21 Ways To Be A Successful Remote Manager

More importantly, managers constantly ask for feedback so channels are a two-way street. Provides managers of remote employees key insights to compare teams and understand where and how they can increase productivity. Provide managers of remote teams with the insights to guide their team members to success. Engage everyone, everywhere in continuous productivity improvement.

Effective remote team management demands that you over-communicate. Whether it’s about a new project, ways of working, something that’s gone wrong, or a job well done—communicate regularly with your team and encourage your https://globalcloudteam.com/ managers to do the same. As long as they’re performing, then don’t worry about how they manage their day-to-day workload. The top three challenges of remote management are isolation, expectation-setting, and burnout.

Instead, the best managers helped their teammates prioritize their todos and left their DMs open in case they needed help. Send a survey around your team to see how everyone feels about the possibility of working remotely. Is there an overwhelming majority who are in favor of it? Listening to your employees and giving them a more flexible way of working will benefit them and your business in the long run.

Now that you know how to effectively manage a remote team in your business, it’s over to you. As a business owner, effective remote working centers on setting and managing expectations. As our team grew, even before going remote with our team and internal communication, we started to understand through many small mishaps that this is not how things work.

As I’ve mentioned, regular team meetings with a clear agenda are essential, as are one-to-ones between employees and managers. But it’s equally important to facilitate your team bonding in a non-work-related way. Managing a virtual team is very different from managing a team in a fixed office environment.

How To Protect Your Remote Team From Burnout

Face-to-face contact leads to random conversations and catch-ups between employees and helps foster relationships on a deeper level, which is beneficial for everyone’s wellbeing. Schedule enough one-to-one catch-ups where feedback is a two-way street, ensure expectations are communicated clearly, and that everyone is aware of important deadlines and goals. Some will have a private space to work; others will be sharing the kitchen table, while others will be overstaying their welcome at Starbucks. My point is, if you never really know what your team is dealing with or going through at any given time, there will inevitably be a misalignment when it comes to expectations.

It’s actually easy to use, it doesn’t require all the data input you’re used to in CRMs, and it helps you to do a better job with your customers as well. In the past, I’ve been working in different roles, within corporates, an agency and some startup projects. View key insights across people, process and technology to help your organization increase productivity, reduce risk, optimize work, and ensure healthy work habits.

With the fundamental principles of transparency, collaboration and informed insight. We’ve developed a powerful platform that focuses on the collection of contextual data, avoiding invasive employee monitoring technologies like keystroke logging and continuous screenshots. A year into forced work-from-home, it’s up to remote managers to maintain company culture and the key relationships between teammates for long-term remote success. These 21 tips cover only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to supporting your remote team. Tends to be built for in-office teams and adapted to try to accommodate remote or hybrid employees – often giving an incomplete picture. ActivTrak provides the data and visibility you need with contextual and actionable productivity insights, to ensure equality in performance management of your workforce.

There’s a jungle of documentation tools in the company tech stack. Without clear organization and channels, sifting through resources can leave more questions than answers. Experienced remote teams know writing is a superpower and have set rules for how they share Managing a Remote Team information. Though a few remote teams may debate the logistics of what makes for the best communication cadence, most emphasized the need to over-communicate. A principle of over-communication eliminates assumptions and allows intentions to be clear as possible.

Be clear on which form of communication is appropriate at what time. For example, an instant message might be appropriate if something is urgent, whereas a team meeting might be more suitable if it’s relevant to the whole team. These are all important to consider if you hope to manage an effective remote working team. Turnover decreases – because remote work tends to improve job satisfaction, this means your employees are likely to stay with you longer, which can save you between $10,000 to $30,000 per employee. Productivity goes up – less time wasted on commuting and navigating office politics, which generally makes employees feel happier and more productive.

No Matter Your Needs, Activtrak Fits Your Stack

As best you can, encourage teammates to take time away from work and break the cycle of burnout before it gets worse. Across our data, managers brought up that the biggest factors affecting team moods were often completely out of anyone’s control. Some teammates lost family members, others felt isolated on their teams. When it comes to understanding burnout, it’s crucial to get context for your support.

Understand work durations and trends for both remote and in-office employees. Just as teammates have preferences for feedback or learning, they also have different reactions to stress. Knowing whether to give space, lend an ear, or take action often starts with asking the person.

How do you manage a team remotely

As much fun and exciting as it is, I kept it for last here, because the platforms are just enablers for what you’re trying to achieve. Like I said at the start, we used to believe that sitting in the same room would naturally make communication flow. At the 30 minute mark, we give a first reminder to start wrapping up. This means that we write out the announcements of the meeting and plan the next meeting if it is necessary.

Become Burnout Literate

If you don’t yet have a support team, then think about what steps you’ll need to take if an employee cannot complete their daily tasks due to tech issues. On top of that, Global Workplace Analytics states that surveys show a whopping 80% of employees want the opportunity to work from home at least some of the time. This is what we’re doing currently, but we keep working on how we attack meetings to make sure that we spend our time with maximum efficiency. Our ability to create a lot of value in these meetings in little time is what makes us competitive towards bigger players with more resources, so it’s extremely important to us.

  • This solution was incredibly popular among the remote managers we interviewed.
  • These 21 tips cover only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to supporting your remote team.
  • Positive encouragement can make the difference between a disengaged team and an invested one.
  • This is particularly important when it comes to difficult, sensitive conversations.
  • Analyze hours of peak productivity to understand when remote teams are most focused and productive.
  • Their work has been featured by Fortune, Yahoo, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur, Harvard Business School, Forbes, and more.

Make sure there’s also a clear structure and time slot for every meeting to avoid wasting anyone’s time . In an office environment, productivity usually hinges on structures and routines. When you take an employee out of this environment, it’s easy to become disconnected and lose focus. You design your ways of working before you roll it out and ensure you and everyone on your team is clear about how you’ll successfully work together remotely.

What Are The Five Stages Of Workplace Burnout?

It’s only after we were forced into a remote setting that we understood how dysfunctional our communication had been by relying on these assumptions. Immediately see user and team productivity and availability status via an at-a-glance dashboard. Establish remote policies, measure their effectiveness, and make changes for on-going improvement.

This is important regardless of whether you’re working in an office or remotely. Positive encouragement can make the difference between a disengaged team and an invested one. If you already have an in-house IT team who deal with all technical problems, you’ll need to make sure they have new instructions on approaching technical challenges once everyone is out of the office.

How do you manage a team remotely

Extending meetings beyond this point hurts the attention levels and stops being productive. I’ll go into how we work together remotely at Salesflare, with a special focus on how to communicate internally to make everything run like clockwork. Easily integrate ActivTrak productivity data with your other software applications to get the deeper insights you need to boost productivity and efficiency in the workplace. Guidance and resources you need to create a culture that empowers employees to achieve big goals. Leverage data insights to understand remote employee collaboration habits and positive engagement. Leverage data insights to adjust remote employee work schedules to optimize productivity.

Encourage Time Off

A quick at-a-glance summary of workforce performance and productivity trends. Everything you need to start your analysis of workforce productivity and operational efficiency. Enables you to discover behaviors of all employees – remote or onsite – that could introduce compliance risk. Managers of distributed employees need insights to compare teams when it comes to increasing productivity. A remote/hybrid workforce introduces different work patterns and systems usage.

Make Your Internal Communication Run Like Clockwork

One of the main reasons business owners are apprehensive about shifting to a remote work setup is that it requires them to release a certain amount of control over their employees. Each member of your team has a different home dynamic, and with this comes a unique set of challenges. To make sure we keep sharpening the saw, learn from our mistakes, and improve our processes (like everything we’re discussing here) we organize team meetings every 2 weeks on Friday afternoon.

Workload Management

ActivTrak enables you to discover behaviors of all employees – remote, hybrid, or onsite – that could introduce compliance risk. Remote onboarding can be a daunting task, especially when you never meet face-to-face. Effective managers always took the opportunity to lay out the virtual welcome mat and emphasize community. They paired new teammates with buddies, outlined everyone’s work-with-me guides, and ensured documentation was clear and concise.

And make sure there’s regular training in place to upskill your team as and when they need it. You create a different set of structures and a new team rhythm. I’m Co-Founder of Salesflare, the simply powerful CRM for small businesses. I love growth, automating sales, and building beautiful products.

Remote workforce management is a method of employee monitoring that allows a business to manage remote employees and teams. Remote workforce management is a unique form of employee monitoring as it helps to handle the exclusive needs of remote employees. By collecting and analyzing remote worker user activity and using those insights to determine if your employees and teams are meeting critical productivity goals. This visibility is key to understanding the success or failures of your remote teams.

Quarantine has lasted longer than anyone could’ve expected. Burnout is at an all-time high as teammates face extreme social, economic, and political unrest on top of their daily todos. With emotional resilience, managers can support their teammates and become a safe harbor during these unprecedented times. You can’t see if teammates are working across the room or scrolling on LinkedIn. Even with a baseline of trust, it can be tempting to re-emphasize expectations just in case.

I help business owners eliminate the barriers to growth and take their company to the next level. When hiring new remote employees, traditional resumes and cover letters are unhelpful. What’s more important is that you figure out which qualities are most important for your business and find a way to let candidates show you if they align with your mission. As a business owner, you have to trust your team to do their jobs without constant supervision. Otherwise, you will never be able to focus on your own tasks and responsibilities. How often do you want your employees to check in with their manager?