Managing Remote Teams – Best Practices You Can Adopt

Managing remote teams is not exactly a new concept. However, with the pandemic and social distancing construct, it certainly has gained a worldwide interest and new understanding. Companies like Google have declared its remote working agenda to be extended till July 2021 and many companies are following suit.

While some are adept in managing remote teams effectively, many organizations are still grappling with the idea and need a structure to help them out. If you are looking for some guidance, this blog can help ensure you and your team retain the same level of productivity as in a conventional workspace.

Tips to Effectively Manage Remote Teams

• Communication
• Set Expectations
• Establish Personal Relationships
• Deploy the Right Collaboration Tools
• Set a Roadmap
• Make Ownership a Priority

Communication, Communication and Communication

Leaving things to chance lead to miscommunications which often end up in missed deadlines and underperformance. Communication makes up for almost every aspect of a successful business. Right from meetings to client interaction, you need communication to express and clarify ideas you have. In such cases, collaboration platforms play a vital role in bringing in the entire workforce together.  Several features like Leadership Talks, News, Kudos and many more are great way for the employee to interact with each other on non-official tasks.

Set Expectations

Setting expectations is not about pressurizing the members but creating an outline of the goals that everyone has to achieve in a day, week or month. These expectations include everything, including project scheduling and production timeline charts.
Create a schedule for meetings and catch-ups and share it with your teammates so they are prepared and ready to deal with project executions and deadlines.

Establish Personal Relationships

In order to manage remote teams, one needs to ensure that the human touch prevails. By maintain personal relationships, your team members are less likely to be stressed and can perform better, sans the pressure. Personal relationships also overcome the hierarchical barriers that limit communication and as a result, make communication murky that in turn, leads to mismanaged tasks. All employees need is to streamline tasks and communication and solutions like PeopleOne offer that refuge. Need to appreciate your colleague’s milestone? There is a solution for that. Need to make their birthday better? Wish them! Technology can help embrace those personal relationships at ease.

Deploy the Right Collaboration Tools

Being aware of the destination is great, but having the tools to help you navigate you, makes it easier. Path to remote working team success is intrinsically linked to collaboration tools that you deploy to connect with your team members. The sign of a good collaboration tool is where your teams connect seamlessly, share documents and collaborate easily to discuss projects. PeopleOne is one such collaboration platform that helps you connect, communicate and collaborate effectively.

Set a Roadmap

Setting a roadmap is important to help guide the remote teams towards achieving a destination and ensure that the path taken is compliant to the business success and vision. Setting a roadmap involves understanding the mission of the project, specifying the tools needed, outlining the resource implementation and maintaining that vigor among the team members.

Make Ownership a Priority

While it is important to maintain a sense of community, individual ownership plays a very important role in building up the project or tasks together to one qualitative conclusion. As they say, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, it is important for individual team members to take up ownership of their individual tasks.

Conclusion

Managing remote teams may seem like a tough task but with the right tools and mindset, it can prove to be essentially productive and helpful in maintaining the work-life balance. If you and your team members are working across borders and time, do not let distance and time zones be a hindrace to productivity. PeopleOne can help you overcome these obstacles with tactical features for task management, social engagements, leadership communication and lot more!

Want to unlock your remote team’s potential? PeopleOne is the solution for you!