6 tips on how to effectively manage a remote team
Miscellaneous / / October 19, 2023
Plan tasks, communicate with your team, and monitor work.
Our startup team works remotely, and employees are scattered all over the world - from Vietnam to Turkey. It seems impossible to organize everyone: you can’t see what everyone is doing and what their mood is. But we did it.
Based on my experience, I wrote a guide on how to sort everything out, organize and motivate employees remotely. I am sharing it with you.
1. Negotiate agreements and secure them
“On the shore”, discuss the rules with each employee:
- From what time and until what time do you work?
- When you need to be in touch.
- Is it possible to address work issues during non-working hours?
During the process, discuss controversial issues and record agreements in the knowledge base. Otherwise, if you hush up problems, the employee will start to burn out.
From practice: it is important for us that people constantly learn and develop. And we reminded the team about this over and over again, but encountered resistance.
It turned out that the guys didn’t know that they could do this during working hours and that we pay for the training. Now everyone is learning: they are taking courses in design and even writing.
2. Plan
Together with your employees, determine goals for the near future and guidelines for the future. To do this, carry out brainstorming and choose priority ideas.
For example, at the beginning of each month we call the editor and together draw up a content plan for the next month. The employee offers a list of topics for materials, and I, as a manager, advise what is worth taking into account and what is better to expand on.
For quality planning, it is important that a person understands the scope of tasks and his resources. If there is no such understanding, he should monitor his productivity. A sign will help: the task is written in one column, and the approximate time it took to solve it in the other. This way, the employee will be able to refer to his experience and set realistic expectations when planning. deadlines.
It is important that tasks have meanings and goals - what you are doing and why. Only in this case will employees have a clear understanding of their work, and the project will have a vector of development.
3. Organize your tasks
Often startups work only within the messenger. We also started this way, but quickly realized that Telegram is not enough and such communication leads to chaos and misunderstanding of who did what.
Therefore, it is better to use a task tracker and visualize tasks on kanban board. Here's how to do it:
- Add tasks to the virtual board.
- Distribute them into several columns, for example “To be done”, “In progress”, “Under review”, “Agreed”.
- Assign a person responsible for each task and set a deadline.
- Move the cards through the columns as you complete them.
It is important to write down tasks in detail and in clear language - so that your colleague and you yourself understand when you return to it.
To organize a Kanban board, you can use any convenient service. For example, we work in Notion. The service is available in Russia, free for a small team (up to 10 employees) and easy to use.
In the service, we have set up a filter system so that you can easily switch between employees and see which tasks are in progress, which are ready, and which are stuck.
The entire team must maintain the board. Everyone is responsible for their tasks and constantly updates them. Yes, it takes up working time, but everything is under control. At first, employees may be unfamiliar with using the tool. Keep reminding them that this is important until the team adapts.
4. Don't turn chats into a dump
To keep in touch with small team, a regular messenger is enough. For example, we have collected all work chats in one folder in Telegram.
Organizing communication for a large company is more difficult: the number of chats will grow, they need to be more finely grouped. And this is where corporate solutions like Hangouts, Pachki, VK Teams or Myteam come in handy.
Make sure that communication is only about business. And to discuss plans for Friday or photos of cats, you can create a separate chat - such floods are good for team building.
5. Dispel illusions
When everyone is working in the office, the mood of the team seems to be clear. But this is an illusion. Even more illusions are born remotely, because in this format there are few personal contacts. We don’t know how an employee’s day goes, what difficulties he has, or how long this or that task takes.
Therefore, the leader’s task is not just to request reports on the work done, but to reflect together with the team, dispel blind spots and look for growth points for the business.
To do this, we regularly conduct:
- Team meeting at the end of the week. We discuss who did what, what happened and what problems there are.
- Retrospective with part of the team at the end of the month. We look at the results and discuss what we can improve. If you have monthly statistics, this will help.
- Meetings 1 + 1 on request. The guys can call their managers any day and ask for advice. We believe that instead of trying to solve something in which you do not have enough experience, it is always better to consult a colleague. Don’t leave your employees to their own devices—be in touch and support them.
The ideal duration of a call is: up to an hour. During this time, the team will not have time to get tired and will calmly continue working.
6. Maintain a knowledge base
Don’t keep all the information in your head: it takes away your strength and makes you indispensable in the bad sense of the word. Unless you know how something works, you can't transfer the task and go on vacation.
Write down templates, instructions, checklists, record useful contacts, and empirical experience. Keep everything in one place so it's easy to find the data.
This simplifies communication, speeds up work and allows you to avoid repeating mistakes. Employees won’t have to constantly pull each other because everything is already organized in folders, for example in Notion.
How to take care of your team💼
- What to do if your employee is burned out
- How to praise employees so that the whole team works more efficiently
- What is the advantage of an owner's mindset among employees and how to create it in your team