Managers managing remote teams know the difficulty of keeping everyone motivated and connected. Here are a few tips to ensure your employees reach their full potential and feel engaged with the company.
One of the biggest difficulties remote employees experience is loneliness. As a manager, your job should be to maintain communication channels and promote team-building activities and social interactions among your workers.
Communicate regularly
Communication is key for productivity at any workplace, whether you work from the office or remotely. Regular updates on upcoming deadlines, answers to queries or issues, and company updates ensure everyone stays up-to-date.
Furthermore, regular communication helps you get to know your team members better. Although this can be challenging when working remotely, it’s essential for creating a positive culture.
Giving constructive criticism and celebrating employee successes requires effort; be sure not to sugarcoat it and be consistent when providing it.
When managing a remote team, it’s essential to set clear expectations for all employees. Doing this will keep your workforce motivated and focused on reaching the business’ objectives.
Create a culture of collaboration
In today’s digital workplace, cultivating a culture of collaboration has never been more essential. Businesses with successful collaborative cultures know they can maximize employee knowledge, workflows, creativity and efficiency by encouraging open communication between all members.
One of the best ways to foster a collaborative team is by investing in employee development, training and mentoring programs. Doing this will boost your employees’ self-worth, commitment to your company and motivation to work together more effectively with others.
Foster open communication by ensuring all employees, both remote and in-office, have video conferencing software installed. This enables everyone to easily connect and join discussions or projects together.
Trust is the cornerstone of successful collaboration. When employees feel safe speaking up and sharing their ideas, they are more likely to do so.
Give feedback regularly
Feedback is an essential element in creating a healthy and productive work environment for remote teams. Doing this encourages employees to stay motivated and enthusiastic about their tasks, which in turn leads to higher productivity levels.
Successful feedback relies on being clear and understandable. By avoiding personal opinions or general statements, data-driven criticism will enable managers and team members to more clearly identify areas for improvement.
It’s also wise to focus on providing positive feedback rather than criticism. Negative remarks can have a detrimental effect on an employee’s morale and performance.
Messaging apps such as Slack can be an invaluable tool in building relationships and encouraging open communication.
Managers should be mindful that they may have limited day-to-day access to their remote teams, so it’s important to create a strategy for seeking and receiving feedback. Whether this occurs through weekly check-in meetings, Slack messages or email, having an organized process for collecting and sharing feedback is key in maintaining an ongoing dialogue about individual and team performance.
Celebrate success
Managing a remote team can be challenging, but there are some proven tactics that will help you succeed. These include setting clear expectations, developing effective communication protocols, using appropriate tools for the job, cultivating trust among team members, encouraging work-life balance and offering performance feedback.
One of the most rewarding aspects of working on a team is seeing your project come to fruition. Even if you’re not physically present, you can still celebrate and reward milestones with your teammates.
For example, you could send each member of the team a gift card or meal delivery to show them that you value their efforts. You could also record videos to recognize both small and large successes.
Though you may not be able to give everyone a toast in person, you can still recognize your team members’ successes by selecting an upbeat victory song that they can dance along to during video calls. Doing this will serve as motivation and keep virtual coworkers motivated to keep striving towards greater success.
