Remote Team Management: A Full Guide to Making Your Virtual Team Happy
Are your remote employees happy and productive?
If you’re not sure, then you may not be engaging with them as well as you should.
Remote work has really taken off in the last decade. Perhaps it’s a new direction for your company, which can put the onus on you to make it work. Or something that’s been in place for a while, but with some niggles or outright problems, such as high turnover, poor communication, or no sense of a cohesive team.
In both cases, you’re feeling daunted and for good reasons.
You might be managing remote workers who are hired as full-time staff, or freelancers who are independent contractors. They may as well be in different time zones or even different countries. Whatever the situation, you want to keep your remote workers happy and make sure that the work they’re producing is high-quality.
But even though remote team management can be a real challenge, keeping them happy is in the end the rewarding part of the job.
Here’s how to do it:#1: Engage Remote Employees and Recognize Their Achievements
One way to keep your remote employees happy is to make sure that they feel engaged with their work.
This means that you should:
Pay Particular Attention to Onboarding
In an office, you’d expect to spend time with a new team member on their first day. Without any doubt, you’d provide them with crucial paperwork and things like a key card to get them in and out of the office, a pass for the car park, and so on. You’d then introduce them to colleagues, inform them about the office policies, and let them know you’re available if they need help.
It’s easy to forget that virtual employees also need a clear onboarding process. You want them to feel settled and confident as quickly as possible. So you want to make sure they have access to everything they need in order to get their work done.
Creating and using an onboarding checklist is the best way to make sure everything gets done, especially if some tasks are handled by an admin assistant or if the employee is responsible for working through some of them.
Provide Clear Expectations
When you give someone instructions face to face, they don’t just have your words to go on. They have other important indicators, like your body language and tone of voice.
If you say, “I need this done quickly,” your employee might take a guess from your body language (nervous pacing, grim expression) and your tone of voice (anxious, harried) that “quickly” means “as soon as possible”.
But if you email someone with the “I need this done quickly”, it can mean different things to each person. Some employees might think you’re implying “some time this week” or perhaps “within a couple of days”.
With remote work, you may find that people aren’t so willing to ask questions as they would face to face. And remember, you won’t have indicators like their expression or tone of voice to indicate they’ve misunderstood you.
Be very clear with your expectations when you’re communicating by email or any form of text (e.g. Slack). For instance:
- Instead of, “I need this done quickly,” write, “I need this by 5pm (EST) today.”
- Instead of “Put a bit more detail into this report,” write, “Please add examples and figures in the sections I’ve indicated with a yellow highlighter.”
Acknowledge and Reward Remote Employees’ Achievements
Do you have any sort of recognition program for your remote employees, where they’re rewarded for reaching certain milestones or targets?
Although you’re unlikely to gather everyone and present an “employee of the month” trophy, there are plenty of ways you could recognize remote employees’ achievements:
- Taking the time to acknowledge and thank them, in a public way (e.g. via your Slack channel) for peers see that you appreciate them too.
- Awarding a gift card (perhaps for Amazon or another online retailer) — this has the advantage that you can send it electronically.
- Sending a physical note or card to let a remote employee know how much you appreciate their work beyond the virtual boundaries.
- Giving employees a bonus or pay rise. If your budget allows for it, this will always be appreciated and can really motivate employees to continue doing a great job.
It will seem fair if remote employees are eligible for the same rewards and recognition as their in-office colleagues. Unless there’s a good reason why remote employees should be on a different scheme (e.g. they’re all freelancers), try to ensure that all rewards can be given both in person and remotely.
#2: Provide Appropriate Feedback to Remote Employees
While having a recognition program in place is a great way to provide positive employee feedback, it’s also important to do it in smaller ways on a regular basis.
You need to feel comfortable with delivering both positive and negative feedback to remote employees, as well as have a good system in place for this.
Positive Feedback
Although you might know when your employees are doing well and meeting (or exceeding) all your expectations, do they have a good grasp of it?
It’s important to provide regular positive feedback. That could be a simple “Great job, thanks!” when someone turns in a piece of work to you. This alone can go a long way.
Where possible, though, get more specific about your feedback. Let employees know exactly what it was that you appreciate about their work: that way, they can focus on maintaining and building on that in the future. According to OfficeVibe, effective feedback has three main components:
The Behavior (the description of what has been done), The Outcome (the result of the employee’s behavior), and The Next Steps (recommendations of how to proceed with the current situation). This is how positive feedback might look like for an employee who meets or exceeds set goals:
I just got a report on your cold calls performance and I see you’ve exceeded your goal by 15%! [The Behavior] This is a great result as we’ve already seen a positive impact on our sales. [The Outcome]. Nice job! You really did your best. Do you mind sharing your ideas how did you do it? It would be great to keep these numbers growing and I’m happy to help. [The Next Steps]
Negative Feedback
It may feel awkward to discuss performance issues over the phone or on a video call, rather than face to face — but those awkward discussions are part of managing remote teams.
Whether your remote employees are full-time, part-time, or freelance, the last thing they want is for you to keep quiet about a problem until i’s too late.
If an employee’s performance isn’t up to the standard you want, then be proactive about addressing that. You might find it’s helpful to have a system set up where you do this on a regular basis: for instance, you might have a one-month review when someone first joins your company (or starts to work remotely rather than in the office), followed by quarterly reviews after that.
When considering whether or how to deliver negative feedback, take into account any difficult circumstances your employee might be facing.
Being physically present in an office, makes it easy to spot who’s having a rough time with their babies, who’s struggling on through a cold, or who’s facing difficult decisions about nursing their parents.
With remote employees, you might not be aware of these situations. For example, if one of your employees is normally very proactive and on top of deadlines and they suddenly start sending rushed work at the very last minute, you might want to gently check whether they’re going through something difficult in their personal life.
Encourage Employees to Give You Feedback
Do you regularly encourage your employees to tell you how you can make their lives easier? If not, you’re almost certainly missing out on a lot of opportunities to be a great manager and help your remote teamwork more smoothly.
Here’s what one remote manager, Rodolphe Dutel, found when he asked remote employees how he could make their lives easier:
Answers may surprise you. They may need more face time/mentoring/written instructions… Here are some situations I previously encountered:
1. Moving a weekly meeting by an hour lets someone pick up their kids at school.
2. Syncing before a teammate sign off for the weekend to help reduce their stress.
3. Setting up a daily-check up to get unstuck.
At regular intervals, encourage employees to tell you what you could do to make them happier. If they seem reluctant to suggest anything, it helps to offer a range of options or even an anonymous survey.
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Author Bio:
Erika Rykun is a content strategist and producer who believes in the power of networking and quality writing. She’s an avid reader, writer, and runner.
