Remote and flexible work is a growing phenomenon. In 2018, over 50% of full-time employees worked remotely at least part of the time, way up from 39% in 2012. The number of remote workers will only continue to rise as it’s now the norm in the workplace. Working remotely has become increasingly common, and a key perk to offer potential job candidates. A survey by After College found that 68% of job seeking Millennials were more interested in a company if they had remote work options.
With more employees working remotely, how can a manager maintain a strong team?
Today, managers can communicate with others from his team in a variety of ways, eliminating the need for regular face-to-face meetings. If your organization includes remote workers, you need to support and enable them. Every employee should be able to work effectively and be fully engaged no matter where they are located.
Call it empathy, emotional intelligence, or basic human decency, the idea is just the same. Since remote team management is all about collaboration and working side by side, the ability to place oneself in the shoes of another person plays a major part in overall collaboration.
Communication, engagement, trust, and collaboration are key elements of a powerful and cohesive team. As your organization expands its remote work opportunities, consider how you need to adapt your tools and approaches to support those working remotely.
One common method of managing teams, especially when it comes to remote teams, is by building trust. Employees need to trust that their managers are looking out for their best interest. On the other hand, managers need to trust that their employees are engaged and motivated at work. Trust, collaboration, and understanding ultimately lead to the most effective remote teams.
Here are a few things I’ve found to be critically important for distributed teams:
- Set up a company culture of distributed team members and collaboration. Job seekers don’t want to be the only one or two remote team members they want have a company where it’s a normal part of the culture work remotely.
- Create a daily stand up to go over the days goals, review action items and work through any issues your team might have encountered.
- Have clear communication channels email and Slack work well for our teams at Job Mobz. But use whatever tools your organization has found to be the most useful.
- Invite remote team members to quarterly events, holiday parties and to visit the team for a week at a time so they don’t feel left out.
- Lastly, set up regular 1 on 1 times for you and your remote team members to connect so you can figure out what is working and what is broken.
What steps are you taking to building a strong remote team? Please comment below.
If you found this article valuable to you it would mean a lot to me if you could share it on Twitter or LinkedIn.
For more content follow me on
