Follow these five ultimate tips to lead your remote team to success.
Video conferencing products like R-HUB`s TurboMeeting (http://www.rhubcom.com) and Cisco’s WebEx have made real the dream of many managers to have their own remote team. But never is it easy, when the moment comes to go for reality. Especially the first time, it is important to avoid improvisation and have a basic scheme to comply with. These five tips will help you to develop a strategy to deal with your first remote team management experience.
- Assume a “remote first” mentality. The usual situation is to have a distributed team and not a remote team, which means that some workers are remote; some other workers are in the office. As the name suggests, “remote first” means that virtual meetings should be your default choice, in order to avoid creating discriminations between remote workers and in-office workers. Remember that the feeling of being missed out is one of the dark aspects of remote working, and it can cause disaffection and disengagement.
- Facetime meeting is king. Facetime meetings have great relevance in remote team management, as they are the unique occasions to foster the sense of belonging to the organization in your remote collaborators and coordinate your team. As a rule of thumb, remote teams need many more meetings than ordinary teams, at least three times a week. The good news is that video conferencing products offer managers great tool sets to engage the audience, at the point that today running a virtual meeting gives more opportunities in terms of content sharing and information exchanges than the classical gathering in the boss office.
- Avoid asymmetry in handling information. Remote workers have the right to have the same amount of information of in-office workers. So, it is important to convey the flow of information to your team as a whole. This can be achieved in several ways. For example, you can use a Google sheet which every team member may access and where every progress is monitored and deadlines are clearly set.
- Take particular care of communication. Distance makes communication more difficult and less immediate. Being in tune with distant workers is harder, as it lacks the immediacy and spontaneity of the meetings in the real world. So, it is important to keep in touch constantly with remote collaborators. Use Skype, or similar chats.
- Use specific platforms. Remember that there are several services, like Trello and Google Drive that are specifically designed to help you to manage your remote team. They offer a huge set of valued resources, like shared sheets and docs, progress tracking, text chats. Similar tools are also available on top-class videoconferencing services, like the above mentioned TurboMeeting.
Conclusion: Keep in mind that managing a remote team presents different set of challenges from managing traditional teams. Persistent communication and specific video conferencing products will be of great help in order to address problems and lead your remote team to success.