To start, managers need to understand factors that can make remote work especially demanding. Otherwise high-performing employees may experience declines in job performance and engagement when they begin working remotely, especially in the absence of preparation and training. So you can take the concepts and put them into immediate action as soon as you finish a course. The production mindset was appropriate 100 years ago, when work was done on production lines, but it’s a broken approach to management today. It assumes that people need to be coerced or motivated into performance. And, it largely runs counter to what employees need to be most engaged and productive in their work.

Culture Questions Uncover feedback with employee pulse surveys. Heartbeat Check-ins Streamline your daily stand-up meetings. Social Questions Build team trust and rapport for remote + growing teams. Icebreakers Onboard new hires with non-cheesy, insightful questions. Integrations Connect KYT directly to the tools your team already uses.

• Everyone knows their responsibilities and what’s in the pipeline.
• Every chance he gets, he’ll spotlight his support champs—whether on Slack, in presentations, social media or other workspaces.
• The cultivation mindset, on the other hand, is inspired by the approach that farmers and gardeners take to fostering the growth of their plants.
• As of April 2021, The Remote Company is a team of 130 people from 30+ different countries.
• For daily appreciation, we created Slack channel #kudos, where we give kudos to people that helped us or did a great job.

This is the predominant mindset of modern management today. It’s one we inherited from the early days of management that treats work as a contract to be enforced with the employee. Production mindset leads managers to think of their job as ensuring that employees simply do the work and put in their time. It’s focused on control and largely treats employees as a means of production (i.e. “Just do your job, that’s what we pay you for.”).

A Simple Experiment That Transformed Our Process For Hiring Remote Employees

This is always an imperative but has become increasingly more important in this current environment. Set clear expectations and request feedback to ensure alignment. Don’t simply assume the team understands where they need to focus their energy. Well-being has always been a vital element of performance and engagement at work. But until COVID arrived, it wasn’t something that got the attention it deserved. On a personal level, we have all experienced the effect that being unwell has on our performance at work.

But how do we make sure that we’re managing remote teams effectively? Delivered by the incomparable Jason Lauritsen and Linda Jonas, who bring with them years of experience and insight, this content is game-changing. Furthermore, you will discuss the differences between leadership and management when working remotely.

For example, some companies are 100% remote, while others offer a variety of office and remote options. Some managers trust their teams completely, while others use tracking software to ensure people are working. This may seem like overkill, but for managers and teams new to remote working, this is key. For instance, when giving feedback, don’t take the most convenient way for you. Time zone issues might make a call harder but it doesn’t justify a feedback email. If you’ve read our remote article on creating an inclusive team, you’ll know that we hire people based on their values.

At The Remote Company, we developed an agile project management system that is simple and allows team members to feel empowered to take responsibility for themselves. While the process is designed to keep track of everyone’s work at a team level, we don’t tell people how they must accomplish their tasks. The fact is that leading remote teams looks different for each company—it all depends on the culture and remote work approach.

We solve our challenges with different time zones by communicating asynchronously. When someone writes a message, we don’t expect others to reply right away. This means no one has to check their messages non-stop, allowing them to work uninterrupted.

To learn about our similarities and differences, every new colleague has to do a short presentation about themselves during their first workation. These presentations, called Pecha Kuchas, give us a sense of people’s culture, personality and interests. By writing down our values and requiring everyone to agree to them when they are hired, we instantly have a baseline for managing distributed teams. Everyone knows how to act and more importantly, they understand why we do the things we do. Managing any team, remote or traditional, starts with setting clear expectations. While each person might have individual responsibilities based on their role, the entire team needs a set of guidelines that help them stay on the same page.

Communication is a pillar for any type of team management, but for managing a remote team across the globe, it takes on a whole new level of importance. All the important discussions and decisions must take place online and be shared with the right people. Again, defining the WHY is always critical for emotionally connecting employees to the mission. Beyond the simple daily check-ins, over-communicating is imperative when it comes to the team’s tasks, duties, responsibilities and desired outcomes, which we’ll cover more in a minute. In a normal workplace environment, lack of communication can already be a challenge. But when employees are working remote – and potentially now focused on new or different tasks and goals, communication is paramount.

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It’s much easier to talk to colleagues when you have things in common. These conversations mostly take place outside the workplace. By teaming people with varying experiences, they can learn from each other. See it as cross-mentorship, except both team members offer different skills instead of one person having more knowledge in a particular area. He started in support and grew into a managing role. Every chance he gets, he’ll spotlight his support champs—whether on Slack, in presentations, social media or other workspaces.

The key to success is communicating in advance what you expect from your team and giving them the freedom to get it done. The way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers. On Slack, team members are encouraged to update their status with their country’s flag. This is a fun conversation Managing a Remote Team starter, as well as a time zone indication for team members. Our multicultural team gives us a broader view of the world and how we can solve different problems together. But this would not be possible if we weren’t intentional about creating an environment where everyone’s voices are heard and respected.

Set Clear Communication Guidelines

Since we can’t physically host happy hour drinks or teamwork events, we’ve created spaces for people to talk about what drives them off-work. Furthermore, we try to plan activities that broaden our minds during our work/staycations. During one of our 2020 staycations, we learned how to meditate, identify new trends and craft great stories. We also organize our RemoteFair, which is a company fair where teams host their own booth and talk about their projects, progress and accomplishments.

The cultivation mindset, on the other hand, is inspired by the approach that farmers and gardeners take to fostering the growth of their plants. The farmer knows that each seed she puts in the ground is genetically coded for growth and performance. As long as that seed has what it needs and doesn’t encounter any major obstacles that stunt its growth, it will manifest into the best version of itself.

Maybe they don’t follow the company’s values, possess the right work ethic or are not as skilled as they let on. Learn the best practices for working from home and leading a team as a remote manager with this free online course. These get-togethers allow us to emerge in team building all week long. We all talk to people from different teams and get to know each other’s personalities. For example, from watching people’s Pecha Kucha presentations, we discovered that the majority of our team is obsessed with cats, dogs, sports, traveling, psychology and food. Strong team bonds are all about people connecting with each other on a more personal level.

We also have quarterly creative days, where people unplug, explore and share their findings with the team. Most people choose to visit a museum, which unintentionally turned our #creative_day channel into a virtual tour of art exhibitions worldwide. For starters, our team created fun Slack channels about food, music, books and what to watch on Netflix next. These channels arose from one person having an interest and flourished into a crowd of people discussing TV series and more.

Our 9 Pillars For Effectively Managing A Remote Team

For daily appreciation, we created Slack channel #kudos, where we give kudos to people that helped us or did a great job. Each month, employees are asked questions, like what accomplishments they’re proud of, where they’re struggling and what can be improved. This is the place where our team leads listen and act when someone indicates they need a happy-hormone boost. In a large team, it’s challenging to keep track of everyone’s well-being and make sure people maintain a good work-life balance.

The best way to get the most from each person is to give them a goal, allow them to freely work in their own style, show gratitude and make everyone feel cared for. We don’t subject our colleagues to productivity trackers or timers. For us, it’s much more important to focus on the end goal.

Knowing this, we need to plan tasks ahead of time, to make sure there’s enough time to complete tasks. As much as remote work can be fraught with challenges, there are also relatively quick and inexpensive things that managers can do to ease the transition. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Be explicit about what is expected in terms of results and behaviours and get the team to repeat back what they understood. Too often we assume something should be obvious or clear, but when working remotely, this isn’t always the case.

For developers, it could also entail spending a week actually working with the development team. Whatever the reason, a weak link can negatively affect the entire team. Follow this author to improve your content experience. Overview See a full product tour for how we elevate your team’s performance.

Want More Resources For Remote Managers? Look No Further Than Know Your Team

For example, our developers have a Slack channel where they document each bug and how it was fixed. Everything is explained in a human, not overly technical language so all team members can understand. The same goes for collaboration and communication tools. The technologies facilitate social interaction and keep records of all conversations. Managers are freed up to focus on the bigger picture and help individuals when they see a potential challenge in the workflow. If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware.

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The key to effective communication is to understand that the measure of success is whether the person on the other end of the communication has received and understood the message as intended. This means that employees have to play an active role in shaping and guiding the type and style of communication used. When our well-being is suffering and we don’t feel strong and energized, there’s just no way we can perform at our best. If I am unwell, I only have a fraction of my potential to even offer up when I show up to work. As a manager, if you want to maximize the potential of your team, you have to be fully invested in the well-being of each individual on your team.

Most of us are self-starters, so we naturally love to pick up new skills and absorb knowledge. Our team members are currently learning how to code, do handstands, speak Japanese, become master chefs and much more. With that in mind, the best way to manage remote employees is to trust them. Give them the assignment and hold them accountable at the end.

Next, we examine the effects of working from home on productivity and efficiency both for managers and regular employees. Analyse the technical options for holding virtual meetings and study some basic guidelines to follow to make your virtual meetings https://globalcloudteam.com/ as productive as possible. Working from home is often seen in a positive light by workforce members, but this is not always the case. Investigate the mental health risks of working from home and the actions a manager can take to reduce these risks.

Be Sure To Read Our Free guide To Managing Remote Teams, As Well

While there is nothing new about working remotely, the scale at which it has been adopted over the last twelve months has been staggering. An option that only a small section of the workforce were able to benefit from became a life raft for many organizations. Necessity forced its implementation, but the results spoke for themselves. So even as we slowly begin to transition back into society, remote work isn’t disappearing.