Tips on How to Effectively Manage Remote Teams

Technology and the seamless integration of it are some of the critical components of a successful business. However, even though you need to consider the technology requirements to enable your staff for remote working, you also need to pay attention to people management.

Unlike traditional office settings, remote work doesn’t provide as much physical interaction. You can’t just bump into someone in the lunchroom or by the water cooler and chat about the work you’re doing. It doesn’t have the same level of spontaneity. You can’t just walk into their cubicle and ask for updates. It doesn’t work like that.

So how do you keep your business flowing? How do you establish a relationship with your staff and keep your team engaged with each other?

At Wyntec, we firmly believe in technology and its capacity to connect people. Technology provides you with opportunities for communication and collaboration regardless of the distance. 

We’ve had remote teams for many years now, and they work really well. The secret lies in putting a little bit of effort and resourcefulness. As a leader of a remote team, you won’t be physically present in front of your members to be seen or heard. You might end up having problems figuring out what’s going on, and without that knowledge, you can’t stay on top of things. You can’t maintain control of something you have no idea about. So how do you gain that “control” in a virtual workplace?

Again, the answer lies in technology. The creative usage of technology cultivates relationships founded on trust and mutual respect. 

One of the things that we have been doing and will increase now as more of our team go remote is what we call our “daily huddle.” Every day, different departments of our company hold a meeting using Microsoft Teams. Together, we go through our tasks and projects. We discuss three things:

  • What did we do and accomplish yesterday?
  • What are our tasks for today?
  • What are the things stopping us from getting things done?

Our meetings are short and sharp. We want to keep our teams focused on their respective tasks but also engaged with the other groups. To do this, everybody needs to know what is going on with the other teams. We’ve also introduced monthly online lunches to bring all our teams together. These are team lunches over video chat to attain the same socialization with people as if we were in the lunchroom.

We will likely increase the frequency of such online gatherings through the next few weeks and months as more of our team get separated from each other. We will conduct more virtual lunches together and increase our huddles two times a day. 

It’s during these times that we’re isolated from each other that we need to maintain contact through technology. We need to ensure teams are connecting via video conferencing to communicate properly. For more informal discussions, you can also use FaceTime. Utilise technology in whatever way that maximizes performance and drives results in your company. 

The world of today has many great collaboration tools in place so everyone can engage and chat with everyone anywhere and at any time. Now, it’s all about adding more to those online interactions to ensure distance won’t be an issue in your teams’ capability to perform well.

If you want more tips on how you can manage your remote teams effectively, send us a comment below or contact us. We can help you enhance your company’s remote working capacity.

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