How Can Leaders Best Manage Remote Employees?

Understanding the Importance of Properly Managing Remote Teams

Managing remote Teams can become a more challenging role for leaders, even greater than having to handle teams in a traditional workspace environment. Leaders and managers are now not only expected to have basic leadership and management skills, but they must also elevate these skills and have the right mindset to be able to lead a remote team. During the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work has become a more common workplace strategy. However, it is understandable that many leaders will need additional tools and skillsets to manage remote employees effectively.

Remote work can be just as foreign for leaders as it is for employees. This unfamiliarity places a certain pressure on managers, who are expected to know how to handle managing remote teams. Showcasing their ability to maintain a productive team despite the changes becomes a major goal. 

With the benefits of physical in-office tools and communications gone, leaders need to understand and adapt to the different working conditions that come with remote work. A great part of a remote team’s success relies on how well management can enable remote employees to work effectively outside the confines of a traditional office environment. Assuring team members that they will be given the support, trust, and confidence they need and deserve to stay productive and successful plays a big part in the success of any organization’s remote workplace strategy. 

The Difference Between Managing Onsite Workers and Leading Remote Teams

The difference between managing in-office and distributed teams extends beyond geographical factors. For leaders, identifying these differences is the first step to understanding the new workplace strategy, and ultimately deciding on the right management approach for your remote team. Once managers can understand these key differences, they will be one step closer to being ready to lead their teams towards success.

Relaying Instructions

In an office environment, relaying instructions is a familiar and easy task. Through words and actions, and with the help of physical tools and visual representations, explaining tasks to employees is a simple and direct aspect of day-to-day communications. There is always an advantage when communication is done in person, and tone is heard first-hand. 

Meanwhile, in a remote work setting, managers will need to increase their focus in organizing, explaining, and establishing instructions and goals. Since many remote interactions center around emails, messaging apps, and other project management tools, tone of voice and emotions are left for the receiver of the message to interpret. This makes it necessary for managers to practice efficient written communications. Of course, there are voice communication tools available, however, an over-saturation of required video meetings can inhibit employee progress and productivity. A great balance of when and how to use the available communication tools is a necessary foresight that managers must exercise. 

Trusting Employees

When the team is in the office, managers can visually see employees working at their desks on relevant tasks. As leaders, it is easy to monitor the progress and output of team members when they are in the line of sight. Plus, problems are solved quickly because there is easy access to the people and resources that can help address any questions that arise. Many traditional-style managers have gotten comfortable and taken the posture that as long as an employee is at her desk, she is getting work done.

However, this is not the case for remote workers. Team members are out of sight, and therefore, managers need to give higher trust to their employees. It also becomes necessary to find a new way to gauge productivity and work performance through updated Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). A bigger focus must be placed on the quality of outputs, even when managers are unable to see their employees actually working on the tasks. With such a big shift in the workplace, the trust between leaders and members can be better established through proper work from home policies and procedures.

Working Through Available Technology

While digitization has become an important part of every business, it becomes even more vital in a remote work environment. Onsite, managers have IT personnel to assist in technological aspects of the job. Equipment and tools are also provided as part of the workspace settings. 

However, in a remote setting, the demand to better navigate the digital world is heightened. The availability of and access to the right gadgets is sometimes left to the employees to acquire. Thus, the organization needs to assess the working environment of every member of its remote team, and be able to either supply necessary tools for them to keep up with the workload while working from home, or to adjust and be flexible with the schedule and demands, based on what available tools a remote worker has at home.

Tips for Leaders when Managing Remote Workers

Employees are the most valuable assets of a company. When you care for your employees, they will have the right mindset and motivation to willingly do well for your business.

With all these changes affecting the management approach for a remote working environment, here are a few things that can help managers adapt quickly and maintain a productive remote team:

Be Flexible

One of the biggest challenges in a remote work setting is the inevitable distractions that come with turning your home into an office — the allure of completing personal chores, the presence of family members, background noise, and distractions not typically found in a professional office, such as televisions and pets, can present an added challenge to remote worker success. 

While most of these things can be taken care of with the right discipline, there are some situations where working from home entails major adjustments, especially in terms of work schedule. As such, managers must be flexible towards their team members. 

Learning the remote work setup of employees is a good start, and this can be better organized with a well-discussed working schedule. Knowing how and when remote workers are most productive in a day is essential in understanding the pattern and quality of output they can provide while working from home. Start by talking with them and pinpointing the challenges each of them has, given the specifics of their home office environment.

Leaders sometimes have the ability to work around the schedules and deadlines to ensure that everyone is working at optimum capacity, even if it means allowing them to have different working hours from the core hours worked by the rest of the team. 

Set expectations with team members

After having a thorough discussion with the remote team, leaders should be able to get into a cycle or rhythm that promotes teamwork amongst the members. By using available communication channels, and balancing schedules and availability, the remote team can perform well and attain success. Leaders need to be the first employees to embrace the changes, and subsequently make their team members understand what is expected from them. In turn, explaining to team members about the remote work management plan and stressing the importance of team-based and one-on-one communications will empower employees to work efficiently in a remote setting.

Be forthcoming with your communication

It cannot be emphasized enough how communication is even more important when managing remote teams. With remote work and the increase of written communications, there is often little opportunity to evaluate communications for tone, voice, and context, along with a lack of physical cues. While video conferencing is also easily accessible, it is a method of communication managers should use selectively. Too many virtual meetings can lead to burnout and stress and are often best saved for when a two-way conversation is needed.

Given the communication limitations that come with working from home, managers need to learn to communicate more clearly and straightforwardly. The lack of verbal and visual cues could result in misinterpretations of text messages when it is not relayed properly.

“Can we talk?” might come off as intimidating when read and could cause anxiety for the message recipient, compared to “Can we talk about a new project I want you to work on?” where the intent and message is clear. It also gives the receiver enough details to react and respond accordingly.

Training Managers to Lead Remote Employees

As we establish the fact that leading a remote team requires a different approach and mindset from managing an in-office team, it becomes obvious that the success of a remote workforce starts with the proper training of their leaders.

And while your leaders may be capable and willing to take this challenge head-on, do not assume the shift to leading remote employees will be a natural or easy one for managers.

Organizations should strongly consider developing robust educational training materials (or partnering with a consultancy like ours for this) to get leaders up to speed on the challenges ahead and to develop within them the requisite skills to effectively manage distributed teams.

Training provides leaders with a clear picture of the road ahead, allowing them to accept the challenge, and mentally prepare themselves to tackle a new path of leadership, where output and results weigh more than employee visibility.

An educational push, in advance of leading remote teams, provides leaders a chance to get familiar with the company’s remote work policies and expectations, so they can communicate and implement these towards their remote team members. 

Effective training allows an organization to align their leaders so they can begin viewing challenges and opportunities with remote work similarly. This is also an opportunity for your organization to get leaders to understand the importance of their role in making remote work successful for their teams.

Leaders have to understand that as much as they are facing new challenges with this arrangement, so are their teams. Flexibility and proactive communication should be key areas of focus for this educational training.

With a shift to remote work, there is a need for managers to evolve, and many of our clients realized the importance of undergoing a comprehensive approach to educating leaders on managing remote teams.

Are your Leaders Ready to Manage Remote Teams?

Learning how to manage remote workers will require proper training and effort from your company’s business leaders. While leaders are expected to adapt more quickly, they still need to adjust nonetheless. 

Just as they are tasked to help their team members, the business should provide leaders with the proper change management insight, training, and tools, so that they become effective remote team leaders. 

Group discussions, policy creation, and overall guidance towards the remote work shift must be in place. Lastly, continuous data gathering through employee feedback and surveys should be conducted to analyze progress and measure room for improvement. 

With SCG’s 20+ years of experience as a workplace change management firm, we can help your leaders get ready to successfully manage remote teams. Fill out the form below to get in touch with us.