The March of 2020 changed everything!
From the way we lived to the way we worked, everything shifted.
Work environments were introduced to a new way of working, AKA the Work From Home (WFH) model.
Some people loved it so much that even today, 4 years later, they are still using the work from home model to work.
However, working from home comes with its own fair share of challenges. Managers and their remote teams face a lot of challenges ranging from productivity to KPI achievement, leading to conflicts and a negative remote work environment.
But you do not need to worry!
If you are running a remote team or are planning to take things remote, you are at the right place!
Our team has compiled the best 7 practical tips to improve coordination with remote teams. Let's dive in:
How to Build a Remote Team?
Building a remote team (that is perfectly coherent) requires careful planning as well as effective communication.
Where should you start?
It's easy.
You need to start by clearly defining roles and responsibilities to make sure that every employee knows their tasks. Hire team members who are self-motivated and have strong communication skills. Use collaboration tools like Calday for setting up meetings and Trello for project management.
Then, you need to work on establishing regular check-ins and updates to maintain alignment and accountability. Moreover, you should also work on creating a positive team culture by arranging team-building activities, even if they are virtual. Provide necessary resources and support to your employees, including reliable technology and access to required information.
Set clear expectations for work hours, availability, and deadlines to ensure productivity. Last but not least, trust your employees and give them the autonomy to complete their tasks while being available for support as needed. By focusing on communication, culture, and clarity, you can build a successful and cohesive remote team.
How to Collaborate Effectively if Your Team Is Remote
Let’s take a look at some techniques you can use if you want to ensure smooth working for your remote employees:
Choose the Right Tools for Remote Meetings
The core of your remote team's collaboration and communication lies in the tools available to its members. They have an immediate effect on the cohesiveness, productivity, and visibility of each member of your team.
With the correct tools, your team members can communicate more efficiently, exchange project updates on time, and access vital information more readily. A video conference is the greatest option when face-to-face meetings with worldwide teammates are not feasible due to geographical distance.
While quick voice calls are common in remote work, they don't really help foster a positive team environment. You should use a well-liked collaboration tool such as Calday to make sure your team gets to communicate seamlessly.
With Calday, you can schedule important meetings for your team in the blink of an eye. It offers multiple packages and options, including recurring appointments on a regular basis at the same time each week or month, one-time meetings without the need for recurring dates, and group meetings with multiple people (perfect for group training sessions).
In other words, managing remote meetings has never been easier before!
Encourage Skill Development in Employees
Developing skills in remote teams is essential for keeping a competitive advantage and promoting career advancement. Teams can stay up to date on industry trends and breakthroughs by supporting continuous learning activities, such as training programs (that you can schedule with software like Calday), workshops, and access to pertinent online course platforms.
Investing in soft skills such as leadership or good communication, for example, can have a big impact on collaboration and team dynamics. This improves team members' individual competencies while also adding to the group's overall competence. Individuals with adaptive and multiskilled abilities who can handle changing obstacles prove to be better in remote work environments.
Plus, putting money into skill development shows that you care about the professional development and job satisfaction of your staff, which boosts morale and output. It also fosters an innovative culture where team members are empowered to contribute new perspectives and skills to their responsibilities, resulting in a more resilient and progressive remote team.
Create Proper Standards for Remote Teams’ Productivity
You can have a better understanding of an employee's demands and workload as a manager by supervising their tasks and monitoring their progress. You can set up dedicated tools so that workers can record jobs completed within a given day or week.
Alternatively, you can try to have casual discussions on a regular basis where each person talks briefly about the topic they are working on. In order to make better use of the resources you already have, you should put in place a system for monitoring staff productivity.
Another notorious trap that managers need to stay away from is micromanagement. Employees who are not paid by the hour may find it extremely stressful to have timers and trackers. If managers concentrate less on the day-to-day activities of their staff and more on the ultimate goal, your company's growth and success will skyrocket.
Celebrate the Small Milestones and the Big Wins, Alike
Your team becomes what it is when you accomplish goals as a unit. Therefore, when leading remote teams, remember to recognize and honor achievements regardless of geographical distance.
Your remote workers will be inspired to keep up their best work when you recognize and celebrate their accomplishments. You can arrange for a gift to be delivered to a team member's door, arrange for virtual parties, or grant an extra day off.
In addition to that, don't wait to celebrate until you've accomplished something significant. Short-term achievements are important, particularly when leading remote teams. If not, it would be easy for your team members to become disheartened.
Take it from us: this is one of the best tips for remote working success.
Document Everything
Managing remote teams can become very tough. It is easier for tasks to skip your attention when you shift to a remote work environment. Therefore, for proper remote team management, documenting everything is very important.
Documenting as much as you can and making the paperwork widely accessible to all remote employees is the greatest method to keep staff on board and improve team productivity. Provide thorough documents that include step-by-step explanations of everything the team needs to accomplish, along with deadlines and accountability information for each task.
You can create templates for routine tasks, work on forms that have proper instructions and data to fill them properly, develop playbooks that have details about project procedures and protocols, and create flow charts that tell your employees what actions to take in different situations.
Last but not least, place these documents on a platform for shared storage and grant team members access to them at any time to ensure that they are always available for reference by your team. By doing this, you will notice that the bottlenecks will decrease, and your team members will be more productive.
Do Not Be Too Rigid
There is little doubt that flexibility is a key element in managing remote teams' best practices. The ability to arrange work according to one's most productive period is a remarkable benefit of working remotely for employees.
Managers shouldn't worry about having their staff members in front of laptops at a specific hour as long as tasks don't depend on real-time questions, like in a customer care department, for example.
When assignments are completed on time and within budget, working remotely can be a great way for managers to demonstrate their trust and concern for their staff members' well-being.
So, always be flexible and do not breathe down your employees' necks at all times.
Use The Same CRM System
When you are working in multiple locations and have multiple teams all over the world, it can get very difficult to keep every employee focused on the task and the goals you want to achieve as a company.
It is critical for businesses with remote employees to adopt customer relationship management (CRM) software to ensure team alignment. Using a single CRM platform that is appropriate for the intricacies of your particular business model is the ideal situation. You can't consolidate your client data if every office or remote worker tracks customer contacts using a different CRM system.
In today's data-driven world, metrics and analytics are more crucial than ever. Therefore, it's imperative to compile all of your information in one location. CRM systems help you identify the most effective ways to connect with and serve leads and current customers by employing a range of analytical techniques to track consumer behavior.
Wrapping It Up
And there you have 7 of the best tips for handling remote teams and making sure you get the most productivity out of them.
In a nutshell, you need to remember that effectively managing a remote team requires the perfect mix of clear communication, reliable tools, and a supportive work environment.
You need to make sure that you do not leave a window for miscommunication by having regular check-ins with your team. Try a reliable tool like Calday to stay in touch. By defining roles, encouraging skill development, and celebrating achievements, you can develop a cohesive remote team.
Moreover, you should encourage and embrace flexibility and trust in your team to make sure your employees get a positive and productive remote work environment to work in. With this remote team solution, you can build a successful team that thrives on collaboration and innovation.