A Guide On How To Manage A Remote Team

Mastering an effective mindset starts with examining your fundamental beliefs about both the current pandemic situation, and the people you manage. Two-way dialogue between managers and employees ensures that communication efforts help, rather than hurt, engagement. Gartner research shows that employees’ understanding of organizations’ decisions and their implications during change is far more important for the success of a new initiative than employees “liking” the change. Two-way communication provides employees with the information and perspective they need. It also enables them to express and process negative emotions and feel more in control.

Use simple pulse surveys to ask specific questions or track output to collect data and find areas for recognition. In the remote landscape, where many people are juggling work and family commitments in their own homes, enable employees to complete their work however is easiest and most productive for them. Team meeting may have to go or you may have to forgo a lengthy approval process. Schedule collaboration at a mutually agreeable time, and lean on virtual tools wherever possible. Flexibility empowers teams to complete their assignments in their own way. “The best thing you can do as a manager is to put utmost trust and confidence in your employees that they will do the right thing — which they will if employers provide a supportive structure,” says Kropp.

Managing remote teams can be challenging, but if you follow the best practices laid out above, creating an effective, open, and collaborative remote work environment for employees is possible. At ActivTrak, we believe that data is the key to unlocking the potential of remote teams. By gaining insight into the ways your employees work, you can take steps to help them work wiser and ensure they are supported no matter their chosen work environment.

No 1: Look Out For Sign Of Distress In Your Employees

If you expect employees to attend virtual meetings, do they have adequate cameras? Even if you don’t have an extensive set of technology and collaboration tools available, you can equip employees to function effectively when remote. But don’t assume that people know how to operate with virtual communications — or are comfortable in that environment. Managers develop their role over time which is down to understanding the relationship between manager and employee as the key ingredient for success.

• You can easily find a lot of strategies and how-tos describing ways to enhance employees’ performance and boost productivity.
• Effective management of employees at home requires that managers have frequent, meaningful conversations about employees’ needs and work.
• We provide the above examples simply to demonstrate how the employee experience can vary between seemingly similar role families.
• Workplace Solutions Learn how to develop and engage employees to create an exceptional workplace and boost your business outcomes.
• But with an informed approach, managers can help employees at home overcome challenges and maintain high performance.

It was easy enough to set employees up with equipment to work from home in a matter of days. However, effectively managing teams remotely became a whole new dynamic. Our levels of tolerance and adaptability vary, and you should consider these factors when managing remote teams. Being a remote manager requires many of the same skills that you may have acquired in-office; however, there are nuances to serving, leading, and guiding a remote team. While remote work offers numerous benefits for both you and your employees, it can present a few challenges for team leaders that will require significant changes in attitude and behavior. Meaningful feedback elevates employee engagement for all employees and has a greater effect on those who work from home more frequently.

For some, productivity has dropped simply because they can’t get motivated in the morning. These considerations are important because your workforce’s performance will impact your company’s overall success. Evolving your mindset as a remote manager will take continuous, conscious self-examination and a personal commitment to shifting how you fundamentally think about work and leading people. In fact, managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement scores across business units. In fact, engaged workers who also have reasonable flexibility in the workplace experience higher wellbeing even as they work more hours per week.

Set up virtual hangouts to chat about how your team members cope with remote work and project management. Discuss how previous projects went, the blockers they faced, how they found solutions, and how challenging or exciting their tasks have been in general. Rethink your approach to communications and ask yourself – can this be an email or a quick IM?

Seamlessly Communicate With Your Remote Team

To help you overcome these obstacles and ensure you and your employees are working effectively from anywhere, we’ve put together some considerations for being an effective remote manager. When managers show up for their remote employees by communicating frequently, they drive employee engagement. In fact, when they are managed effectively, fully remote teams can substantially outperform on-site teams. However, unlike most knowledge workers, these financial professionals experience higher levels of burnout when they primarily work from home. Perhaps their intensified focus on clients and productivity makes it particularly difficult for them to set boundaries related to work-life integration. Given the lack of visibility in a remote environment, improve your monitoring techniques and relationships with direct reports.

Organizations need a clear remote work blueprint to create a competitive advantage while supporting employees’ wellbeing in the long term. When managed poorly, remote work can dramatically erode engagement and productivity. In the same way, a marketing employee who leaves the office early to pick up their children and then finishes their project after the kids’ bedtime may experience engaging work-life integration. Working remotely can be a highly engaging or seriously disengaging experience for employees. Meaningful communication elevates engagement and performance even further. We provide the above examples simply to demonstrate how the employee experience can vary between seemingly similar role families.

Leadership Identify and enable future-ready leaders who can inspire exceptional performance. Join your peer CHROs and senior HR executives from leading organizations to discuss specific HR challenges and learn top HR trends and priorities. “As a manager, you have to stop paying attention to the process and pay more attention to what things are getting done. Just talk to your team about what you want them to accomplish,” says Kropp. There is no need to micromanage every task and question your employee, after all, once you’ve built and established trust, the need to question your employee goes out the window. Connecteam is so easy to use, even the non-tech-savvy employees can onboard in a matter of minutes.

From navigating long-distance collaboration and staying focused in a home office to effectively onboarding new hires without the benefit of face-to-face interaction, managing remote teams can be difficult. Luckily, following the best practices laid out below will help you solve these challenges and more. Whether your company has three, 30, or 300 remote workers, it’s essential that you know how to manage a remote team. When you have a strong grasp on how to effectively manage remote employees, then you establish a strong company culture, attract top talents, and retain the very best from your in-house team to your remote workers. Read on to learn how to effectively manage remote teams and explore how user activity data can help transform your remote environment, increase employee productivity, and empower your organization as a whole. Another effective practice of managing remote teams is modeling work activities around your employees’ working hours.

Employee Experience Analyze and improve the experiences across your employee life cycle, so your people and organization can thrive. Employee Engagement Create a culture that ensures employees are involved, enthusiastic and highly productive in their work and workplace. Provide opportunities to share successes and safety for potential failures. Make an effort to highlight the value of employees’ continuing to scale their activities, and ensure that any risks are worthwhile. This creates an opportunity for managers to evolve their approach to remote work.

Best Practices For Effectively Managing Remote Employees

Nevertheless, within the broad knowledge worker category, remote worker experiences vary significantly from role to role, making careful evaluation of each role necessary. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, many employees in knowledge worker roles were already doing at least some work from home. Since the outset of the crisis, worry and stress have been worse for people who work from home than for those who do not.

Remote teams have unique needs and in order to manage remote team members effectively, you must take a collaborative, transparent, and systematic approach to performance management. The ActivTrak team is committed to helping managers adopt this approach, navigate any challenges that might come up in a remote environment, and unlock the resources needed to help remote employees work wiser. With ActivTrak, managers can access a bird’s eye view of employee activity https://globalcloudteam.com/ as well as granular insights into workflows and key productivity metrics including work hours, focus time, and app usage. That kind of data helps managers better understand how their distributed teams work, pinpoint what they need to succeed, and improve productivity overall. Instead of relying on subjective surveys or waiting until it’s time for performance reviews, managers can use objective workforce productivity data to better manage their remote teams.

Instead, focus on efficiently managing your remote team to turn them into your biggest asset. You won’t believe how much you can achieve when the right communication is put in place. Your employees will be calling you to arrange meetings and advise you of their work progress.

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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. This virtual face-to-face assessment could be the perfect time to ask for project management feedback and suggestions on how to move forward. 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.

Some of your team members may not complain about this, but stress will reflect on their work performance. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , one out of four employees complains that work is the number one stress factor they deal with. When you schedule check-ins, you give yourself a break from constant overseeing, allow your team to be more accountable, and reduce unattended projects.

But, for those that do, greater flexibility significantly improves employee outcomes. When executed haphazardly, a remote work structure can curtail remote work productivity and sour the employee experience. Decisions that affect the employee experience reflect what the organization stands for and how leaders want the organization to be known. These decisions can leave a lasting impression on an organization’s reputation with employees, customers, investors and communities. Employees have performed heroically to support one another and adapt to a new, challenging work environment. Even if a role aligns well with remote work, it is important to consider that people have different talents and, therefore, different ways of achieving the same outcome.

Culture Transformation Understand the culture you have, define the one you want and make your organizational identity a competitive advantage. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. “During periods of disruption, employees’ desire for recognition of their contribution increases by about 30%,” says Kropp. Hybrid & Remote Workforce Management Analyze work patterns & trends across teams. Better retention, higher productivity, and overall employee satisfaction and happiness. Please, share your thoughts and ideas, describe a problem or give us information on how we can help.

But if you’re ready to take things to the next level and provide remote workers with everything they need to succeed then you need a mobile app. And not just any mobile app, you need the mobile app that was Managing a Remote Team built for remote, deskless workers – Connecteam. 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.

Amazing Tools For Team Collaboration

This will promote work well-being — which has a huge impact on feelings of psychological safety. Additionally, if you host meetings that a remote worker can’t attend, record those so they can catch up at a later time. If you’re interested in the tips then scroll on down but if you are looking to gain further knowledge into what you’re up against then take a look at these challenges. Irina is a marketer and international keynote speaker based in Dublin, Ireland. She’s currently working at HubSpot, on a program called “Surround Sound”, where she is focused on building awareness for the company’s freemium products. Irina was also one of the Head Judges for the 2020 Global Search Awards and has been on the judging panel for the 2020 European Search Awards.

Top Challenges & Solutions When Managing Remote Employees

Create a remote work policy that answers any questions remote workers might have and offers additional productivity resources. DRIVEN Professionals, explains that in order to manage a productive remote team, you need an effective communication strategy. When you manage a remote workforce, you must be knowledgeable of the challenges you are up against, so that way you’re prepared for whatever comes your way. Our guide will walk you through overcoming these challenges and giving you the tools you never knew you needed. The race for improving team collaboration has become a hip trend in the business world. You can easily find a lot of strategies and how-tos describing ways to enhance employees’ performance and boost productivity.

Build Your Company Culture

However, at the same time, many at-home workers have developed a taste for remote work, reporting a desire to continue working remotely after restrictions on businesses and schools are lifted. “Show employees that you plan to look out for them for the long haul,” says Kropp. Companies spend years building a set of values that describes how much they care about their employees, and how it’s important for them to create great lives and experiences for them. Encourage open communication and create opportunities for social interaction to grow your company culture. “It is important to manage expectations and stay focused on goals when embracing a remote workforce.

Managing Remote Teams While Maintaining Company Culture

Effective remote teams have a company culture of transparency and open communication that includes fully remote workers just as much as those team members who may choose to come into the office on occasion. Collaboration tools including instant messaging apps like Slack and video conferencing apps like Zoom have made maintaining that communication easier than ever. With remote employees, you have to ensure you’re using tools they’re familiar with. For example, Zoom for video, face-to-face communication can help with engagement. While Slack or Google Hangouts helps you stay connected in real-time.

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. 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.