Managing a Remote Team: Best Practices to Follow

The digital workplace opens the door to productivity despite geographical limitations and crises that could render on-site work impossible. However, the successful management of remote teams can be a challenge. Below are the best practices for managing a remote team and ensuring optimum and consistent levels of staff effectiveness.

1. Choose Skilled Team Leaders

First and foremost, team leaders must have excellent leadership and communication skills to effectively connect with their members. This ensures smooth information flow and collaboration, which are crucial requirements for effectively managing remote employees.

Experienced leaders in managing remote teams can quickly anticipate obstacles and introduce mitigating actions to curb their potential consequences. It is also recommended that leaders establish an inclusive work culture and incentivize team members to collaborate using virtual communication tools.

It’s up to team leaders to build a framework that sparks productivity, collaboration, and engagement among team members. This can be achieved through various socializing activities and virtual experiences. For example, it’s good practice to organize lunch hours or coffee breaks where employees can have casual conversations and time to replenish their energy bars. With the right direction and guidance, remote employees can remain motivated and productive in their work.

Leaders need to know all members of their team, along with their skills and knowledge. This can help in creating a workflow that maximizes these assets and facilitates the execution of business processes.

Effective communication is another skill leaders should master. Because the work is remote, employees can feel disconnected from their workplace and colleagues. It’s the team leader’s job to ensure all team members are equally engaged. Schedule frequent conference calls to keep the members updated, informed, and motivated.

2. Create Effective Teams

To ensure that remote teams stay productive, place double emphasis on their structure.

Every company has unique preferences as to team size capable of tackling large projects faster and generating desired results. Generally, a team with five to six members can display a high probability of increased productivity rates compared to a smaller group. Still, it is best to also look into the skills and experience of both leaders and members.

Determining the best team size for remote teams can be tricky — small teams can exhibit skill gaps, while large teams can show drops in productivity, preventing effective collaboration. To help you figure out the optimal team size, answer these questions:

What is the team’s goal?

Determine if that goal can be achieved with more employees without compromising on quality. Review if you will be handling big projects and how many people you need to break them into smaller tasks. At the same time, check the number of people your managers can effectively handle.

Does the team have enough expertise to achieve its goals?

To maintain the desired level of performance and output, each team needs all the unique roles filled to prevent skills gaps. Conversely, it might be a waste of talent and resources to keep experts who share skills and knowledge on a single team.

If you are having trouble with identifying skill gaps, team meetings and one-on-one sessions can help. Other strategies to fill skill gaps include upskilling, hiring, and outsourcing. Getting your current team’s input is beneficial for determining which strategy to go for.

What is the deadline for goal completion?

If you need to complete a goal quickly, extending a team beyond the normal size can be necessary. You can consider staff augmentation for temporary project needs. This organizational hiring strategy lets you outsource staff to supplement the necessary expertise or workforce that your company is lacking.

3. Establish a Strategy

Another effective way to manage remote employees is by developing a functional strategy. First, create blueprints outlining what the project scope, desired quality, and team member roles are.

If team members have conflicting information regarding project context, deliveries or outputs are likely to suffer from inconsistency and delays. The strategy should clearly describe how business processes can be translated into the digital medium.

Furthermore, every team should set clear goals that all members understand. Joint coordination is an imperative factor that can guide the team in identifying what tasks can be done individually and which ones require multiple hands on deck.

4. Pick Tools and Technologies

A digital, remote workplace requires different sets of tools and technologies to function fruitfully. These tools have to facilitate specific business needs and spur employee engagement.

Because communication is critical to the success of remote teams, use solutions that offer a rich digital experience with audio, video, chat, and file exchange. Consider tools such as Slack, Trello, Convene, Office 365, or Google’s Suite to keep employees productive and connected.

Ultimately, whichever tool you choose, it should be able to automate work and increase productivity. Investing in effective and intuitive tools is one of the virtual collaboration best practices that can amplify workforce engagement and modernization.

Read this guide for more tips for managing remote teams: Your Guide to the Digital Workplace

5. Measure Employee Effectiveness

To get tangible information on remote employee productivity, use analytics. Many remote work solutions pack insightful visual reports and analytics that show collaboration patterns and productivity.

Develop productivity benchmarks to quantify the use of collaboration software on workforce effectiveness and team member satisfaction. The simplest way to do this is to work out an average operation output and divide it by the number of employees. While many companies might not calculate the output using this formula, establishing benchmarks is critical for the accurate measurement of employee effectiveness.

Manage Your Remote Team Successfully and Enrich Employee Experience

Managing remote teams can be a challenging task. The remote environment calls for leaders to be more responsive to the slightest nuances to maintain a satisfactory level of productivity. To make things easier, only use tested portal software solutions together with the best practices for managing remote employees.

Convene helps senior management and the board communicate across time zones securely and efficiently, through a board meeting application. Learn more by reaching out to our friendly team.