A remote team involves individuals who collaborate with the same project to achieve specific objectives within a defined period. As each team member shares various skills, the team leader expects everyone to deliver refined work by reporting progress. Therefore, communication is crucial in maintaining a remote team.

To effectively share information within the organization, ensuring data privacy must be your main priority. Underestimating the power of unprotected information poses data breach consequences such as lawsuits, governmental audits, lost reputation, and bankruptcy. 

To help you implement stable data management effectively, you can utilize online tools that allow you to assign and distribute tasks to your team. To track productivity even in a work-at-home setup, using tools such as Trello and other similar apps that help promote team spirit is a wise choice. These productivity apps are innovating the work processes to ensure efficient fulfillment of tasks even without much supervision. You can even export your trello data to excel by Coupler.io to blend information from different systems in one place. 

Since managing remote teams is challenging, you can take online courses to sustain your guidelines. For example, you can understand how to build an online presence, use software, or train your employees using the tutorials. Thus, this article is for you if you plan to revise your organizational remote team guidelines.

1. Assess Existing Communication Guidelines  

Evaluating the progress of your remote team members is an excellent way to start your organizational guideline revision. This strategy plays an essential role in analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the previous and present remote team management. Therefore, you must track the existing communication guidelines to sustain organizational productivity while the team remotely works effectively.  

Here are some questions to ask your organizational leaders upon planning to revise your remote team management:  

• Do you have a defined scale that can determine whether your recent virtual team management is successful or not? 

• Do you have enough tools to monitor the online team members' productivity effectively? 

• Can the productivity tools accurately determine the strengths and weaknesses of your team? 

• How can the organization adjust to the growing team requirements? 

• Do you have enough employee feedback about the existing team management guidelines? 

• Can the organization implement regular physical meetups? 

Assessing your existing management guidelines will help your organizational leaders identify which strategies you can readily implement. In addition, the leaders will understand how to properly align the corporate objectives to the capacity of the remote team members. Indeed, revising new team management guidelines involves regular evaluation. 

2. Understand The Obstacles Of Remote Management 

Remote access is an increasing requirement for every organization. This situation allows mobile staff to have the privilege to access business processes, office systems, and customer data from different locations. While remote access includes hundreds of benefits for your business, this organizational requirement poses shared risks.   

Underestimating the need to manage various management threats may be vulnerable to your business data. Since remote working depends on sharing organizational data outside the workplace, you have to find suitable technological devices to implement proper data protection. Therefore, consider investing in data restriction tools as you revise your remote team management guideline.  

3. Illustrate And Appoint Responsibilities 

While hiring a remote team reduces expenses, managing virtual team members are challenging. Since employee distance varies, communication is a crucial factor. Therefore, you must appoint separate tasks to sustain effective communication and real productivity between your workplace staff and remote members.  

If you don't have first-hand experience managing remote teams, you have to gather enough knowledge initially. After understanding how virtual teams work, create a training program for your employees. This technique includes welcoming and orienting your remote staff by designing a presentation that provides individual roles.  

Next, find the right collaboration tools to communicate with each team member. These tools include chat applications, project management tools, video call software, and screen sharing applications. Pick which communication tools work best with your in-house and remote staff.  

Before conducting your first virtual meeting, set a regular conference with your team members. If an appointment for the entire organization is required, you must consider this scenario. Note that a daily meeting is a great way to gather updates from each team. In addition, remember that duration of these daily meetings shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. However, if you have further concerns, you can extend so. 

After setting a regular conference schedule, appoint a team lead. This strategy helps in easy information transfer within different departments. Moreover, having a team lead lessens the time you'll spend meeting the entire team. Thus, appointing team leaders increases overall productivity.  

4. Build Detailed Standards For Remote Work Productivity 

While working from home decreases workplace costs, this situation exposes each remote team member to various distractions. These obstacles limit the attention and focus of the individuals who must stay on finishing tasks. Therefore, if your team members can't overcome work from home (WFH) challenges, these risks may harm their productivity.  

If you want to improve your remote team's productivity, you should provide them with the right tools to help them connect and produce high-quality work outputs. These technological devices include project management tracking apps, messaging apps, and video conferencing apps. Entrepreneurs and virtual staff can all stay on track wherever they work by equipping remote teams with new specialized tools.   

Take note that maintaining the accuracy of these work productivity tools requires assistance. Therefore, you must outsource professionally trained staff to ensure that you're utilizing these tools at their highest capabilities.  

5. Don't Underestimate The Risks Of Overworking

While monitoring the constant progress of your remote team, being sensitive to the risks of overworking is equally essential. As a business owner, you should always remind your team leaders not to assign too much workload to each staff. Shortened deadlines may build up unnecessary pressure on your employees, which may hinder them from submitting quality work outputs.  

To become more sensitive with your remote team, stay open to discussions. Prepare to adjust to your employees' physical needs to make things easier. Here are some work guidelines to help you implement healthy remote work productivity:  

• Set limits on the duration of daily work without breaks: Communicate the importance of proactively blocking periods on work calendars. To make this technique happen, advise your employees to hold themselves accountable. 

• Prevent work-life- boundaries fogging: Help your remote team understand the difference between work and play. Show the importance of the people-first approach.  

• Remind remote employees to take regular workouts: Tell your virtual staff to incorporate regular exercises into their daily schedule. Activities don't need to be as extreme as the tutorials you watch on television. You can schedule weekly company virtual yoga to make exercising a collaborative effort. 

  
  

6. Collect Feedback From Your Employees 

Gathering regular feedback from your employees is vital in monitoring if the remote team management guidelines work correctly. Feedback helps the organization determine weaknesses that require further adjustments. Moreover, this technique provides enough details on whether your management plan is working at all.   

Here are two ways to collect feedback from your employees:  

• One-to-one meeting: This allows your employees to disclose project details, giving you weekly project performance reviews. Since loneliness is a common complaint by WFH employees, you need to immediately understand how to bridge the gap. Regular two-way feedbacks make communication personal, and the employees will feel more connected with the organizational leaders.  

• Anonymous polls: Although one-to-one meeting helps the team leaders receive enough information, sensitive details need anonymous feedback. Since the rise of technology provides advantages in maintaining remote teams, you can utilize additional tools that lessen the fear of retribution. With that, gather anonymous employee data that gives one-to-one approaches in receiving a more holistic sense of how your employees feel.  

7.  Deliver Emotional Support 

Since you already understand how isolation can negatively affect the productivity of your employees, you must find ways to provide emotional support. As an entrepreneur, you shouldn't just focus on the welfare of your potential customers. Instead, you must invest in the dynamic agility of your internal employees.  

If you want to manage your remote teams effectively, you must train the emotional intelligence of your team leaders. A great team leader should possess qualities such as empowering team members, creating a friendly environment and showing productivity. Moreover, having emotionally intelligent team leaders foster highly-efficient team cultures.  

Since a leader's emotional distinction significantly affects organizational success, the team leaders must understand how to empower their team members. So, here are five ways a great corporate leader can encourage remote team members:  

• Actively listen to your colleagues as they speak. 

• Promote virtual empathy. 

• Utilize company values as a guide in making organizational decisions. 

• Show vulnerability. 

• Create a resilience routine. 

The pressure lies within the emotional intelligence of remote team leaders; therefore, you must always recognize efforts. This technique empowers all your online teams, which increases organizational trust, empathy, and overall productivity. Indeed, training your team leaders is one of the best ways to manage your remote teams effectively. 

8.Adjust Effectively 

Managing a telecommuting team is a difficult task. Although some organizational roles can exercise flexibility overnight, other departments can stop micromanaging your virtual workforce.   

For example, if your team members have set work hours within a week, allow individual restructuring. This method will give them enough free time to feel like they don't constantly work. Thus, those rest periods increase the energy of your remote team members, which adds to the organizational productivity.  

Key Takeaway 

To effectively manage your remote teams, you must assess your previous managerial guidelines and plan. As you move along with revising your remote team management, utilize technological tools to monitor workers' progress. However, don't underestimate the risks of giving too much workload because this situation may cause more challenges to your remote team.  

Author Bio: This article is written by our marketing team at HR Cloud. HR Cloud is a leading provider of HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee engagement, and intranet software. Our aim is to help your company improve employee engagement, employee productivity, and to save you valuable time!