Tips for Building and Managing a Remote Team Effectively
With so many companies moving to a work-from-home model, building and managing a remote team has been a challenge for many managers. However, creating a top-performing team doesn’t have to be difficult, even when hiring and managing completely remotely.
To be successful as a remote manager and build the strongest team possible, you simply have to update your previous in-office strategy for the new virtual workplace.
In this article, we discuss some top ways to manage, hire, and conduct team-building activities remotely to build an outstanding team.
Ways to Successfully Build a Remote Team
Building an amazing remote team has three components:
Effectively managing the remote employees you have
Being able to build a culture and initiate remote team bonding
Having a successful remote hiring strategy
1. Managing Remote Teams
To build a productive and motivated remote team, you must first learn how to effectively manage employees that aren’t in the office. When managing remote teams, there are various techniques to employ to ensure everyone stays motivated, satisfied, and productive.
The following are some top tips for managing your work-from-home team.
Communicate Often and Effectively
Even when in the office, communication is a vital part of building a strong and motivated team. Effective communication is even more crucial when building and managing a remote team. To initiate effective communication, invest in tools that allow this to happen remotely. These tools include video conferencing software, like zoom, and workplace chat apps, such as slack.
You also need to implement an open communication policy. Let employees know they can reach out to you when they need, and encourage all team members to be open in communicating and responding quickly and effectively.
Deciding on protocol and platforms for different types of communication can be useful too. For example, you may tell employees to use the following platforms for these main types of communication:
Quick Internal Messaging: workplace communication platform, like Slack
More In-depth Internal Communication: email, call, or video call
Client Communication: email, call, or video call (depending on their preferences)
Project-Based Communication: project management software/system
If implementing the above, get the opinions of employees on which types of platforms they prefer for which types of communication. Additionally, ensure that you have a protocol for when team members don’t want to be disturbed.
To build a successful remote team, you must adjust your management strategy for the new work environment.
Set Out Clear Remote Work Guidelines
Remote working can be more flexible than an in-office set-up, which is one of its appeals. However, you still need to set guidelines for your employees.
Things these guidelines may cover include:
The number of hours they must work
The times when they should be actively working
How often they must check-in/be available throughout the day
How they should track their working hours
What communication platforms to use for what things (as discussed above)
As long as everyone knows what’s expected of them when working remotely, meeting goals and avoiding workplace conflicts is achievable.
Help Your Staff Create an Effective At-Home Set Up
Even if you’re great at motivating your team and maintaining job satisfaction, these benefits will be lost if your team doesn’t have the tools to do their work from home. Therefore, you must aid them in creating an at-home office space that allows them to reach their most productive levels.
You must ensure they have access to all the tools they need to do their job and offer to pay for equipment like desktop monitors and ergonomic office furniture.
Implement Burnout Prevention Tactics
Employee burnout is more likely to occur when working remotely as staff no longer have work-life boundaries and may feel the need to keep working even after their contract hours are reached for the day.
Communication issues can also leave employees wondering if their performance is up to par. Not knowing if they are performing as desired and being concerned that management thinks they aren’t performing well (even if they are) is a primary cause of employee burnout.
Luckily, there are lots of ways to prevent burnout in remote employees, such as:
Setting work hours that must be stuck too
Limiting the approval of overtime requests
Offering incentives to take personal time
Communicating about employee performance clearly and frequently
Do you need some more in-depth advice on how to manage a remote team? Read our 12 top tips for successfully managing remote employees.
A first step in creating a strong remote team is helping staff with a home office setup.
2. Building Culture and Relationships in a Remote Team
It’s incredibly important to know how to build a strong culture with a remote team and create employee bonds. Individuals that don’t feel connected to their team are less productive, lack job satisfaction, and are more likely to quit unexpectedly.
When building and managing a remote team, maintaining a company culture and creating strong team relationships can be challenging. However, it’s not impossible and there’s a lot you can do as a manager to help with remote team building. The following are some ways to give your company culture and team bonds a boost.
Make the Company Mission and Values Clear
It’s difficult to build a company culture if employees aren’t sure what the goals and mission of the organization are. Ensure that your focused company mission, values, and goals are shared with all staff members. This is especially important to go over when new hires join the team.
In understanding and aligning company and employee values and goals, a strong culture can be generated.
Implement Team Building Activities
You can discover an array of remote team building activities that help create strong bonds and friendships within your team. Best of all, these activities can be done remotely, over video call or on messaging platforms.
Some great remote team building initiatives to try include:
Virtual happy hours or lunches
Virtual coffee breaks or water cooler sessions
Office quizzes and ice breaker sessions
Internal mentorships
Cross-departmental collaboration on projects
Offer Ways to Meet In-Person
If your team is still based quite locally, in-person meet-ups can do wonders for team building. You could meet up for a happy hour, for example, or host a once-a-month lunch at a restaurant. In the case that your team is more geographically spread out, consider hosting a retreat where everyone can meet and bond.
Click here to learn more about building employee relationships and a strong company culture when operating remotely.
Virtual team bonding activities are a critical element in remote team building.
3. Hiring Employees Remotely
A significant part of building and managing a remote team is knowing how to hire effectively. When conducting the hiring process remotely, there are things to consider that you wouldn’t have had to when your team worked exclusively from the office.
Some things to think about before you begin hiring for new remote positions include:
Whether to keep hires local or hire on a national or international level
Having a remote team limits the need for staff to be based within a certain geographic area. While expanding the area you hire from will increase the talent pool you have access to, the competition for top candidates also increases. Due to increased competition, you may have to offer more than before to lock down the best candidates, such as higher salaries and more benefits.
Therefore, you must weigh up the pros and cons of expanding your hiring area and choose the option that brings the best talent to cost returns. Comparing candidates on an international level can be challenging too, due to discrepancies and differences in qualifications, such as degree programs taken.
Time Zone Differences
If your employees are spread across the country, or across the world, you need to consider how differing time zones and work schedules will affect operations. Do employees need to be available no matter what during specified hours for external and internal communication? Or will having certain employees out of office at your standard business times be okay?
How your salary structures could be adjusted
Salaries are set, in part, on the cost of living in the area you hire from. When employees had to be in-office, they all shared the same cost of living expenses. If considering expanding the geographic area you hire from, cost of living (including the cost of housing, utilities, and groceries) will vary across employees.
Therefore, should you adjust each employee's salary based on where they live (even if these employees are doing the same job and have the same experience)? Or do you offer the same salaries across the board, adjusting only for experience and job responsibility level?
Adjusting salaries based on cost of living levels out the playing field for those that live in expensive areas. However, employees can lose motivation if they see a colleague is making more than them in the same position.
Take a look at our previous article for a more detailed look at the discussion on whether going remote will affect salaries.
Do all hires need to be permanent?
Remote work has opened a lot of companies’ eyes to the range of employment models they can benefit from. Now that staff don’t need to be in office, the option to hire freelancers from across the globe has become viable for many.
The advantages of hiring freelance or other temporary workers include reduced costs from not needing to provide benefits and the ability to hire international candidates that don't have permission to work in your country of operation.
A downside to these employees is that you can’t necessarily have them working for you whenever you need. While your contracted employees must be available during the hours their contract states, very few freelancers will stick to working a 9-5, five days a week type model for you.
There are additional things to consider when hiring remote staff, like salary, location, and if they’ll be full or part-time.
Creating a Successful Remote Hiring Strategy
Once you’ve answered the above questions and know what type of candidates you’re looking for (and what salary you’re willing to offer them), you can start the remote hiring process.
The first part of your hiring process, including posting about the open position on job boards, will be quite similar to before you moved to a remote model. If you previously relied heavily on finding candidates at events, such as job fairs or general industry events, you’ll need to find a way to replace that strategy while these in-person events cannot be attended.
Remote Interviewing
Once you’ve posted your job openings and have a list of qualified candidates, you need an effective remote interviewing strategy in place. You must understand how to get the information you need from interviews you hold over the phone and via video call.
In addition, there are cues relating to professionalism that you can pick up on when giving virtual interviews. The interviewee’s video background, attire, and general environment (can you hear or see other people, pets, etc. in the video? Or are there other interruptions?) can show a lot about how professional a candidate will be when working from home.
It’s also important to ask questions that show how good of a remote employee they’ll be. For example, ask them if they’ve worked remotely before, what their success was like with that, and if they can provide a reference of the person they worked under remotely.
You should additionally ask about their:
Independence level
Organizational and time management skills
Ability to meet deadlines with limited managerial input
Requesting interview presentations and/or administering tests or practice tasks may need to become part of your virtual hiring process too. These tactics help ensure that you’re selecting the best remote candidate.
Remote Onboarding
Now that you’ve chosen the best candidate and offered them the job, you must have a successful remote onboarding strategy in place. This process needs to both teach the new hire what they need to know about doing the job and help them begin to integrate into the team and build relationships.
Your remote onboarding process must:
Make the new employee feel welcome and initiate team bonding, for example by having a virtual meet and greet with the team
Help them understand each of their co-worker’s roles
Teach them about general company and remote working policies
Show them how to complete their work tasks in a way that aligns with the company’s way of doing things (for example, the tone you use when talking to clients, which communication and project management platforms are used for what, etc.)
Create checklists and digital folders that hold all the information they need
You need to also use onboarding time to ensure the hire has all the equipment they require to do the job. If they’re missing anything from their work-at-home setup that’s necessary to do the job, provide what they need as quickly as possible.
Need even more onboarding strategy suggestions? See our eight helpful tips for remote onboarding.
Working with a Recruitment Agency
Does the process of remote hiring seem daunting? If so, why not partner with a recruitment agency? Recruitment agencies can help you throughout the entire hiring process, from finding qualified candidates to conducting preliminary video interviews.
If you operate in the publishing or medical communications industry and are interested in learning more about a recruitment agency partnership, contact the team at Lynne Palmer. We have decades of experience in these industries and would be happy to discuss your needs and help you hire the best remote candidates!
In Conclusion
Knowing how to build a remote team is crucial if your organization plans to continue working from home for the foreseeable future. Luckily, building an amazing remote team doesn’t have to be a challenge, and just a few tweaks to your in-office strategy can bring amazing returns in terms of employee productivity, success, and satisfaction.