Providing a clear onboarding plan and any equipment to provide a comfortable home working environment is the first port of call. Micromanagement, confusing expectations, disconnectedness– these are some of the most common complaints among remote workers. Review the following advice to adjust your approach to managing remote teams and keeping team members happy.

• This helps you maintain a view of what they’re working on individually and as a whole and send an important message about keeping up with their own progress.
• Managing remote teams is in Felicia Kohlenberger’s professional DNA.
• A completely different platform that acts as a non-work meetup location.
• Otherwise, you will end up spending a considerable amount of your day simply chasing after your employees or asking for updates.
• That’s what makes him write about leadership in a way people are inspired to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more.

The World Health Organization found that poor productivity due to anxiety and depression cost the world $1 trillion every year. However, it also found that for every $1 invested in mental health, there’s $4 worth of improvement in health and productivity. You should understand that your team members don’t all have the same working environment. You can solve these problems with the right remote working management practices. I understand that the data I am submitting will be used to provide me with the above-described products and/or services and communications in connection therewith. Although this is common in other industries, it is still relatively new to ours.

Encourage Professional Social Interaction

Blocking specific times of the day for short meetings with your employees is a simple method to ensure consistent communication. A calendar would allow remote workers to see which blocks have been taken. Daily or weekly team meetings become a must when you have an entirely or partially remote team.

Most applicants will create a newsletter and complete an assignment. For developers, it could also entail spending a week actually working with the development team. Leaders constantly strive to balance forward thinking, planning, and efficiency with a little creativity, resilience, and compassion for the team’s experiences.

How to Manage Remote Teams Effectively

Reach out via your virtual communication channels to let your employees know how they’re doing, praise them for excellent work, and point out where they could make some adjustments. If you put these tips into practice strategically, your team’s output will undoubtedly improve. Aside from a few annoying aspects of working in a physical office, there is a level of social involvement. This can be helpful to employees, which is lost when your staff works remotely. As technologies continue to evolve, it is important for remote team members to be adept at using technology to communicate, or at least open to learning new solutions. Kohlenberger finds that the best remote team members are “self-starters who are able to adapt to change and work independently.”

Managers can help and should also lead by example, taking regular breaks themselves and encouraging employees to take theirs. Without expert advice from business people who have done it before you, it can be challenging to figure out how to manage a remote team effectively on your own. But if you follow these guidelines and keep a positive attitude, you’ll make the switch to a work-from-home setup without a hitch. Just because you can’t see your employees face to face the same way you would in a traditional office environment doesn’t mean that you don’t need to give them attention as individuals. When using the right virtual communication software, this task is really easy. With remote teams, organizing a project may require a new approach.

This could be done through the creative use of technology to create engagement. One way of ensuring that communication happens regularly is to block certain times of the day and inform employees that they can book short sessions with you during those blocks. You could then have a calendar so that remote workers know which blocks are taken. For how to do this, check out tips for effectively onboarding remote employees. If this is not taken into account, managers may find themselves with employees who would be great in the co-location environment, but struggle in a remote setting. Both the employees and the manager may not have remote work experience and assume that the rules that applied in the office can be taken as they are and transferred to the remote environment.

Schedule daily meetings

This might be monthly gift cards, trophies, or even a day of paid time off. It was manageable for introverts to disappear during in-person meetings, how To manage a remote team but it’s downright effortless in digital sessions. Consider having daily check-ins on Slack or initiating more collaborative group projects.

And some of these obstacles will separate simple team managers from true leaders. Organization and guidelines are more important than ever – but so is being supportive, understanding, and resilient. Even after the dust settles and the pandemic is behind us, the need to manage a remote team effectively will still continue to some degree. Organize all your project activities with a project management software. Being out of sight, you may have to struggle to address the needs of every employee.

The responsibility falls on you to structure your remote team to stay focused on their end-goals, and having the proper systems in place will position your team for success. Find systems and team collaboration tools to foster the work experience and manage expectations. This helps to build overall efficiency as well as accuracy in your team’s output. It requires ego strength, confidence, focus, and dedication to both the job and the team’s success.

Common Obstacles to Remote Collaboration

Brosix is an employee communication solution that enables higher-ups to manage their remote teams effectively, having multiple features for various needs. People in leadership positions must constantly innovate ways to keep the organization’s employees motivated and feeling valued. Every company has dozens of processes that appear during a typical workday. You need to find the right balance between actually actively managing the team and granting them independence, that way it’s not forceful but also not “slacky” or lethargic. Being separated across locations and lack of face-to-face communication can be annoying.

Instead of having one employee work on one project on their own, determine ways to make remote workers accomplish projects in small teams. For example, some companies are 100% remote, while others offer a variety of office and remote options. Some managers trust their teams completely, while others use tracking software to ensure people are working.

For communications, teams usually prefer to use programs like Slack, Zoom, MS Teams, Skype or Google Meets for video calls. So, you decided to work with a software development team remotely. Offshore companies offer compelling conditions for cooperation and the prospects of cooperating remotely shouldn’t deter you. Because even your in-house team, if you have or would decide to build one, may switch to working-from-home, as COVID-19 lockdowns have popularized this approach. Screen recording apps are a dime a dozen, so finding the right one that is simple, fast may seem like a daunting task. However, there are few that are worth taking a look at and even fewer that are actually suitable for remote video communication.

In this module, you will understand the importance of culture and values statements for supporting business strategy. You will learn how to develop, roll out, and refine organizational values for a distributed team. These get-togethers allow us to emerge in team building all week long. 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.

Whether good, bad, or in between, they should always know if they are performing at the desired level. Flexible schedules are an in-demand perk and are even more so during a pandemic when everyone’s lives have been thrown into disarray. A single mom with three kids, a married couple with a newborn, or a single person with health concerns might need this flexible schedule option. Be mindful of the various life needs of different people while respecting the needs of the business. Giving them responsibility will give your team accountability and demonstrate your trust in them.

Establish processes to manage projects and productivity

Regardless of regular meetings with the team, a manager should also try to have one-on-one talks from time to time with the company’s employees. All in all, you have to remember that communication is a two-way street! It helps employees improve their skills and work, and having a thriving team is always a positive reflection on the management of a company. If deadlines are met, and tasks are realized as estimated, working remotely is an excellent opportunity for managers to show that they care about their employees’ wellbeing and trust them. Establishing clear processes and standards for remote work productivity is mutually beneficial for managers and employees. This way they have concrete evidence of their work and the tools to ask for help when needed.

Best practices for effectively managing remote teams

For fully remote offices, encourage team members to pick up the phone or schedule short video calls to cut down on the back and forth. Instead, the best thing to do would be to establish a routine where you host daily stand-ups and check-outs. This means you sit down with every member https://globalcloudteam.com/ of your team, at least once during the day, giving everyone a chance to share which tasks they have worked on during that day. No matter what tool you decide to use, as long as there’s a way to foster two-way communication, remote workers won’t feel isolated from one another.

For instance, if you want to foster a culture of open communication, remote team members need to be able to communicate with everyone, including the CEO, with a virtual “open door” policy. If you want a company culture that’s fun, try scheduling fun get-togethers, gift cards for employees to go bowling together, or hosting a virtual movie night. In this lesson, you will explore the subject of diversity in the remote workplace, starting with its value to your team and company.

Team building and productivity management are much harder to do when you can’t see your employees face to face regularly. When firms aren’t confined to hiring within so many miles of an office location, the pool of potential applicants becomes much bigger. Remote teams allow collaboration to happen between the brightest workers across the country. Remote working also could help facilitate a return to office by vulnerable populations who struggle with in-person work like employees with disabilities, employees with children and others. One way of encouraging employees to know each other and feel less socially isolated is for you, as the manager, to find opportunities for collaboration.

As of April 2021, The Remote Company is a team of 130 people from 30+ different countries. It integrates with your calendar in Google, iCloud, Office365, or Outlook and automatically updates your availability based on your preferences. Then, anyone who wants to chat with you can pick a time from your available slots. Is a great way to keep everything in one safe place, where anyone can access it anytime they need. Once a week during a group meeting, ask everyone their “team happiness score” on a scale of one to ten.

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.