6 Tips to Manage Remote Teams Efficiently
I’ve worked with remote teams for almost a decade in a company that was built to make the most out of this methodology. This is what you need to know.
Working remotely on a full-time basis has been quite a challenge for all the people that had no experience in the matter. It’s a completely different experience from those Fridays without scheduled meetings when you decided to work from home and all the common types of location flexibility that traditional companies offer.
This challenge reaches new levels of complexity when leading a team. Managers and team leaders have had the responsibility to keep everyone productive, connected, and engaged with their work. When you add the effort of navigating the sea of tools and best software solutions for these purposes, it’s easy to see how things can quickly get overwhelming.
But not all hope is lost. There are quite a few things you can do to polish your remote management skills. I’ve worked with remote teams for almost a decade in a company that was built to make the most out of this methodology.
This is what you need to know.
1. Set Clear Expectations
Your team will always be driven by the expectations you have of them, regardless of your management style or experience. The success of your remote team will heavily depend on how you manage this. If people don’t know what you expect from them, how are they supposed to do what they need to do?
Accountability is key here. You can achieve remote accountability in many ways but I always recommend using some form of issue and project tracking software. For general purposes, you can use an off-the-shelf product. If you want to match the tool exactly to your needs and requirements, you might want to reach out to a software development services company that can take care of the process.
2. Focus on Outcomes
Unlike what most traditional extremists think, working from home isn’t a detriment to productivity. However, you need to keep in mind that in-office productivity looks a lot different than remote productivity. That difference depends on the unique characteristics of each member of your team. Trying to measure it the same way you did at the office would be inefficient.
Instead of focusing on how loyal people are to their old 9-to-5 schedules, focus on the results they bring to the table. To do this, you need to look at the bigger picture and break it down into manageable outcomes. There’s no way to keep track of what everyone is doing all the time — and there shouldn’t be.
3. Build Trust Through Communication
A remote team needs to be built on trust. Otherwise, nothing would ever get done. There’s a reason you hired all these people and it’s your job to bring out the best in them regardless of the circumstances. Whenever possible, avoid micromanaging like the plague. But how do you build trust? You communicate a lot.
One of the greatest challenges for remote workers is maintaining valuable communication with their teammates. This is particularly difficult for those used to office environments. And with social distancing looking like it’s going to stay with us for quite some time, it’s your duty as a manager to put as much effort into communication as possible. A team that feels trusted is more likely to step up and take matters into their own hands.
4. Make Room for Check-Ins
Whether daily or weekly, maintaining good communication with your distributed team will revolve around your check-in meetings. Your emails and chats can only go so far. A good starting point is to set weekly one-on-one meetings where each team member has a quick 15-minute conversation with its team leader and, of course, a weekly status call where each team reviews the achievements and challenges of the week. Push for video calls, too, as seeing each other faces humanizes the meetings.
5. Provide the Needed Resources
In this day and age, there are countless tools and software services designed to boost the productivity of remote teams. However, the software can only be as powerful as the hardware allows. Your team should have all the hardware tools they need to do their job, including laptops, mobile devices, high-speed internet, and any software licenses their job may require. Not everyone will have access to all of these. You need to find those people and put a solution together.
6. Be Flexible
Years ago, when companies started offering remote positions for the first time, flexibility was a central selling point. That’s not a coincidence. As I’ve argued before, flexibility is an intrinsic part of remote work and it’s wasteful to try and contradict that fact. What’s more, most people will definitely have a lot going on in their lives with the pandemic and all. Putting together trust, smart productivity management, and everything else we’ve established here should lead you straight into what flexibility really means in remote work environments.
