When you manage remote teams, it can be difficult to know how to manage them. If you work with remote employees, you know there are some challenges involved. One of the most difficult challenges is how to manage remote employees, who may require different management styles than you or your team. Things like communicating with them, team meetings, tracking projects, etc. are all much harder when you are not physically in the same place. However, there are some simple hacks that can make the job much easier.
Set Clear Expectations
One of the most effective ways to manage remote employees is to set clear expectations. When you do this, you can avoid misunderstandings, dead ends, and unnecessary adjustments.
Document Your Communication Strategy
Communication strategies are essential when it comes to remote working, since you need to have clear information about how you are going to communicate with your team members in both technical and non-technical terms.
Communication is at the heart of any business. Yet, many business owners are overwhelmed by the amount of communication that they are expected to manage in their daily lives. From emails to meetings, social media to phone calls, the job of managing the communication is often left to the last minute.
When you document communication strategies, you can share them with your team easily without repeating the same tasks.
Onboard New Hires
Hiring new employees is one of the most important things you can do for your company. Many people overlook this aspect of the hiring process, but it’s easy to see how much impact hiring has on the long-term success of your business.
When you bring on a new employee, you can’t help but hope that their experience will be a positive one. The best way to do this is to make sure you are providing all of your staff with the tools they need to succeed. This means not only providing them with training but also providing them with the staff to support them during their learning curve. Given this, it’s easy to see how onboarding new hires is an important part of your company’s success.
Establishing An Effective Communication
The best way to manage remote employees is to be proactive in communication. Having a good communication plan in place can help a team a lot in a remote environment. The communication plan that you want to have should be a guideline for what information is to be shared with the team, what is to be shared privately or internally, and what is to be shared externally. Without a communication plan, the communication may fall short of what it should be.
Establishing An Effective Feedback System
One of the most important things to think about when setting up a remote workforce is establishing an effective feedback system for your team.
Feedback is the heart of any remote working system. It’s also one of the most difficult parts to get right. The only way to get the feedback you want is to get it right.
Help Your Employees Avoid Burnout
Many people in the workplace suffer from a chronic state of burnout, something that is made many times worse by the impersonal and often dismissive nature of the workplace. Often, workers in this situation resort to unhealthy, and often illegal, behaviors in order to cope with their work situation.
A recent survey shows that one-third of all employees in the United States have been diagnosed with a psychological disorder, and technologies such as social media have been blamed for helping to create a new golden age of stress.
Engage As Often As Possible
As a remote worker, one of the best things we can do to feel more productive and happy in our day is to engage in the things we enjoy. Sure, we might be tired and overworked when we do, but we’re usually happy in the end and it’s a sign that we’re doing things we enjoy and that we’re not stuck in our heads or sucked into a horrible work rut.
Engagement as a remote worker can be a real challenge to those used to being connected all the time. When you work from home, there are moments where you have to leave your desk and work from a different location to keep the information flowing, but there’s a strong temptation to avoid these moments to keep everything running smoothly.
Schedule Regular Team Meetings
This is not something that many of us think about, but it is something that is important to consider if you are an employer of remote workers.
For many remote workers, the only time they get to work together is when they get a group email or calendar invite. Yet, working together as a team is essential for success. Without regular meetings, your team can easily get lost and disjointed. Schedule regular team meetings and you can help your team become more productive and create a stronger culture.
Be Transparent
Its not easy to be a remote team when you depend on the work of others. You need to be able to provide transparency, and in order to do that you need to be transparent with your employees. Transparency is a two way process: we need to be transparent with our employees and put them in a position where they need to be in order for them to provide transparency to others.
One of the best reasons to be transparent when using remote employees is that when you don’t have to worry about confidentiality, you can be more open with your team when it comes to work-related topics, such as pay, benefits, and working hours.
Set Aside Time For Regular One-On-One Conversations
A disconnect between businesses and their employees is a deadly one. This disconnect can lead to disengaged employees, and disengaged employees can lead to an increase in employee turnover and a loss of productivity.
Your life as a remote worker is different from those of your colleagues, but it can also be quite similar to them. It’s a misconception that working from home as a lifestyle is as easy as it sounds. In fact, as a manager, you can often find yourself missing out on important conversations about your team, and you can also find yourself missing out on opportunities to help your team members improve their work. This is why it’s important to set aside time to communicate regularly with your team and to take advantage of these opportunities and conversations.
Don’t Micromanage
Micromanagement is the practice of over-supervising the performance of employees. If you’ve ever worked for a boss who insisted on checking in on you frequently, you’ve probably experienced the negative effects of micromanagement.
Most managers think a good remote worker is a micromanager. But a micromanager is terrible for remote workers, and a micromanager will destroy a remote team.
The problem with a micromanager is that the micromanager attempts to control everything from a distance. This is a bad idea, as a micromanager is forced to be a bottleneck for the entire company.
In a distributed team, a micromanager can cause someone to do something that they shouldn’t do. The problem with a micromanager is that the micromanager cannot predict what is needed and they cannot predict what is not needed.