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 in 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 for recent times as 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 a 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 on 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 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 supports of coworkers help to foster that feeling.
- The work might be favorite to the workers, but they probably don’t feel fully energized or motivated to put whole effort into the roles.
To solve these issues, put your time and effort to cherish relationships among remote employees. Create opportunities for casual interactions within the colleagues and take initiative to maintain those kinds of relationships.
Deploy Employee 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 the employee engagement app, this responsibility can get 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 in this matter.
- Collaboration can happen in scheduled meetings or formal brainstorming sessions. But most of it comes from organic, casual conversations outside formal meetings.
- Informal communication is directly linked to increased productivity within the group. As an employer, you need to take the challenge to make this sort of communication easier for the team.
- The effort to collaborate and communicate will prevent any chance of taking technologynesss and project forwarding without consultation of involved people, which is necessary for avoiding unfinished or wrongly done projects.
Prioritize Video and Phone Calls
- Make it mandatory to use a camera during team meetings and one on one meetings. It helps to feel closer when you can talk and see each other.
- Also, give priority to video calls rather than emails and messages whenever possible. It’s quicker to communicate ideas and helps you not miss any content or tone of the message.
Ask Employees to be Responsive and Available
The lag in communication causes the distance between coworkers. It can create some great impacts on the workflow. For example:
- If a worker lives hours away and doesn’t respond for several hours, the sender may feel hesitant 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 technologyness-making and action taking parts, let them feel like an important part of the family.
- Manage projects in a way your remote employees can be involved easily. It helps to exile the feeling of missing out from the team.
- Put an effort by yourself and other team members to make conversations and make everyone a part of it. This helps a lot in creating a loop of mental focus on the team.
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.
- Hold Q&A sessions with executive members of the organization 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 until the right time- you have to take steps and turn the current day into the right time. Remote employee monitoring software, for example, is an affordable solution. Ensure the great productivity of your remote employees with this tool and other tactics that we talked about. The results will surprise you!