How To Manage Your Remote Team Effectively

Until a couple of months ago, remote teams was a concept practiced among the most advanced digital & wild SaaS companies. But circumstances, have made adoption of remote work policies and managing remote teams effectively the need of the hour.

Remote teams today are the lifeline of all businesses across industries and geographies. Be it your banker, the local city council, your government, the departmental store in your neighborhood and your favorite apps that you rely during such times….

The idea is to maintain order in all walks of life.

We all are used to work 50-60hrs or more a week, commute to office, do daily chores etc. And with the lockdown, you are all but restricted within your homes. So confinement & restrictive movement is suddenly the new normal.

At the same time you have a business, your customers depend on you & your employees look up to you too in these trying times.

 

How do you support and address their anxiety?

Being a smart business owner, leader or manager you must ensure to:

• Provide your teams with the relevant tools to perform their work
• Maintain continuity of work policies & procedures
• Clarity of roles, expectations and goals
• Give the team a chance to explore new stuff
• Offer freedom to learn new skills that will help them & the business in future
• Keep their focus on the customer

This is easier said than done.

You can provide the most advanced & expensive remote collaboration tools out there in the market.

Not all are best suited to you. There may be a learning curve, adoption issues if the teams have not used them earlier.

How to effectively manage your remote teams?

Maintaining a common understanding across the board is crucial to all your remote work plans.

And to that effect, keep things simple.

• Address your team’s anxiety first
• Do not start with radical operational changes
• Let them know, the work is as usual & no different
• Tell them, it’s ok if somethings are delayed a bit
• Accept that situation isn’t normal
• Share the plan with confidence
• Give precise instructions leaving no room for confusion
• Have everyone’s work cut-out
• Have definite timelines for each activity

The idea here is to give the teams a clear goalpost that they can rally towards. This is most important in uncertain times like the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Do’s and Don’ts for a Remote Team Manager

Don’ts

• Check on your teams constantly
• Set up too many meetings to track mini-progress
• Know what to execute next
• Keep information at distributed sources
• Use too many apps and tools

DO’s

• Schedule short checkpoint meetings -2 max
• Use a single collaboration tool
• Keep the information centralized
• Plan the tasks proactively – at least a day in advance
• Monitor progress in real time

Let us now, look into some of the more tactical aspects of remote team management.

1. Encourage Transparency:

As a manager, be transparent!

Allow your team members to get involved in all aspects of the business. Organize meetings and let them know the company’s objectives and mission. Get them aligned.

Enable and simplify communication. The easier and more the teams communicate, more empowered they become!

Now apps like Slack, Zoom, and Google Tasks have emerged a lot for better communication among remote teams. This can be beneficial for your company as you can now have barrier free communication.

2. Define Goals:

Always discuss with your remote workers what to do and what not to, which project or task they can and can’t perform remotely. Share helpful “Dos & Don’ts” on how to manage your own work

Do you prefer daily/weekly reports? Then go for the best collaboration & time tracking options in a project management software. This can definitely help you to get all the updates wherever you are. You can also track your team performance easily.

Hence it becomes easier to plan for the upcoming days and weeks.

3. Adopt Clear Work Process

Processes are meant for the team not the other way around.

Establish clear hand-off points and outcomes of each step.

Overall, each team member must know how a complete process looks, what are its moving parts, what are the expected timelines and outputs.

If your processes aren’t clear and do not give the above picture distinctly, then you are in trouble!

And you can achieve that by defining clear tasks with timelines and dependencies. On top of that ensure everyone on the team can view the task list transparently.

Using a project management software you give yourself a single source of truth, centralize collaboration, information & communication. In real time!

4. Use Project Management Tools:

Though remote working is the best solution for improving business productivity, it can also be difficult to manage sometimes.

So what’s the solution?

Use a project management software to track daily/weekly task status of your team members and bring them together.

Its time tracking feature can help to keep your employees on track. You can set clear objectives, review your team member’s performance, which in turn increases team productivity.

Timesheet software is now on demand. It helps team members to be more productive by showing their estimated vs. spent hour(s).

“A good time tracking tool prevents employee overloads.”

Along with this, you can easily mark your billable/non-billable hour(s) and can charge your team’s true worth.

5. Avoid Micromanagement:

For a healthy and dynamic work culture, it’s essential to make all your remote employees like sitting next to one another.

Set goals for your remote team make sure no micromanagement is required.

So that they can feel like, out of sight doesn’t mean out of mind.

6. Grow Your Connections:

Expand your network by attending webinars, listening to podcasts, reading books and connecting with potential clients to improve your business growth.

Ask your remote teams to connect, support and enlarge your user community. Let them interact, brainstorm and share new product and service ideas, inflight service augmentation work with your community.

Now is the best time to spread the word!

Conclusion:

It’s really challenging to manage remote teams effectively. But if you are having good project management tools like Orangescrum, then definitely you are well positioned to manage your remote teams effectively.

With the help of Orangescrum project & task collaboration tool, you can continue to follow meaningful processes, centralize team activities, and keep your teams and projects well aligned.

Keep your teams focused, delivery exceptional customer service and stay ahead of your competition with ease.

You’re just in time! Start Now!