10 Tips And Best Practices For Managing Your Remote Employees

Office cultures can vary widely, depending on industry and location. Traditional office cultures tend to be more formal, with clear hierarchies and division of labor. In contrast, remote office cultures tend to be more flexible, with employees working independently or finding innovative ways to collaborate cross-functionally. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, many workers worked in home-based cottage industries. With the advent of the telephone and other forms of communication, it became increasingly possible for people to work remotely.

These distractions are healthy and inevitable, so fighting them is futile. 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. Trust that you and your talent management teams have put together a skilled group of people. Consider setting up a short one-on-one meeting once or twice a week with everyone on your team.

Use messaging platforms and daily video standups as avenues for team members to provide project status updates and successes . It’s easier to hit your targets if you can keep the team aware of other projects that are being worked on. Measuring the “output” of remote knowledge workers can get murky, but again, communication tools can help here. The first step is to ensure you’re getting the right candidates in the door.

If you’re open and honest, for instance, they’re more likely to be open and honest with you. By making transparency a part of your team culture, it’s easier to build trust with all employees and ensure they feel comfortable coming to you with any questions or concerns. Take a moment to engage directly with remote employees at least once a day, whether through an email, instant message, phone call or video chat. The longer you go without reaching out to these employees, the more likely they are to feel left out and become disengaged from their work — which may lead to poor performance and turnover.

If one employee prefers to work in the early hours of the day, encourage it; if another is more of a night owl, allow that, he said. If the work is getting done, treat employees as the individuals they are. Take note that maintaining the accuracy of these work productivity tools requires assistance. Therefore, you must outsource professionally trained staff to ensure that you’re utilizing these tools at their highest capabilities. There are other circumstances when quick collaboration is more important than visual detail.

We also have a list of Slack apps, and ideas for Slack channels, which can help promote connection and collaboration with remote workers. If you have both remote and in-office employees, then you can plan hybrid activities for your team. He enjoys helping businesses improve their employee productivity & data loss prevention efforts through the deployment of the CurrentWare solutions. From the perspective of the remote team, the SSO features allow them to securely access corporate applications with ease.

Although some organizational roles can exercise flexibility overnight, other departments can stop micromanaging your virtual workforce. Here are a few tips to make sure you and your team don’t feel guilty about the occasional loss of Managing a Remote Team focus. Hale noted that good managers make themselves available to team members. A monthly or quarterly employee net promoter score, for example, can be useful, along with pulse surveys for a deeper dive into employee sentiments.

But you have to have some focus on cybersecurity, so that they can both access and communicate information securely. Knowing the potential challenges you’re likely to face when managing a remote or hybrid work force means you can better equip yourself to deal with them quickly and efficiently. Your stack will be different to ours, but we use a combo of Slite for docmentation, Airtable for project management, Slack and Gmail for comms and then an HRMS for HR stuff. By knowing your employees’ aspirations, you could easily determine how to connect them to those of the company. This has a positive effect on engagement, job satisfaction, and loyalty. To provide emotional support, you will need to tackle issues from a place of empathy, always be in communication with your employees, and ask them if there is anything they need from you.

Communication

Is essentially each member’s ability to work, i.e the total number of hours available and the percentage of time they can dedicate to each task. In the case that your team is both remote and in-house, then ideally you will want everyone together in a virtual room. In remote work, you can give your team this same experience by organizing a parallel structure through the cloud. These interactions provide a sense of personability and accountability that are critical to small businesses. Whether that understanding is related to work affairs or personal troubles. By doing this, you will have to trust that your employees work just as hard in lieu of direct monitoring.

• Without documentation of company policies and ongoing projects, it can be nearly impossible for teams to understand what’s going on across other departments.
• The tips discussed above will not only enable everyone to perform better, but it will also help them enjoy the opportunity of working from home.
• Therefore, you’ll have to weigh the pros and cons to ensure remote work is right for your business.
• According to a recent study, 71 percent of remote workers say they’re happy in their current job.
• In conclusion, remote team management can be as easy or as difficult as you make it.
• Basecamp is a web-based tool with to-do lists, project milestone management, messaging, file sharing, and project time tracking.

ProductFeatures OverviewSee how high-performing teams are using Fellow to level-up their meeting and productivity habits. You can also make “shout out” videos that highlight contributions each team member made that week and why it matters. Web filtering is also an essential part of data loss prevention as it allows you to proactively block websites used for data exfiltration such as personal cloud storage accounts.

Focus On Team Building And Collaboration

It will enable them to develop a sense of independence, something which is critical for remote work. The tools have an intuitive user interface and are highly interactive for employees to communicate and connect. The life of managers becomes much easier by integrating such tools into their daily chores.

We’ll end it with the most important of all the tips and tricks, trust. If you hire the right people, you’ll manage a team of go getters and hard workers. Trust that everyone is doing their assigned tasks and staying productive. It doesn’t have to be everyday or even every month, but find the time, at least a couple of times a year, to meet with the people you work with.

If your employees strive to deliver good results and don’t get to celebrate the impact their efforts create, they might feel discouraged about their performance. According to Global Workplace Analytics, the number of people who work from home has grown by more than 173% since 2005. Every chance he gets, he’ll spotlight his support champs—whether on Slack, in presentations, social media or other workspaces. Our support team is our most engaged team because the people in this team feel especially connected. 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.

Tips For Prioritizing Outcomes With Remote Work:

There are tools for everything from remote team management to tracking employee goals and happiness. Beyond the simple daily check-ins, over-communicating is imperative when it comes to the team’s tasks, duties, responsibilities and desired outcomes, which we’ll cover more in a minute. In a normal workplace environment, lack of communication can already be a challenge. But when employees are working remote – and potentially now focused on new or different tasks and goals, communication is paramount. Although company leaders and HR departments can work to anticipate the needs of remote employees, it is also helpful to ask.

This keeps team members focused and purpose-driven to assist with productivity during meetings. 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.

Everyone has different routines and environments that can promote productivity more in the early morning or late at night. Encourage your remote employees to go hybrid and work from the office at least once a week. If that isn’t possible, ask them to join groups of like-minded individuals within your organization.

The idea here is to make sure employees feel supported and to give them opportunities to discuss any issues or challenges on their end. We’ve all sort https://globalcloudteam.com/ of been taught to not trust the people on the internet. Hiring team members you can trust can take a lot of time, but it’s very much worth it.

Create A Video Or Tip Sheet With Other Remote Employees Suggestions

Yet, even if a shift to remote work is anticipated to take place in a matter of weeks , a four- or 24-hour trial run may reveal unanticipated shortcomings to a seemingly workable remote plan. Meanwhile, a call center employee may need to resolve 10 client calls an hour while ensuring there are no crying babies in the background. A recruiter may need to conduct 20 phone interviews and fill five positions a month. Assuming such incidents don’t become routine, patience is helpful – especially when remote work is a temporary solution to a short-term event, situation or crisis. Fill out the form and one of our representatives will contact you within one business day.

By monitoring the computer activity of your WFH team you can see how they spend their time, the hours they are active, and how engaged they are. If you put these tips into practice strategically, your team’s output will undoubtedly improve. Spend time checking in on the team members working remotely to ensure everything goes smoothly. Ongoing iteration and improvement of the onboarding process are critical to business success in terms of productivity and employee satisfaction. When determining what others should do in a constantly changing environment, the first step is to figure out what you should do.

Even though your team is working remotely, plan to keep the employee engagement alive. A mass celebration of birthdays, anniversaries over a video call, helps build team spirit. It is apparent, you will not have visibility into what the team members are doing on a constant basis. After assigning them the tasks to be completed, give them the freedom to get work done as per their schedule. Trying to manage every aspect of how the goals are being achieved, turns into micromanaging.

What Is The Role Of The Manager For Remote Teams?

Managers should encourage their employees to reach out through instant messaging, video conferencing or a telephone call if they have any questions or concerns. However, many of those concerns turned out to be unfounded, at least several months into the large shift to remote work spurred by COVID-19. Prior to the pandemic, just 1 in 30 companies had at least half of their staff working remotely, according to research from human resources consulting firm Mercer. Of the employers surveyed, 94% said productivity has remained the same or increased since employees began working remotely. While working from home decreases workplace costs, this situation exposes each remote team member to various distractions. These obstacles limit the attention and focus of the individuals who must stay on finishing tasks.

How To Stay Focused When Everything Feels Stressful And Overwhelming

TimeZone.io is a simple tool for keeping track of time zone differences between employees. With TimeZone.io you simply add your employees, note their time zone/location, and give them a profile picture. Then, from the dashboard you can see what time it is for each of your employees. Simply put, when working remotely it is far easier for a team member to take advantage of the lack of visibility.

Build An Environment Of Trust

This is not to say that people are unable to make friends outside of work but that work is a big part of everyday life. Professionals who are actively involved in the company life feel more appreciated and valued. Their mindset shifts from ‘working for a company’ to ‘being part of something greater’.

Tips And Tricks For Managing A Remote Team

This virtual face-to-face assessment could be the perfect time to ask for project management feedback and suggestions on how to move forward. As a team manager, the mental health of your employees should be of utmost concern, especially since they will deliver better results when they have sound health and feel supported. You can hold virtual parties, online hangouts, joint brainstorming video conferencing, and welcome sessions to build positive interpersonal workplace relationships. Your check-ins don’t necessarily have to be daily — schedule check-ins based on what works best for your team, pending projects, and work hours.

Having company knowledge in a centralized platform is incredibly valuable for managing a remote team. As new remote workers get onboarded that can be provided access to essential company documents and an internal knowledge base. With remote teams, organizing a project may require a new approach. The best thing you can do as a manager is to exhibit empathy and compassion in your acts and conversations throughout the growing pains. Blocking specific times of the day for short meetings with your employees is a simple method to ensure consistent communication.