Understanding the people who you’re working with makes for positive and efficient collaboration. However, picking up important cues or “Reading the Mind in the Eyes,” as they call it, is impossible when you’re not in the same place. Using video chat for meetings is the first step, but it isn’t the whole solution. Company retreats how To manage a remote team and meet-ups are amazing, but they can be costly and are usually infrequent. Getting that face-to-face time with remote workers isn’t impossible, but you have to take concrete steps to cultivate it at your agency. Microsoft Project is a project management software used for both traditional and remote working models.

The giant Google offers free access to Google Docs, Google Sheets, and even Google Slides. Thus, all the employees concerned have access to the documents present on the cloud support in our case and can edit them in real time. Thinking creatively about how to communicate and celebrate your remote team’s successes will help you inspire their confidence and build their trust. The good news is that there are a plethora of highly effective tools to help you facilitate remote communication techniques. The first step is defining the needs of your team and selecting—and tailoring—the right tools to meet those needs. Check out our catalog of free exclusive trainings to learn all the ins and outs of your business.

These channels arose from one person having an interest and flourished into a crowd of people discussing TV series and more. Strong team bonds are all about people connecting with each other on a more personal level. It’s much easier to talk to colleagues when you have things in common. By teaming people with varying experiences, they can learn from each other. See it as cross-mentorship, except both team members offer different skills instead of one person having more knowledge in a particular area.

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We don’t subject our colleagues to productivity trackers or timers. While remote work requires each team member to manage their own projects, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t create a structure and process that everyone follows. We solve our challenges with different time zones by communicating asynchronously. When someone writes a message, we don’t expect others to reply right away. This means no one has to check their messages non-stop, allowing them to work uninterrupted. Knowing this, we need to plan tasks ahead of time, to make sure there’s enough time to complete tasks.

• It is up to you to decide which tools will best help you manage your remote team.
• To ensure that everyone is clear about how communication will happen within the remote team, consider creating a communication strategy.
• Whether your remote team struggles with too many meetings, or long boring meetings, or unstructured meetings, Geekbot helps make your meeting short, engaging, and to the point.
• For example, if your agency is constantly trying to acquire new clients, a goal might be one client proposal per week, two closed deals per month, and twenty per year.
• Managing remote teams includes creating time for your remote workers to connect and cooperate among themselves.

I don’t know about you, but I’m at my most clear-headed and efficient when I’m in an environment where I can share that focus with like-minded people. That’s a huge perk of being in an office… but now it has vanished. And some of these obstacles will separate simple team managers from true leaders. Organization and guidelines are more important than ever – but so is being supportive, understanding, and resilient. Reach out via your virtual communication channels to let your employees know how they’re doing, praise them for excellent work, and point out where they could make some adjustments. Read on below to learn everything you need to know about how to manage your team remotely.

Other Tools That Can Enhance Productivity In A Remote Team

But if you apply these simple tips and guidelines for managing a remote team, you’ll find the process will go a lot smoother than you expected. Check out these helpful strategies for becoming a successful remote manager. Of all the challenges that arise from switching your business to a work-from-home model, managing a remote team is one that tops the list. Team building and productivity management are much harder to do when you can’t see your employees face to face regularly.

To ensure that everyone is clear about how communication will happen within the remote team, consider creating a communication strategy. It’s also important to create structure within meetings themselves, to keep them efficient and to the point. An example is the EPIC structure, which stands for energy, purpose, insights, and connection.

Some of those face-to-face interactions that you’ll be missing include lunchroom breaks or after-hours drinking. When a developer changes his or her thinking regarding a specific task, they must actively update the requirements document to keep the rest of the team on the same page. For example, if you were working on building out an authentication feature, requirements might entail the different kinds of platforms a user can sign into your product with. A requirement doc can be something as simple as a Google doc that team members can access to gain information about what needs to be built. While sprint planning typically occurs at the beginning of the week, retrospectives are held at the end of the week.

Work on Team Bonding

Establishing clear communication guidelines creates a structure for this process and ensures all team members know how and when they can report and contribute. Learning how to manage a remote team shouldn’t be as difficult as it might seem. Remote employees’ performance affects your overall business growth. But don’t be too harsh when you identify problems and make corrections.

It offers collaboration across departments, 360-degree visibility, and enhanced automation features. With Wrike’s application, it is possible to manage professional services, marketing, project management, and IT. A lot of features and work tools can be integrated into the Trello workflow. Trello also has its own Power-Ups (add-ons) that can cater to the specific needs of the team. This is the best tool for setting up and customizing workflows in a jiffy.

Make sure your team uses project management tools that fit your team’s size and project types so you won’t be spending money on unused functionality of spawn unneeded complexity. Productivity-killing distractions plague remote and non-remote teams alike, but remote distractions are harder to deal https://globalcloudteam.com/ with as often there’s not much that managers can do. By reminding them of what you are attempting to achieve as a team, and what you stand for, you can inspire and support them. Additionally, set up supportive networks where staff can listen and talk about issues among their peers online.

Solution: Real-Time Time Tracking

By fostering a culture of trust, communication, and autonomy, remote teams can not only survive but thrive in today’s fast-paced, ever-changing business landscape. It’s an opportunity for leaders to step up and showcase their ability to adapt and lead in this new era of work. Don’t let your remote team fall behind, take action now to ensure they are equipped with the tools and strategies they need to succeed. Having a remote workforce means you need to invest even more time in strengthening your company’s culture, not less. A shared mission and sense of purpose tied directly to what your company is working toward is critical for your employees to feel invested in what they’re working on. Focusing your resources on building a strong company culture will help you retain the best talent, as well as set you up for hiring success going forward.

You can do this by getting input from your team about what policies should be included in your playbook. Make sure to revisit and regularly reevaluate what does and doesn’t work. Again, defining the WHY is always critical for emotionally connecting employees to the mission.

However, they show that the manager of remote employees needs to be clear about the challenges they may meet. They also show that when employees move to remote work, it cannot just be business as usual. Thus, managers of remote employees need to consider how they will use different forms of communication to replace the face-to-face interaction at the office.

Communication tools that your team uses define a lot how your teammates talk to each other the depth of their collaboration. For example, if you observe that people are not engaged during daily stand-up meetings, consider adding an icebreaker question at the beginning of every session. Analyze the number of meetings in the team’s calendar — are there too many, are there too few? Notice if some people are absent from discussions or have too many meetings on their plate. Reporting helps managers identify strengths and weaknesses in the model and feedback can inform any necessary adjustments. When working in a flexible environment, it is only natural that they will select the schedule that suits how they work best.

Being truly collaborative in this way strengthens engagement between yourself and the employees. Strong and intentional goals have a substantial impact on growing businesses. It offers channels to categorize different work-related content, a feed, and instant messaging.

Stay Connected with Passionate Team Members All Over the Globe

This is the place where we surface important conversations that might get lost in the fast-paced Slack. It replaces internal email and acts as a great archive for anyone on the team to reference old discussions and keep up with company updates. Slack is where we talk about work, while Async is where we share work with the rest of the team. In August of 2012, Mike moved back to Missouri while his girlfriend was graduating law school, and in October of 2012, we started hiring. And since we were already a distributed team, it made sense to keep moving that way since we could hire people we knew were awesome but just didn’t live in the places we lived.

Ensuring that every team member has access to the appropriate communications platforms and knows how to use them is the most important step you’ll need to take. Our team members are challenged to make a genuine impact and play an integral role in driving the business forward. We embrace a dynamic culture that always puts the consumer first, and where ownership, accountability and agility are celebrated at every level. She also says that “knowledge exchanges” which would normally happen in the office need to be considered for remote workers.

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Unless teams are providing customer support, the hours they choose to work don’t need to be fixed, as long as they are completing their contracted quota. Set Key Performance Indicators for staff so they know what is expected from them and fix milestones in place for largescale projects. Now you can identify the best-suited members of your team for each task and delegate the workload. Use project management and task management software to ensure everyone has an overview and understanding of all ongoing work and expected deadlines. I feel that in the future, remote work will become increasingly common.

To learn about our similarities and differences, every new colleague has to do a short presentation about themselves during their first workation. These presentations, called Pecha Kuchas, give us a sense of people’s culture, personality and interests. Our tailored hiring process allows us to find the best people. Applicants are able to share their “Why”, display their skills and express their personality in a natural way.

This provides a chance for social interactions, team-building, and bigger outcomes. Ultimately, good communication is key to creating a strong foundation for a positive remote work experience. Keep in close contact with your team and encourage open and honest 360 feedback year-round, not just during annual performance reviews.

Managing Remote Teams

But each one of them is different and more suited for certain types of projects than the other. Icebreaker questions are typically designed to help team members to learn more about each other in the workplace to improve the trust and depth of their communication. But their main advantage is that these questions don’t take much time to answer and can be injected into other meetings. Before the meeting starts, Geekbot automatically sends a list of questions that employees can quickly answer directly in Slack and MS Teams.

It’s easy to disconnect when employees work in different locations. There should be a clear timetable for meetings, and employees should know what different people are doing so that they have an idea of where they fit in the process. For how to do this, check out tips for effectively onboarding remote employees. Even though it may be exciting in the beginning, over time remote workers may start to feel isolated and lonely. If the manager has not devised methods on how to deal with this, it could become debilitating.