13 Tips For Leading And Managing Remote Teams

To start, managers need to understand factors that can make remote work especially demanding. Otherwise high-performing employees may experience declines in job performance and engagement when they begin working remotely, especially in the absence of preparation and training. A lighter file sharing tool, Dropbox may be perfect for smaller teams. With its block-syncing feature, Dropbox lets you make quick updates, and enables your team members to view the changes almost immediately. This makes collaboration a breeze for remote teams trying to work on a single project simultaneously from different locations.

It lets managers call out wins and recognise employees for a job well done. Moreover, it lets other co-workers get in on the action — they can cheer each other on with personal messages and comments. Employees receive points for achievements, which they can redeem for rewards like gift cards and experiences. Overall, Kazoo is a great tool to boost employee engagement and to boost workers’ morale. As companies embrace remote work, managers need to adopt strategies tailored to globally distributed teams. In this course you’ll learn the tools and develop the skills and strategies needed to hire, manage, and optimize remote teams.

Consider setting aside a program budget to purchase games like Jackbox or books for a book club. You can also get started with these five fast team-building activities for video meetings. The most important thing is that people enjoy it and want to show up. Research has proven that remote workers tend to be more productive, despite the lure of Netflix and laundry. But a key to productivity for any team, remote or co-located, is a manager that can properly protect and prioritize the work that comes to the team. When requests start sliding into DMs unfiltered and the stress builds up, it can be easy to miss the signs as a remote manager.

Employee Isolation

If you think effective onboarding is tough when peeps are co-located, it’s even more of a challenge in a remote environment. As a manager, before you can hope to determine what is expected of others within a changing environment, you will need to start by looking at what is expected of you. The fact that employees are part of your team means that you trust them. If there are employees that you do not trust, then it may mean that your hiring systems need to be improved. As a remote-first company before the pandemic, we draw from our personal experiences as well those from our community and wider research. A great thing about working remotely is that normal boundaries like location are transcended.

Your remote workers, in turn, will be able to share their personal goals and objectives for your brand. I’ll go through 12 tips for how to keep remote workers productive—and happy. The proliferation of remote teams has been accompanied by a corresponding growth in available project management software.

A Guide To Managing Your Newly Remote Workers

Try nBold’s Onboarding template to structure and streamline this process. Ongoing iteration and improvement of the onboarding process are critical to business success in terms of productivity and employee satisfaction. Managers must conduct regular status and performance reviews with their remote staff, but they should also avoid micromanaging them too much, since it contributes to employee dissatisfaction. Irina grew up in San Francisco, California and is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As new technology appears in the marketplace, and new generations make the workforce more diverse than ever, it’s difficult to know what your people will need to thrive.

Envision and execute the development of industry-defining products, and learn how to successfully bring them to market. They show priority, status, can attach files to tasks, add comments and much more. There are also kanban boards to visualize workflow and a calendar view, too. All project views are simultaneously updated so no one is ever working with old data. “During periods of disruption, employees’ desire for recognition of their contribution increases by about 30%,” says Kropp.

And it’s likely not something your boss or mentor has tons of experience with, either—it’s an emerging business phenomenon. While many challenges might come up while managing team members in different cities or countries, managing remote teams is a breeze with the right actions and tools. Regular career catch-ups are a results-driven way to manage a remote team as you’re able to build employees’ trust and connect with them on a personal level.

Remote Project Management Best Practices

Set a schedule for regular conference calls on progress or problems. This also includes individuals being able to contact you if needed. Establish rules about who talks when.I have in the past mailed talking sticks to my teams to act as a visual cue for who’s talking next. You may think that communication is an issue easily solved with the various tech-based solutions you’re using.

In response to the uncertainties presented by Covid-19, many companies and universities have asked their employees to work remotely. How to manage a remote team in this regard is to advocate for mental health days — workdays you set aside to help improve your employees’ psychological wellbeing. Regardless of the physical distance between your employees, social interaction is an effective method to manage a remote team. Just as in a traditional office workspace, managers are expected to keep workers up-to-date on staffing changes and policies. Although it’s essential to see how well team members meet expectations, don’t oversee their actions too closely, as that can breed distrust.

Your Transition Plan Should Provide The Necessary Remote Work Policies, Structure And Support To Be Successful

It may seem artificial or cumbersome at first, but encourage your remote workers to contact you and other team members regularly – and vice versa. What constitutes “regular contact” depends, of course, on the job and the tasks work from home employees must accomplish. As a manager, it’s your responsibility to ensure that your team is not delayed by the fact that a team member cannot accomplish their tasks due to technical problems.

Consider who may be feeling left out, and intentionally plan to have regular conversations with each member of your team. Consider your organization’s unique characteristics and ideal remote work situation when preparing your remote work strategy. Let’s review the basic drivers of employee engagement through the lens of remote work.

Additionally, the lack of regular social interaction in a remote setting can negatively impact your employees’ mental health. While in-office teams usually get to know each other over time, it isn’t Managing Remote Teams always the case with a remote workforce. This can result in low team morale, impacting employees’ work quality. Unfortunately, poor communication is one of the biggest challenges remote teams face.

Make sure you use video conferencing technology, like the Meeting Owl Pro, to help your virtual conversation feel inclusive and more natural. If you don’t communicate your expectations effectively, you are doing a great disservice to your virtual team. The productivity, efficiency, and deadlines of your remote workforce can only be successful if you have clear and concise directions in place. Remote work can sometimes be less structured than the traditional office work space, but it doesn’t need to be.

But don’t be too harsh when you identify problems and make corrections. Encourage your employees to take breaks now and then so they can relax and feel refreshed. Taking breaks is one of the simplest ways to keep mental health in check. Some of your employees might be going through a challenging life crisis and become torn between attending to their challenges and keeping their jobs. This could take a mental toll on them if not quickly and adequately addressed.

Product Manager

Team members who need more time to adjust to the remote environment might deal with mental health concerns if they continue to work under pressure. When you schedule check-ins, you give yourself a break from constant overseeing, allow your team to be https://globalcloudteam.com/ more accountable, and reduce unattended projects. Here are a few tips to make sure you and your team don’t feel guilty about the occasional loss of focus. What’s critical is that you, as a manager, sign off on the every-now-and-then distraction.

Provide breaks to build a happier working environment and encourage successful performance while managing remote teams. Due to business shifting to remote working from the typical office workspace, managers should acknowledge stress, distractions, and rate of adaptability. Then, exercise flexibility in task supervision while managing remote teams. While managing remote teams, ensure you find that delicate balance between continually pinging employees and delegating workflow by setting up automation. As common as remote working is nowadays, team managers still face challenges when managing remote teams. For remote teams, it may take a little extra effort to recreate common workplace water cooler communication.

• The starting point for evaluating if a role is remote work capable is to consider if employees can do the job outside of the traditional office setting.
• Adobe’s Document Sign is a small but handy remote team management tool, which makes approvals a breeze.
• Identifying the issues experienced by virtual employees is critical to understanding the measures needed to achieve effective remote workforce management.
• While some workers might find it easy to adapt to remote working, project guidelines, and company regulations, some may need more time to get accustomed to how you handle working from home.
• To truly manage and engage remote teams, you should be ready to work harder than ever, which brings us to the next section.

Long term questions about how many remote employees companies will have and how often hybrid staff (some days in-office, some remote) might work from home remain unclear. Either way, managers need to be front and center in giving hybrid and remote teams the direction and support they need. But managing a remote team —maintaining a sense of cohesion, keeping morale high and more — can be a tall order.

The automated invoice processing and payment features can particularly save managers time and effort, allowing them to reinvest that valuable time in managing their team. In short, TalentDesk.io brings multiple capabilities and systems under one single platform, which saves you from having to invest in a variety of team management tools. Another effective practice of managing remote teams is modeling work activities around your employees’ working hours. Keep in mind, team updates may vary based on time zones and preferred work hours, so set expectations for team members in regards to communication. At ActivTrak, we are committed to supporting remote workforces, no matter what form they take. Lack of face time with coworkers and supervisors – face-to-face interaction is vital to company culture and workplace encounters.

This, combined with the growth of the gig economy, means that today, many managers rarely if ever meet with their team members in person. The transition was a difficult one for some businesses, and it’s normal for leaders to feel like they’re still learning about and adapting to managing remote team members. 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.

Put Your Communication Efforts On Overdrive

You, as a manager, need to approve of the occasional distractions. Show your coworkers you’re okay with a bit of Twitter surfing or dog-playing time. Fighting these interruptions is pointless because they are healthy and unavoidable. If you use Microsoft Teams internally, create an onboarding team for your new hire, prepare all the required tasks, resources and other information they might need to successfully onboard.