Technology

Manager’s Guide to Lead a Remote Team

The Covid 19 pandemic has brought us an opportunity to explore our hidden talent to work from home. People are not only more productive working from home, but they are giving quality time to their families also. While this is a bright picture of the story, it has been enormously challenging for few to adopt to this new work culture. And above that team communication, team leading efforts, data processing, team meetings, and other important aspects of professional work has inculcate new ways to perform tasks.

Now that if you are finding it hard to manage and lead the team remotely, this guide is for you. Here, we have discussed 5 practical steps to lead a remote team in an effortless manner.

Step 1: Develop a resourceful remote home base.

Source: zoho

Just like you have proper mechanism in office that includes designated section of desks, meeting room, lunch room, and other sections that could be easily accessed by your team, you should also have resourceful remote home base for your team. It could include some useful tools that should be incorporated to make remote work seamless or team. For example, you can use tools like Slack or Skype for chat and calls, or use cloud based apps such as Dropbox to share common work.

Step 2: Build a friction less process for your team

Next important aspect is to build a friction less communication process for your team. Every member of your team should be assigned with clear duties & expectations. To do this, you should visually organize the work in such a way that employees could easily understand what is expected from them. You can create different tasks sheets for individual team members or common sheet for shared tasks to avoid confusion.

You should also provide all necessary tools to your team to avoid any performance drop. For example, if you are leading a content team, then you should provide them tools such as grammar checker tools, plagiarism checker, and all important tools that are needed by your team.

Step 3: Set up recurring 1:1 meetings

Source: USCC

Setting up recurring meetings with individual team members could help you track performance of each member effortlessly. It will not only help you track team member’s performance, but it also gives you opportunity to understand their challenges and help them fix that. You can use tools like Google Meet, Skype, Zoom, etc. to schedule these meetings with individual team member. Remember you should schedule once in a day or once in a week or as needed to avoid unnecessary distraction caused due to these online meetings. These meetings should help not bother the team member. In addition to 1:1 meetings, you should also consider having useful team meetings on weekly basis.

 Step 4: Find & foster time for remote team health & fun

Source: ntask

Not only work, but your team’s health should also be your top priority. It could be frustrating sometimes working from home for long hours, in such cases you need to keep regular interaction with your team. You can schedule online team games or similar activities to keep your team engaged in a more interactive manner. You can also discuss health issues faced by your team members and try to help them with best telemedicine apps.

Step 5: Hire and onboard new remote team members

Source: flexjobs

Hiring & on boarding has become easy like never before with advanced hiring and HR tools. These advanced online HR solutions help you streamline all your human resource work seamless. Additionally, you can use video conferencing & chatting apps to conduct interviews and perform other necessary tasks. These tools help you with recruitment, on-boarding, and employee management while also covering your time off management and off-boarding workflows. Some of these cloud-based HR management software are really useful for both small, medium and large organizations.

Conclusion

Managing workflow with effective employee management could help you do wonders. Following a few simple yet effective steps, you can easily manage your large teams while ensuring better productivity. In the wake of remote work culture, use of online solutions has increased significantly which is going to rise for sure. If you are leading large teams in your organization and want to share your experience, feel free to reply in the comments below.

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