Managing a Remote Team

A lot of businesses and companies are going remote and this transition is becoming inevitable. In that case, it is important to learn how to manage your remote team. Managing a remote team is similar to managing a team on-site but there are a few factors that you need to consider. That way, you will be able to get your team to be productive even while everyone is not in the same place.

Getting Started

When it comes to managing a remote team, there are a few things you need to put in place before you proceed. These things will help you make it a lot easier to handle different challenges that might arise. For a start, you need to ensure that you get to know your team individually. In that case, you will be able to determine key areas that we have mentioned in the list below:

• Individual strength
• Individual weaknesses

Once you are able to determine your team’s individual strength, you will get to know the areas that you need to focus on so that you can increase productivity. In addition to that, you can as well help each member work on their strength to make them a lot better. On the other hand, knowing the team’s weaknesses will let you work on how you can tackle those loopholes so as to reduce mistakes.

Check-in Daily

For a start, you need to check in with your team members every day so that you can get feedback on how they are doing personally. Creating a personal relationship with your team members make it a lot easier to get them to tell you what they struggle with. In addition to that, you can easily get honest feedback from each member directly. Below are some of the benefits of daily check-ins

• You get to set the agenda easily
• Get easy feedback
• Provide the resources they need to excel

Communicate Constantly

Just like checking in daily with your team members, you need to communicate with them individually and collectively. You need to encourage ideas from each member so that you can learn how to improve them personally. The impressive part is that you will get to know which member is more active and the one that is slacking on the job. With that, you find it easy to tackle the problem directly.

Make Use of Technology

At the moment, there is a host of impressive technology that you can use as a remote team. You should introduce your team members to one or more tools that they can use to make their work faster and easier. In addition, you need to take advantage of different communication tools to make it easier to get in touch with each member of the team. Also, there are collaborative tools that you can use as well.

Manage Expectations

As a manager, you need to define your goals and what you expect from the team. In this case, you need to manage expectations by setting realistic goals. You need to help your team with a clearly laid out deadline for their daily tasks and schedule. That way, you will be able to track each of the member’s productivity. In addition, you should also set clear reasons why they need to do certain tasks as well.

When it comes to managing expectations, it means that you need to define the scope, deliverables and deadlines of each project the team is working on. When you do that, you will not be left out in what each member is working on and you can keep track of the team’s progress. Aside from that, you will be in control of the time table and in the loop every step of the way.

Focus on Results

You need to understand that you cannot monitor each of your team member’s activity every moment. If you try to do that, you can get the tag of the “creepy boss”. As a result of that, you need to ensure that you allow your team to do their job and you simply monitor the results. With that, you get to see if they are actually getting the job done or not.

In addition, you can as well track productivity to see the member that is not putting in enough effort in the team. For this reason, you should not bother about what the team is doing or how many hours they put into work. You should only focus on whether they are getting the desired result or not. That way, you can easily save resources and time while you are able to increase productivity.

Help Your Team with Resources

As we have mentioned in the previous sections, you need to equip your team with top tier technology if you want to get increased productivity. Once you do that, you will find it to keep up with the team and track productivity as well. The first thing you need to do is figure out what each of the team members is lacking and then proceed to provide those resources to them.

It is recommended that you do not make any assumptions that someone might have a particular resource. In that case, you need to ask each team member what they will like to have that they think will increase their productivity. You can then proceed to get them what they need so that they can continue to provide increased productivity. With that, you can rest assured that your team will give you 100%.

Additional Tips

You need to understand that there are factors that each team member might be facing especially if the whole team works in different regions. In that case, you need to understand if there are challenges that are unique to each member depending on their environment. With that, you need to put it into consideration so that you can help them achieve top-notch productivity. So, we advise that you ae flexible but assertive with your team.

Final Verdict

Managing a team remotely comes with a lot of responsibility since the whole team is not together in the same. There is a possibility that each member has different challenges that need to be handled distinctly. For this reason, as a manager, you need to be in touch with your team consistently so that you can get the best out of each member.