As remote work continues for at least another year, some managers may be struggling with their remote teams, whether they’re new to remote work or not. For others, pandemic or not, remote work will steadily become the norm.
Managing remote teams isn’t all that different from in-office teams, but the added challenge of things like unclear communication and different time zones, to name a few, is what can make it difficult.
Here are 10 tips to help you manage your team well so that they’re motivated, productive, and happy.
1. Know the struggles of remote management
When you’re aware of the potential challenges that you could face with managing a remote team, you can better equip yourself to deal with them efficiently. Here are two of the most common struggles you can help your team with:
Struggle: Lack of trust in remote employees
Solution: Remote work gives a lot of autonomy to its employees. Without physically being around your team, it can be tempting to micromanage to make sure they are really doing the work, but this isn’t advisable. In fact, allowing your employees a more flexible schedule has been proven to lead to increased productivity and a better sense of work-life balance. To ensure accountability, set a weekly or monthly meeting for everyone to report on their progress on a task or project.
Struggle: Distractions and interruptions
Solution: From children, to pets, to deliveries, and preparing lunch and dinner, there are a ton of distractions and interruptions that happen within the work from home day. Again, a flexible schedule will come in handy for these bumps. Allow your employees to take breaks when they need it and also remind them that establishing boundaries at home helps them concentrate on work better.
2. Delegate properly
Delegating is more than just passing out work to your team. It’s knowing everything that needs to be done, breaking them down into doable tasks, set clear goals on every task, and identifying which team member would be the best one to do it.
Then, make sure to discuss thoroughly with your team your expectations for the tasks and set a schedule for updates on progress and reports.
3. Make sure communication guidelines are clear
This is where some managers can start slacking off and leave their team to do their work autonomously all throughout, but they mustn’t fall prey to it. This is how remote workers end up feeling isolated and lonely, which can affect their mental health. It’s very important to keep communication open, regular, and most of all clear. Empowering your team on how to communicate with you and the rest of the members can make work efficient, trust grow, and work relationships stronger.
From day one, you should let your team know the company’s preferred means of communication for certain things whether it’s by email for updates, chat for questions, or video call for meetings. You can also create channels within your communication tools dedicated to certain projects, tasks, or departments to make it easier to find the right people and make communication organized.
4. Create measurable standards for productivity
If your team is in different time zones or has flexible schedules to work around when they are most productive in the day, it can be difficult to measure their productivity.
Having set standards for measurement will greatly help you with this dilemma, such as defining KPIs and setting milestones for tasks and projects.
5. Be careful about overworking and overloading
Remember that we are still in a pandemic and everyone is going through it differently. Take care not to assign too much work or set deadlines that are too tight. Talk to your team and get a sense of how they’re doing and adjust the work accordingly to give them some breathing room. Encourage them to take breaks, use their vacation leaves, and do things that benefit their mental health.
This also applies to managers themselves. Make sure to follow your own advice and not let work life bleed into your home life.
6. Encourage team to mingle virtually
Remote work relationships aren’t as easy to form as in-office ones. That one place where everyone used to get together to talk about anything but work, the water cooler, is gone.
It’s not impossible to create a virtual version, however. You can create a channel or group on the video conferencing app that you use that’s dedicated solely to casual conversation between the team. You can dedicate certain days of the week to certain topics like Pet Mondays, Foodie Tuesdays, where people can share photos of their furry friends or meals of the day. Make sure that these channels are free from any work talk.
7. Get regular feedback from your team
Whether it’s your first time managing a remote team or not, it will be helpful to ask your team for feedback on your managing style and the company’s overall system of work. You can use this information to improve on weak points and create a better working experience and environment for everyone. You can get feedback through one-on-ones with your team or doing anonymous polls. This gives them more confidence to speak about any issues that they otherwise might be apprehensive about to bring up within the group.
8. Check in with your team
Remote work can be lonely for some people and this can affect their mental health and therefore their performance. Once in a while, reach out and ask your team members individually how they are coping. Give advice where you can but mostly let them know you’re there to listen when they need it. Remind them of company values and how they contribute to instill a sense of motivation and inspiration.
9. Encourage flexible schedules if preferred
Working at home, it’s totally inevitable that something will break the workflow no matter how many boundaries you set. Even if you live alone and don’t have anyone who will need your attention at some points in the day, there’s still chores to do and other life things that sometimes aren’t possible to do on a weekend like errands in government offices.
If your team has a set amount of hours to work every week, then allow them to structure it the way they see fits with their daily lives. They will appreciate it and be motivated to work better.
BONUS: 10. Partner with us!
Hire your next team member through us and we help with the onboarding, H&R, and payroll of your Workmate!
We do everything from sourcing to interviewing and present to you only the best qualified candidates for you to do the final interview with. If you’re interested in working with us, let’s schedule your obligation-free consultation now!
