Managing a remote team is a fundamental aspect of your company.
Businesses are made up of people. Your remote employees are your most valuable asset, so learning to manage them makes all the difference.
People are complex and have feelings, so it is necessary to understand each other and find a way to make us feel comfortable and give the most of ourselves.
I will explain the keys and factors to consider so that your remote team’s management succeeds and your business continues to grow.
What is Team Management?
Team management is the discipline a company’s team leader uses to optimize human resources and focus them on a common objective.
This task requires great empathy and a deep knowledge of the tasks to be carried out.
It is a skill in high demand in companies to fill the department or project head position, the well-known project manager.
Its mission is to make collective work superior to the sum of individualities.
Keys To Managing Remote Teams
There are a series of key elements when managing teams.
All of them involve achieving the involvement of your team members and knowing how to align their virtues and skills with the work to be done.
So roll up your sleeves and learn to be a good leader.
These are the keys to managing remote team:
Set an example:
Leading is leading by example. If you work and give your all, you won’t have to demand that your employees do so. It will come out of them.
Be close:
Get on the level of the rest. Get off your pedestal and offer to help them resolve their questions.
Encourage creativity:
Applaud your employees’ proposals, whether you like them or not. Then determine which ones to implement and which ones not to implement. This will keep them doing them, and surely some will be worth it.
Motivate your team:
Create incentives, recognize their work, and hold regular feedback meetings with each one.
Train them:
Your employees must be up to date in their field of expertise. Investment in training will multiply its value with the quality of your work.
How To Manage Remote Team
These are the steps to follow to manage remote team successfully:
Promotes Internal Communication
The most critical point in any organization is always internal communication.
You can have the best professionals in the world and if communication between them is not fluid you will encounter time optimization problems and duplicate work.
This represents a significant loss for the company. The greater the communication, the greater the benefits.
Delegate Tasks
And here it is not enough to say, “So and so, do this task for me, and I will review it later.”
It’s about delegating, with all that that implies. That is, leaving the tasks in the hands of another person and letting them lead that facet.
If you limit yourself to delegating only the execution and you are reviewing every few minutes, the bottleneck will be you.
So get used to saying, “So-and-so, lead this task.”
Document and Process
If you want your company’s internal processes to work regardless of who executes them, you must create an operations manual.
It must detail all the steps to be carried out to carry out a certain task.
This way, when someone is on vacation or abandons a ship, any employee can execute the task successfully.
Notion is the best tool for documenting processes.
Define Objectives
Start with the company’s objectives at the team level.
Once you are clear about the global objectives, you can determine the specific ones more precisely since they are not limited to just meeting certain metrics for each position but must contribute to the company’s overall results.
Therefore, your employees must know the company’s objectives (renew them yearly) and their own. This way, they will perform better, and you will be closer to your goals.
Encourage Internal Collaboration
This point is closely related to communication. It’s about taking it to the next level and making it a strong business point.
Help between different departments is key to achieving good results.
To achieve this, the following elements can help a lot:
Meetings: sharing knowledge and ideas to solve specific issues is a great way to take advantage of your company’s human resources.
Collaborative tools: internal communication, project management and process documentation tools are essential.
Company culture: your corporate identity must include a collaborative spirit among all stakeholders, mainly employees.
In short, facilitate the work and collaboration of your employees and optimize the methodology to minimize time loss.
Follow Up Individually
Occasionally, for example, meet with your employees individually every quarter or semester and let them tell you about their experience in the company and their feelings.
Then, give them your point of view. It is about valuing your attitude and your contribution to the company. It helps to rate your work in the areas you are involved in.
Determine points for improvement and thank them for their involvement.
Celebrate Victories
From the smallest to the largest.
Sometimes we only celebrate big milestones and forget to recognize small victories, which lead us to achieve our goals.
Promote this culture of celebrating and giving thanks in your business, and your remote team will be more eager to achieve the following objectives.
4 Tips For Leading Remote Teams
The main problem in organizations that work remotely is the complexity of communication. The fact that we are not together generates tensions and distance.
There is a loss of social life with the model, and then you have to try to somehow compensate for what is difficult in social life.
Therefore, we have implemented a model called the Daily Standup.
Daily Standup
It is a very short meeting. Standup in English means standing meeting because the meeting has to be very, very short.
It has to bring together all the people in your organization, so it works better for small groups. You have to divide it into departments if it is done in larger organizations.
The idea is to explain a little about yesterday’s victories, what will be done today and the problems or needs you have to reach your objectives today.
In this way, the entire team is aligned towards the same objectives.
When you need to share something from one person to another, it is enough to ask for your turn to speak and do it.
We perform This routine every day at 10:00. Normally, by 10:10, the meeting is over.
It allows us to see each other in a Zoom meeting and have a daily meeting in which we at least see each other and greet each other.
Daily Standup is a practice that helps you do your work as a leader in remote organizations.
Work For Objectives
The second need has to do with the way of working.
Since you cannot control what people are doing because you are not with them, it is essential to be able to work towards objectives.
Here your ability to plan work is very important:
- Annual planning
- Quarterly meetings
- Monthly goals
- Weekly goal
- daily goal
All this has to trigger a series of actions from Monday to Friday to meet the objectives.
This way, you will implement a way of working to allow people to work towards objectives.
Your role is to understand the weekly goals you can set for each one and let them carry out this work in their own way, in the time they want, organizing themselves how they want and focusing on the results.
You can have not only quantitative metrics for numbers and results but also cross these metrics with other more qualitative ones, which will allow you to guarantee a minimum level of quality in what is executed.
To be clear about your objectives and meet them, it helps to use good tools for working remotely.
Working by objectives is a norm because you have no option but to set objectives for each of your collaborators.
Everyone who works with me has their metrics.
They are the owners of these metrics. If we have a problem with the metric, these people know they are responsible for the numbers we have marked.
Assigning certain metrics to a job lets people understand better how you value their work.
In addition, it allows them to organize their priorities and actions so that they can focus on the most productive things for the organization.
Working with objectives, metrics by job positions, and dashboards is an important triptych to implement if you want fair leadership in your remote organization.
Feedback Meeting
We hold a quarterly one-on-one feedback meeting between the leader and each of the employees.
Obviously, the size of your company is going to impact who you hold these meetings with, but it is essential to have them.
These meetings aim to open a two-way channel in which your collaborator can give their opinion on your role and your performance in the last period.
It also serves to bring up unpleasant topics or things you are seeing and want to be corrected.
These feedback meetings are a way to heal all unresolved conflicts or poorly addressed emotions that a person may have.
It is essential to try to do this work at least once a quarter because the energy may have completely changed at the end of these meetings.
People feel truly cared for.
During these meetings, action plans come out for you as a leader and for them.
At the next meeting, you can evaluate how things have progressed.
These direct meetings with you are not a waste of time because there, you will discover many things that would not come to light in other group environments.
1:1 Meetings
And the fourth element that I recommend you implement in your remote organization is face-to-face meetings.
They are extremely useful for forming a remote work team.
There are two meetings that we do regularly:
Quarterly meeting
First is a quarterly planning meeting in which the project leaders close the quarter and plan the next.
These two-day meetings are held in person because you have to share a lot of documents and you have to create them together. Planning is a creative exercise.
Doing them in person allows you to obtain a much more solid plan.
Team meetings
There is a second face-to-face meeting that I recommend organizing. Yes or no, they are the team meetings.
These team meetings are intended to bring together the entire team, usually going to a rather rural or quiet environment where you can do:
In the morning you can have a work plan communicating results, explaining things, presenting organizational changes, etc.
And in the afternoon, you have time for people to socialize because affection is one of the most powerful forces in the world. Although there are many things you can do virtually, there are also things that cannot be substituted.
Being together in a house, cooking a meal, having time to talk, walking in the mountains, or doing a rafting-type activity will foster team spirit and allow you to have good times.
Pleasure at work is one of the things that makes people stay in your organization much longer.
Here you have the main keys and strategies to manage remote work teams.
Surely, you are already applying for several. I encourage you to implement the others and give them time to wait to see the results.
Seek to adapt them to your business and show your employees the advantages of doing so.