How to avoid mistakes in managing remote teams
When you manage a remote team, you are facing many challenges that you definitely never had before in an office. Because this is a new scene in the professional world, it is still to be defined the best way to engage your team, motivate them and lead them to success.
Making sure that you get from each member the productivity that your company needs is not easy, and that is why as a manager is on us to avoid mistakes that might irreparably hurt the project.
Given our experience, we can share with you the best ways to avoid great (and common) mistakes when managing a remote team.
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Getting obsessed with other companies results
The fact that other companies couldn’t make remote teams work doesn’t mean you won’t be able to make it either.
Nobody said that challenges were easy, but here and now we have the change to become leaders in a new work force style that is happening and that will be a staple in a near future whether we are part of the movement or not.
So stop paying attention to negative news about remote work and focus on how to make it work for your business.
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Letting your employees forget that they do belong to a team
One of the problems that we will most commonly bump into is individuality. Because bonding as a team doesn’t happen as naturally as it would with everyone sitting next to each other, it is not uncommon that your each one starts focusing on meeting their goals and forget to look around, and push together as a team.
It is crucial to remind everyone that if one of us win, we all do, that is not about personal goals but cooperation to reach the goals together. Having under control might be a huge challenge, but as we said before, it is all about growing into a new concept.
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Forgetting about communication with your team
Again, how easy is to forget to check on people that we don’t see? Well, very easy.
A common mistake is to forget to ask your employees on their feedback, how they feel about the job, the strategies we are using and the hopes of growth they have within the company.
It is on us as team leaders to build the communication necessary to remind everyone that they do belong to a team that listens to them no matter where they are on the map.
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Hiring good professionals that have no idea how to work from home
Yes, finding the right professional is incredibly difficult, finding talent, much more, but now we also need to find people that know how to manage working from home.
The fact that they know how to do their job might not necessarily mean they know how to do it when they are outside the classic work environment.
From having the right tools at home to work, to be able to manage different schedules and organize on their own, working from home might be too big of a challenge for some people.
So make sure you have a strong conversation about it with them first, and maybe look into people that already had the experience of working remotely to start building your team.
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Not using the right communication tools
Because you all might be far from each other in the team, and maybe with different time schedule, you can’t just say something, leave a post it or have a quick talk about a pending issue.
Traditionally everyone runs to email to leave track of what has been said, but the truth is that it can become so messy it can really hurt our team.
So make sure you choose the right platform and tool for every communication and establish a system that everyone knows how to follow to guarantee a fluent communication.
