how do you effectively manage a remote team

8 Best Practices for Managing a Remote Team

• 1. Maintain effective communication When your entire team is working remotely, keeping up with them via effective communication is one of the biggest challenges that you’ll face. ...
• 2. Conduct regular meetings ...
• 3. Use time blocking ...
• 4. Organize the workflow ...
• 5. Be supportive and patient ...
• 6. Maintain a healthy work culture ...
• 7. Focus on improving cybersecurity ...
• 8. Don’t neglect professional development ...

Full Answer

How to successfully run a remote team?

Run a Remote Team Successfully with These Tips. If you want to set up a remote team, run a remote team, and work with a remote team successfully, you should have a look at the following tips first: 1. Hire Carefully. It all starts with the hiring process.

How to successfully manage a team remotely?

Tips for managing a successful remote sales team

• Encourage social interaction. Isolation can be a real problem for employees who typically don’t work remotely, and often has a negative impact on employee engagement.
• Encourage collaboration. ...
• Establish clear processes and document everything. ...
• Empower your remote sales team with the right tools. ...
• Gamify your remote team. ...

How to build a successful remote team?

Building a remote team is about finding the right people, managing time correctly, and communication. What may seem challenging at first becomes much easier once you understand how your employees work, what their needs are, and how to provide them with the information and tools they need.

How to successfully manage a remote startup team?

here are three tips to help you effectively manage and strengthen your teams. Develop A Remote Work Playbook It’s critical to have a playbook that outlines remote work policies and expectations. The first step to implementing a successful remote-work ...

How to encourage remote workers?

Celebrating your successes — both big and small — is a great way to encourage your remote workers. Not only that, but you’ll motivate them to do their best. More so, it gives your team the satisfaction that their efforts get desired results.

What is the role of managers in an office?

Just as in a traditional office workspace, managers are expected to keep workers up-to-date on staffing changes and policies. Although it’s essential to see how well team members meet expectations, don’t oversee their actions too closely, as that can breed distrust.

What can you do with virtual parties?

You can hold virtual parties, online hangouts, joint brainstorming video conferencing, and welcome sessions to build positive interpersonal workplace relationships.

Where do people work in the home?

Some have standard home offices, and others might work from anywhere — their yard, bedroom, or favorite coffee shop.

What is the job of a manager?

Your job as the manager ensures that there is no lapse and work is progressive while managing remote teams.

How to manage a remote team?

To manage a remote team effectively, you need to show your team that you understand their experiences. You also need to show compassion, consideration, and a willingness to try to meet them halfway.

Why is it important to manage remote teams?

When managing remote teams, it’s absolutely critical to be able to keep your team’s sense of trust, reliability, teamwork, and overall confidence that you support them.

What is remote work management software?

This remote work management software integrates with and connects more than 2,000 other apps. It moves information over so that you can have continuity without having to manually add the same information into different places.

What is Trello project management?

Trello is a simple yet beautiful project management tool that lets you break large projects up into individual tasks so that nothing ever gets left behind.

What are the challenges of managing remote employees?

Before we get our hands dirty with the solutions, let’s take a closer look at the key challenges of managing remote employees: structure, communication, productivity, and confidence.

How long should a team meeting be?

To start, I recommend setting a daily meeting of just 15 minutes (depending on your team size, of course).

What is virtual leadership?

The best virtual leaders constantly strive to balance forward thinking, planning, and efficiency with a little creativity, resilience, and compassion for the team’s experiences. You don’t even need to strike this balance perfectly. Just working toward it every day makes all the difference.

How to familiarize new remote employees?

A well-designed onboarding process is an effective way to familiarize new remote employees with the people, processes and tools that they need to succeed . Videoconferencing technology can help. For example, managers can give new employees a virtual tour of the office and introduce them to new co-workers.

Why is remote work important?

Remote employment can enable companies to recruit from a wider talent pool, reduce overhead expenses, and deliver more timely customer service . It can also increase employee productivity and engagement as well as reduce attrition.

How to keep remote workers from feeling alienated?

Continue that collaboration by setting up regularly scheduled team meetings to keep remote workers from feeling alienated and disconnected from the group.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of remote work?

Remote work has its advantages—flexibility, low or no overhead costs, and a greater pipeline of applicants from which to hire. And it has its disadvantages—less interaction, managers worried about how to tell if their employees are staying on task and communication challenges. How can companies maximize the advantages and minimize the disadvantages? Here are tips from supervisors and workplace experts who are getting great results from their remote teams.

Should all team members be treated consistently?

Regardless of where they're located, all team members should be treated consistently.

Does GrooveHQ hire remote employees?

It takes a unique temperament and skillset to work remotely with aplomb. When GrooveHQ first began hiring new remote employees, the company targeted people with previous startup experience. After some early hires didn't work out, it expanded its requirements to include people—such as freelancers--with prior remote experience.

How to help remote teams?

Remote teams often need some kind of boundaries to outline their work and personal life. As the teammates are working from different time zones any notifications or chat message or emails can ruin someone’s sleep or disturb their family time. Discuss work schedules with each team member by respecting their time and show them that you care for their time. This will help in building positive relationships with employees making sure nothing is too hard for anyone.

What is a Remote Team?

A remote team is a group of professionals from various time zones, diverse skills and different culture working together on a unified project. Each teammate working from a separate location, living in different cities, and working across time and space. Working remotely is one thing and managing a remote team is another challenge. Remote work is everywhere. There is a lot of difference when the teams are sitting right in front of the office and when they are working outside of an office.

How to communicate effectively in remote work?

And of course, online communication skills. As you start with the conversation, be quick and concise, so the teams do not get confused. Develop your writing skills, talk precisely, use the right remote collaboration tools to collaborate effectively as awesome communication is vital in the remote workplace.

What is the role of a remote manager?

And managing remote teams is the responsibility of a manager. As the manager of remote team members, your job is to nurture, guide and support team members which is a challenge in itself. This is a guide for managers to manage their remote life and make employees happier.

Why is it so hard to manage a multicultural team?

The problem with multicultural teams involves misunderstandings and conflicts that divide the teams apart. It becomes pretty hard to manage the people of different races, embracing cultural diversity to allow team building. A simple way is to find how different people from different areas are open to receive feedback, promote a mindset of celebrating differences, be respectful about national holidays for your global team, and respect every cultural difference

Why is communication so difficult in distributed teams?

A big challenge in building a distributed team lies in poor communication over distance because of different time zones. Varying time zones leads to issues of communication.

Can you talk to each other in a remote team meeting?

When working with remote teams, you cannot have that washroom meeting and talk to each other, or gather around the water cooler to know each other or enjoy the happy hours after office. So, for have the team bonding you need to stay connected with your team. Try these methods:

How to hire a remote employee?

Hire with personality and skill set in mind. Help employees feel included. Make communication a priority. Mind the schedule. Measure performance. 1. Hire with personality and skill set in mind. If you want to have an easier time managing a team, you have to hire the right team first. If you hire the right people who would be naturally good remote ...

Why is remote work so popular?

Remote work is making huge gains in popularity because it’s at the perfect intersection of business benefit, employee need, and cultural shift. And that trend is only going to gain in popularity in the future as more people get used to the idea and figure out that it’s a completely doable task with the right tools.

What to do when you are separated from your coworkers?

When you’re separated from your coworkers by borders, vast distances, or walls, the most important thing you can do is communicate with them. Remote teams need to be empowered to communicate with each other by whatever means necessary—whether it’s video chat, voice chat, or instant message, communication will be the foundation that remote team success is built on.

Why is communication important in the office?

Communication and collaboration are incredibly important in the modern office, but even more so when managing remote teams—set your team up with the tools they need to work together and establish the processes they should follow to make it a smooth process for everyone.

How much does remote work increase engagement?

Research has shown that remote employees are more engaged and productive, reporting a 9% boost in engagement, 13.5% boost in productivity, and a 50% reduction in likelihood they’ll quit:

Why do we use video chat in Zapier?

While phone interviews can provide value early in the screening process, video chat allows hiring managers to better evaluate body language and personality. In addition to that, Zapier also frequently introduces new team members via weekly video hangouts: Your motto when building a remote team should be, in the words of Zapier CEO Wade Foster, ...

Is remote work a good fit for a company?

Not everyone is a great fit for remote work —the right remote employee needs to be a strong independent worker, focused, tech-savvy, able to produce impactful work with little direction, and have incredibly strong communication skills.

1. Set Expectations

As the project adapts to this style of working, provide your team appropriate time to settle into this changed scenario. Do not expect 100% productivity from the first day.

2. Communicate Effectively

In a distributed workforce situation, Communication is a major barrier that needs to be overcome.

3. Have a Daily meeting

Routine sets into an autopilot mode in each project, once members are assigned their tasks. Until we foresee any issues in the near future, we sit back, assuming that things are operating as per plan.

4. Avoid Micromanaging

Trust your Team. 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. Trust is a crucial factor when dealing with remote teams.

5. Employee engagement

When working remotely, it is easy to feel isolated. 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.

6. Appreciate Performance

Recognition is a way of delivering a message that you are doing a great job. It not only helps build employee motivation but keeps the team competitive in terms of their performance. This Employee Recognition gradually gets on a back seat in case of Remote working.

Why is remote work important?

Or ROE’s as we call them in the military. Remote work becomes more efficient and satisfying when managers set expectations for the frequency, means, and ideal timing of communication for their teams. For example, “We use videoconferencing for daily check-in meetings, but we use IM when something is urgent.” Also, establish expectations on the best times of day for team members to reach their manager (maybe that’s you) and the manager to reach each team member. And make sure peers are sharing information as needed.

What are the challenges of working remotely?

Common Challenges. To start, managers need to understand factors that can make remote work especially demanding. Otherwise high-performing employees may experience declines in job performance and engagement when they begin working remotely, especially in the absence of preparation and training.

Why is it important for managers to acknowledge stress?

Especially in the context of an abrupt shift to remote work, it is important for managers to acknowledge stress, listen to employees’ anxieties and concerns, and empathize with their struggles. Research on emotional intelligence and emotional contagion tells us that employees look to their managers for cues about how to react to sudden changes or crisis situations. As we say in the Navy SEAL teams, “Calm is contagious.” But guess what? So is panic. So, chill out.

Why is over communication important?

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.

Why is it important to set clear expectations and request feedback?

Set clear expectations and request feedback to ensure alignment. Don’t simply assume the team understands where they need to focus their energy.

Can a great battlefield commander send their troops into the fray without proper training and resources?

No great battlefield commander sends their troops into the fray without proper training and resources. Ok, maybe that’s not totally true, but you know what I mean. Many remote teams now need new laptops, better WiFi, and new technology such as headsets and webcams. This may mean shifting already strained budgets towards critical tools. Set the team up for success.