The U.S. workforce was comprised 25% of workers working remotely from home prior to the pandemic. It is a wise to consider the advice, tips and strategies and best methods of managers leading teams of remote workers before the pandemic happened.

It would make sense to set down company policies and training for remote-work employees, but when problems arise, and circumstances change this may not be feasible. On a positive note, with the advent of modern management knowledge and techniques there are known actions company managers and supervisors can do, minus little to no trouble to enhance the daily actions and output of employees working remotely. The time to make these management actions to improve and maintain remote-work employee daily productivity is today.    

Widespread Task Productivity Issues

To begin, supervisors must know the issues that remote work makes particularly challenging and difficult. If these issues are not considered, top workers might start lagging in work performance and job commitment as remote work starts and then continues for the foreseeable future. This is particularly true if there is no planning or hands on preparation.     

These factors being the case a great proportion of committed companies are comprised of workers that are ongoing blatant or subtle uncommitted workers. Now take it one more step and consider employees with laisse faire attitudes becoming remote workers and think about how it will negatively affect their daily work habits, output, and commitment to the company’s goals.

Negative issues built into remote work are as follows:

• No direct in person manager observation
• Reduction of sources of important company data, information, and news  
• Working alone equals lack of socialization
• Negative impact of working at home and its inherent distractions

Steps Manager Can Follow to Improve Management of Remote Worker Teams

Despite the ongoing pitfalls and problems associated with remote work, there are steps manager can take that do not cost much to improve the change-over for employees working at home.

As much as remote work can be fraught with challenges, there are also relatively quick and inexpensive things that managers can do to ease the transition. 

Supervisors and managers of employees remote working at home should follow these steps:

Hone on End Results, Not on Tasks

By honing on results, it will grow employee commitment and give them the power they need to do their best. By spelling out desired outcomes and then giving employees the leeway to determine an action plan to make them happen it will grow their inventiveness and commitment to the end results.   

Spell Out the Reasons for the End Results

This connects the heretofore described steps. Spelling out the reason is paramount for cognitively tying employees to the company’s agreed end results. However with the current upheaval occurring in the pandemic, with new work places, new goals, new issues and large levels of difficulties and unusual new circumstances, making certain your entire team is full informed about the company’s desired end results and what each persons roll is in making a success happen is the foundation of building a successful remote work team.

Supply the Tools Needed for Success

In history there has never been a successful leader in war that sent their soldiers into battle minus the needed tools, training, and supplies. Remote workers need good desktop computers, big screen monitors, laptops and premium WiFi, headsets and high-quality web cameras. For your remote team workers to be successful they need to be equipped right.

Take Away Roadblocks

It is critical for you to know their will be roadblocks employees encounter work remote working. Things like being alone, kids at home home-schooling, neighbors coming over, family communicating with your staff more often because they are at work and not at home are all roadblocks that will have a negative impact on their productivity. Your job is to determine what those roadblocks are and help your employee figure out ways to prevent them from occurring or help them manage them when they do.
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Promote connecting socially when working remotely

Communicate to your remote staff that you are requiring that they set up regularly scheduled fun events everyone can join. Those events can be video conferencing happy hours, pizza party or an after 4 p.m. Friday happy hour. These activities can be games or any number of fun things to do. These should not happen all the time, like weekly, but definitely need to happen at least once monthly.  

Be Open to Offering Work Schedule Adaptability

Remote workers all have different lives. Keep this in mind when their work setting to work remotely is not ideal. They may have children or parents at home. Their internet connection might be at the local coffeehouse. As a remote team manager adapt with your employees and their unique situation and you will be rewarded with commitment on their part.

Show Understanding

Particularly in the framework of the sudden change to remote work it is critical for managers to communicate to your employees that you recognize their worries and struggles and support them as they make the transition. Studies have shown that employees lean on their manager for direction on how to manage and deal with a big change or an overly difficult new set work setting.  Be supportive and you will realize better results in the end.

Be a Mentor and Coach to Realize Success

Managing is a lost art form and that is because the best managers coach and mentor and give employees the freedom to figure things out, be successful an grow in the process.

The steps described here are straight forward but not a piece of cake. They mandate time on your part, direct focus and sticking with each of them. Your remote work team will appreciate your efforts, they will enjoy their jobs and be more effective because you took the time communicate with them and stick with them through these difficult times   

The U.S. workforce was comprised 25% of workers working remotely from home prior to the pandemic. It is a wise to consider the advice, tips and strategies and best methods of managers leading teams of remote workers before the pandemic happened.

It would make sense to set down company policies and training for remote-work employees, but when problems arise, and circumstances change this may not be feasible. On a positive note, with the advent of modern management knowledge and techniques there are known actions company managers and supervisors can do, minus little to no trouble to enhance the daily actions and output of employees working remotely. The time to make these management actions to improve and maintain remote-work employee daily productivity is today.    

Widespread Task Productivity Issues

To begin, supervisors must know the issues that remote work makes particularly challenging and difficult. If these issues are not considered, top workers might start lagging in work performance and job commitment as remote work starts and then continues for the foreseeable future. This is particularly true if there is no planning or hands on preparation.     

These factors being the case a great proportion of committed companies are comprised of workers that are ongoing blatant or subtle uncommitted workers. Now take it one more step and consider employees with laisse faire attitudes becoming remote workers and think about how it will negatively affect their daily work habits, output, and commitment to the company’s goals.

Negative issues built into remote work are as follows:

• No direct in person manager observation
• Reduction of sources of important company data, information, and news  
• Working alone equals lack of socialization
• Negative impact of working at home and its inherent distractions

Steps Manager Can Follow to Improve Management of Remote Worker Teams

Despite the ongoing pitfalls and problems associated with remote work, there are steps manager can take that do not cost much to improve the change-over for employees working at home.

As much as remote work can be fraught with challenges, there are also relatively quick and inexpensive things that managers can do to ease the transition. 

Supervisors and managers of employees remote working at home should follow these steps:

Set up company calendar with a short daily meeting

Holding a meeting every day may come across as overzealous, but for both managers and remote workers for success to happen, these meetings must happen daily. These meetings establish and maintain a connection that cannot be replicated via text, phone, or email.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

On top of a quick daily meeting, communicating extensively all the time is a must about team daily tasks and duties, accountabilities, and company goals. When working in an office communicating can be difficult, but when remote working, it can be impossible, if it is not built into a managers and employees daily interactive routine  

Make the Most of 2020’s High-Tech Tools

Since the pandemic arrived in 2020, it has pushed most businesses to use today’s high-tech tools within days or weeks because of our circumstances now. On-line meetings are held daily using Google Meetings, Zoom, and Microsoft teams. Daily meetings and communicating all the time are breeze using theses tools.

Create Meeting Rules

Meeting rules are important because efficient effective use of time is critical if meetings and communication is going to be part of everyone’s daily routine. Remote work will be enhanced and gratifying when managers create meeting rules with respect to time, date, and meeting agenda. IM can be employed when communication must happen immediately, and daily meetings can be done using video conferencing when doing your short daily meeting. Share meeting info and even IM content when and where warranted.

Communicate Information and Belief in Outcomes

This is more important now than ever due to the current climate. Keep in mind company’s have had to change more now than ever. That means keeping everyone informed and getting commitment from staff about commitment by them on agreed goals and outcomes.

The steps described here are straight forward but not a piece of cake. They mandate time on your part, direct focus and sticking with each of them. Your remote work team will appreciate your efforts, they will enjoy their jobs and be more effective because you took the time communicate with them and stick with them through these difficult times   

Manage Your Work

Managing your business through strong well thought out organization will help it grow. Businesses that are unorganized are scattered, struggle to get tasks accomplished and quite often ultimately fail. Overseeing a team people working remotely around the planet and not knowing what project or task each person is working on while trying to complete several projects at the same time can turn into a disaster for the team, its projects and its weekly task are not organized and manage well. For a business to succeed it must develop businesses processes and then institute them through an online project management tool such as Monday.com. With the proper implementation of a set of business processes and a project management tool like Monday.com your company will complete its projects on time and be successful.

To begin, put together the company’s data and the develop specific categories for it. Be sure to make the process open and include the company’s team members. The age-old adage, two heads are better than, is so true. Decide how your company will communicate across the entire spectrum of company tasks, its team members, its proposals and current projects. Email immediately when an urgent subject or project comes up. Implement a 24/7 company chat room that team members can use if something critical happens.

When new projects are brought on board to the company, communicate with the team members that will work on project through the company’s project management tool. Implement the team collaboration and sharing tools in your project management software so you are can view what each team member is working on, where they are at with their assigned tasks and what needs to be completed to finish the job.  

Implement Time Tracking

Include a time-track tool into the workflow of your business. It is an excellent method to maintain employees focus, look at their ongoing job performance, create specific attainable goals and build up team daily, weekly, monthly and annual success.

Announce your company’s new time-tracking tool to the entire team and inform them about how the tool will be a huge asset for them with respect to work productivity and project completion. Be certain they know exactly how to use the tool to assist them with time management, productivity and success.

Time-tracking software tools will assist your team to be aware of exactly how much time it takes to complete tasks, which will enhance focus and overcome getting side-tracked. Time-tracking tools end the hassle of correct payroll computation. Once you institute time-tracking software into your company, you will always pay payroll exactly because your new system tracks and records every minute team members spend working.   

The primary upside component of time-tracking tools for remote teams is each team member is in control of their time because they know exactly how much time they worked and what they accomplished. This fact gives them ability to identify the work activity that is no productive and see where they need to improve and then have the data need to make the correct the deficiency.

Strive to Build a Positive Company Culture

Finally, the goal you need strive towards achieving is to build a positive company culture, factoring in the accolades each team member deserves to learn about because they do produce amazing results while working remotely. Building your company’s positive company culture can be accomplished by building relationships through online meetings, striving to accomplish company goals, honoring each team members contributions and time and finally, acknowledging each team members skill sets and gifts.

Summing Up Remote Team Management

Remote team management is not easy: developing quality workflow process, reviewing team members ongoing work task status and tracking project completion is harder to do remotely than it is if everyone worked in an office. Know that once you institute a work process with built in rules, reporting and time-tracking for your remote team you will be able to accomplish what might otherwise be impossible to do. Organizing your company by setting it up logically with a user-friendly system will help you build a team of dedicated, focused and results-oriented employees that will assist to make your company’s goals a reality.   

The advent of business owners, companies and corporations turning into thriving businesses using the digital world known as the internet created a demand for teams of virtual employees and contractors that work remotely. Locating employees that work remotely and hiring them is part of the requirements needed to fill this new demand and the second part of the requirements are figure out how to manage them remotely as well.

What does a company need to do to manage a team of workers that work remotely from home and do it well? What needs to happen communication wise to make certain all assigned tasks are understood, to make sure job responsibilities are spelled out and known and be sure that work that’s been assigned is being completed, instead of working on other client’s work and not working on your company’s assignments at all. What needs to be done to drive a remote team to do excellent work and be committed to completing tasks on time. How can communication be factored into a regular routine with remote team members, so they become engaged and connected to the company and its managers.

Here are a set of strategies to assist you in locating the resolutions to this set of needs and how to become good and improve at overseeing a remote team from any place on the planet on a regular basis. The strategies are as follows:

Promote Openness

Building a team, then leading it and managing it well requires team members and their manager absolutely need to work just as hard and communicate freely. Remote teams need a manager that is completely real with them. Teams work more effectively when a manager is available and communicates freely. Managers that are open and promote frankness, idea sharing and opinion sharing regarding current jobs, upcoming projects and pending proposal are more effective, productive, and successful. Team members work harder and feel committed to their work when they know their free to express their opinions and ideas about work and upcoming projects.

Be open. Act on being open by directly involving team members in each component of the company where it makes sense. Communicate with your team about the company’s goals, its mission, its current projects and its short- and long-term plans. From there, set down what your expectations are going forward and be sure to share some aspects about you and promote talking about subjects other than just work.  

When you have a remote team it’s easy to hold a meeting remotely through Google Hangouts or Go To Meeting applications.

Conduct Meetings Regularly

Remote teams are challenged with holding meetings because team members and their manager often work at different hours in different time zones around the world. Don’t let that stop you from conducting regular meetings. Set a time for your meetings that makes sense, then stick to it.

The best way to find out what type of folks are on your team is to conduct meetings at a minimum one time a week. Be sure to make the meeting upbeat, welcoming and open to create and atmosphere where all attendees can talk freely and feel comfortable doing it. Look at as if you’re team is meeting for coffee and make it feel that way.

The pluses of a virtual meeting are many. The upside of virtual meetings is that remote team members can be on the road, sitting at their home office or at a shared office space and still meet easily. The primary goal here is to have your virtual team log-in to its regular weekly virtual meeting program and then enjoy the meeting while catching up and communicating with each other and about what’s going on with the company and its projects.

By way of conducting regular meetings your team will create a camaraderie it didn’t have before, which will help create the bond your team needs to connect and in turn it will help the company be more successful.