Remote work and your remote team are not slowing down.
A FlexJobs’ survey states, “Hiring managers anticipate work done by flexible talent”,…meaning remote employees…“will increase by 168% in the next 10 years.”
Why? Because remote work has tons of benefits – for both employers and employees.
It allows for flexibility, diversity in skills and knowledge, better time use, and higher productivity volumes. At Time Doctor, our team is 100% remote and has more than 80 team members!
How do we manage a team of people spread across four continents?
In this article, I’ll discuss 5 tips for managing a remote team to increase productivity, improve collaboration and inspire success.
1. Create a Supportive Culture for Your Remote Team
There are few things more gratifying about a job than feeling truly valued as an employee.
For remote employees, this sentiment can be missing due to the absence of physical proximity, the lack of face to face communication, and the feeling of isolation. Therefore, it’s crucial to foster a supportive culture within your remote team.
How can you do this?
First, recognize your remote employees’ accomplishments frequently. Check in often and give positive feedback when possible. Publicly acknowledge their work over company emails or performance management platforms like 15Five. Publicly recognizing their work will make remote employees feel included and equally important.
Second, conduct virtual team-building activities. Because remote team members miss out on “water cooler talk”, they often find it challenging to bond and become friends with their colleagues. By dedicating time to virtual team building and non-work related conversations, you can make substantial improvements to boost team spirit and a feeling of belongingness.
2. Share Your Vision and Goals
When working with remote employees, you must share the company’s strategic vision, tactical goals, and objectives.
Why?
Remote employees often struggle to see the impact of their work, as they miss out on office talk and in-person events. The more often you remind them of their purpose and how they are contributing, the more involved they will feel.
What’s more?
Communicating a shared vision to your remote team clarifies the big picture behind tactical goals. This plays an important role in syncing the efforts of different teams toward shared objectives.
Remote team members in marketing, product development, sales, and support roles need to embrace a shared vision and collaborate to achieve key goals. For example, in real estate marketing teams, different team members need to coordinate activities for social media messaging, branding, PR, B2C outreach, and visual media.
This coordination isn’t too difficult when people are working out of the same office. However, if you have a remote team, you need to go the extra mile to ensure that each team member is absolutely clear about what the team is trying to achieve.
Therefore, rather than assign discrete tasks to your remote team members, clarify how each task contributes to the bigger picture.
3. Map Your Virtual Team’s Processes
One of the most effective ways to improve remote team productivity is to have clear processes.
Processes lay out a clear path for executing a certain task. Tried and tested processes are efficient and will get the job done. They are invaluable in a remote team where you don’t have the luxury of explaining things over face-face communication.
Moreover, if someone makes a mistake, you can easily identify the error by checking which step in the process was not followed correctly.
Defining processes isn’t too difficult. You can easily create detailed Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for different types of tasks. But how do you ensure that your remote team members actually follow these processes?
Related: How to Set Up Your Marketing Team for Remote Work
The easiest way is to map these processes using some project management tools or a simple drawing tool where you can use symbols for your process maps.
In such a way, you can map company processes as project templates, recurring tasks, and checklists. These templates go one step ahead of SOPs. To encourage your remote teams to follow processes, you must ensure that they check off the different task and checklist templates.
Task templates make process training and implementation a breeze for remote teams!
Processes mapped into templates clearly define expectations, leaving less room for sloppy work. They also define timelines and deadlines, informing the employee of how much time to spend on the task and when to submit it.
4. Step Up Your Communication Game
You’re basically in a long-distance relationship with each of your remote employees. How do long-distance relationships work?
Communication!
Here’s how to better your communication:
Use The Right Communication Platform(s) With Your Remote Team
When conversing with virtual team members, choose consistent and efficient platforms.
Here are some apps that we like to use plus a few other suggestions.
Chat
Use chat for conversations that require immediate exchanges. Chat is great for quick comments, photo and document sharing, and back and forth conversations that don’t require complex explanations.
Slack, HipChat, and Flock are all great platforms for chatting with team members. Many of the chat apps available also allow for add-ons and integrations that make other daily tasks quick and seamless.
Video
Participating in a virtual face-to-face conversation with remote employees is critical for engagement. Google Hangouts, Zoom, Cisco WebX, and Skype all do the job well. Choose a tool with screen sharing features to get the most out of video capabilities.
Video chat is best for meetings and demonstrating processes through screen sharing features. Video is also optimal for conversations that are better conducted face-to-face, such as employee reviews. Presentations are a great addition to video calls for further enhancing remote team communication. Using tools like visually appealing free PowerPoint templates can help produce engaging and impactful team presentations and improve team collaboration. Moreover, team building activities are significantly strengthened when team members can see each other’s expressions and reactions in real-time.
Phone Calls
Though most communication will occur on chat and video apps, phone apps like Whatsapp or MightyCall level up phone calls for virtual workers. From assigning business phone numbers to employees to set call routing rules, virtual phone apps control, and organize company phone calls.
Phone calls are a great alternative to chat and video conferencing. They convey a message faster and in more detail than chat and further allow employees to be on the move or away from their computers during a conversation. They often require less time than a video meeting as well.
5. Establish Expectations from Your Virtual Team
This might be the last point, but it’s vital to do this even before hiring a remote employee!
From the very beginning of the hiring process, clearly outline your expectations for any remote position.
Successful remote work has several requirements, and it’s best to specify those requirements in the job description to attract the right applicants.
Do you require that remote employees work during set hours? Do they need to be in touch with the team throughout the working day? Maybe there are weekly meetings they will need to attend? A particular strength of internet connection they must have? Include these requirements in the job description.
By clearly defining your expectations from the beginning, you are more likely to find the right candidate.
Conclusion
Managing a remote team might sound challenging. But simple steps like mapping processes, setting up communication systems, and clarifying goals and expectations are all you need to skyrocket your team’s productivity.
