Remote Work 101: Effective Tips to Virtually Manage Your Team

Regardless of whether you are going into the brave new world of remote work, one thing is sure: remote team management requires a strategy different from real-life management. In the long and short term, below are the recommendations for better, more effective, and more aggressive management of your remote staff.

Schedule management

Everyone’s got a different habit of sleeping. Everyone has different orders to run and work comfortably at different periods of the day. You might even be busy yourself as a project manager as you need to attend PMP training online to develop professionally. As everyone works at different hours, it’s difficult to work together on the same project. Thus, when everyone is comfortable working, you should try to correct them once a day as team leadership. That helps you to work with your co-workers simultaneously.

Don’t manage by process

One of the numerous benefits is the autonomy to develop work processes. Also, it feels like micro-management to try to monitor the process in the virtual environment. Make sure you give explicit direction on what you want in the final product, schedule check-in times, and specify deadlines. Then follow up and provide feedback. Use the results. Hopefully, the new inventive ways that your employees find will amaze you.

Transparency

Each team-mate should know the other person’s topic or project. This helps people not only feel valued but also allows them to collaborate better by updating each other’s work. Encourage your coworkers to improve their performance by setting goals. Whenever possible, do not hesitate to appreciate a coworker. It could be a simple graph or a piece of well-designed information, but it could take time to appreciate it if you find it defective.

Let the virtual meetings be meaningful

We all participated in a virtual conference call that felt like a total waste of time. All meetings can feel like that for virtual employees. Just like you would prepare yourself for virtual meetings, make an agenda, invite the right individuals, start on time, and so forth.

Use a short icebreaker or use the first few minutes of the meeting to share fun or personal things for team members to make the meeting more meaningful. To use webcams for all team members. Perhaps every person has posted a picture of his previous holiday or asked everyone to discuss last week’s experience. Virtual teams often lack cohesion without any informal opportunity to engage with colleagues

Create spaces for collaboration

Virtual team members often find it difficult to work on projects. Dozens of emails are usually sent, and then one person takes the lead while others edit and remark — right? This may work for certain projects, but others may require brainstorming and creativity. To enable group collaboration, use application sharing of documents like SharePoint, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. During a meeting, you can start a discussion about a new project and use the original comments in order to start the ball. Timetable for monitoring progress and guidelines for next steps.

Advice them to use coworking spaces

Coworking helps employees to acquire control over where, when, and how they operate, just like other flexible types of work. It also helps companies to boost productivity, reconnect people to their organization and transition their physical environment.

Coworking spaces are a type of place in which employees who usually do not belong to the same organization meet to work in a common office.

It has previously been utilized popularly by location-independent freelancers, but currently is employed by several sorts of workers, including major organizations and SMEs.

Remember to give feedback and rewards

Note that virtual staff should be handled like in-office staff whom you regularly meet and talk to. Be equitable and communicable. Take time to discuss your job directly with all your online employees and provide regular feedback. Consider also incentives and prizes which benefit all employees equally. All your team members want to be recognized and appreciated.

Conclusion

It’s difficult to work from home, but to make things easier, you can take several actions. Give your teammates a while to become familiar with the new routine. Do not forget to talk to your teammates casually. Plan a work schedule on which everyone can work comfortably. Try to keep your teammates updated at least two meetings a week and don’t forget to activate the video, so you can see new faces. Each team member should know what the other team member is doing and should attempt to send files via free file transfer apps. Following these ideas, a fluid homework procedure is guaranteed and everyone’s spirits in your team are maintained high.

Originally published at https://facilethings.com.