As is the current trend, working remotely is widely applied as a working system that offers benefits for both parties, and workers get flexibility. On the other hand, companies can save costs for space and work facilities.

Even so, companies also need to know how to properly monitor remote employees. Managing workers with remote working methods requires a very different approach.

Besides trying to video call and keep all team activities transparent, you need to make individual remote experiences visible. That means keeping everyone’s workload, work/life, engagement, performance, and sentiment in focus.

This can be a challenge for companies in monitoring and controlling remote employees. Without a good strategy and planning, your company can suffer losses due to out-of-control employee performance. Here are the best tips and tools for managing and developing remote employees:

How to Manage Remote Teams Effectively?

Here are some best tips to manage employees with remote working methods, enabling a highly effective and happy remote workforce:

1. Maintain Communication Effectiveness

The main key to success in developing remote employees is maintaining effective communication. This will greatly affect the smoothness and productivity of work. Starting from communicating to providing job briefs to information about work processes.

This communication can be supported using an appropriate communication platform. There are several media to facilitate communication between teams, such as group messaging, video conferencing, project management tools, and so on. 

For example, you want to organize a training program for your remote team. The best medium is video. You can provide animated explainer videos to conduct training in your company. Don’t worry, you can use explainer video services to create high-quality videos.

2. Develop a Remote Work Policy

If you want your company to be successful with remote work, you need to establish universal rules of engagement for every employee. Your company should have a remote work policy that clearly outlines managerial expectations, rights, and processes.

In addition to detailing the mechanisms that enable remote work, your policy should act as a cultural document, communicating your company’s values, corporate responsibility, and commitment to transparency. With this work policy in place, your remote employees can be more focused, organized, and clear.

3. Set Clear Expectation

One way to manage remote employees is to set clear expectations. Each job certainly has a target load, both in terms of quality, quantity, or from the time (deadline) of work. It can also help your employees stay motivated and on track with their tasks.

Setting these targets will help employees have the right job limits and work standards. Employees will know what must be achieved and how to achieve it. Thus, it needs to be clear, realistic, and measurable, so that companies can assess employee performance from their work output.

4. Schedule Weekly Team Meetings

Keeping your team interactive is an essential part of remote working. You can schedule weekly team meetings to keep them on track with the progress of their weekly tasks and bring your entire remote team together virtually. 

Besides maintaining cohesiveness, you can also get to know each of your teams more closely. 

5. Celebrate Employee Success

When your team has a great work performance and achieves success, it would be best to give rewards and celebrate your employee success as an appreciation of their hard work. That way, they will feel more valuable and appreciated.

It can be in the form of, sending thank you, giving shout-outs at the regular meeting, or sending care packages.

6. Provide Emotional Support

Remote employees are vulnerable to stress, anxiety disorders, and feelings of loneliness. That’s why it would be better if the manager can provide emotional support to each team member who works remotely.

Ask about their situation, and listen to their responses and concerns. If necessary, hold a virtual break to be a time when you and your team members can talk and greet each other.

7. Do Evaluation

Evaluation is an important agenda every month to assess and improve employee performance. Work evaluation is carried out using a basis in the form of work reports or employee performance appraisals (KPI). 

This can help a team become more advanced and develop because the team knows what is lacking and what needs to be improved.

Best Tools your Remote Team Needs to Succeed

Now you have a better idea of how to develop and manage your remote employees effectively. Now let’s move forward to some best tools that can support your remote team’s needs to succeed:

1. Slack

One of the best tools for maintaining good communication with the team is Slack.

Slack is an instant messaging application that is widely used by remote workers. This application has various features you need to communicate with other remote employees. It can also be used via desktop or mobile devices.

2. Asana

Asana is one of the most effective project management tools that can be utilized for teams and individuals with a simple and intuitive interface. Interestingly, Asana can also be your video tool because it has features to build out presentation videos.

This tool makes it easy for leaders to divide tasks between teams and manage project schedules. Asana is integrated with various work support applications, such as Microsoft Teams, Jira Cloud, Gmail, and Slack. 

3. Proofhub

Proofhub can make it easier for the team from each project to carry out their responsibilities in an orderly and timely manner.

For every team leader, this tool can be used to monitor the progress of various ongoing projects through the features provided, including:

  • Multitasking feature
  • Gantt chart
  • Calendar
  • Reporting
  • Project templates

With various features, the ProofHub application can still provide a simple appearance so that it is easy to use.

4. Trello

This one best team collaboration tool is useful for managing various projects in one place. With Trello, everyone on the project can see what’s being worked on, who’s working on it, and how far they’ve come.

Takeaway

Even though managing remote employees is a challenge for every team leader in the company, with good rules and management of remote employees, it can run smoothly and provide success for the company.

Therefore, each team leader can implement the tips and tools mentioned above to help monitor and maintain team performance so that they remain good and productive.

 

About the author: 

Natasha Rei is the Digital Marketing Manager of Explainerd, a motion graphic agency. She ensures strategic goals are met by directing online and social media campaigns.