Remote work—or working from home—has suddenly become more than just a trend. It is a necessity for companies around the world. As a result, thousands of team and company leaders have suddenly found themselves having to manage fully or partially remote staff.
This can be daunting for anyone, especially if it’s your first time and you haven’t had time to prepare.
If you find yourself in this situation, this list of tips will help you get organized and ensure success for yourself and your team:
Whenever possible, communication should be one-on-one and in a video format with images. Phone calls, email, and Slack work for a while.
The team needs to see their leader, and the leader needs to see the team. The good news is that services like Zoom or Google Team Hangouts are perfectly capable of doing this. At first, it’s best to make video calls every day.
The goal is very simple: to set plans and provide feedback and resources that your team needs.
1. Communicate a lot
Most likely, there is no need to explain that you should communicate with your team regularly. One of the most difficult things about working from home, especially when you are not used to it, is the feeling of loneliness and isolation that can take hold in your mind. This is greatly exacerbated by the external necessity of quarantine and voluntary self-isolation.
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2. Take advantage of modern technology
Your job as a manager is to keep your team connected. Electronic communication platforms are an easy way to get all employees involved in the work. Email and chat work well for short distances, but for long-term remote communication, it’s better to use Slack or Microsoft Teams. Incidentally, some of these communication solutions are now available free of charge.
3. Manage expectations
Help your team understand who is responsible for what and set realistic expectations for their work. Expectation management also applies to you as a manager. Prepare yourself and your team for successful completion of work tasks by clearly defining these tasks and the reasons for completing them, and help the entire team understand how you will measure results.
This means that you must clearly define the scope of work, deadlines, and the final result for each task or project your team is working on. Otherwise, after a couple of weeks, you won’t be able to understand what everyone is doing. And this leads to the following…
4. Focus on the result, not the process
It is impossible to control every aspect of a remote team’s work. You shouldn’t try to do this with an office team either, but it is especially pointless when your people are working from different locations. Instead of focusing on what they are doing or the number of hours worked, focus on the results and judge the team’s work based on them.
5. Provide your team with the necessary resources
Make sure your remote team has all the technical capabilities to do their job. If you suddenly have employees working from home, you will most likely need to provide them with laptops, software, mobile communications, and high-speed internet. It is unreasonable to assume that everyone already has all of this, and it is your responsibility as a manager to provide your employees with these resources.
