Managing remote teams requires skills and refinement from employers, as organizations face some particular challenges when workers aren’t being together in a real office. Nevertheless, with a strong plan and efficient communication, companies with remote employees can defeat these obstructions.
There may be continuous challenges for businesses, however, they aren’t impassable. Business owners should keep the office cohesion unbroken, create a cooperative environment that’s efficient, impede employee burnout, and promote accountability and transparency.
Anyway, there’s no universal plan for managing remote workforce, but we provide you with some usual guidelines remote managers should really consider.
Create Precise Standards
Remote employees can choose different schedules for how they will work from home. Not to be careless, but to fit when they’re more efficient throughout the day. Since everybody’s so different, creating some established rules to zero in on and assess productivity is useful.
Set timelines. These might be daily, weekly, or monthly. It shouldn’t be important what times your employees choose to work (unless, for instance, they provide customer support). Also, their time zone shouldn’t be important as well.
Furthermore, define KPIs. For instance, you might need a content writer to put forward a specific word count weekly. Determine milestones for tasks and for big projects. Big projects can really benefit from that because not only does it make things easier, but it also helps you gather crucial data for improving productivity.
In the end, you may also get monitoring software for employees and check how everyone on your team is doing separately. Employee tracking software will tell you exactly how your employees use their time. So, collecting that powerful data as well leads to an even more productive and efficient team.
Find The Right Employees
As excellent as it might be for certain employees, not everybody is able to work well in a remote environment. Similarly, not everyone is able to manage a remote team. Consequently, managers should be extra observant when they take new employees into their teams.
In a remote environment, every person should understand the significance of output and goals. Although such employees still need leadership and direction, they need to be able to get the job done regardless of where they are.
This indicates that you can rely on such employees to deliver outcomes with limited supervision. It could be challenging to recognize the right employees within the time that an interview allows. One way to solve that problem may be to hire several people temporarily for several projects and appraise their skills. You can later choose your permanent workers from that pool.
Make Sure The Appropriate Tools Are Available And Accessible
If your team is working remotely, then usually they don’t need access to the equal tool kits they would in their regular work environment. What tools they require will differ in accordance with your sector and their responsibilities.
You may employ tools like Asana, Dropbox, or Microsoft Teams. But the most common thing almost every remote team needs is a good integrated communication and collaboration platform such as Slack.
Gather Feedback Frequently
If you’ve just moved to a remote work model for the first time, you must understand that gathering feedback is crucial for ensuring that your team functions properly.
Feedback helps to recognize weaknesses that need adjustment or improvement or even things that aren’t functioning at all. There are several ways to accomplish this:
- One-on-one meetings. If you’re already holding online meetings with individual employees, utilize them to ask if they feel the ongoing processes function well.
- Polls. Anonymous surveys allow you to collect data on different areas of your practice model.
Be flexible
It’s not always simple to manage a home working team. With certain roles, it can be more challenging to practice flexibility. However, it doesn’t mean you need to turn to micromanage your mobile employees.
For instance, if they have a determined amount of hours to work in a seven-day interval, then ideally, you should allow them to structure their working schedule however it suits them. Flexibility is essential not only for employees but for remote managers as well.
Provide Emotional Support
In a remote work environment, the employees you manage have different emotional challenges than the ones working in a co-located environment. We’ve already implied loneliness. Few might struggle with time management.
As a manager, you can also be the root of employee problems if you can’t respect the fact that although they work remotely, they aren’t accessible 24/7. To offer emotional support, you should constantly be in communication with your employees and ask them if there’s anything they need.
Final Words
Managing a remote team is not easy, especially in the beginning. However, by implementing the right tactics, you will see that you will reach the maximum level of productivity as time goes by. You can start with the ones we mentioned above and then readjust accordingly.
Kiran Shahid is a Canada-based B2B copywriter. As a copywriter for eight years, she is determined to make boring business copy shine. In her free time, you can find her trying out different foods. You can connect with Kiran on LinkedIn or check out her website.
