While the world holds its breath as the novel coronavirus savagely cuts through countries’ medical line of defenses like a knife through butter, leaders and managers find it more demanding to stick to the tips for managing remote teams.
This is a life-altering unprecedented situation we’re facing, especially for those leaders alien to the core nature of supervising a task in a digital and much-less communicative workspace, AKA the virtual distant-working. To everybody’s distaste, unfortunately, the existence of remote working won’t be over soon as the threat of COVID-19 virus is still real and deadly. As a result, we’re witnessing more and more companies coming up with work-from-home policies for all their employees to break the chain of the coronavirus’ ravaging spread.
The excessive measure doesn’t appear to be unharmful, however. As physical relations fade away from memories and more employees resorting to their own personal screens to stay in contact with the whole team, it’s natural for leaders and managers to stress out and get psyched over the direction the team is heading to. They need to double down on different fundamental teamwork aspects to maintain the workforce and keep them motivated and engaged.
If you’re one of these managers who feels like at one point, they might lose the grip on the group, don’t be alarmed; this just means you’re self-conscious about the whole experience. To help you get over your fear and set exemplary leadership trivia for your team, here are some tips for managing remote teams to bring serenity and comfort to an already fragile and misleading digital workspace.
Overcommunicate
The reckoning of working afar hit all non-freelancer workers hard and knocked them off their feet, mainly because it cut off easy and straightforward communication lines between colleagues established through extended periods of close-quarter working behaviors. Now, it feels a tad weird to get in touch on a screen where miscommunications are bound to happen. Over-communicating with your team and promoting such a tendency helps you to calm the crisis down and send out wrinkles of calmness throughout the distributed group. This, however, can quickly get out of hand and turn into another devastating fiesta, so set clear and precise expectations.
We dab overcommunication as the most crucial point in tips for managing remote teams.
Set Precise Expectations
Your professional group of people, with a rainbow-spectrum of cultures, who once worked closely in the premises of an office has now migrated to a new location; the odd digital chatrooms or picture-in-picture video-conference calls. Also, as people get further away from each other, they forget more about each other’s cultural sensitivities and backgrounds. Not to mention, some are a newbie to the whole digitalized-communication idea and get overwhelmed by it. Realizing all of this can save from falling into a dysfunctional remote team abysmal.
Not constructing a seamless line of communication with the team at the beginning of remote working can lead to disastrous outcomes down the road and leave a huge mess on your hands. As a critical point in tips for managing remote teams, layout clear and realistic expectations for the team, so they’ll know what’s happening. Here are some standards:
- Clarify what tools they need to use
- Share essential information with them
- Fan out the means of communication roadmap
- Manage projects and deadlines
- Stand firm and decide
- Set working hours and assign task owners
- Ask for individual results and give the members your feedback
- Make the daily huddle a priority
The Daily Huddle
Today, monitoring everybody at the office, figuring out what everybody’s up to and how and when they’re delivering on their tasks sounds like a long-forgotten treat. In the new world, keeping up with everybody has completely changed. To avoid getting thrown into a misinformation abyss of ending up making bad decisions, we suggest opting to a “daily huddle” ritual as another excellent example of tips for managing remote teams. The daily huddle, or in scrum terms, the “stand-up,” transpires in 15–20 minutes meeting, same as the run-of-the-mill early morning gatherings at the office. The purpose stays the same; the only thing differing is the means. Use video conferencing to rally up your team and spend some time with them while getting up-to-dated on some vital details:
- What each individual team member has accomplished in the set time?
- What are they planning to do today?
- What barriers they might face today? How progress might linger?
Crates a Video-Conferencing Culture
This part doesn’t only confides to the daily huddle of culture or executive meetings to decide the route of a company; the video, conferencing must take over. Between the lack of regular exchanges at the office where people come face to face with each other and the frustration of having to work from a lonely office designed for the pandemic, it’s normal for employees to feel isolated and lose their sanity. By creating a video-conferencing culture and transforming the god-awful in-audio meetings into meaningful and encouraging virtual confrontations where employees can truly feel alive and connected to their friends, break away from stereotypes and boost the morality of your workers. Doing so would provide a more “in-person” relation for the already-bored workforce and introduces a more human element to the meetings, which all the new-era digital communications seem to be missing.
Another huge plus of the concept is that you can keep track of what employees are doing during the conference. Old-school all-voice conferences strip the leaders and managements from detecting what their team members are up to and increased the possibility of them multi-tasking while presumably being active in the meeting. This way, you people are more engaged (vigilant if you will) to take part in the conference knowing that you’re watching their every move and facial expression, another outstanding result of sticking to the tips for managing remote teams.
