Maintaining long-distance relationships can pose a challenge in our personal and professional lives. The task can be even more daunting if you are in charge of a team.
In this article, we’ll review seven best practices of remote team management. But to fully understand these strategies, we need to learn the basics.
Working remotely means not working in a physical office together with your workmates. It could also be called “work-from-home.”
However, working remotely doesn’t necessarily mean working at home. You can work anywhere you want to, just as long as you can do your tasks effectively.
There are a lot of mixed reactions when we say “remote work.” Some managers love it, while others think it negatively affects productivity.
On that note, here are five of the most prominent challenges managers face with remote work.
If you manage a remote team, anything can go wrong, and you can’t be there personally to assess and work out the situation. Before creating your team, consider the following:
Working remotely has its setbacks. However, applying the following best practices ensures these issues are resolved quickly.
You can’t monitor your remote team as effectively compared to an in-house setting. Your remote team can pretty much do whatever they want with their time.
Setting clear ground rules establishes the type of working environment your team expects. Some examples of ground rules include:
Setting ground rules is only effective when you have the proper communication channels. Your tools must be accessible intuitive, and help optimize your team’s communication. Double-check with your team if you can use your home phone service or other phone systems if you need to use a company-provided communication channel.
You have email, messaging, video conferencing, and more. There are tons of available tools online you can use for these channels. Famous examples are Slack and Gomada.
Team building helps your team become more cohesive. However, since you’re working remotely, you’ll be limited to conducting virtual team-building activities.
These activities can get your team to know each other better, encourage collaboration, and improve communication. Here are some actions you can try:
Setting well-defined and realistic expectations can be challenging for both remote and in-house. You can start by defining a project’s scope, delegating tasks to members, and setting due dates.
Managers can also set clear expectations for the standard quality of deliverables. More importantly, you must select a clear goal everyone should strive for.
Working in an office setting allows you to communicate with your team at a personal level. You can catch up about your lives outside of work, hang out, and more.
These are often lost in a virtual and remote working environment. That’s why scheduling a 1:1 meeting consistently with your team members is essential. Some of the benefits of 1:1 include:
According to a study from Gallop, team members who consistently have 1:1 meetings with managers are three times more likely to be engaged at work.
Instead of striking fear to keep your remote team in line, I want you to be approachable. This will make your 1:1 meetings more effective, conversational, and authentic.
Remote managers need to be pillars of support for their teams. But holding yourself and your team members accountable is also essential.
Statistics from Click Onboarding suggest that 69% of employees will likely stay in a company for three years if they have a good onboarding experience.
According to Apollo Technical, poor onboarding results in one-third of new employees quitting after six months. We don’t want this to happen.
What we do want is to have new team members engaged. Forbes cites that 87% of engaged team members are less likely to leave the company.
Working remotely allows your team a more balanced work-life relationship. According to a Stanford study, remote working setups can increase productivity by 13%.
But before jumping headfirst into a remote work set-up for your team, consider the following:
