10 Tips For Successfully Managing Remote Workers

Employees typically value their spontaneous conversations, social interactions, and professional relationships with their colleagues. But there is a risk that these bonds can weaken when https://globalcloudteam.com/ working remotely, heightened by the social isolation a shift to remote work can create. These factors can undermine an employee’s sense of belonging to their team and organization.

Because with remote team management, you don’t have as many opportunities to identify what emotional challenges your workers are struggling with. When your team is working from an office, it’s easy to check in regularly with the whole group as well as individual team members. Regardless, the hardship of managing remote teams is a small price to pay for the benefits they offer. Plus, how you handle this new reality of work will shape your true potential as a leader. Time Doctor is a powerful time tracking and productivity management tool used by large companies like Ericsson as well as smaller businesses like Firehouse Subs for in-office and remote team management.

Tips For Motivating Remote Employees

“Have your employees give you a work schedule, along with tasks they are expected to accomplish within a given time,” Civitella suggested. “Instead of lengthy meetings, have short virtual huddles. …. Apply this thinking to team resourcing, scheduling and action planning.” And just as in the workplace, managers should keep workers up-to-date on policy and staffing changes, company successes and tips for working at home, Pellman said. ​Stay-at-home orders prompted by COVID-19 are creating a challenge for managers—including those in HR—at a time when many companies are implementing telework policies for the first time. Nearly three-fourths of employers are finding it difficult to adapt to telework as a way of doing business, according to recent research from the Society for Human Resource Management . Build trust by communicating with transparency.Be honest about expectations for productivity while your team is working remotely.

However, some jobs will require you to track the time that a remote employee took to complete them. To ensure that everyone is clear about how communication will happen within the remote team, consider creating a communication strategy. When people are heading into the office daily there are clear boundaries between work life and home life.

When the topic of remote work comes up, it’s quite common for people to be doubtful of how to work on the projects. The whole process involves connecting solopreneurs and project teams living in different countries or continents. Every individual is looking forward to endearing the culture of remote working.

Understanding These Challenges Will Teach You How To Manage Remote Workers

Most people say they feel pressed for time and want better work and life balance. But the often-mentioned “balance” metaphor isn’t particularly helpful or realistic. Our online effective leadership course, The Effective Leader, gives mid-to-senior level leaders the tools needed to lead and collaborate virtually across organizational and geographical boundaries. Though they don’t have the benefit of in-person communications, team leaders can take steps to steer their dispersed teams in a positive direction.

While text and IM are quick and easy, they lack the nuances of spoken communication that are important for both good and bad messages. Just be sure to always follow up with team members to see what challenges they face, optimize systems and operations where necessary, and lead from the front to set an example for your team. Get started with one of our top business credit card picks of 2022 today. But through all of the growing pains, the best thing you can do as a manager is to practice empathy and have some patience and compassion in your actions and communications.

They’ll feel more connected to the team and not forgotten by the main office that may have people on video wearing swag all the time. Since you don’t have all those moments in the office to build rapport and talk about issues ad hoc, make up for it by setting aside more time for your one on ones with your remote employees. Use these tips to be more conscious of the unique approaches you should take to managing remote employees. Remote management can feel like a totally different challenge than managing people you work side by side with. Things that work in an office don’t always translate exactly to remote employees. But, for the vast majority of companies, the advantages to remote work are numerous.

• Have a good understanding of what needs done, whether a single project or a series of ongoing tasks.
• Many office-based businesses can maintain performance and hit key deliverables via remote working.
• No one likes to be micromanaged, and trying to control your employees every moment can actually lower productivity.
• There are very real professional and personal benefits unlocked by remote work.
• And shifting to a remote work environment can be difficult, especially for companies that are accustomed to the idea of presence being a job requirement.
• Managers can also arrange in-person retreats/events that allow employees to engage with each other in a casual setting.
• With much of the world being asked to work from home as we try to beat COVID-19, suddenly managers and employees alike are scrambling to be productive and work well from their homes.

You can also get more ideas for how to build rapport with your remote team members here. I worked with a largely remote team when I ran product at KISSmetrics, and now, the Lighthouse team today is fully remote. Imagine trying to make an important decision with only 7% of the information.

When employees are at home, they avoid the risk of being exposed to the coronavirus and other contagious illnesses. It can be expensive to replace employees who have left your Managing Remote Teams business, both in terms of the costs to hire a replacement and lost productivity. Remote work often boosts job satisfaction, which means employees stay with firms longer.

Supporting Remote Employees As A Manager

Availableleadership topicsinclude Authenticity, Collaboration & Teamwork, Communication, Emotional Intelligence, Listening to Understand, Psychological Safety, Virtual & Remote Team Leadership, and more. These are just a few of the most common challenges with managing remote teams. Understanding these unique challenges and working through them will improve engagement, productivity, and cohesion across your entire team. Good communication tops the to-do list when managing remote teams. So be sure to follow up with all teams and select members regularly, optimize processes as necessary, and lead from the front to set a good example.

Employees also have different engagement styles and handle interruptions differently. Whereas one will find Skype chats effective, another person may find them intrusive and distracting. “Good job” is fine sometimes, but specific details will be more meaningful and show your employees what they can continue to do to be successful. Don’t assume “no news is good news.” A lack of regular communication can lead to confusion about an employee’s status and performance, for you and for them. In other cases, low productivity may be perceived (but isn’t necessarily true).

Common Challenges Of Remote Work

Tim Eisenhauer is a co-founder of Axero Solutions, a leading intranet software vendor. He’s also a bestselling author of Who the Hell Wants to Work for You? Tim’s been featured in Fortune, Forbes, TIME, Inc Magazine, Entrepreneur, CNBC, Today, and other leading publications. He topic of remote work has become a source of hot debate lately, with some companies singing its praises while others that had once been telecommute proponents, like Yahoo!

One of the big knocks on remote work is that collaboration suffers. A big worry is that if a team can’t jump into the conference room to hash out an idea, innovation will come to a halt. That is a real risk, but it doesn’t have to be a foregone conclusion. By using video conferencing, instant messaging and collaboration tools, business owners can prevent collaboration from suffering.

It’s important to keep this in mind, especially when you’re giving feedback or constructive criticism. Remote work refers to an arrangement where employees are not required to report to a specific place to do their work. In this episode Allison and Ren talk about an organization’s role in doing the right thing, the kind of leaders it takes to do the right thing, some of the spaces in between, and lead with that. A team charter can help you stay on track, clarify roles, and meet your objectives. Read more about how to keep your team on track with a team charter.

Communication Is Key

This can get complicated in larger companies, where some teams are remote and others aren’t, or there are multiple remote teams working separately. One of the significant benefits of remote work is that it allows your employees to work anywhere in the world, as long as they have the required tools. As a manager, this provides you with an opportunity to connect your employees’ goals with those of the company. For instance, an employee who has always wanted to visit New York could be given a chance to work on a New York project when it arises. We recommend that managers establish these “rules of engagement” with employees as soon as possible, ideally during the first online check-in meeting.

The best managers mentor and coach more than “manage.” They also understand the not-so-subtle nuances and differences between the disciplines of leadership and management. And just because we are in the midst of volatility, complexity and ambiguity, that doesn’t mean we halt any and all efforts in developing our teams – and ourselves. Sometimes that requires outside help, new initiatives, and making the time. Being out of sight, you may have to struggle to address the needs of every employee. Though you may be out of sight, don’t ever let them be out of your mind.

Blink, for example, is a mobile app that allows team members to communicate via a social-media-style feed, instant messaging, and cloud-based document sharing — all from one place. But when everyone is struggling to communicate efficiently, it gets increasingly difficult to do that. And with no visible body language and non-verbal cues, you may not get an accurate sense of their level of engagement, feelings, and emotional well-being. You can also implement an employee recognition program where peers anonymously vote for each other. This can help strengthen employee bonds, create friendships in the workplace, and reduce employee turnover rate over time. Stronger team relationships are an indispensable resource for any professional team.

As we talked about earlier, more than half of human communication is nonverbal. When you don’t get to see someone in the office every day, having any type of visual clue to what someone is thinking is essential. In 2022, 72% of companies in Buffer’s survey have said they plan to adopt remote work permanently, up from 46% in 2021. This section is just a basic guide to get you started, and learn more about what these tools have to offer. For instance, activity trackers can have the option to screenshot an employees desktop at regular intervals, or they can trace what websites are being visited from the device.

Review section on managing non-exempt employees for specifics on FLSA compliance. Make the most of this time to engage in these projects, which may be valuable in the long term but may not have otherwise been given the time to come to fruition. Discuss which critical tasks cannot be performed remotely and generate alternative plans.

Even if they’re working from home, remote employees need to understand the roles they play in the organization and how they contribute to the company’s long-term goals. Watch our webinar, Leading Remote Teams When the Stakes Are High, which covers the mindset, skillset, and toolset needed to effectively lead remote teams. If you’ve come this far, you are pretty committed to the idea of being great at managing remote employees. A survey of remote employees by job search site Indeed found that 37% of those surveyed believe that working remotely can lead to reduced visibility and less access to company leadership. Today, we’re here to guide you through the challenges of leading remote teams.