How To Manage Remote Teams and Employees Who Work-From-Home
With recent developments and lock-downs, more and more companies are looking to add remote teams to their workforce, employees that never have to come into the office physically.
And while this change has a number of benefits, from saving money on office space and supplies to broadening the pool of potential employees to choose from just those in your local area to anyone in the country, it also created an entire collection of new problems for managers.
After all, how do you manage an employee who’s never really there?
Obviously, you have to trust your remote employees to do their work. Yet, if you’re incapable of checking their job status, it isn’t easy to gauge the quality of an employee’s performance.
It may feel a little bit like driving blind; however, it doesn’t need to be. Managing remote teams is possible with an online project monitoring software application that assigns, keeps track of, and reports remote employees and entire remote teams.
What Is a Remote Team?
A team is simply another method to say a group collaborating to work toward a goal.
A remote team is a group of individuals collaborating to fix a typical objective working in various workplaces, cities, or nations.
Managing Remote Teams
Remote teams function similar to non-remote teams, with all the members reporting to the same supervisor. That means the supervisor must be able to provide and collaborate with the group as if they were all in the same area. The supervisor should appoint their jobs, monitor their development, and report necessary information back to stakeholders.
That pattern looks as if it will continue, so it’s vital that supervisors find out exactly how to manage remotely. Whether remote teams are minimizing above-the-line expenses, providing tasks via a 24-hour job cycle, or simply offering companies the chance to work with more skilled workers, supervisors still need to manage them.
Challenges for Remote Teams
Communication is one of the most noticeable difficulties when managing remote groups. Having the ability to clearly direct tasks and maintain a network open between supervisor and team is crucial to successful execution.
Tracking work and efficiency, as noted previously, is likewise essential to recognize if the project is aligned with the strategy. Naturally, there is a business society to think about, as some businesses will be slow to approve a brand-new paradigm.
There are concerns for the group, as well. If they work from another location while others are in the workplace, the distributed team participant can feel as if they’re not even part of the team and that their contributions are not appreciated.
5 Tips for Better Remote Team Management
1. Video Conferencing
It’s a bit unpleasant; however, there are plenty of tools available to connect people regardless of where they are. Having daily conferences or, for much deeper discussions, a whiteboard session is a great method to communicate, obtain feedback, and see one another’s faces.
Don’t underestimate the power of a digital conference. Putting faces to the names builds connections and develops bonds that are essential for teams to work well with each other.
2. Be Clear in Your Instructions
When you’re in the same office with teams and managers all in consistent communication, the need to be exact is still essential but not as crucial as managing remote groups. Don’t make use of unclear language like “rapid” or “excellent.” Those terms are up for personal analysis.
Create clear examples of what you want from your team, utilize target dates, and set milestones. Share your schedule, so everybody can see when what is meant to be happening and when. Establish clear expectations.
3. Remain Engaged.
It’s very easy to disregard remote groups. These laid-back connections slowly develop trust, while remote groups can feel more abstract, like a name without a face.
Consequently, as a manager, it’s crucial for you to reach out and remain in touch with the remote group. Invite them into conferences via some teleconferencing tool and established regular check-ins to get a feel for how they’re doing and if they require anything from you to do their job better.
4. Concentrate on Goals.
Micromanagement is a harmful road for managers to go down. It can make employees feel as if you don’t trust them or their ability to do the work they were hired to do. When you’re handling remote groups, it can be difficult not to micromanage.
This talks with a count on concern, of course, yet if you can track the development of the remote team’s objectives as opposed to what they’re doing every min of the day, after that, you are tracking their efficiency without making groups seem like they’re just robots. If you’re meeting your goals, that suggests your remote groups are managing their work.
5. Get the Right Software.
Before you use remote groups, ensure you have the tools you need to keep them in the loophole. If your groups are cut off from the rest of the organization, if they can’t connect, share files and collaborate, after that, they’re likely to work successfully.
Tools to Use:
Toggle
TOGGLE’s cloud-based job administration software is accessible online via an internet browser, so remote staff members and those who work from their home can remain connected to their groups, anywhere that there is web access.
TOGGLE makes it easy for individual employees to track working hours broken down by projects and tasks making it easy for management to know the progress of each task and how long an employee has spent on it.
Check out TOGGL today and see if it is right for your business.
Facebook Workplace
Workplace from Facebook is an online communication tool that connects everyone in your company, including all remote employees and teams.
It functions the same as Facebook making it super easy to get used to. You can use familiar features like Groups, Chat, Rooms and Live video broadcasting to get people talking and working together.
It’s essentially your own private company Facebook. Learn more about Facebook Workplace here.
Final Thoughts
The switch to remote work is a massive evolutionary jump forward in how businesses are run and how employees are managed. While the situation with COVID has sped up this change, it’s likely that this change would have taken place any way.
Getting rid of commuting long distances to work helps the environment and saves the company money by not having to provide as much office space, it also saves employees time by getting rid of the time they would have spent commuting to and form work so they now effectively work shorter days (have more free time to spend with family or on their own pursuits) for the same pay. As you see, it can be a win-win-win scenario in many cases.
With these tips and tools of the trade you will be able to effectively manage remote teams and if you’re still deciding if your small business should offer remote work or not, check out this detailed breakdown on the pros and cons to see if it would be a good option for your business.
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