How to Effectively Manage Teams Remotely

Increase productivity and reduce stress

Having a geographically distributed team is in so many respects more beneficial than a usual office. Remote work saves costs, increases productivity and allows hiring the best professionals, whatever their location is. There are people who prefer personal space to open spaces, and in some industries, like in software development, the contribution of introverts is priceless. With so many tools available for team collaboration, you can easily bring together people working from different locations. Here is how remote work makes employees more satisfied and productive:

82% of telecommuters are stressed less when working remotely. No extra payments, no extra time, no traffic jams twice a day.

87% of remote workers feel more connected through the use of video conferencing, according to Harvard Business review.

79% of knowledge workers say that they work from home, according to a PGI survey.

23% of employees do a part of their job remotely.

Together with benefits come the challenges: how to see whether your remote team is actually working? How to ensure data security when people use personal devices for work? How to facilitate collaboration when co-workers live in different time zones? Let’s talk about the techniques and tips for motivating teams and keeping them productive and coherent.

Connect the team and ensure security

Not every professional shows best results when physically isolated from co-workers. Hire the people who are motivated, organized, results-driven and have good communication skills, as brainstorming and decision-making will be performed mainly through discussions in chats and conferences. This is why it is especially important to keep the fire in the hearth of communications of distributed teams.

Four elements make remote team management successful:

1. Convenience: remote employees need to feel themselves a part of the team, have all the instruments to share ideas, presentations, sensitive data, and get timely feedback from colleagues. You may use several services for communication, sharing files, task management and scheduling meetings and activities, or you can organize unified communications in a single service.

2. Progress monitoring: to ensure that remote employees are actively involved in their tasks throughout the day, it is useful to monitor their connections and track progress in projects. Use a tool where you can assign tasks and get notifications when they are completed.

3. Smart management: sometimes you need to leave your people alone and let them concentrate on their tasks, and sometimes it’s essential to monitor their progress and encourage them. Set clear goals and expectations, be open for ideas, discuss your general mission and success with the team, reward performance, stay in touch for timely troubleshooting.

4. Security control: management needs an opportunity to regulate the settings of users. VIPole solutions provide the tools for centralized security settings configuration, monitoring active sessions, assigning contacts to users and restricting access to sensitive corporate data.

VIPole messenger unites the collaborative approach with security and flexibility to meet the needs of teams where performance matters and location is irrelevant. To make it work best, you need to be a leader, an administrator and sometimes a psychologist with a deep understanding of what inspires people and what discourages them. When employees understand the global goals of the company, have the clear vision of their professional development in the near future, improve their skills daily through teamwork and individually performed activities, — the team is successful.

Organize agile team collaboration

In the office, news naturally spread fast, and people read the minds of co-workers through facial expressions even before they start speaking. You see when someone is having a lucky day and when someone feels low, and you can support these people or at least allow them to be less productive for a while. When you are not under one roof, you need to put additional efforts in staying aware of the mood and the progress of the team.

• Organize conversations, projects and documents in group chats, making everything close at hand and easy to find.
• Create special chats for regular status meetings and hold conferences in the overlapping time most suitable for everyone. You may need Every Time Zone to schedule them.
• Specify the working hours and the time when people should be always available online for calls and group discussions. Introduce corporate standards to keep consistency and refine them when necessary.
• Make file sharing flexible, as when you work in different time zones, activity hours can be different for team members. Ensure that the files you send will be delivered even while you are offline and after you are inactive for a while. Another important aspect is access to files from any device you use while you are in the office, at home or on a business trip. With VIPole, you can join the conversation anytime on your phone, tablet or laptop, with full access to history and files.
• Choose the best suitable communication type for every occasion. Even if you mostly work with introverts who prefer messaging, sometimes problems are better handled over calls. During a call, you can perceive the emotions that are unrecognizable in chats. Video chats are even better, but people may feel they need to wear a tie for a serious conversation. A conference with video turned off is a more laid-back way to keep in touch.
• Prioritize: turn off notifications from chats that don’t require your permanent involvement.

Use video as much as possible, as over 65 percent of human communication is nonverbal. Make sure you know when your colleagues will be available and unavailable during the week. Schedule all important activities in advance to ensure people are ready to collaborate in real time.

Use video conferencing and calls

When you don’t see co-workers on a daily basis, having a visual clue to what they are up to helps a lot. Group calls and personal calls are the essential part of interactions in remote teams, as eyes tell you much more that an instant message. Conference calls are a handy tool for instant brainstorming sessions, weekly team meetings, webinars, and distance learning. The issues you discuss can be simultaneously recorded in chats so that the employees who couldn’t join the conversation had a follow-up. Several tips for making group calls more productive:

• Introduce the participants at the beginning of a video conference when there are newcomers.
• Moderate the conversation and provide the opportunity for everyone to be on air to express their ideas.
• Share the documents and presentations you are speaking about to keep them available in the related chat.

The only cons of video conferences is that you have to put on pants. Well, even this is optional with certain skills ;) In addition, there is an advantage too — you can show your dog to colleagues. Make sure it is wearing your corporate cap.

Maintain control and compliance

One of the main challenges in managing distributed teams is ensuring data safety. As long as people from the team can be overseas and you in no way control their devices, their access to business-critical data creates risks. This is why we have developed a number of tools for data retention in VIPole, which will give you a peace of mind. Even if an employee loses control over a device, you can wipe all data remotely. You may set the online mode for users that prohibits opening their local profiles and working with files while they are not authorized on the server. VIPole Team account administrator powers include:

• Managing passwords and encryption keys. In VIPole, you can generate and assign strong passwords to users or allow them to set encryption keys independently.
• Monitoring active sessions and disabling connections remotely if you recognize any suspicious activity.
• Controlling access to data locally stored on employees’ devices. You may set a special mode to prohibit access unless users are authorized on the server.
• Configuring standard corporate security settings for users and groups of users. You may assign special settings for employees from different departments and configure lock and block modes for users.
• Creating ready-to-use contact lists for newcomers to keep them accountable to other people in the team, especially to those with whom they will interact often. It’s also useful for working with freelancers: assign fixed contact lists and prohibit changes to prevent data oversharing.
• Make sure you have a plan B with a set of emergency protection instruments in VIPole, such as remote history wiping and a mode for fake authorization.

Create a virtual watercooler

In your corporate communication system, there should be a space for non-working conversations that would give the team the sense of community. Help people to get to know each other not just as specialists, but as people who have multiple interests, certain preferences concerning movies on Netflix, sports, dancing, cats, dogs and chameleons. It is especially essential for employees whose job does not involve human contact and for extroverts who lack socializing when working from home. Encourage social interactions within teams, and you’ll see how rewarding it is. Add a water cooler effect to your virtual collaboration environment to make it closer to the way people communicate naturally.

Even with the best online communication tools, there is nothing like a real life meeting. Try to get together face to face once a week or at least once a month and organize team events at least once a year. If you live in one city — weekly hangouts and holidays celebrated together would be great. These occasions inspire team members to express their ideas and vision and just to relax with co-workers who look a bit differently in a video conference than in real life.

Even if you mostly work remotely, with motivation, convergent instruments, a bit of control and a space for self-expression and fun, you can keep your employees committed to the team. We hope that a few tips that we have mentioned will help you to be a smart leader and inspire your team to achieve more. Would be great to read about your remote team management experience in comments!

VIPole offers end-to-end encrypted messaging and collaboration solutions for teams and enterprises dealing with commercially or personally sensitive information, and individuals wishing to protect themselves from hackers, identity thieves and malware. More at www.vipole.com