Effective Remote Work Requires Following These Principles

Then, exercise flexibility in task supervision while managing remote teams. While managing remote teams, ensure you find that delicate balance between continually pinging employees and delegating workflow by setting up automation. As common as remote working is nowadays, team managers still face challenges when managing remote teams. How to successfully manage your remote teams is an itch in the several brains of managers and business leaders. We give you a brief overview of the best practices here.

Remote employees’ performance affects your overall business growth. But don’t be too harsh when you identify problems and make corrections. Team members who need more time to adjust to the remote environment might deal with mental health concerns if they continue to work under pressure.

Final Thoughts:14 Tips For Successfully Managing Remote Teams

But it’s during such times that innovation and risk-taking become even more important for employee engagement and organizational success. Even when the organization has constraints on new investments, managers can emphasize the need and provide opportunities for incremental innovation or process improvements. Managers can create opportunities how to build culture in a remote team for two-way dialogues that focus on a realistic picture of both the positive and negative implications of the current COVID-19 outbreak. Use both direct conversations and indirect observations to get visibility into employees’ challenges and concerns. Use every opportunity to make clear to employees that you support and care for them.

• This could take a mental toll on them if not quickly and adequately addressed.
• In a physical environment, relationships are more easily established and maintained, but some managers struggle to achieve this when staff are working from home.
• Also continue to model the right behaviors — and encourage employees to call out unethical conduct.
• The benefit of a remote work arrangement is that employees have more flexibility.
• Brightful is a suite of online games for team building.
• When used correctly, values can inspire remote teammates and create a sense of pride in the company.
• Lastly, stay aware of your company’s mission and values during the hiring process.

With employees willing to take up to a pay cut of up to 10% if they are allowed to permanently work from home, employers save several thousand bucks in reduced salaries as well. And a grateful employee is statistically proven to show higher levels of trust and loyalty to the company. It is a method where you work on a 25-minute sprint and you take a short break. Based on their roles and responsibilities, encourage and train your employees to work on prolonged cycles and take compulsory breaks in between. Setting up recurring half-hour meetings across your calendar can help in understanding the pulse of your employees.

Happier employees are more productive and engaged in the work they do, so leaders have that to look forward to with a remote team. While many challenges might come up while managing team members in different cities or countries, managing remote teams is a breeze with the right actions and tools. Adapting to this new work style can be scary, especially if there isn’t enough time to prepare for the change. However, if you know how to manage remote teams the right way, you’ll get the best results from your remote workers.

You can make that easier for others by establishing a clear personal etiquette and sticking to it consistently. After a long and liquid client dinner, an advertising executive opens an email from his boss reminding him to submit his expenses on time. Annoyed by this micromanagement, he immediately responds with his uncensored thoughts. Allow for a proper amount of time and attention before starting a wider discussion. Design activities that include everyone, including disengaged teammates.

Also, consider planning out their course material and anticipate what challenges new teammates might face. This can make a huge difference in the pace of learning for new hires. Nothing livens up the day of a remote work team than some light fun and games when interacting with each other.

Create Ways To Meet In Person

Webflow has also launched a feature that specifically supports remote collaboration between teams working on the same website. When you have meetings to juggle, tools like Reclaim.ai can help keep schedules organized and balanced, which is both more challenging and more important when you’re remote. Sometimes just talking things out in real-time is the best way to get on the same page. Meetings can support good communication and team unity, but they can be exhausting if they aren’t planned well. You should establish a consistent framework for what your meetings should look like, how long they are, and what mediums everyone will use.

Set up systems that help you follow up with your employees and hold them accountable for their performance. These video calls can be three-pronged – discussions, progress and growth. Then talk about the progress they have made over the past weeks. Emphasize that participation is more important than response time. Discover how design teams are streamlining their workflows — and building better experiences — with Webflow. On a personal level, being genuine in your interactions can help mitigate the impersonal feeling of digital communication.

Proper tools must be provided for timely and effective communication. Leadership must ensure that it applies uniformity in what, where, and how communications occur. Even if you don’t have an extensive set of technology and collaborative tools available, you can equip employees to function effectively when remote. But don’t just assume that people know how to operate with virtual communications — or are comfortable in that environment. According to a collection of data by ProofHub, remote workers are more satisfied at work. On a scale from one to ten of happiness, remote workers scored 8.10 while traditional workers were at a 7.42.

For Yourself, Your Team, And Your Company

A remote workforce is isolated and is affected by many cultural and personal factors. Fostering a growth mindset helps employees experiment boldly, offer creative freedom, and accelerate innovation. The remote manager https://globalcloudteam.com/ needs to create opportunities for employees to emulate these experiences. The transition of in-house teams into remote teams at breakneck speed is in itself an amazing endeavor on the part of our managers.

How to manage a remote team in this regard is to advocate for mental health days — workdays you set aside to help improve your employees’ psychological wellbeing. 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. People who work on remote teams face these challenges consistently.

More In Remote Work Tips

Some may have spouses and children, and others may not. Several companies didn’t have work-from-home plans on their agenda until the global pandemic caused them to adapt to these new ways of managing their employees. While we often tend to regard human predictability as a defect, few qualities are more sought-after at work, especially in virtual collaborations. We are all unique, but our consistent behaviors help others predict what we do, and in turn help them to understand us — and we all benefit from being understood.

Transparency in communication is vital for building trust and setting clear standards. Employees must not feel that there are double standards or things are being hidden from them. Whether it is about accessing relevant work documents or company announcements, everyone must feel like they are on the same page. This important for team building between team members, as well as the team and leadership. Individual team members can also build interpersonal relationships with each other on shared interests.

As restrictions are lifted and employees vaccinated, there will be more opportunities to strengthen the team through in-person events. Virtual happy hours, fundraisers and brown bags may not be as effective as in-person events, but it can still help the team come together until it is safe to meet in person. To ensure efficient telework, it is critical for managers to institute the proper systems and processes. Whether or not we are remote workers, it is likely we are all part of a global workforce.

Team meeting may have to go or you may have to forgo a lengthy approval process. Schedule collaboration at a mutually agreeable time, and lean on virtual tools wherever possible. Providing flexibility empowers teams to complete their assignments in their own way. Managers may be concerned and even frustrated to lose the constant visibility they once had into their employees, but don’t respond by micromanaging. That will only disengage and fatigue already stressed employees. Don’t fixate on perceived performance problems; you’ll have plenty of time to lean on established performance management systems once the height of the crisis abates.

Include Time For Social Connection

Over the same time, employers have also learned which functions need an in-person staff to perform. If you want someone who is completely remote it changes the entire calculation. Concerns range from a lack of face-to-face supervision and limited access to information to social isolation and reductions in productivity.

Always respond to prompts and set an example of the behavior you’d like to see. Acknowledge that teammate values may oppose one another. It’s troubling when core values clash with a coworker. However, this understanding can shine a light on differences and strengths.

Monthly Manager Tips Delivered Straight To Your Inbox

People who work on remote teams face communications challenges consistently. As more and more of our interactions happen digitally, we will continue to experience new forms of miscommunication and misunderstanding. The solution lies in building a skill set that reflects the demands of our digitally-driven age. For instance, when communicating digitally, don’t assume that others understand your cues and shorthand. Spend the time to communicate with the intention of being ultra clear. Don’t bombard your team with messages – it’s ineffective, and annoying.

Maybe they can talk about their pets or similar work ambitions when interacting with each other. The more they interact and bond with each other, the greater their trust will be in each other. So part of the responsibility of remote team building lies on the individual team members themselves.

Setting this type of tone is an essential tip for remote team building. Having strong relationships with remote coworkers makes work more fun, rewarding, and effective. However, team building is more than just playing games. All three of these strategies––social events, value-based discussions, and asynchronous cadences––come together to connect remote teammates. By using these strategies deliberately, teams can create healthy team cultures from the ground up.

According to ProofHub, remote workers can get more work done at home, 30 percent said that telecommuting allowed them to accomplish more in less time. There are fewer opportunities for workplace distractions that take workers away from their tasks. Leaders can feel satisfied that work projects will be completed on-time since remote workers can stay focused on their work. Over the last year, many employers have learned that many functions can be efficiently and effectively performed remotely.

If not, use something like Dialpad’s video conferencing feature to hold a virtual workshop. Remote workers may choose different schedules for how they work from home—not to slack, but to fit when they’re most productive during the day. Set a schedule for regular conference calls on progress or problems. This also includes individuals being able to contact you if needed. Use a good task management or project management system so everyone knows where they are and what they have to do. Share useful information on best video conferencing practices.

The digital era has ushered in a revolution in communication that’s equivalent to the one surrounding the invention of the printing press. And it’s affecting what we hear, as the jumble of information coming at us can lead to frequent misunderstandings and confusion. Although moving to remote work has allowed workers to be more flexible with their work hours, things aren’t that rosy. Emphatic managers are the ones who are able to resonate with their workers’ needs and help them establish a sustainable biological clock. Building philanthropic perceptions aside, sending off employees to work from their homes allows companies to save on operation and infrastructure costs.

It is important for team members to take time during video conferencing, and thank the team members that have helped them. By speaking up and telling the team about how a particular person has helped you at work, gives a morale boost to the person being acknowledged. Gratitude from coworkers helps in remote team building.