Tips on Managing a Remote Team

Remote work is becoming a trend for businesses who would want to increase productivity and yet save on cost. But before you go ahead and dive into it, you need to understand first how to effectively manage people from different places, with different work hours and work styles.

Here are some tips on how you can efficiently manage a remote team.

Choose the right team members

Make sure to have the right people and these are people that you can trust. Yes, you need someone with the right skills and expertise, but it is more important to have someone with the dedication, professionalism self-motivation and accountability to do their work even on their pajamas. You won’t know this right away, so it’s better to start with a trial stage. Test the new hire for a few weeks if he/she will be a good fit to your team or not.

Choose the right tools

Thanks to technology, there are a vast variety of tools that you can choose from. Essential tools include email, messaging and communication platforms, file sharing, project management software and other tools specific to your business needs.

Create an effective process and workplan

It is very important to have an effective process, clear set of goals and objectives when you’re having a remote team. Having the right project management plan will help each team member follow work and project status, team updates regardless if they are working on different schedules and have different work styles. Having these documented will be helpful when you have new employees coming on board, making it easier for them to integrate themselves to the team.

Communicate frequently

Working in an office set-up or remotely, constant communication is very important. Since you interact with your remote team online, find the best platform that is suitable to how you can best have consistently chat with each other. Encourage everyone to interact by initiating daily greetings, checking on what they are working on and topics that could initiate reactions from everyone. Create a chat room for any random topics, another one for official work concerns and groups for each department and projects. The more you communicate with each other, the stronger you can build trust and essence of team collaboration.

Have remote and in-person team buildings

Articles about how working remotely may cause depression to some are recently coming out. And it’s not too shocking since remote workers may tend to have lesser social life, relies on social media for some socialization and some may even neglect taking care of themselves since they’re just at home. So, how can you prevent this happening to your team members? Aside from consistently checking on them, think of activities that would still engage them socially to one another. Make sure to schedule constant virtual team buildings. Aside from ensuring their mental and emotional health, team buildings will also help you get to know their personalities better.

And of course, face to face meetings are also essential. You can have quarterly or bi-annually get-togethers. This will build a stronger connection and bond within your team.

If you think managing a team might take up too much of your time or would be another item to be added to your to-do list, then hire an offshore service provider that can handle that for you. Here at DyCom SmartStaff, we can provide our clients with quality service with our highly-skilled, committed and trustworthy team. Talk to us to find out more.