Leading a Remote Team Successfully

More companies continue to turn to remote teams. It makes sense. In many cases, it can help to boost productivity while being more efficient on members of the team as a whole. It even reduces the costs a business owner has on managing their employees in-house.

There’s no doubt that remote working is the future. Yet, that doesn’t mean all companies and human resource teams have the tools and resources to properly manage these teams. Most managers don’t know how to balance remote workers, access to cloud data, and still meet labor goals. Incorporating remote working initiatives into your business is a good move, but to do so, you need to have the right strategies in place.

Setting Clear Goals for Your Business Makes the Difference

You want to incorporate more remote working into your business. And, you need it to be a success from day one. Keeping that in mind, consider a few tips for creating clear goals to ensure this is possible:

Create SMART goals. That means they should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
Ensure all goals are working towards facilitating a flexible, remote worker. It’s easy to try to implement the same rules and guidelines you have in your physical structure to a remote team. It just will not work.
Managing your team remotely is also different. Set goals on how you will do this. For example, establish a goal to connect with each team member every day or once every two days.

Implement Deep Work

Because managing teams remotely is very different, it is also important for companies to look at new strategies that facilitate success. It’s easy to have a picture in the mind’s eye of a freelancer sitting in front of the TV sipping on a drink while working on their laptop. A component of goal setting for your team should be to ensure they are working through deep work.

Visit us next week as the author, Ashley Wilson, does a guest blog on Team Building.

Deep work is a concept in which a person is focusing on a specific task in a distraction-free environment. This helps the individual to get the work done more fully and efficiently. Remote work doesn’t mean that a person can juggle multiple tasks at one time. Your team members still need to treat work as it would be treated in the office.

To achieve this, consider:

Having a location where they can work without distractions.
Create an environment where productivity will flourish based on what that individual benefits from within their workplace. With outgoing people, it’s best to have some type of noise. For those who are reserved, quiet is best.
Incorporate flexibility into the workplace as well. It’s important to find a way to balance work-life, but at the same time to incorporate some level of flexibility within that structure.

Overall, remote team management is very different from your typical office structure. That’s okay. Once you set clear goals and communicate with your team what they are, including how to implement deep work, you will see the benefits it offers.

Do you need to add to your team? Contact us today to see how to work with us.