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Managing a Remote Team
As more of our team begins to work at home or our organisation begins to adopt a hybrid working model, it’s a bit of change managing a team who are no longer in the office with you. Here are some top tips for managing remote team members.
9 Tips for Managing Remote Teams
- Ensure clear rules of communication. Set clear times when you would like your team members to check in with you and how. Use video conference software such as Teams to have people connect with the rest of the team.
- Use tools to check the progress of tasks. Setting up a Trello board or using a spreadsheet in your Google Drive, have your team members chart their progress against the tasks that they have been asked to complete
- Re-prioritise tasks. Make sure your team have tasks to complete that they don’t need access to the office for. Make sure you can fill their time while they are away from the office.
- Use any spare time for personal development. If you can’t fill their time, use the time for other activities for personal development. We run a schedule of online courses that you may find interesting.
- Encourage people to stay in touch. Have your team member stay in touch with each other to talk about progress, things that they are working on that may impact on others and generally to keep team cohesion.
- Set shorter-term goals and objectives. Keep the team focused by setting much shorter-term goals and objectives. Setting daily tasks or tasks that take a couple of days rather than larger project objectives.
- Stay available for contact. Make sure your team can contact you when they need to. Even if it’s just for a chat. Working from home who you are not used to it can become lonely really quickly.
- Tap into individual motivators. You know what gets your team going and you’ll need to be a little more creative in how you can keep the team motivation. Use of gamification (team competitions), clear goals, targets and objectives and lot’s of virtual pats on the back can go a long way.
- Prepare your team for working from home. Make sure the team know what to expect and also what your expectations are. We wrote a recent post titled 10 Tips for Working From Home that they might find useful.
We hope you found these tips useful.
Managing Remote Teams Training Course
If you are a leader or manager, our Managing Remote Teams Training Course provides lots of guidance for leading and motivating your remote team workers.
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