9 Tips For Managing Remote Teams For Productivity

Some may need daily contact, while others only need to connect once a week or when a particular issue arises. The distraction of working from a home environment is often one of management’s main concerns with remote work. Household chores, deliveries, and childcare can interrupt an employee’s work day, affecting their engagement. Companies like Aha, NationBuilder, Automatic Buffer and many more are successfully working as 100% remote companies. Still, many companies are going through thick and thin to successfully run around as remote working companies.

Remote workers are generally happier due to the greater freedom, flexibility, and autonomy they have. The lack of commute plays a significant role in this—one study found that 79% of respondents cited avoiding the commute as the biggest benefit of remote work. As a result, 52% of employers report an improvement in employee productivity since working remotely.

Pre-pandemic, remote workers spent about 200 fewer hours commuting than their on-site counterparts, according to CNBC. Ready or not, remote work has become an enduring reality for organizations and their management teams nationwide. Increasingly sophisticated technologies and the COVID-19 pandemic have fueled the widespread acceptance and adoption of telecommuting. There’s no better way to see if people can handle your company’s remote communication style than having them work on a project with you. Best of all, it lets them evaluate your company and their future coworkers, too. One of the best ways to offer consistent encouragement and motivation for your remote team members is to set up development plans with them during your regular one on ones.

Potential Challenges Of Managing Remote Employees

Reiterating current and upcoming projects, deadlines and other critical information by way of a weekly update or summary is an easy way to create a reliable, central thread of communication. It also encourages employees to better organize and schedule themselves, and to stay connected to each other’s tasks. Managing remotely is about building trust and a culture of accountability. Dispersed team members often have a love-hate relationship with virtual teamwork.

While video conferences allow teams to pick up on visual cues and gestures, they also help remote employees build familiarity. These tools give you and your remote manager a quick overview of all your projects and help you assign tasks to various members of your remote workforce. Let’s look at how to keep these remote team management issues in check. Remember, remote teams don’t work in the same office as you do – they work virtually. Managing remote employees can be challenging for your team manager — especially if you recently switched to remote work due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Diversity and Inclusion are a part of Cornell University’s heritage.

Leading Virtual & Remote Teams

As a remote team manager, you’ll need to come up with ways of ensuring that none of your team members suffers from social isolation. This could be done through the creative use of technology to create engagement. For how to do this, check out tips for effectively onboarding remote employees.

Now that you’ve all agreed on your team’s purpose, ensure there’s a clear direction for completing the tasks required to accomplish your mission. Unlock unlimited access to our world-class, research-based leadership development content and solutions. It’s not because you don’t like her—you just moved away from each other and lost touch. A month without contact turns into six months, then a year, and soon you realize you have no clue what she’s been up to. Fortunately, no matter how long between phone calls or family reunions, your cousin will always be your cousin. Our mission is to eradicate small business overwhelm by simplifying the offshore outsourcing process and facilitating cost-effective business scalability.

Work Remotely And Prosper

To make things easier for yourself, let the employees be responsible for creating the standard operating procedures for their roles. One of your most important duties is to ensure that there are well-documented procedures in place for damn-near everything. Ensure that all employees know where to find these documents , and then use them. Similarly boundaries need to be set around working hours and methods of communication.

Communication is one of the most important soft skills for every manager and every team member to master, especially in the world of remote work. Choosing the right channel for communicating is essential to how a message will be understood and acted upon. Most importantly, if someone is not particularly reliable in your office, there’s very little chance that improves remotely. Instead, as the report from Avast showed, they’ll be one of the people struggling working remotely. However you become more remote friendly, you may find that your first remote employee leads to a cascade of requests from other members of your team to work partly or even fully remote, too. If you’re new to 1 on 1s entirely, check out our comprehensive guide to 1 on 1 meetings here, and a step by step guide for starting 1 on 1s here.

The Benefits Of Remote Work

They’ll feel more connected to the team and not forgotten by the main office that may have people on video wearing swag all the time. Since you don’t have all those moments in the office to build rapport and talk about issues ad hoc, make up for it by setting aside more time for your one on ones with your remote employees. Use these tips to be more conscious of the unique approaches you should take to managing remote employees.

• Building positive relationships with employees making sure nothing is too hard for anyone.
• The big upside of using video conferencing for these ideas is that it naturally leads to more impromptu, unplanned conversations that can often lead to the best ideas from your team members.
• When you don’t get to see someone in the office every day, having any type of visual clue to what someone is thinking is essential.
• Train yourself to worry less about what’s being done on a micro-level, instead concentrate on what’s being accomplished.

Think of these process documents as living things that may evolve over time as your team settles into remote work. Provide opportunities to share successes and safety for potential failures. Make an effort to highlight the value of employees’ continuing to scale their activities, and ensure that any risks are worthwhile. Emphasize objectives over processes to create greater clarity for employees — and drive greater engagement levels.

Using effective employee monitoring software, companies can not only track the productivity of their remote workforce, but also better understand their optimal working patterns and circumstances. On average, remote employees invest more working hours than on-site staff. However, in spite of their higher workload, they tend to feel like outsiders.

How Do You Create A Remote Work Policy That Works?

Although doing a team meeting over video might not be exactly the same thing as being in-person, it does enable bonds to form faster during those times when everyone is in one place. When people who work together over video conferencing meet in person for the first time, they’re often amazed at how familiar their co-workers seem. So find ways to bring your remote team face-to-face as often as possible, whether in-person or using video. It’s an easy and effective way to build strong relationships among people who aren’t together every day.

Supporting remote employees at every stage is also essential for efficient teamwork and morale. This is why several remote teams choose to have physical get-togethers every year or so. Many successful managers follow a video-first practice for remote meetings. It allows remote employees to be comfortable with each other and work well as a team. And when your team works together, their work is quicker and better.

As each remote employee largely works according to their own schedule, you’re unsure when they’ll have time to reply to your message. You can deal with this by charting out a few common working hours each day or week when the entire team can be online to ensure smooth collaboration. However, this can be difficult when teammates work across time zones or have different working hours.

By knowing your employees’ aspirations, you could easily determine how to connect them to those of the company. This has a positive effect on engagement, job satisfaction, and loyalty. Just because employees are working remotely doesn’t necessarily mean that they can never meet physically if an opportunity arises.

This is especially true in regards to companies with a high percentage of hybrid or remote employees. Take a personal interest in your team’s learning and life goals while connecting them to the goals of the company. For organizations and employees to reap the rewards of remote work, a culture of open communication must be sustained in the workplace. The health and success of any team are determined by the quality of communication between colleagues. Here are the top skills managers must demonstrate to best support their remote employees. As well as using a dedicated messaging platform, delivering information in a consistent manner, and on a regular schedule, can work wonders for team productivity and motivation.

Growing A Business

One of the great things that people like about working remotely is the flexibility that this affords them. For instance, an employee may want to get her groceries at 11 am, when the shops are less busy, and then work an extra hour in the afternoon. As a manager, you may also be the source of employee problems if you fail to https://globalcloudteam.com/ respect the fact that even though they may be working remotely, they’re not available 24/7. Unless it was an absolute emergency, you would want to keep communication within reasonable hours. In a remote environment, the team members you manage may have different emotional challenges than those in a co-located environment.

Perhaps most importantly, understand that trust will come with time, and focus on the long term rather than expecting overnight cohesion of the team. If you’re starting a new team from the ground up, be clear from the beginning about the team’s purpose. Explain why those Managing Remote Teams tasks are important so that team members understand the big picture and meaning behind what they’re working to accomplish. Video conferencing is also a great way to encourage social interaction. When cameras are turned on, it’s easier to make a connection with your team.

Face-to-face video conferencing is a great way to retain non-verbal comms. If your team is particularly large, consider breaking it down into sections for the regular calls.Be mindful that video fatigue exists, and you may need to allow for camera downtime. In fact, our research found that 82.9% believe that not all video meetings require video. Accept that a remote worker’s schedule may differ but that they will still get work done. Allowing your team the autonomy to work when it suits them best, has proven to show greater quality and productivity. With the proliferation of employees working remotely, there has been a corresponding increase in companies offering remote training.

You have to rely on digital communication tools to talk to each team member. Make sure each employee has access to the systems, training, and information they need to get their work done. Utilize technologies that facilitate collaboration and engagement, like Zoom, Slack, and G-Suite. Your employees need access to technology that allows them to collaborate effectively with fellow employees, suppliers, and customers.