This blog explains how to manage a remote team effectively with 7 best practices. It will only take 4 minutes of your time.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, most businesses adopted the work-from-home strategy. Even before that, there were numerous remote working companies all over the world.
Managing a remote team is more difficult than managing the typical office. There are many challenges you & your employees have to face. So, you should have best practices to get the desired results.
DigiFix is a fully remote company. We have employees from various countries who work from home. In this blog, we thought to share how to manage a remote team effectively with seven best practices.
How to Manage a remote team effectively with following best practices:
1.Understanding the challenges in a work-from-home environment.
Working from home is much more different than working in an office space. As one of the best practices for managing a remote team, a manager should understand the challenges of working from home.
There are some challenges remote employees face each & every day. Following are those,
a). Lack of interaction with coworkers & supervisors.
Lack of interaction with coworkers & supervisors is a serious challenge for a remote working team. Continuous interaction with each other is an important factor in a company’s culture. For a virtual team having continuous interaction is difficult.
So, to increase the interaction among remote team members, a manager should use collaboration tools. It will increase the interaction & productivity of team members.
Plus, you can use Zoom, Microsoft Team, or other communication tools to keep in touch with your team members. Having team catch-ups every day or as much as possible is also a great way to increase interaction between team members.
As a manager, you can encourage your remote workers to interact well with each other.
b). Many surrounding distractions.
Since your team members work from home, there can be many surrounding distractions in their remote environment. There are other family members in their houses, many background noises & many other distractions.
So, as a manager understanding these difficulties of your employees is essential. You can use many actions to prevent these distractions. For example, taking meetings at their possible time will be easy for them.
2.Improve the interaction during meetings.
It is essential to monitor the progress of ongoing projects continuously. Otherwise, the team will be distracted & demotivated & will not reach desired goals. For that, as a manager, you can arrange daily meetings & daily check-ins.
Unlike physical meetings, virtual meetings tend to have less interaction. But you should increase the interaction between meeting participants. In this way, you can track the progress of projects & identify the drawbacks & mistakes.
You can do the following things to increase the interaction & take a productive meeting,
Set clear expectations from the attendees. For example, whether you need them to be on the camera, whether they need to bring reports. Otherwise, they will be helpless & not ready for what you expect.
Create a clear & complete agenda for the team meeting.
Inform who is presenting before the meeting starts. Then the attendees will know who they will be listening to.
Try to manage time as much as possible because if you take too much time for the meeting, employees will not have enough time to work & they will be bored during the meeting.
3.Consider the suggestions given by team members/employees.
This action is also one of the best practices for managing a remote team. Your team members know the situation of working remotely better than you. Because they are the people to experience things in a remote environment. They may have better ideas & suggestions to improve the productivity of the company.
As a manager, you can always listen & consider the suggestions given by employees. Some of those can be valuable suggestions. Those suggestions could be effective tools, apps, websites, or any other thing.
The importance of doing this best practice is not only productivity improvement. Listening to your employees, and considering & implementing their suggestions will motivate them more than ever. They will feel valuable & motivated to offer more to your company. Managing remote employees will not be difficult if you follow the best practices like these.
4.Get to know your team members better.
Since you are not meeting your team members face-to-face, you may not know about them. Plus, team members may not know well about each other. It is an obstacle to achieving the desired goals of a company.
If you personally know about each & every employee, you can monitor them properly. You can do the following things to get to know your employees well.
a). Spend quality time with your team members to understand them. You can arrange small discussion sessions & invite your employees to attend. Also, you can arrange remote team-building activities & games or online social gatherings.
By attending these, your team members will get to know each other well. And you can also understand them well. This way, as a manager you can understand the best management style that suits your remote team.
b). Interacting with team members personally will also help to know them better. From time to time, you can have a chat with your team members and ask about their ongoing projects & the difficulties they face.
5.Hire employees who can manage themselves.
Managing a remote team will be a piece of cake if you hire employees who can manage themselves. That doesn’t mean that you set them free & let them do whatever they want. “Managing themselves” means you don’t need to monitor them 27/7 & they have the presence of mind to work appropriately.
If you hire someone who is not following work ethics & not working properly, it will affect the entire team.
So, what can you do? Hiring remote teams is different from the typical hiring process.
When having a remote company, you can hire people from different parts of the world. But their working experiences, time zones, and education qualifications are different. So, a typical CV & cover letters are useless in the hiring process.
Instead, observe their soft skills & personality. Do they have qualities like team playing, self-motivation, enthusiasm, positive attitudes & self-learning? Then they are the perfect fit for your company.
6.Accept & respect cultural differences & viewpoints.
A remote company can have employees from different parts of the world. And those employees represent different cultures & have different viewpoints. As a remote company, you must respect this diversity.
This diversity will help your company to see the world from different perspectives & build as one unit. But it will not be possible if you or your employees do not respect & accept diversity.
As a manager, you should create a remote working environment where everyone’s ideas are heard & respected. The firm as a whole needs to accept these cultural variations rather than trying to mould people into their way of thinking and working.
7.Train & educate your employees.
This best practice is also an answer of mine when someone asks how to manage a remote team effectively. You have to train & educate your employees to get the maximum output. Having employees who are enthusiastic to learn new skills is an asset to a company.
As a remote company, you can train your new employees with the necessary documentation. Then your employees will learn about the company. Team leaders can educate newbies about the company & their job roles.
Learning is not something we should stop. Continuous learning & training build a good employee. Especially when working from home, you need certain skills. So, managers can train their employees in these skills.
Conclusion
I hope this blog article helped you to understand how to manage a remote team effectively with 7 best practices. If you manage a remote working company, it is essential to keep the work life balance while achieving goals of the company. Managing people from different parts of the world always gives struggles. But if you know the best practices, it will not be an issue anymore.
Are you looking for a digital marketing agency to handle your business’ online presence? Then we at DigiFix are more than happy to help you. Contact us by visiting our website: DigiFix
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