Thinking about how to manage your remotely working team? Here are a few strategies and tips to ensure work efficiency from your employees working remotely.
To increase the efficiency of the employees in a company and maintaining their high performance is a timeless topic that needs continuous revisiting. The coronavirus pandemic meant work from home for many of us. A vast number of employees are now working remotely all around the world. It has now become really important to make the remote-work experience productive and engaging — for employees as well as for the organisations.
In this article, we aim to help you manage your team remotely in order to achieve maximum efficiency. Here are few strategies to help you manage a high-performing virtual team.
1. Establish right goals:
Establishing short-term and long-term goals – for both the individual and the company – is crucial. While you build your virtual team, it is important for you to understand that today’s workforce is more interested in constant learning and self-improvement than stability and longevity. Therefore, it becomes necessary to set the right goals in order to align the interests of your remote team with the larger goals of the company.
2. Foster your communication with the team:
Maintaining good lines of communication is the first and foremost key to manage remote teams. Just because your team is working remotely, it doesn’t mean you can’t collaborate with the team members to bring out the same creativity as you used to when you all were present in a conference room in the office.
I can totally understand that if you don’t have enough face-to-face communication, it can become difficult to sense the intent in the messages between you and your team members which can become an obvious challenge in managing remote employees. It’s harder to understand a message when it’s only text.
Therefore, instead of your prolonged conversation on slack, you can start your day with a video conference. Maintain a meeting rhythm. This can be especially effective for a larger team. If you manage a smaller group, individual check-ins on the phone or through Skype might work best. The important thing is that you communicate priorities right, keep projects on schedule, and keep ideas flowing. This will help you save misunderstandings and quickly help you and your team members move forward aligned.
For remote teams, it may take a little extra effort to create online communications. This may even feel artificial at first, but encouraging your employees to contact you and other team members regularly – and vice versa will surely help you gain more productivity.
3. Identify and provide right tools:
An important aspect of successfully managing remote employees is to make all necessary tools easily accessible to each and everyone in the team. Project management tools like Trello, Workzone, and Zoho Projects become essential when managing a team remotely. Make sure that everyone in the team is on board and make proper use of the resources provided by the company.
4. Be emphatic, organised and Trustful:
Since remote team management is all about collaboration and working side by side. In order to smoothen out team’s work, empathy is one of those soft skills that rewards in a greater sense. Call it empathy, emotional intelligence, or basic human decency, this basic effort can help you create and build a strong and long-lasting relationship with your employees or teammates. Empathy in 2020 is for-sure a must-have skill to manage employees working remotely.
When it comes to working with remote teams, the core idea is to maintain the consistency of work with flexible working hours. This requires proper organising of work. As a manager, anticipate potential problems and be proactive towards solving them.
One common method of managing teams, especially when it comes to remote teams, is by building trust. Managers need to trust their employees in order to engage and motivate them to work efficiently.
5. Create a culture of belonging:
A unified culture of belonging among the team members can ensure greater productivity of work. According to a study, culture, engagement, and employee retention are now the top talent challenges faced by business leaders. More than half of business leaders and managers rate this issue “urgent”.
Culture is the set of behaviours, values, artifacts, reward systems, and rituals that make up your organisation. Therefore, it is important to maintain a defined culture in your company or organisation as once the culture is established and communicated, it becomes a tool to screen and assist candidates.
6. Appreciate great performance:
Appreciation of work can be done with the help of positive feedbacks. Positive feedback is a great motivator and essential for building a team spirit. Make sure that you give your remote team members positive feedback regularly and encourage peers to celebrate successes, even online. As a manager, you should definitely create a habit of sharing praise with each of the team members, by making it quick, easy, and public.
Recognising the hard work or excellent output of remote team members is significant. In order to appreciate good and efficient work, make sure you send congratulatory emails you’re your employee hits a milestone. This process makes the employee feel appreciated and noticed. You can even appreciate employees by giving them increments, rewards, and gift cards.
This process not only increases the loyalty of the employee to you and to your business, but also helps keep everyone motivated, happy, and producing great work!