12 Ways to Successfully Manage Remote Employees
Many managers will have managed remote employees for the first time during the last year. For those that are used to managing in-office, managing employees remotely is a big adaptation.
Adaptations cover many areas from getting employees set up with the best communication channels to ensuring full productivity is achieved and keeping company culture and teamwork strong.
If you are planning to keep employees working remotely full or part-time, then now is the time to really understand the best ways to manage remote employees.
In this blog, we cover the main challenges that can occur with remote working before offering some top tips on how to successfully manage remote employees to keep productivity and satisfaction high.
The Challenges of Remote Working
Before discussing management of remote employees, it's important to understand the challenges that come with remote working.
No In-Person Supervision
A primary challenge of remote working is the loss of in-person supervision. This can cause managers to worry that employees are not working as hard as when in the office. Unfortunately, this can result in micromanaging, which brings many problems.
The loss of in-person supervision also means that employees cannot get support or advice as easily.
Communication Difficulties
Even if you have lots of communication channels set up for your remote employees, these don’t match communicating and asking questions in-office. Getting an answer to a simple question can take drastically longer when working remotely, which can delay the completion of work.
A loss of in-person communication also makes it harder to understand each employees’ mood and sentiment. This can harm relationship development, especially with new employees who have never met those they are communicating with.
Distractions
Working remotely brings many more distractions than in-office working. If working at home, employees may be distracted by home-life tasks or taking care of children that are learning remotely.
There will also likely be other people in employees’ at-home workspaces that can be a source of distraction. This is especially true if those individuals are not working at the same time as the employee. Pets and potential house guests could distract too.
Employees that work remotely encounter more distractions which can affect productivity.
Social Isolation
Workers are used to spending a large amount of their day with other people. Working at home takes away this social contact. This can cause isolation which can affect mood and productivity.
This is even more of an issue for those who live alone. The problem is more pronounced during the pandemic as so much personal social contact has been removed.
Poor Work Setup
Most employees will not have an at-home office. They may not even have space to set up an office space in another room.
A lack of comfortable work furniture, tech items, and a work-life divide all contribute to reduced work efficiency and productivity.
Burnout and Loss of Motivation
Issues that arise when working from home can lead to loss of motivation and even eventual burnout. These issues include social isolation and loss of work-life separation to not knowing if they are performing as expected.
This loss of employee motivation and burnout will drastically affect productivity and could result in high employee turnover.
Ways to Manage Remote Employees
Now that you understand the main difficulties experienced when employees are working from home, what can you do to fix these?
The following are some top ways to manage remote employees that will keep everyone productive, motivated, and happy!
1. Set Expectations and Keep Staff Updated
Remote workers need clear expectations set and they often actually want this.
Make sure you offer a lot of clarity on what needs to be done and by when. Set measurable KPIs and performance goals too. While you may have had these in the office, they are often quarterly or monthly targets. It may be useful for some employees to have weekly goals when working remotely.
Set hours to be worked too (discussed more below) and outline policy for working outside of office hours. Working at home can lead to employees never “logging-off” from work. But this needs to be discouraged to avoid burnout.
Get more advice on how to prevent employee burnout while working from home here!
Keep staff members updated on what is going on as well. This includes news about other projects that may concern them, staff changes, policy changes, and general company news. These are things that would have been told, heard, or spread in the office organically but now need to be communicated to everyone to ensure all staff know.
When managing remote employees, it’s important to set clear expectations and goals.
2. Make Tracking Productivity Easy
It’s a lot harder to know if employees are being as productive as possible when at home. Managers need a way to ensure employees are working without interruption when they should be and getting as much done as they would in the office.
Employees can worry too that their manager thinks they are not working hard enough. A good tracking system fixes these concerns.
Some productivity tracking solutions include:
Providing a work schedule with what needs to be done, when it needs to be started, and deadline dates. You can use shared documents or ideally, invest in task management software like Asana.
Ask employees to send a list each day of what was worked on and what will be worked on the next day. Avoid micromanaging though, simply ask for this list and only comment on it if the employee isn’t working on what they should be or isn’t being productive compared to their equals.
Use work tracking apps, like Timely, that show times active, activity level, websites viewed, etc.
Setup Check-Ins
Initiate daily check-ins via each employee’s preferred platform (call, video call, email, etc.) They can tell you what they worked on, what they have to work on, and any issues they currently have or may have going forward.
Try to have team check-ins as well, so that everyone is on the same page and help can be offered where needed. Do a start and end of week team meeting plus a daily team check in email to keep everyone on the same page.
3. Don’t Micromanage!
Managing remote employees can lead to micromanaging, which is damaging for everyone. As long as you have good task management processes, then managers should leave their employees to their work and only check-in in more depth if productivity appears to drop off significantly.
Ultimately, managers need to trust employees when they are working remotely. If an employee isn’t being productive or working all the hours they should, this will become clear on its own.
4. Offer Flexible Work Schedules
In the office, everything is set up to focus 100% on work. There are minimal non-work-related distractions and the environment is built for successful working. At home, that is not always the case. Employees will have many distractions at home that could lead them to feel more comfortable working different hours than in-office.
For example, it’s not easy to work when children are at home or when a roommate or partner is around and not working themselves. Employees in these situations may want to move their work hours to when these groups are not in the house.
If you don’t want to offer everyone flexible hours, set out the hours to be worked but tell employees to come to you with concerns. You can then work with those employees to make a schedule that works best for their needs.
Remember, most if not all of your employees didn’t sign on to work from home. Therefore, you cannot just expect them to fit into your schedule when a home office setting offers many third-party distractions that can make working difficult.
Do be careful changing hours without consultation if employees signed a contract with set working hours. Those hours must always be enforced if that’s what the employee wants.
Some remote employees may need adjust the hours they work due to home commitments and distractions.
5. Make Communication Key
Communication is crucial when working remotely. Managers need to emphasize the importance of this and promote two-way communication. Make it clear that you’re always contactable, and set up the best communication methods for your staff.
A good practice is to offer as many communication options as possible. Email, call, text, video call, messaging platforms, etc. This allows employees to say which is best for them. Managers and other employees can then try to communicate on those platforms.
For example, one employee may prefer email as a communication method. Whereas another may not want coworkers to contact them via email because checking email frequently distracts them. This employee may prefer using a messaging platform with notifications that appear on screen as they are working on their current task so they can stop to answer the message without other distractions.
Unless the request or question is very urgent, allow some delay in reply. Productivity can be an issue when remote working, so don’t break someone's flow to demand a response to small questions that can wait. Make this clear to other employees trying to contact each other too.
Allow some time for a reply or allow employees to say “I’ll get back to you shortly” (and be ok with that!)
6. Listen to Your Employees
Along with needing to communicate with employees, you need to listen to them and give them what they need as much as possible.
To help with this, some managers have started making use of monthly surveys or simply ask for feedback at intervals. This feedback can be anonymous or named.
Ask what is going well, what could be improved, and major issues with management and working from home. Then must act on this constructive feedback where possible!
Additionally, make it clear that employees can still come to you with concerns whenever they want and that you have a virtual open-door policy. It can be more intimidating to call, video chat, or email a manager than to walk into their office to discuss something. A virtual open-door policy will help reduce some of that intimidation.
7. Adjust Meeting Length and Style
Meetings will be different when virtual as opposed to in-office too. What works in the office may not work remotely, so management made need to adjust meeting protocols.
When working remotely, it’s even more important to think about if a meeting is really necessary. When in-office, it’s easy to call a quick meeting. But when being done virtually, this process takes more time to get everyone connected to call and started with the discussion.
A good strategy is to note down things to discuss in a meeting and ask employees to do the same. Then instead of calling a meeting for everything on the list, host one longer meeting where you cover all topics.
While the meeting maybe longer, you avoid the lost time that occurs when getting started with lots of shorter meetings.
8. Watch Out for Employee Issues and Signs of Distress
When working out of the office, it’s much harder to pick up on employees that feel unmotivated, stressed, or just a bit down. Therefore, try to be more alert to picking up on these feelings in conversations and by looking at their work productivity.
If you think there is an issue of distress, discuss this with the employee in a friendly and non-threatening way. Then make changes where you can to help ease these feelings.
It’s even more important to pick up on signs of employee distress when managing a remote team.
9. Ensure Employees Have Equipment to Be Successful
Not having an optimal work setup or resources that are found in-office can affect productivity. If employees have not been provided with equipment, for example, because management did not know how long they would be working remotely, provide them with that equipment asap. This is a must if your team is staying remote for the long-term.
Ask what things employees need and cover the expenses. This includes ergonomic office furniture, stationary, and tech equipment.
Those with a less than ideal work from home setup, such as living in a small apartment with roommates, could be offered a budget to work in a co-working space too.
Utility Expenses
Be cautious of unseen expenses that employees may encounter too, such as higher utility bills from using heat and electricity all day.
While employees can offset some of this cost when they do their tax return, offer to give each employee a monthly fund for utilities. Being forced to work from home and cover costs such as higher utility bills can be frustrating and cause work satisfaction issues.
10. Promote Team Building and Company Culture
Working remotely can cause isolation, reduce team bonds, and make collaborating more difficult.
Try to promote working together and keeping up team culture as much as possible. This includes setting up virtual events and initiating team games and icebreakers.
Also, try to have some non-work catch-up at the start of meetings. For example, at the beginning of start-of-week and end-of-week meetings, let employees discuss what they did over the weekend or what they have planned.
If you have made new hires while working remotely, this step is even more important.
11. Celebrate Successes
Recognizing achievements helps with employee morale and motivation. This is especially important when you have employees working remotely.
If employees do good work be sure to tell them that and congratulate them. You may even want to share employee successes with the whole team.
If you do that, don't favor certain employees while never acknowledging others. This can have the opposite effect where some employees feel inadequate compared to others, and rifts between employees may occur.
12. Provide Employees with Advice on Working at Home
Working at home will have been a new phenomenon for many employees. Along with thinking about ways to manage remote employees, help your employees adapt to working at home by offering them tips to help with productivity, motivation, and satisfaction.
You can offer advice based on what has worked for you. Or, you can share articles with top remote work tips such as our blogs on staying motivated and efficient when working from home and maintaining a healthy work-life balance when working remotely.
In Conclusion
Despite being a new phenomenon for many, managing remote employees doesn’t need to be difficult. By making just a few adjustments to your management style and techniques, you can keep employees motivated, satisfied, and highly productive!