Ways to Better Manage a Team in a Remote Work Environment

Are you currently in charge of a fully remote team of employees? If so, you may need a little input on how to juggle your responsibilities and ensure you’re meeting your team’s needs while operating in an entirely remote work environment. When all of your employees are working from home, it can sometimes seem difficult to balance various work concerns and handle the team effectively, even if you’ve instructed everyone to use a particular branded virtual office zoom background during remote meetings. Fortunately, there’s a better way. Here are some simple ways you can use your communication skills and various team-building exercises to ensure a well-managed team, even from a distance.

Consistent and Clear Communication

No matter what type of zoom background office your remote employees may be using, your messages and instructions may not be getting across if you lack the right communicative approach. Communication is one of the key ingredients for any synergistic workplace, including fully remote ones. That’s why you may want to spend some time re-evaluating your approach and checking whether your business communication has been both consistent and clear. To improve your strategy overnight, you may want to:

• Let employees know they can contact you with questions or concerns at any time
• Establish clear-cut company communication guidelines, spelled out and distributed via the employee handbook or other pamphlets
• Open several different channels of communication, such as online instant messaging systems, video chats, phone calls, text messages, conferencing tools, professional emails, and so on
• Proactively provide key information to employees to minimize the risk of confusion or frustration
• Open an anonymous tips box where your employees can drop their feedback and ideas

Also read: 5 Ideas Make Successful Virtual Meetings and Webinars

Team Building Practices

Although it may seem tougher to build a sense of teamwork and cohesiveness among a remote team than among an in-person one, you can still make it happen with enough time, dedication, and planning. Just as you may have instructed all team members to either implement or bypass zoom virtual background requirements, so, too, can you instruct all team members to follow the same company playbook and comply with the same guidelines? For a few team-building practices to get you started, you could:

• Create an online space where team members can come to chat, build relationships, and get to know their co-workers
• Hold regular company-wide meetings or info sessions to ensure everyone is on the same page
• Make yourself available for one-on-one meetings to talk with disgruntled team members who may feel left out or left behind
• Hold occasional in-person company retreats so your remote workers can get to know each other better

Managing a team effectively when all the team members are working remotely full-time can present several challenges for supervisors. If you’re in charge of a remote team, there are several tweaks you can make to your approach to help you better meet the needs of your work-from-home employees. In particular, ensuring clear and consistent communication with your team and trying different team-building approaches throughout the year can help you build a successful and productive team while operating on a fully remote setup.