To understand the value of remote team management, we have to go to the root of personal relations. We all have that one cousin whom we haven’t talked to in months or years. It’s not that we don’t like them, we just lost the connection in the middle and couldn’t manage time to get in touch. Despite the long break between phone calls or family reunions, our understanding will remain intact with that person.
Things are quite different in the case of remote work, where everyone’s living at a distance. The immense value of remote team management can only be understood when you get to realize that remote employees take a few days to drift apart, not months or a year. This is more important in recent times because 40 percent of organizations offered full-time telecommunications in 2019 – a giant leap from just 5 percent in 2018.
It doesn’t matter if your organization has ten or ten thousand remote employees, learning effective management tricks and preventing disengagement is equally necessary.
If you want to attract the best candidates from across the globe and retain good people inside your team, implement and maintain the remote team management practices below and prove that your organization is a great place to work.
Use Remote Employee Monitoring Software
As an employer, you need to know your remote employees’ work progress on the go. You can’t meet them in person, but remote employee monitoring software can reduce that gap. It solves many issues involving remote employee monitoring, such as:
- It lets you know if the employees are working properly.
- It lets you find proactive and self-proven workers.
- It builds trust from both sides of the organizational structure.
- Its remote check-in system makes work attendance time visible.
- You can ensure the official data handling is done by actual employees with its face recognition system.
- You can see the time an individual worker spends in a day or week with this software.
Overall, the software helps to decide which employees are productive at work.
Help to Build Personal Connections
If you can build positive relationships, it will work as a key element for establishing high employee engagement. In research done by Gallup, 63 percent of women agreed that they had a best friend at work and it made them more engaged to work. According to Gallup:
- When employees spend more of their waking hours at remote work, they do want to build a connection with team members.
- Remote employees want to feel like a worthy part of the team – the trust and support of coworkers helps to foster that feeling.
- The work might be enjoyable to workers, but they probably don’t feel fully energized or motivated to put their whole effort into their jobs.
To solve these issues, put in time and effort to foster relationships among remote employees. Create opportunities for casual interactions between colleagues and take the initiative to maintain those kinds of relationships.
Deploy Employee an Engagement App
Employees need motivation when they work from home for a long time. As an employer, you need to keep them encouraged so that they don’t feel alone and isolated at home. With an employee engagement app, this responsibility becomes easier. It has benefits that will allow your employees to be productive.
- It helps to keep employees motivated at home.
- It encourages workers to go through tough times and beyond.
- It helps to achieve health goals by providing challenges.
- As an employer, you can also motivate the team to stay healthy with this app.
- It can help you to keep them engaged to work and increase their productivity.
Establish Team Collaboration
Employees need to feel a professional connection with the organization despite working from home. Collaborative work with the team can help.
- Collaboration can happen in scheduled meetings or formal brainstorming sessions, but most will come from organic, casual conversations outside of formal meetings.
- Informal communication is directly linked to increased productivity within the group. As an employer, you need to make this sort of communication easier for the team.
- The effort to collaborate and communicate will prevent decisions or projects from moving forward without consultation with others, which is necessary to avoid incomplete, or poorly done, projects.
Prioritize Video and Phone Calls
- Make it mandatory to use a camera during team meetings and one on one meetings to foster closeness.
- Also, give priority to video calls rather than emails and messages whenever possible. Video calls are faster in communicating ideas and tone as well as reducing the possibility of missed content.
Ask Employees to be Responsive and Available
Lag in communication can result in distance between coworkers and can impact workflow. For example:
- If a worker lives hours away and doesn’t respond for several hours, the sender may feel uneasy and wish they were working in the same room.
- Getting responses immediately will make employees feel like they are all in the same room and working side by side at the same pace. So influence your team members to be responsive during office time.
Keep Remote Team Members Involved
Involve your team members in important decisions and actions, so that they feel like an important part of the family.
- Manage projects in a way that allows your remote employees to be easily involved. It helps prevent the feeling of missing out.
- Make an effort to initiate and encourage conversations with team members. This helps in creating team mental focus.
Strategies for Remote Team Management
Also, try these additional strategies as a part of strong remote team management:
- Allow team members to own or lead collaborative projects from time to time.
- Give importance to phone calls for emergency responses.
- Train your remote team members on giving recognition to everyone, both inside and outside the organization.
- Have executives hold Q&A sessions just for the remote team.
- Establish a remote work policy even before starting a remote team.
- Check on the team frequently and regularly.
Remote work is becoming more common and your organization can’t afford to wait for the right time – you have to take steps and make today the right time. Remote employee monitoring software is an important part of this process. Ensure great remote employee success with this tool and the other tactics discussed above. The results will surprise you!
