Introduction
With remote work becoming a common practice in organizations worldwide, managing remote teams effectively is essential for sustaining productivity and engagement. Before the pandemic, around 6 percent of employees worked remotely. However, the percentage has reached 28% and is expected to increase progressively in the coming years. Additionally, businesses also operate with multiple distributed teams to attract top talent.
As this trend is here to stay, it has become crucial for managers to develop effective strategies for managing remote teams. Failing to apply best practices for remote team management can lead remote employees to feel disengaged and overlooked. Do you have distributed teams or remote employees? Do you want to ensure consistent performance from them?
In this article, we discuss some best practices for managing remote teams that can help make things easier for team managers. But first, let’s address the challenges managers face when supervising a remote team.
Common Challenges in Managing Remote Teams
Communication Barriers
- Challenge: Remote teams may often face delays, misinterpretations, or lack of clarity in communication, especially when relying primarily on digital channels.
- Solution: You must try structured communication tools (like Slack for chat and Zoom for video calls) and establish clear guidelines for response times, meeting schedules, and message formatting to ensure everyone in your team is on the same page.
Maintaining Team Cohesion
- Challenge: Without daily face-to-face interaction, team members may feel isolated, and it can be challenging to build a strong sense of camaraderie.
- Solution: Create opportunities for team bonding, such as virtual team-building activities, “watercooler” chat channels, or occasional in-person meetups if possible.
Tracking Productivity and Performance
Challenge: It can be difficult to monitor productivity and ensure accountability without in-office oversight. Solution: Use time tracking and productivity monitoring tools, such as Monitask or Mera Monitor, to understand work patterns, help employees stay focused, and provide performance metrics without micromanagement.Overcoming Time Zone Differences
- Challenge: Remote teams spread across different time zones may struggle with synchronous communication and project coordination.
- Solution: Define core hours when all team members should be available and rely on asynchronous communication for updates that don’t need immediate responses. Tools like project management software with flexible task timelines can help bridge the gap.
Ensuring Effective Collaboration
- Challenge: Remote teams may find it harder to collaborate on complex projects due to limited real-time interaction.
- Solution: Implement collaborative project management software, like Karya Keeper, which allows for task assignment, progress tracking, and document sharing in a centralized platform, making collaboration more accessible and streamlined.
Building Trust and Accountability
- Challenge: Trust can be harder to establish in a virtual environment, and some managers may worry about team accountability.
- Solution: Focus on outcome-based evaluations rather than time spent online. Set clear goals, regularly review progress, and build a culture of trust through transparency and supportive feedback.
Maintaining Employee Engagement and Motivation
- Challenge: Remote work can sometimes lead to disengagement or lower morale due to a lack of in-person interaction and recognition.
- Solution: Regularly recognize team achievements, set up structured one-on-ones, and encourage participation in decision-making. Social events like a virtual “Fundoo Friday” trivia game can also help boost engagement.
Best Practices for Managing Remote Teams
Many well-known organizations have witnessed success with their remote teams, and some have become 100 percent remote companies. So, are you ready to achieve this? Here are some effective practices for managing a remote team.
Set Clear Expectations
More than 32 percent of remote employees agree that transparency creates a feeling of connectedness at work. You can maintain transparency by establishing clear regulations for all. Set expectations and boundaries for remote teams. Communicate the company’s vision and mission clearly. Ensure that every employee understands their individual goals as well as team goals.
One of the most effective ways to implement expectations is to organize a kick-off meeting and explain all procedures and policies to the remote team. After that, prefer to hold monthly or weekly meetings.
Use of The Right Tools
Every employer should ensure that remote employees have access to the tools, information, and training they need to complete assigned tasks. Deploy the right tools to empower them. Use tools that support better engagement and collaboration. There are multiple tools that works best for project management like Trello, Asana, and Karya Keeper. Some tools aces at time and productivity tracking like Mera Monitor, worktime, and insightful. Use these tools to handle every task of a business wisely. From AP tools to IT tools for tech teams, the tools can simplify a lot of tasks.
Create Clear Policies for Remote Teams
Don’t forget to establish a proper remote work policy for distant employees to maintain compliance. Besides, set clear guidelines. While making policies, ensure that they are tailored to the organization and the specific role of the employee. Implement policies for total work hours, compensation, use of office equipment, employee leave, security, etc.
Hold Face-to-Face Meeting
Meeting as a team or individually can offer a lot of benefits. With purposeful meetings, managers can create a strong work culture, boost engagement and develop rapport. Even though you have a remote team, arrange face-to-face meetings. You can use tools such as Google Meet, Zoom, Skype, etc. to discuss work progress, employees’ requirements, and much more. These practices make remote employees feel connected. Keep your meetings short but meaningful.
Create Space for Flexibility
Every remote employee has a different work environment. Besides, some will have children and spouses while some won’t. While some employees will have a private workplace in their home, some will be attending meetings from a café or closet. Well, the point here is that managers need to understand such circumstances and allow flexibility.
For example, allowing employees to work at their desired time, setting reasonable timelines for tasks, etc. Just a little bit of flexibility can work like magic for remote employees.
Focus on Creating Streamlined Workflows
It is common for a remote team to encounter various challenges when it comes to coordinating their tasks and staying on the right track. But you can avoid this by setting clear workflows. Besides, establish clear processes for every task. What’s more? You can also cut out unnecessary steps using modern tools to simplify some tasks for remote employees. With this, you can ensure that every task is completed on time and efficiently.
Regular Performance Reviews
Just like in-house teams, remote teams can also benefit from performance reviews. Regular performance checks will allow organizations to discuss clearly about work expectations and progress. Besides, it helps to identify areas for improvement. Furthermore, these reviews can keep employees and managers on the same page. Try to offer constructive feedback, as remote teams may lack in-person feedback which is common for in-house employees.
Create a Culture That Supports Work-Life Balance
As remote employees are working remotely from various time zones, any notifications, emails, or chat messages can disturb their sleep. So, be conscious while setting meetings and deciding on working hours. Respect the time off of every remote employee. Just because these employees are not available physically in the workplace, that doesn’t mean they can be bothered or called on their leave. Show that you respect their time. With this, you can cultivate the trust factor and create positive relationships.
Encourage Social Interactions
As per a survey conducted by Buffer, around 20 percent of remote employees deal with loneliness. Besides, 20 percent of them face challenges to communicate and collaborate. How do we avoid these issues? Encouraging social interactions can be an effective method for this. Set up coffee chats, organize team-building gaming sessions, keep fun Fridays for extracurricular activities, etc. for every employee to socialize and connect with others.
Offer Emotional Support
Isolation can affect employees’ psychological health negatively. It is crucial for every manager to understand stress and listen to remote employees’ concerns and anxiety. Showing some empathy can also work great. Don’t depend on others to find out what’s going on with your employees. Go on and ask employees how they are doing. Listen to them actively. Don’t just listen; understand them and come up with the right solutions.
Celebrate Every Wins
Achieving objectives and celebrating every milestone together is something that creates a perfect team. So, while managing a remote team, don’t let distance affect the ritual. Make an extra effort and recognize employees’ contributions. This act can keep your remote team motivated to give their best. You can organize virtual parties or send gifts to employee’s addresses. If possible, offer a bonus leave. Don’t postpone such celebrations. Celebrate both big and small wins. With this, remote employees will feel encouraged.
Some Effective Tools to Manage Remote Employees or A Team
Communication Tools or Platforms
A core element for managing team remotely is effective communication. You should use efficient and reliable tools for remote employees to facilitate smooth communication. Various tools such as Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, and Basecamp 3 come with useful features. For example, quick file sharing, instant messaging, video calls, and more.Project Management Tools
With the best project management tools, you can increase the efficiency of your remote employees. Besides, they help in attaining work centralization. On the other hand, these tools make collaboration between teams easier. Some reliable project management tools you can use are KaryaKeeper, Wrike, Asana, Monday, Trello, Jira, Miro, and TeamWork.Collaboration Tools
There are many collaboration tools that are designed for remote teams. These tools allow participants to create and share documents, make changes in real time, leave suggestions, etc. Some of the best tools you can try are Click Up, Miro, Todoist, Google Workspace, Dropbox, and more.Video Communication or Conferencing Tools
With these tools, it is possible to allow teams to collaborate or interact face-to-face, making conversation more meaningful. For video meetings, you can use Vowel. It has all the features to keep meetings engaging. For async communication, Loom can be an excellent choice.International Hiring Tools
These tools can help you eliminate potential global barriers while attracting global talent to the team. You can opt for tools like Greenhouse and Veremark to get the best results.Time Management Tools
Use tools like Harvest, Hubstaff, and Toggle for better time management of remote employees. These tools offer a central dashboard for different tasks, deadlines, scope, and more.Employee Well-Being and Engagement tools
With the right engagement tools, you can develop belonging and team connection. For a better understanding of your remote employee experience, you can use Culture Amp. For rewards, give Bonusly a try. To help employees find the right co-working space for remote working, you can use Desana.
Conclusion
Just like your in-house team, remote employees have the potential for innovation, creativity, and productivity. However, they may take their expertise and knowledge elsewhere if you don’t prioritize managing remote teams effectively. If you already have a remote team, you can’t afford to delay implementing best practices for managing remote teams. Consider the practices mentioned above to create and maintain a motivated remote team. Wishing you success in building a positive remote working culture!
FAQs
It is a process of effectively managing remote employees and tasks. It involves a lot of effort, and the use of tools and policies to maintain collaboration and productivity in a distributed work environment.
Whether you are managing a single team or multiple teams, it is important to focus on communication and deployment of the right tools like MeraMonitor, Asana, ClickUp, etc. Besides, consider recognition and work structure.
Conduct regular check-ins, follow a results-based approach, and motivate every employee to attain success independently to keep them productive.