Challenges And Best Practices Of Managing Remote Teams

It allows you to provide the members of your remote team with a link to schedule meetings, appointments, and more based on your availability. Toggl Track provides features for tracking the time that team members spend on specific tasks, making project billing and timesheets easier for companies with off-site employees. Remote team management doesn’t require you to know everything about every aspect of your organization. Still, you should know what each team member is expected to do, what challenges they face, and what their responsibilities are.

• Don’t assume that you’ve been clear in outlining your expectations – be thorough and ask your employees if there’s any confusion to clear up.
• It’s important to set clear expectations when discussing productivity standards with your remote team.
• Slack is a team chat app that helps remote teams communicate through instant messaging, file sharing, and video conferencing.
• Taking breaks is one of the simplest ways to keep mental health in check.
• All the important discussions and decisions must take place online and be shared with the right people.

Here are three of the big ones, provided by Adam Hickman, a content manager at Gallup and the author of studies on remote workforces. Gathering regular feedback from your employees is vital in monitoring if the remote team management guidelines work correctly. Feedback helps the organization determine weaknesses that require further adjustments. Moreover, this technique provides enough details on whether your management plan is working at all. With so many great tools and apps like Dialpad out there to make remote work easier, you’ll find that communication and management are as easy as if your team were in the office with you. From sharing work-related files to just having fun face-to-face interactions and regular phone calls, it is possible to retain many of the best parts of in-office work as a remote workers.

Tips For Managing Remote Teams

While sprint planning typically occurs at the beginning of the week, retrospectives are held at the end of the week. They are reflective and provide an open, honest, and constructive atmosphere to share ideas and opinions. It would be nice to know what’s been working and what hasn’t, right? If an in-depth video conference seems like overdoing it, you can also try a quick Slack check-in.

It’s an easy and effective way to build strong relationships among people who aren’t together every day. 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. Instead of having one employee work on one project on their own, determine ways to make remote workers accomplish projects in small teams. To help you adjust to the new normal, we’ve put together 27 tips for successfully managing remote teams. Follow our list of practical tips for managing remote employees and enhancing your business’s performance and productivity.

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 Managing a Remote Team 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.

Change Your Management Approach

Our team members are currently learning how to code, do handstands, speak Japanese, become master chefs and much more. Each month, employees are asked questions, like what accomplishments they’re proud of, where they’re struggling and what can be improved. This is the place where our team leads listen and act when someone indicates they need a happy-hormone boost. The best way to get the most from each person is to give them a goal, allow them to freely work in their own style, show gratitude and make everyone feel cared for.

Building off this, managing remote teams means adjusting how you set goals. Chances are good your employees are managing not only their personal workload but also new responsibilities at home (e.g., homeschooling or caring for sick loved ones). Although frequent communication is paramount, avoid going too far and micromanaging.

Research on emotional intelligence and emotional contagion tells us that employees look to their managers for cues about how to react to sudden changes or crisis situations. If a manager communicates stress and helplessness, this will have what Daniel Goleman calls a “trickle-down” effect on employees. We recommend that managers establish these “rules of engagement” with employees as soon as possible, ideally during the first online check-in meeting.

To request permission for specific items, click on the “reuse permissions” button on the page where you find the item. Setting goals enables a worker to focus on the most important tasks.Focus on the outcomes, not the path there. You need to know how to maintain employee engagement—no matter where they’re located. There are a few primary issues you may want to consider right at the start.

The employee may then provide you with an idea of how much time they need to be added to the tasks that will be affected. This will determine the number of meetings you will have with your team. In the strategy, look at such issues as limiting noises in the background, decorum around what team members can have in their backgrounds during video calls, and the use of meeting templates.

Warren Averett is a top accounting firm providing audit, tax, accounting and consulting services to companies across the Southeast. Our firm has expertise in industries including manufacturing, construction, real estate, financial services, healthcare, government, education and retail. Let team members know you expect them to ask questions if anything is unclear about a task or ongoing project. When you give your team a task, you know exactly what you want from them. But just because you’re clear on what you need doesn’t mean your team has the same level of clarity.

Give Your Employees A Chance To Share Their Thoughts

That said, there are basic guidelines for managing any remote team. The sooner you embrace the new paradigm shift of managing remote teams, the better—for you and your employees. 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. No matter how long you’ve been in business, there’s always going to be a learning curve when building remote and distributed teams.

Employees need to feel confident that you believe they’re working as hard as they would in a regular office, including keeping similar hours and maintaining productivity even if they aren’t visible. If you’re unnecessarily checking in several times a day with remote employees just to see how things are going, those workers may feel like you don’t trust them. Next, find the right collaboration tools to communicate with each team member. These tools include chat applications, project management tools, video call software, and screen sharing applications. Pick which communication tools work best with your in-house and remote staff.

Provide details about timing and responsiveness, such as how soon you expect a response to an email during working hours. There is a dramatic shift happening in the workplace that is requiring many leaders and managers to work and manage their people and teams remotely for the first time in their careers. Besides using online tools, remote teams should make sure to have frequent meetings and check-ins, like daily stand-ups, retrospective meetings, and weekly sprint planning meetings. With that in mind, you can use these tips to your advantage and learn the best tools and practices for enhancing communication with remote teams.

This method will give them enough free time to feel like they don’t constantly work. Thus, those rest periods increase the energy of your remote team members, which adds to the organizational productivity. Her research interests include the impact leadership enactment has on organizational culture and employee engagement, with specific focus on supporting flexible work arrangements. Prior to her academic career, Dr. Vroman worked for over 20 years as an organizational effectiveness and strategic human resource management executive and advisor. A crucial expectation you’ll need to set for your remote team is which communication channels to use. Hopefully, you already have some remote communication tools in place.

As ever, it’s important to be open minded and focus on how you as a manager can remove blockers and foster greater collaboration. 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 calls on you to be deliberate when it comes to providing feedback and provide it often and clearly. We also have Slack channel dedicated to employee recognition and encourage team members to recognize each other. Guard against just telling team members what the goal is without providing them with an idea of how that task is to be accomplished.

But when you’re not sitting next to your employees, it’s easy to assume they’re not working or sticking to the tasks you’ve delegated. This can quickly develop into micromanaging behavior where leaders bombard remote workers with communications and continuously ask for progress reports. In addition to sharing expectations with each team member individually, it’s also important to document your communication process so remote employees have something to reference. For example, outline what kinds of questions or issues necessitate a group meeting or video call versus a quick message or email.

According to a survey conducted by FlexJobs, 65% of remote workers said they were more productive when working from home. Assessing your existing management guidelines will help your organizational leaders identify which strategies you can readily implement. In addition, the leaders will understand how to properly align the corporate objectives to the capacity of the remote team members. (pixelsmithstudios.com) Indeed, revising new team management guidelines involves regular evaluation.

Create A Video Or Tip Sheet With Other Remote Employees Suggestions

Recognition is a way of delivering a message that you are doing a great job. It not only helps build employee motivation but keeps the team competitive in terms of their performance. This Employee Recognition gradually gets on a back seat in case of Remote working. You tend to assume that employees are doing fine at their as they deliver consistently. As the project adapts to this style of working, provide your team appropriate time to settle into this changed scenario. Due to the current unanticipated scenario, companies have started operating in a distributed fashion, but building a Culture that upholds and fuels a remote workforce is easier said than done.

Many organizations have and continue to operate with a “throw-them-to-wolves” approach to onboarding. This usually means that the company doesn’t have a formal onboarding process, and new employees are left to learn on their own. And even as there are calls for employees to return to the office, it’s highly unlikely that employees will return to the traditional 5-day week at their employer’s location.

Create Requirement Docs And Engineering Tasks

Host regular virtual meetings to check in with your team about their work. 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. When you’re having an in-person meeting, it’s a lot easier to run things like a conversation; people can easily chime in when they have something to share in real time.

Tips And Best Practices For Managing Your Remote Employees

Asking remote employees for their feedback allows them to have a voice in aspects of work-life that affect their productivity and engagement. Managing remote staff requires a thorough, systemized onboarding program. This program involves a vetted plan, a personalized experience with social introductions, meetings with leadership, and scheduled training. This will result in greater team and client frustrations with new hires and can lead to higher turnover rates at the company.

To engage these defectors, split your call into small group breakout rooms where everyone has a chance to speak and be heard. These prompts will help attendees feel more comfortable speaking and sharing their ideas. Start with easy icebreakers like each participant’s name, role and dream vacation. Then, you can https://globalcloudteam.com/ check out our list of ice breaker questions for virtual meetings for more inspiration. This field includes developing effective team management skills, HR skills, and using remote work software. When companies consider hiring a remote team, their thoughts often go towards the communication challenges it brings.

Although it’s essential to see how well team members meet expectations, don’t oversee their actions too closely, as that can breed distrust. We document all company-related information on Notion, so people can learn about our company. New employees receive this link in their welcome email during the onboarding process.

Employee Productivity & Time Tracking

This is a fun conversation starter, as well as a time zone indication for team members. Perhaps one of the greatest differences between remote work and traditional office work relates to the skills required to thrive in both environments. Resource sharing, status updates, and instructions need to be thoroughly documented in order to avoid confusion, too many unnecessary touchpoints, and to keep meetings succinct. And each type of deliverable or interaction needs to be sent through the correct communication channel. By day, Celita Summa is a Florida-based freelance writer specializing in business, technology, marketing, and a plethora of other topics.