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Try setting a reminder in Slack for you or your team to keep up with your 5-15s on Monday or Tuesday morning. Collaborative opportunities won’t always appear on their own—sometimes you have to look for them or create them. For example, if you’re managing a content writing team, your team members might naturally be used to working on projects by themselves. Mix up their day-to-day work by assigning 2 teammates to a single assignment. It might not get done as fast as usual, but it could provide the interaction your employees need to feel engaged. Ask your team to come up with ideas of what they’d like to do or talk about, so they’re invested in the events.
- “Have your employees give you a work schedule, along with tasks they are expected to accomplish within a given time,” Civitella suggested.
- That’s fine and dandy, but you’ll need a bit of overlapping schedules to enable and encourage collaboration.
- This can also help you recruit talent farther away than was ever possible.
- Take time zone differences into account, and strive to be aware of important holidays and days of observance.
- To help you out, we’ll highlight the three potential challenges of managing remote employees and the 12 best solutions to them.
- The customer service industry offers some of the most sophisticated and specialized jobs in the administrative space.
You don’t have to sit idly by and watch distance destroy your teams. You can take action to overcome these obstacles and better lead your remote teams. Let’s jump into a few game-changing best practices that’ll get your team headed in the right direction. 60% of remote workers feel less connected to their colleagues. That’s going to be a problem when you’re trying to build trust and nurture close-knit relationships.
Hybrid Is Hard Work, But Heres How To Get Past The Challenges
When employees don’t know about past mistakes or how they can improve, it can be incredibly challenging to accomplish their work as expected. For example, if the budget allows, fly remote team members to retreats and other team-building exercises to get the same fun bonding experiences as in-office team members. These casual conversations might seem trivial, but the truth is, they’re part of what brings your team together. Next, check out our list of books for new managers at work, guide to creating a work from home policy, this list of books on remote work, and this one on employee engagement best practices. Meeting the team allows remote employees to build trust and form deeper bonds. Let’s look at how to keep these remote team management issues in check.
Communication is a two-way street, and feedback from teams is also a powerful way to continuously improve processes. Remote collaboration builds stronger bonds, and reporting allows for better decision making. As recent events have shown, the benefit of remote project management is that it keeps the lights on. That is, many businesses were able to continue to stay in business thanks to project management tools that keep them working from home. Important as that is, though, there are other pros to remote project management. Using F4S, remote employees can set individual professional goals, get online coaching, improve their soft skills, and increase happiness at work.
Here are lists of Zoom meeting games, Slack games, improv games and online game night ideas. Investing some extra effort and time into better team relations can have major productivity payoffs in the long run. However, it’s important to keep an open-door policy so your remote staff can ask for help anytime they need it. If an employee works best during the afternoon rather than the morning, allow them that flexibility. Doing this can lead to higher employee satisfaction, engagement, and productivity. Receive attendance reports marking each remote employee as present, late, partially absent, or absent.
Finally, when managing remote teams, it is best to accept that there will need to be a period of adjustment, where team members get used to working in this way. It is almost inevitable that some unanticipated problems will arise, and certain team members https://globalcloudteam.com/ may initially feel unsettled or overwhelmed. As a result, managers need to create a system to provide both formal and informal feedback to employees. Moreover, the input should highlight the employees’ shortcomings, strengths, and areas of improvement.
Tips For Successfully Managing Remote Teams
Barbara Z. Larson is executive professor of management and director of partnerships at Northeastern’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business. Prior to her academic career, Professor Larson worked for 15 years in international finance and operations leadership, most recently as Director of International Finance at R.R. This phenomenon extends beyond task-related work to interpersonal challenges that can emerge among remote coworkers. Research has found that a lack of “mutual knowledge” among remote workers translates to a lower willingness to give coworkers the benefit of the doubt in difficult situations.
There are downsides to remote work that can hurt collaboration. Learn their personalities, working styles and communication preferences. Engage in remote team-building activities or virtual social gatherings to build rapport and understand who your employees are on a deeper level. Find out how you can adapt your management style to best support each individual employee. 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.
Share whatever news and tips you have, even if it’s a small update or to say there’s no news to share. Make extra effort to keep remote employees in the loop on company and departmental news. As a leader, you should give your take on any priorities that may be shifting.
For daily appreciation, we created Slack channel #kudos, where we give kudos to people that helped us or did a great job. On Slack, team members are encouraged to update their status with their country’s flag. This is a fun conversation starter, as well as a time zone indication for team members. By writing down our values and requiring everyone to agree to them when they are hired, we instantly have a baseline for managing distributed teams. Everyone knows how to act and more importantly, they understand why we do the things we do.
While remote work requires each team member to manage their own projects, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t create a structure and process that everyone follows. We solve our challenges with different time zones by communicating asynchronously. When someone writes a message, we don’t expect others to reply right away. This means no one has to check their messages non-stop, allowing them to work uninterrupted. Knowing this, we need to plan tasks ahead of time, to make sure there’s enough time to complete tasks. With some roles , it may be more difficult to exercise flexibility.
Product Support
Project managers can monitor progress and performance no matter where or when their teams are working. They automatically gather project data, crunch the numbers and display charts and graphs that show project variance, cost and more. One-click reporting goes even deeper into the data and can be filtered and shared with stakeholders. There are multiple project views that allow everyone to work how they want. Gantt plans can then be shared with stakeholders and the entire team. Have management tools such as timesheets to keep your team accountable on how much time they’re spending on tasks.
Your 9-to-5 workday might not be the same across your team, so make sure you’re aware of everyone’s time zones before scheduling a meeting or sending a Slack message. Virtual teams can be located in different parts of the world, making it difficult to schedule meetings with varying time zones in mind. Scheduling a call sporadically or during business hours may look different for each party, depending on the time zones. I write about my experience working with and leading remote teams since 2010.
Time
Editorial content from The Ascent is separate from The Motley Fool editorial content and is created by a different analyst team. Along with choosing and becoming proficient with the actual platforms, you also need to set precedents for which channels are appropriate for which types of communications. A subscription purchase is the best way to support the creation of these resources. We don’t care where work is done, or where, as long as it meets our standards and customers and other team members are not being inconvenienced by a lack of communication. This may not always be possible, but you could travel to regions where your employees live or organize summits where everybody gets together in the same place. Thus, make an effort to get each team member to present something at each meeting.
Emphasize objectives over processes to create greater clarity for employees — and drive greater engagement levels. Make remote work more manageable, productive and engaging for employees and the organization. Ask your employees how they are set-up for working from home.
Learn what workplace friendships mean for productivity and company… Several recent surveys have examined how employees’ daily commutes… Hiring can be a big challenge for business owners, especially when your pool of potential candidates is limited by your location and hours of operation.
Here are three of the big ones, provided by Adam Hickman, a content manager at Gallup and the author of studies on remote workforces. Remote work happens when employees don’t report to a physical office. For years, many companies resisted the idea of allowing employees to work from home. Presumably afraid that employees would spend their time doing laundry, watching TV or taking care of errands, employers preferred to have their workers in the office. Business owners and managers also feared that collaboration would fall to the wayside and productivity would decline. Being proficient at managing remote employees requires a mental leap, especially for traditionally minded managers.
Step 4: Build A Process To Protect Your Team From Distractions
We all talk to people from different teams and get to know each other’s personalities. For example, from watching people’s Pecha Kucha presentations, we discovered that the majority of our team is obsessed with cats, dogs, sports, traveling, psychology and food. 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.
A remote team doesn’t need to make up earned time off just because their office is accessible 24/7. We draw these best practices from the first-hand experience of program managers like you and our own Managing a Remote Team expertise. This white paper is a comprehensive guide that will be your roadmap to building a world-class mentoring program. The above-mentioned tools will help you and your team work in tandem.
Look For Opportunities For Collaboration
There are options available for monitoring activity levels, but these can feel intrusive and may not necessarily provide an accurate reading of all kinds of activity anyway. A better way to keep productivity high may be to work with team members and set individual goals or targets, along with broader team objectives that will help guide individual decision making. Remote management may be a permanent change, and a common mistake is failing to implement team accountability. At the same time, managers have a variety of systems to hold themselves accountable, but they often don’t work long term. Team Meetings GuideLearn how the world’s best companies run effective team meetings – featuring insights from Figma, Buffer, Close, Webflow, Shopify, and more.
The goal of the meeting is to create a list of projects for the following month. These projects are “must do” and will take priority over anything else that comes up that month. At the end of the cycle, you do the next meeting and the expectation is that your team will have completed all projects and be ready for more. This system creates very clear priorities, especially for remote teams, and will help skyrocket productivity.
As much as remote work can be fraught with challenges, there are also relatively quick and inexpensive things that managers can do to ease the transition. As part of the onboarding, consider organizing a training session to cover KPIs, expectations, task descriptions, and team member job descriptions. To get the best results, one recommendation from Brent Gleeson, writing in Forbes, is to try to mentor more than you manage. Mentoring means different things to different people, but the aim is to assist with personal development. One-on-One GuideThe Art of the One-on-One Meeting is the definitive guide to the most powerful tool for managers.
While the journey may be the destination in some instances, the destination for your remote team is their endwork. Let the work they’re doing speak for itself rather than obsessing over how they get the work done. Do you want to limit video calls for your sake and the sake of your team? If so, establish messaging and email as the preferred channels for most everyday communication needs. If not, you’ll want to adopt a video conference platform as well as an easy-to-use messaging tool. Be sure to clearly communicate which platforms you expect your team to use to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Make Time To Connect And Socialize
A consistent calendar works great for knowing what everyone’s doing, both for work and for their non-work lives. Don’t assume someone will see a comment or update if you don’t specifically address them. There’s no harm in repeatedly using someone’s name to make sure they’re informed. Earnings Reports “Open company, no bullshit” isn’t just one of our values. Here’s what we’re sharing with our investors and stakeholders each quarter. Designed for business owners, CO— is a site that connects like minds and delivers actionable insights for next-level growth.
The following is a short list of ways you can do team building with virtual teams. You should consult our list of virtual team building games/activities for more comprehensive information. Unlike traditional office setups, you can’t just walk up to your remote employees to have a discussion or chat.