Managing Remote Employees: 12 Tips for Manager
Your team manager may find it challenging to supervise remote workers, mainly if you recently switched to remote work. But if you have the correct tools, managing remote teams isn’t challenging. This article discusses tips for managers to manage remote employees.
12 Tips That Can Be Adopted by Managers to Efficiently Manage Remote Workers:
1. Set Clear Expectations
Expectations apply to all businesses, whether employees are based locally or electronically. Keeping staff informed will help them stay focused on the same objectives.
You should be explicit about your expectations for work hours and availability. You should also be clear about the communication system and punctuality of meetings. Also, set expectations for important projects and deadlines, scheduled meetings, and email responses.
2. Be Available to Give Them Help
Working remotely presents several obstacles for many employees who are still getting used to it. Such challenges include time management and a healthy work-life balance. They also deal with social exclusion and loneliness.
Be proactive and watch for any warning signals rather than waiting for the problem to get worse. For instance, you can mail a remote team member to see whether everything is alright. This can be done if they are running behind schedule and missing deadlines.
For effective teamwork and morale, it’s also crucial to provide remote workers with support at every level. Recognise the cues your staff may be giving you and assist them if something is seriously bothering them or if they are feeling unwell.
Additionally, it demonstrates to them how much they are valued. This then fosters an environment of candour and empowerment among staff members.
3. Use User Provisioning Tools
User provisioning tools are used for managing user access to IT applications. User provisioning tools are necessary for businesses to keep records of user data. These data include personal data, account histories, or application credentials.
Employees and administrators can use these private records to store rules and information. User provisioning tools also have automated user provisioning capabilities.
Automated user provisioning helps to automate processes like account creation, modification, and deletion. User provisioning tools enable managers to manage employee lifecycle changes efficiently. They can manage changes like onboarding, promotions, or termination.
Provisioning tools and remote tools have a lot in common. Additionally, these products frequently offer SSO/federation or password management capabilities.
4. Have Individual Check-Ins
This may seem obvious if you have a small team, but it’s important to spend one-on-one time with each team member. Ideally, your team won’t require constant monitoring. But everyone must understand they can turn to one another for necessary support.
As a manager, giving your staff a place to talk about any issues they feel uncomfortable bringing up in front of others is crucial.
Think about scheduling once or twice a week 10- or 15-minute one-on-one meetings with each member of your team. Make sure your team is aware of your availability outside of those hours in case anything arises. Holding frequent check-ins will help evaluate employee performance and track their productivity levels.
5. Have General Weekly Meetings
It’s crucial to electronically gather your whole remote staff at least once a week in addition to weekly one-on-ones. Team meetings are presumably already held once a week or every day, thus, they shouldn’t change while working remotely.
Here are some pointers on conducting productive weekly meetings with your remote crew.
- Ensure connectivity: Technology is both a giver and a taker. Determine the best way to hold weekly meetings for your complete team, and make sure everyone is aware of how to participate and communicate.
- Humanise: Have fun with your team. Create a professional atmosphere.
6. Use the Right Remote Project Management Software
When everything is housed under one roof, your culture of remote teamwork will thrive. And you can accomplish this by using remote project management software. It helps to schedule activities, projects, and even personnel. What you can do using project management software is as follows:
- Maintain and manage timesheets
- Communicate with your dispersed team
- Keep track of project progress
- Monitor productivity
- Exchange information in real-time
To track the development of each project, you can use tools like ClickUp, Trello, and Asana. These technologies assist you in delegating duties to various members of your remote workforce. They provide you and your remote manager with a rapid overview of all your projects.
As a result, you may determine whether the remote workers are hitting the project milestones required. And, if not, whether any workflow bottlenecks need to be resolved.
7. Use Appropriate Remote Communication and Tools
To effortlessly stay in touch, a distributed team often uses various communication methods. These include email, video conferencing, and instant messaging. Some of the many remote communication tools you’ll require are detailed below:
Tools for video conferencing let you use video calls to conduct distant meetings and conversations. Consider Skype and Zoom.
Platforms for instant messaging make it easier to communicate with your team and share files. They are helpful for chats and speedy responses as well. Examples include Microsoft Teams and Slack.
Tools for real-time collaboration and cloud storage make it simple to share data with distant team members. Examples include DropBox and Google Drive.
8. Use Time Tracking Tools
Using time monitoring software, you can monitor how much time employees spend on various tasks and projects. You can also examine each employee’s output using thorough daily and weekly reports.
It also allows you to send distraction warnings to employees if they haven’t been working for a while. And finally, you can obtain attendance records. These records detail whether each remote employee is present, on time, tardy, or absent.
9. Focus on Outputs
You must take a backseat and allow your staff to handle things however it works best for them if you want to manage your team effectively remotely.
Give an employee the freedom to work best in the afternoon rather than the morning. Higher employee satisfaction, engagement, and productivity may result from doing this. Trust your remote workers to do the task without micromanaging them. This helps to train them for leadership positions.
10. Do More Video Calls
Video conferences assist distant workers in becoming more accustomed to one another. It also enables teams to pick up on gestures and visual clues.
Employees can better get to know and feel more comfortable with their co-workers. Implementing frequent video calls helps to communicate with your employees and foster teamwork.
11. Celebrate Employee Success
Recognising excellence in work can help reduce the isolation that comes with remote work. This employee appreciation might come in the form of compliments. They can also be benefits, bonuses, promotions, or gifts of gratitude.
This helps convey the expectations of the company. It also makes each employee feel as though their participation matters.
12. Socialise With Your Remote Team
Although communication techniques have advanced significantly, face-to-face conversations remain superior. This is the reason why several distant teams decide to meet up in person once or twice a year.
Meeting the team in person helps remote workers build stronger relationships and trust. You might hold virtual pizza parties in place of regular get-togethers. This can be done by delivering the food to each employee and then hosting the party via video call.
Alternatively, you may organise online team-building exercises like a weekly trivia competition. The categories, time, and level of difficulty can all be changed. Long-term productivity results can be strongly impacted by social activities and team development.
Conclusion
Managing remote workers has unique difficulties. Simply apply the finest management principles discussed in this article. These tips will help you effectively manage your remote workforce. Once you do, you’ll see how productive and healthy remote work can be for staff members as well as the bottom line of the business.