Managing Remote Teams: Challenges and Best Practices
Managing people in-person is difficult enough, but managing remote teams brings a whole new set of challenges. Use this guide to help you overcome them and get the best out of your remote team members.
Table of Contents
- Challenges of Managing Remote Teams
- Tips for Managing Remote Teams
Remote and hybrid working are here to stay. But managing teams is tough, and managing remote teams is even more challenging!
To help you adjust to the new normal, we’ve put together some best practices for successfully managing remote teams.
As a remote-first company since the pandemic, we draw from our personal experiences as well as those of our community and from wider research.
We’ll take you through the challenges you’ll likely face and then provide tips for overcoming them.
The Challenges of Managing Remote Teams
As companies hire remote workers, managers are left wondering how they’re supposed to lead people they rarely see in person.
To understand the best practices in this article, let’s start by looking at some of the key challenges of managing remote teams.
Communication
Managing a dispersed team poses a number of communication challenges such as coordinating meetings around time zones, misunderstandings due to lack of face-to-face interactions, and too much “notification” or message noise.
Team Cohesion and Morale
When your team is remote and your work is frequently asynchronous, it’s easy to neglect to put the time in to make your team feel like a team. It’s critical to create opportunities for everyone to get together and feel connected as people, not just colleagues. Providing your team with a sense of accomplishment and success for the work they’re doing—and how it’s tied to the greater mission of your organization—is essential.
Resource Management and Setting Boundaries
When you’re working with a remote team, it can be tougher to manage workloads and allocate tasks efficiently. You want to foster an environment of productivity that rewards strong performance, but you also want to be careful not to overburden individuals with too much or set unrealistic expectations and deadlines.
Isolation and Disconnection
Over time, remote workers may start to feel isolated and disconnected. If the manager does not recognize this and devise methods to deal with it, it could become debilitating. A study published by the Harvard Business Review concluded that “remote workers can feel shunned and left out.” If not appropriately managed, isolation and loneliness could become the basis for physiological and physical health challenges.
Lack of Trust
The fact that employees are part of your team means that you trust them. If there are employees that you don’t trust, then it may mean that your hiring process needs to be improved. Treating employees who work remotely as if all they want is to earn money for doing nothing—i.e. micromanaging—will have a negative impact on collaboration and engagement.
Burnout
When people head into the office daily, it creates clear boundaries between work life and home life. With remote working, this boundary is removed, so many people end up working longer hours, which can eventually lead to burnout or diminished productivity.
Tips for Managing Remote Teams
With the above challenges in mind, here are our tips for effectively managing remote teams.
1. Determine Your Responsibilities
As a manager, before you can hope to determine what is expected of others within a changing environment, you will need to start by looking at what is expected of you. You need to get a firm grip on your role in applying company policies and processes fairly and consistently.
2. Create Structures
Productivity in any workplace depends on predictability and structures, and it’s easy to disconnect when people work in different locations. Mitigate this by creating team rhythm. 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.
When creating this rhythm for remote employees working in different time zones, ensure that the burden of inconvenience does not fall on one member. Rotate meeting times so that the inconvenience of having a meeting either too late or too early in the day doesn’t fall on one employee. It’s also important to create structure within meetings themselves, to keep them efficient and to the point. An example is the EPIC structure: energy, purpose, insights, and connection. This keeps team members focused and purpose-driven to assist with productivity during meetings.
3. Continuously Hone Your Communication Channels
Communication is something that you’re always working to get better at as a manager. Some simple ways to improve this with your remote teams are to ensure you have regular 1:1 meetings set up with direct reports and make it clear that you’re available for ad hoc discussions if necessary.
It’s easy for priorities and messages to get jumbled when you’re typically communicating via tools like Slack, so a weekly kickoff meeting can help you to align your team on priorities for the week, provide status updates on ongoing projects, ensure clarity around new initiatives, and share pertinent or timely housekeeping information.
You can also provide weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly summaries that cover your big goal, your priorities, challenges to overcome, accomplishments, roadblocks, and things you’ve learned together. Also, when using a tool like Slack, make sure there are enough channels to house dedicated discussions without disturbing too many others, but not so many that important information gets easily lost in the noise.
Try and document processes as much as possible to help ensure that everyone is clear about how communication will happen within the remote team.
4. Check-In Often
When you’re co-located, it’s easier to see if an employee is overloaded. For example, you may notice that someone isn’t taking their lunch or is leaving late every day. You don’t always have this insight with remote workers. If proper care is not taken, people may end up getting overloaded.
Therefore, it’s important to regularly check in with your reports individually to see how they’re faring with their workloads. Ensure they feel comfortable being honest if they’re feeling overwhelmed, and be on the lookout for any additional resources that will make it easier for them to complete their work more efficiently.
You may discover common themes, or that there’s a particular task that may be best suited to delegate to another team member or even outsource. Perhaps there are particular tasks that are taking much longer than you thought to complete, and thus your capacity expectations are out of whack. These things are easy to overlook in a remote environment.
It’s also good practice to ask your team to be clear about what their typical working hours are and to provide updates or set away messages as needed when they’re going to be unavailable or away from their work. You don’t want them to feel like they’re being “monitored.” Instead, you want to reinforce the importance of driving impact and delivering performance over clocking in and out of their standard workday. This provides them with a level of autonomy and independence that’s really powerful and motivating.
5. Create Well-Documented Procedures
One of the things that your remote team members will not be able to do with ease is to walk over to another team member’s desk, or around your office, and ask how they should do something. Therefore, it pays dividends to ensure that there are well-documented procedures in place for nearly everything.
Let your team members be responsible for creating the standard operating procedures (SOPs) for their roles and continuously update these SOPs as things change.
6. Be Open to Feedback and Input
There’s no dispute that you have to establish procedures and expectations for your remote team members. But each individual circumstance is different, and they’re the ones who know how they work best and get the job done. As such, it makes sense to get their input into how to go about creating this way of working.
An example of an area where you may want to involve employees is the method of communication they’d prefer, or to set core hours for working and collaborating. Creating a psychologically safe environment where your team feels comfortable and encouraged to share their ideas and questions is crucial.
7. Be Flexible
One of the great things that people like about working remotely is the flexibility that this affords them. For instance, someone may want to pick up their kid from school and then work an extra hour or two in the evening. This calls on you, the manager, to be flexible.
At People Managing People, we don’t care where work is done, as long as it meets our standards and customers and other team members are not being inconvenienced by lack of action.
8. Set Reasonable Expectations Around Working Hours
While you want your team members to work hard and care about their performance, you don’t want to risk burnout by expecting them to be “always on.” Set expectations that after-hours emails or messages are not expected to be responded to until the following workday (unless in urgent edge cases), and practice what you preach! Teaching this by example is important.
Setting clear boundaries between work life and non-work life in the world of remote work is tremendously important, and will help keep team members happier and more productive when they are working.
9. Determine Outputs, Forget About Activity
In the traditional work setting, as long as someone has clocked in, is sitting at their desk, and leaves at the agreed time, they usually consider themselves to have done a full day’s work. However, in the context of remote work, the workplace and the home are no longer easy to separate. Thus, it is essential to focus on what is delivered, instead of the amount of time an individual spends sitting at a desk.
10. Include Everyone
Even when you deal with team members in the same location, some individuals naturally end up taking a back seat. If you’re not careful in remote teams, such individuals may disappear altogether. Thus, make an effort to get each team member to present regularly. This doesn’t always have to be work-related; it could be something as simple as asking everyone to say what the best thing that happened to them was since the previous meeting.
11.
Do Your Part to Reduce Their Isolation
Remote work can become a lonely affair for many people, especially if they are not used to it. If you’re managing a remote team, you can take steps to ensure that team members don’t end up feeling lonely.
One of the ways to prevent loneliness is to set some time aside at the beginning or end of meetings to allow team members to talk about things other than work. For instance, you can start the meeting by asking people what they did the previous weekend. Alternatively, set up virtual coffee breaks or schedule team-building activities to ensure that people don’t just focus on work-related issues. These interactions could be as simple as playing games together online.
12. Invest in Technology
The smooth running of your remote team depends heavily on technology, so it’s important to invest in the right tools. These could include project management tools, communication tools, and other software that makes it easy for the team to work together. For example, if you invest in the best project management software, it will be easy for you to monitor what everyone is working on and ensure no one is being overloaded.
When looking at technology, avoid those that will bring complexity to your team. Choose something that everyone will be comfortable with and can easily learn.
13. Celebrate Achievements
When you work in a physical office, it’s easy to see when people are doing a good job, and you can easily celebrate their achievements. For remote team members, you need to be more intentional about celebrating their achievements so that they don’t feel like no one notices their hard work.
An excellent way to do this is by having an achievements channel in your collaboration tool (like Slack). Each week, people can put down the significant milestones they have achieved and let others congratulate them.
If your company offers rewards for those who perform exceptionally, don’t let your remote team members miss out. For example, if someone has hit their sales target, give them that gift voucher, send them those flowers, or offer them that extra day off. Let them know you appreciate them.
Conclusion
While managing remote teams is challenging, it is possible to have successful and engaged teams if you are deliberate about how you manage them. The key is understanding that people are different and that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to managing people.
The challenges of managing remote teams are surmountable with the right mindset and tools. By being open to feedback, setting clear expectations, investing in technology, and fostering a sense of belonging, you can create a productive and happy remote team.
