team. However, this doesn’t mean that you are the only one who should develop them. It is for this reason that you should invite the team to participate when creating these rules. It could be a challenge to identify the right employees during the short time an interview allows. One way of solving this problem could be to hire several individuals on a short-term basis for a few projects and assess their skills.